Is College the New High School?

At the height of the Great Depression, my grandfather was once turned down for a job pumping gas at a service station. The reason? He was insufficiently qualified: They were only accepting applicants with a college degree. In a period when unemployment peaked at 25%, education was simply being used as an arbitrary way to reduce the applicant pool.

If you can manage to find a full service gas station (outside of the few states which require them by law), I don't think that pumping gas requires a college degree yet, but it's often been observed lately that a college degree is increasingly becoming an absolute requirement for a "good job".

I think this overlooks a fair number of jobs which require several years of journey-man style training, but not a college degree (plumber, car mechanic, etc.) but certainly, if you're looking for maximizing your starting earning potential at age 22-24 and guarantee the highest peak income around age 50, a college degree seems to way to go.

Last year, Charles Murray wrote a three part series on education in American, in the second of which he made the argument that too many people go to college. His argument was that most people are not cut out for high level academic achievement, and that what many people who go to college these days need is a couple years of professional training rather than a BA in some generic subject. College, he argues, should be for serious academic work, and flooding forty percent of the population into the college system only brings the level of college work down, and thus cheapens the actual value of a four year college degree.

Now, re-reading Murray's piece, one of the things that struck me was: Only 40% of Americans go to college?

It's often editorialized that practically everyone goes to college these days. Maybe among the set of people who editorialize, practically everyone does. But it seems that among Americans as a whole, only a minority actually go to college. According to the US Census Bureau stats on education, 86% of Americans age 25-35 have a high school degree or equivalent. 29% have a bachelor's degree or higher. And of Americans 18-24, 40% have taken at least some college classes.

So the overall picture seems to be, around 85% of Americans eventually graduate from high school or get a GED. 40% go on to take some college courses or get an AA, but only 29% actually get a bachelor's degree or higher by the time they're 34. (And in general, if you don't do it by 34, you're not going to.)

The percentage of Americans with a bachelors or better is the same for ages 35-44 and ages 45-64. So for all that wisdom about more Americans going to college than ever before, it appears that the same number are graduating as have for nearly forty years. (It may well be that the number that take some college but don't get a degree has increased.)

On the one hand, it's clear that higher levels of education bring huge economic advantages. The median income for Americans with a college degree is twice that of those with only a high school diploma or GED. (45k vs. 26k in 2006) And yet, watching people like my executive VP, who never went to college, it's clear that some people can do very well for themselves without spending four years at a university.

Personally, I would prefer to see college left to those with an interest in spending four years seriously studying math, science and the humanities. But in reality, a college degree is all too often simply a way to telling whether someone has the intelligence and discipline to stick it out through four more years of school and do well at it. And in all fairness, I'm not sure I can think of another way to provide the same filtering effect.

UPDATE: From where I sit, one of the trends I'm particularly unimpressed with is MBA madness. Increasingly, going off and blowing 20-40k on getting an MBA is seen as the way to show that you're one of the better people at the company. However, as the sort of person that MBA interns spend their summer following around: an MBA often seems like a way to simply inflate the ego just enough to make its owner not want to actually listen to others. About half out team is MBAed, and they're good folks at root, but mainly because they're put some time in and learned how to do things. "But in MBA school they always said..." is not a good way to start your argument.

There are some really good MBA programs out there, and there are people who really do benefit from them as they attain a certain level, but the tendency of people with almost no work experience to get one just to boost their earnings potential is simply degrading the value of the degree, in my opinion.

"...She Didn't. Move. A. Muscle."

Forget Marathon Man -- Bearing goes to the dentist, where the hygienist tells her a true horror story:

I actually work on a lot of people that it's the first time they ever had novocaine. Sometimes the first time they ever had dental work too. A lot of recent immigrants. People who don't speak much English. Makes it hard to communicate sometimes. I remember this one guy, he brought in his elderly father. After his shot, while we were working on him... well, I never saw anyone in the dentist's chair with such a big smile! The whole time we were working he had this big grin. The son was interpreting for him. They were from Ethiopia originally, I remember that. The son told me that his father thought it was magic that it didn't hurt. Can you imagine that? Magic.

But we don't let family members be interpreters anymore. We used to, but I brought it up in a staff meeting once and said it made me uncomfortable. And so now we use non-related interpreters. Ever since that staff meeting. It was after just about the worst day I ever had.

Read it and shudder.

Boy Toys

We have all these resolutions around here pertaining to living a non-materialistic lifestyle. And more to the point, Mommy and Daddy get angry when they find all sorts of plastic Made In China lying all over the play room floor. So we've worked the toy collection around here down to a minimum and kept it there. What we have is generally stuff like blocks, stuffed animals, wooden trains and dolls which can be played with in a free-form sort of way.

However, the girls were giving signs that a wider range of characters were needed. They've not yet reached the point where one endows a sweet looking stuffed bunny with evil will to power -- so a collection entirely of nice stuffed animals and baby and princess dolls was limiting the play. Plus whenever we had people with little boys over to play, the fooled around with the trains for about ten minutes and then announced they were bored.

