Matt Walsh:
My fellow Americans,
Let me tell you a tale.
A friend of mine was recently laid off.
He’s a hardworking kind of guy, so he decided to forgo the customary process of sitting around his house complaining on Facebook that no employers are knocking on his door to compliment his pajamas and offer him six figures to do some Really Important Job. Instead, in a unique and risky strategy, he hit the pavement, actively and aggressively searching for something else. Anything else. “Anything is more lucrative than nothing,” he reasoned, because apparently he doesn’t realize that, these days, nothing can be quite the profitable career.
He told me that he found a couple of openings for management positions at some local retail outlets. A perfect fit, he thought. He has years of experience in retail. He’s managed teams before. He’s younger than me but has over a decade of full time work experience under his belt. Not only that — he’s determined, organized, motivated, intelligent, and reliable. He has all of the requisite qualities and even a bunch of extra qualities that are extremely rare among management types (see: ‘reliable,’ ‘intelligent’).
But he was passed over. Twice.
Twice he’s settled for having his résumé “kept on file” while someone else got the job. And twice the person who got the job was the person who brought less relevant work experience to the table, but had up their sleeve one thing my friend lacks: an expensive piece of paper called a “college degree.”
If you’re not familiar with it, a college degree is a thing that we tell our kids to buy with money they don’t have, in hopes that it will help them make money they might earn, which will give them the ability to pay back the money they spent in order to make the money they’re paying it back with.
This piece of paper is very important.
It’s almost as important as teaching our children how to be fiscally responsible.
So the shocking twist at the end of my friend’s story isn’t that surprising to most of us. It’s a story that’s been repeated time and time again, all over the country, for decades.
Now, is there any conceivable reason why you need an additional four years of formal education to effectively oversee a team of iPad salesmen?
Can anyone seriously argue that spending 48 months on a college campus better prepares you for a retail environment than spending 7 years in a retail environment?
If, through some very bizarre set of circumstances, your life depended on finding someone who could function effectively at any particular job, would you place your fate in the hands of a guy who frequently read about the job over someone who’s been too busy successfully doing it?
Moreover, if we look at the great leaders of human history (something you can do even without a college degree, thanks to inventions such as Google and libraries) can you build a convincing case that leadership qualities are more often learned in academic buildings than developed out in the wilderness of the real world?
Is a college degree actually a necessary ingredient for success in the vast majority of professions?
No, no, no, no, and definitely not.
It’s not a need. Most tasks in life only require someone with the skill, competency, and desire to complete them, not the academic credentials to write papers about them.
“Here is what the position entails. If you can’t do any of this, we will pay you to stay home and compose thoroughly researched essays on the subject.” – No interviewer I’ve ever encountered.
Most jobs are learned by doing.
Most talents are honed through action.
I have another friend in the opposite situation. He graduated from a good university and now has a high paying job (that he hates, by the way) where he sits at a desk and enters numbers into a computer. He could not have gotten this job without his educational credentials, but he will be the first to tell you that his degree is in no way, shape, or form actually necessary to perform his daily duties. All he really needs are fingers and a high tolerance for mundane tasks. The college degree is irrelevant. Or should be.
What amazed me was how many truck drivers there are with college degrees. They could earn more money driving a truck than they could in the area they went to college for.
Do the employers check to see what subjects an individual took in college? I remember one college or university offered a class on The Simpsons. I recently read about a class on how to please yourself sexually. There are many other classes like these that I would like to see the student apply for a job after they graduated, and see how it goes.
At a time when college graduates can’t find a job, there are millions of high paying jobs going unfilled. Fox News told about the tool and die industry needing workers, but there aren’t enough people applying. These are very high paying jobs.
There are other jobs going unfilled that trade and other schools could fill, but the emphasis is to get the kids wanting to go to the colleges and universities thinking that this would get them better jobs, when they are really propaganda machines to brainwash the kids into liberalism. Look at the professors they hire.
@Smorgasbord:
Mike Rowe, formerly of Dirty Jobs, talks all the time about how there are no blue collar workers left. Everyone wants to be a tony university grad and then wonders why they can’t get a job when their major was something absurd like Nigerian Women’s Basket Weaving or Gender Studies. Ask these spoiled brats who spent 4-6 years living off their parent’s hard work, while they attend classes and complain how tired they are because they had a 9:30 a.m. class, when Columbus discovered America or who the first president was or who is even the Vice President now and all you’ll get is a look that reflects a totally blank mind.
@retire05: #2
Let’s not forget about the years of liberal brainwashing they got.
I like Mike Rowe’s comment about the college ad that says, “Work smart, not hard.” As you already know, Mike says, “Work hard,
notand smart.” He leaves the “not” in it, but has it crossed out. I like that touch. I would like to know if it was his idea, or someone else’s. I believe in giving credit where it is due. You probably also know that he has a show on CNN.First: Because you have to be indoctrinated with the horsesh-t that is only ‘real’ in a college classroom led by some dork that most likely has never had a real job relative to the ‘subject’ that he is ‘teaching’.
Second: Because most of the ‘higher-ups’ have the paper and realative ‘inexperience’ that goes with it and this guy is seen by them as a mega threat since he can probably make good decisions by instinct rather than by pre-conceived notions that have to be backed up with propaganda!
A third from my own experience is the ‘locked down’ mentality in a lot of work environments that rejects any questions or suggestions re procedural doctrine!
ALL:
“Most jobs are learned by doing.”:
I hope that the next time YOU need to go to a doctor, you remember to make sure that the doctor you choose wasn’t school-trained. Make sure that he can throw a knife, because if he is handy with a sharp blade, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
I hope that the next time you get behind the wheel of a car, it was engineered by the yahoo next door who spent the first 30 years of his life lounging in a second-hand couch in the back of a double-wide.
I hope that when you drive that wreck into another wreck and have to hire an attorney to defend you, the lawyer you get will know what to do because he saw a lawyer in a comic book once.
Life is full of all sorts of jobs that require all sorts of education. If you think that degrees from institutions of higher learning aren’t important, it’s probably because you’ve spent most of your time doing things that don’t require much thought.
Keep pigeon-holing yourself and your friends.
Keep them all dumb as dirt. Watch them be out-worked and under-bid by Mexican laborers. Watch them try to figure out where their retirement income is going to come from. They’ll be wearing hand-me-down coats while they stand on a street corner selling pencils from a cup. Ain’t life in a rut perdy grand!