My final newspaper column until August is in praise of Matthew B. Crawford's new book, "Shop Class as Soulcraft." Excerpt:
As the cost of a college degree spirals upward, The Chronicle of Higher Education anticipates that fewer young Americans will be going to universities, which have priced themselves out of the market. Write Joseph M. Cronin and Howard E. Horton, "There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering."That's good news. The idea that everybody ought to go to college is misguided at best and damaging at worst. It's a middle-class shibboleth that is overdue for debunking.
There's a practical case against the college push. Only about 60 percent of Americans who enter a four-year college graduate with a degree within six years - a rate that has been consistent for three decades, according to the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit reform group. The organization advocates for higher graduation rates, which is admirable. But this assumes that everyone is equally capable of succeeding in college and that college is the right choice for everyone.
Not so, says Tom Pauken, head of the Texas Workforce Commission, who thinks that given the dismal college graduation rates, high school seniors who struggle academically should not allow themselves to be pushed into college. Says Pauken: "They'd be better off trying to become more self-sufficient and developing a skilled trade, something portable they can take with them but can also make a real living doing. As a plumber, electrician and so forth, there's still a way to make a good living, even in tough economic times."
Matthew B. Crawford understands the protection that tradesmen have in the global market. "If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help," he writes. "Because they are in China."
The column has appeared in newspapers around the country, and I'm getting some pretty interesting e-mail from readers. Read on, past the jump:
Here's one:
I wish more people felt as Mr.Dreher does about alternatives to a college education. A couple Sundays ago our priest invited all the graduating high school seniors to come to the front of the church so the congregation could applaud them. He then asked each of the graduates which college they were going to attend, as though enrollment in college were a given. I often wonder how my son-in-law feels when he hears things like that. My son-in-law makes a good, honest living as an electrician. He often helps my wife and me with electrical projects that to him are routine but to me, with my college education, would be virtually impossible to complete. If it weren't for skilled tradesmen like my son-in-law, a lot of us college graduates might still be living in tents and running to the outhouse.
Here's another:
I enjoyed your column.
I recall this conversation with an academic mentor 30+ years ago:
Dr. D: In order to get a Ph.D, one must have perseverance, nearing average intelligence, and a high tolerance for boredom.Me: Doc, those are the same requirements for a trash collector.
Dr. D: Now you understand.
He was no Yoda, but he was the smartest professor I've ever met.
I come from a long line of machinists. Both grandfathers, uncles, brother, grandmother (WWII "Rosie the Riveter") were machinists; I was a commercial cabinetmaker. After eight years of struggle, I got my BA. For 30 years, I have delivered conflict management training to groups from Stealth Fighter Pilots to the psychiatrists providing care to Charlie Manson. For eleven years, I was the lead trainer for the Presidential Management Fellows program, though I never told them I was... gasp... a community college product.
I feel pretty good about the folks I have helped over the years. Missing from the outcome was the satisfaction of seeing a physical outcome. When I retire, other than writing a book about raising tough kids (two of my six were/are hell), I will putter in the woodshop.
A couple of nuggets. It has always been a comfort to know I had the cabinetmaking as a backup for the suit-and-tie work. I feel I have always taken a blue-collar ethic to the development of my training programs and materials, constantly refining the product. Rather than the either-or decision that most are faced with, I was blessed to have my life take the "and" direction, although it was by necessity. Cabinetwork paid for school. For many, I would recommend raising the expectations bar to include "professional" skills and a trade.
My blue collar experience also provided me with the ability to address the widest range of employees, from shop workers to Einstein Fellows at NSF. I recall a few years ago when my wife and I were watching CBS News with Dan Rather and the report was on grizzled utility workers being let go from Con-Edison in California. Senior management hired a consultant to ease their transition to unemployment and this took the form of a 30 year old woman reading poetry from behind a podium. I told my wife I knew what they were thinking. She asked and I replied, "Can I close the gap between my chair and her podium and take her out before they stop me." Poems are never heard in shop environments. Just bad limericks.
Particularly poignant is my older brother's unexpected retirement (left one job for another and it didn't materialize). My grandfather was a crackerjack machinist who worked his way through the depression as a "honey dipper" (bailed out outhouses with a bucket and a rope). My brother was six-and-a-half years old when he asked my grandfather for a job and grandfather asked, "How old are you?" Upon hearing my brother's age, he said, "You're hired and I will pay you 6 ½ cents an hour. My brother recently said to me, "You know, Michael, I cannot remember a time in my life that I didn't work."
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Smells like determinism
Only about 60 percent of Americans who enter a four-year college graduate with a degree within six years - a rate that has been consistent for three decades...
Took me eleven years, then another three years' worth of coursework before I could get a graduate program to acknowledge my existence (thanks to having the wrong kind of undergraduate degree for most humanities fields). I was somebody for whom the expectation that you would go to college right out of high school was not appropriate, that much is certain. Academia has (finally) turned out to be a path with some promise, but it's taken me a long time to figure out how to get there.
What's interesting is the degree to which so many formerly "blue collar" jobs now require some kind of degree for advancement. I'll cite two examples:
Police officers now typically have at least a two-year degree, and many have a great deal more than that. Formerly, you didn't even need a high school education.
Career enlisted personnel in the military also will typical acquire a degree (formerly, only officers, and senior officers at that, would have a college education). It's true that most junior enlisted people only have high school (again, even that is an immense increase in the educational requirement for enlistment), but once you reach a certain point (say, E7—senior NCOs—or higher), college becomes a necessity for advancement; it's already a huge asset when you're trying to advance to E5 or E6 (junior NCO status).
I'll also point out that a lot of study that was formerly done in apprenticeships is now being conducted in a more formal setting (witness the availability of college credit in things like welding or the growth of vocational programs that award degrees). I view this development as being similar to what happened to the practice of law about 100 years ago, when you could become a lawyer and be admitted to the bar after serving alongside other lawyers in an apprentice-type role. Now it's unthinkable that any lawyer out there hasn't been to law school.
Naturally, a lot of blue collar work is still learned on the job in master-apprentice type scenarios. But especially in the more specialized crafts, I can see that changing more and more as time goes by.
re: the loss of apprenticeship learning in the "learned" professions--it still exists in the field of medicine, as an extra year for internship and an extra several years after that for residency, but there is no longer anything like it in the law. It sure as hell is not to be found in law school, which not only doesn't teach you how to practice law, it doesn't even teach you how to pass the bar exam--you have to take special commercial cram courses for that. I suspect an MBA isn't much help in the actual running of a business, either.
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