Daddy contemplated the problem for a while, and realized that what we needed was boy toys. So as the after Christmas sales raged, daddy girded up his wallet and went in search of what was needed.

Who can truly be happy without a large, metal, yellow dump truck? No red-blooded American child, I immediately realized. Into the cart it went.

Every kid needs some toy dinosaurs, so a pair of those went in as well: a "big headed meat eater" and a "long necked plant eater" to use the terminology the girls have developed.

And a dragon, who can resist a big plastic Chinese dragon?

But the real find from Daddy's point of view was the toy knights. I'd had a number of Britains toy nights as a kid: great toy knights, but only about an inch tall, with removable weapons, and thus clearly not for the under 8 set. But these are about three inches tall, beautifully painted, but all in one piece with no removable parts. They're made by Schleich , a company in Germany, and I found them on clearance at Target: several knights and a princess dressed in pink with a fan. (It's all girls here except for Daddy, so a princess is an essential part of any game involving knights, dinosaurs and a dragon.)

That seemed like exactly what was needed: I bought one of each type that was on sale.

I'd considered a bucket of green army men, of the sort I spent so much time with as a child, but the cart was looking full, and they seemed a little too edible for the youngest. But there's some simply awesome stuff these days in the way of toy soldiers. There was a whole line of detailed, die-cast WW2 tanks along with men to go with them. Why didn't they have these when I was a kid?

So I took all the loot home (where it was well received) and informed MrsDarwin it's her job to get a boy on the scene post haste, lest I be forced to start getting all these great things to play with myself.

Finally, missing the TV

In general, we've been getting along fine without the boob tube. We'd already stopped watching LOST, and Masterpiece Theater wasn't showing anything interesting. We'd canceled the cable a while before the TV bit it. We never watched the news. If we have a yen to see a movie, we can either pop a DVD in the computer or watch videos upstairs on the little screen with the built-in VCR.

But now, now I'm wishing we had TV access. Masterpiece Theater has, at last, shaken off its lethargy and is broadcasting The Complete Jane Austen, starting tomorrow. All six novels dramatized, four in new productions. A movie about Jane's life (perhaps more critically successful than last year's Becoming Jane). And I'm going to miss it all.

Recently I re-read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and had a great desire to see the Alfred Hitchcock movie, which won Best Picture in 1940. Netflix, usually such a useful resource in these cases, unhelpfully listed the DVD's availability as "unknown". Does that mean that they don't have it in stock? That there's only one copy being passed around the myriad Netflix subscribers and my turn isn't until 2010? Blockbuster doesn't carry Rebecca locally; nor does Hollywood Video. My public library doesn't list it in their catalog. To buy a new DVD on Amazon would run me about $90, though I could get a used VHS for much less. And for all this, a search at Turner Classic Movies reveals that they'll be showing Rebecca on Feb. 5 -- and I don't have a TV.

These are miniscule problems compared to homelessness or Peace In Our Time (or the cost of a new flat panel), but I would dearly love to spend a month of Sundays curled up in front of the TV watching the new Jane Austens or some good Hitchcock. Score one for the boob tube.

The Concentrated Life

I've been asked to comment on the question of whether the Catholic Church teaches (and if so whether it is correct to do so) "that only the celibate can devote himself completely to God while this is not possible for marrieds because they have other responsibilities."

Consecrated virginity has always had a place in Christian spirituality. The most obvious discussion of it in the New Testament is probably 1 Corinthians chapter 7, where Paul discussions a number of concerns surrounding marriage and said famously:

I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.(1 Cor 7:32-34)

Paul's discussion makes it clear that some, including himself, remained single during Apostolic times in order to concentrate more fully on the Lord's work. In the coming centuries, the great traditions of Eastern and Western monasticism would spring up, many examples of which survive down to this very day.

Paul assures his readers several times that it is not sinful to marry, and advises any who don't feel up to celibacy to get married so that they won't find themselves tempted to more freewheeling solutions to their desires. But if people are serious about holiness, their question is not "is it sinful to marry" (and really, who could imagine that it was, given that the Church constantly uses the image of husband and wife for the love between Christ and the Church) but "is it less holy to be married than to be celibate" or perhaps more indignantly, "are you saying that I'm not holy just because I'm married?"

As with any good question, the correct answer is not necessarily pat. Obviously, being celibate does not itself make someone holy, though I don't deny that at certain times and places some people may have imagined such.

Still, family life, for all its blessings and channels to holiness, can make certain approaches to spirituality difficult. Case in point: a few months back I helped get a group off the ground in our parish that says Vespers four nights a week (M-Th) at a timeslot that's basically right after work. It's a very peaceful cap to what's often a rather crazy 10 hours of my day, so I've really been enjoying going down there, and feel like it's added a much needed spiritual pause in my schedule.

However, much though I love the Divine Office (and really admire the way it structure the whole day of monastic communities) things keep happening to underline the fact that is an element of spirituality which is not always a 100% fit with family life. For instance, at first, MrsDarwin and I were trying to go together. However, this meant taking the girls (ages 5, 4 and 1.5) and this proved such an abject failure that our associate pastor (fairly tactfully) requested that we avoid it in future. It's easy to take a kid out or hush her in the middle of mass. However, when half a dozen people are reciting psalms antiphonally in an otherwise silent chapel, you can't step away, and you can't hush the kids. Much though it annoys me when people act like children don't belong in church, I had to admit to myself after those first couple tries that you just can't take kids this young to Vespers. They don't understand it, and hushing them isn't practical.

As for the sort of schedule of all eight hours of the Office, daily mass, spiritual reading, etc. that monastics do: not only would it not fit well with family life, it would be an active abandonment of your vocation as a parent to try to live like a monk or nun. As parents, we participate in God's creative power by bringing new souls into the world, but accepting that vocation means accepting an active, not a contemplative, life.

Traditionally, the contemplative life has been seen as the highest form of Christian spirituality, on the theory that it is the most like heaven: the life to come. In the last fifty years, many people have come to frown on that view, seeing both active lives (whether parenting and working or ministries devoted to active service of others) and contemplative lives as "separate but equal" means of holiness.

Personally: I'm a fairly traditional kind of guy in a lot of ways. It does seem to me that the contemplative life is more similar to the life to come, and thus a powerful road toward holiness. However, I think that understanding needs to be balanced with an understanding that we are not currently in the world to come. We currently live in an earthly realm, and as such most of us need to spend most of our time focused on basic things like food, shelter and reproduction. We're meant to do that. That's why we have bodies.

So while I think that the contemplative life lived out by celibate monastics is more a window into heaven than my own, I'm not worried about it. All of us, in our different vocations, are living out parts of the Christian journey, and I don't think it's important to worry about "higher" and "better" paths so much as to live out the path you're on as well as possible.

Once upon a time, back in college, my roommate when to a Catholic "vocations fair" where numerous orders had come to get recruits. He saw a poster that said "Are you called to marriage, the priesthood, or the consecrated life" but misread the last as "concentrated life". Seeing this, he thought, "Well, you really can concentrate on things more if you're single. Maybe 'concentrated life' is a good phrase for being single." (The mis-reading, when discovered, was less interesting. But he eventually found a "pasty white blond" to marry and didn't have to worry about the issue anymore.)

A while back when MrsDarwin and the girls went off to visit relatives for two days, I got a taste of the "concentrated life". Wow. There is a lot of time if there's no one else in your house. It could be very peaceful. You could become very, very dedicated to and good at some hobby or duty in all that time. (Personally, I wasted it all on watching anime on the computer and drinking beer.)

I think this is why the use of consecrated virginity shows a lot of wisdom. You do have a lot more time to devote to God if you aren't dealing with a career and a family. However, you also have a lot of time to fall prey to laziness or gluttony or envy or whatever other collection of vices you're prone to. Celibacy gives you a rope, but it doesn't guarantee that you'll pull a wagon with it rather than just hanging yourself. And as with all things, the more you have, the more is expected of you.

Law or Theory

Razib takes advantage of some (rather silly) comments by political candidates that "evolution is only a theory" to discuss what the difference between "scientific laws" and "scientific theories" actually is.

Resolutions for the New Year

I suppose it's rather late in the year, already, for publishing resolutions. Most people have already moved on to breaking their resolutions, now that we're a full nine days into the near year.

Actually, I've never been much of a one for new year's resolutions. However, with the new year beginning, and two and a half years of blogging stretching out behind me, I a few minor changes needed in order to make sure that blogging remains something sustainable in the time to come.

I've been contemplating giving up blogging, from time to time over the last few months. However, I think I've definitely decided to keep it up. (Feel free to express your displeasure with this and reasons why I should quit in the comments!) But as other projects call, it seems that a little bit of moderation and prioritizing may be necessary.

I've tried over the last couple years to assure that something-or-other is posted on DarwinCatholic every weekday -- mostly because I myself prefer to read blogs which provide new content most days. At this point, however, I think I may be backing of that commitment just a little bit. I think I can promise at least 2-3 posts per week, and I'll make sure they're solid, substantive ones. But writing at least one solid post every day has the tendency to use up all my writing time for the day, and so I think a little backing off may be necessary.

In tandem with slightly reduced blogging volume on DarwinCatholic, I'll be getting back to regular writing at the Humanities Program. Expect fairly regular links to new content over there in coming months.

Watching all sorts of people put up lists of the books they read during 2007 has made me realize that I never keep any sort of track of this, so I think I'll add a block to the sidebar to track books for the year.

Also, finally, I'm starting to think dark thoughts of trying to write fiction again after about ten years. To that end, a fiction blog (with very occasional postings) will be making its appearance in the next month or two.

And now for a word from you: Is there any interest in a continuation of the Dante series this coming Lent? (Feel free to say "no" if that's the answer.)