I dropped out of university after my junior year in 1973 and didn’t return to campus to complete my B.A. in English until 2003. The lack of a degree never got in the way of working for almost a quarter-century as a newspaper reporter. I suspect a degree in most non-STEM professions is redundant. After earning my long-deferred degree, and in a state of mental exhilaration, I contemplated going after a Ph.D. I was fifty years old. Every faculty member I consulted at Skidmore College, including the novelist Steven Millhauser, told me it would be a waste of time. I was briefly disappointed but they were right.
In one of his essays Guy Davenport observed that Americans are the first people in history to possess documented proof of their illiteracy: Just ask them to produce a college degree. He wrote that in the seventies, when the trivialization of higher education was well underway but not yet complete. I have no regrets though occasionally I wish I had become a welder after high school – a real job, one that contributes.
A reader has
asked whether she should return to college after dropping out several years
ago. She’s still young, not yet thirty. Advice is dangerous stuff. If taken and
the outcome is unhappy, the advice-giver has set himself up for resentment and
blame. Rather, I urged my reader to examine her motives and expectations. She’s
smart and better-read than most of her contemporaries, so a typical college
curriculum could crush her. I shared Dr. Johnson’s advice to Boswell: “to have
as many books about [. . .] as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon
which I had a desire for instruction at the time.”
In a 2011 essay
on the nature of evil Theodore Dalrymple describes his reading strategy, and in
it I recognize my own:
“Often I
read more than one book at a time. When I tire of one I fly to another. This is
because the world has always seemed to me so various and so interesting in all
its aspects that I have not been able to confine my mind to a single subject or
object for very long; therefore I am not, never have been, and never will be
the scholar of anything. My mind is magpie-like, attracted by what shines for a
moment; I try to persuade myself that this quality of superficiality has its
compensations, in breadth of interest, for example.”
Dalrymple’s approach suggests that my reader, regardless of her decision, will never have reason to ever again be bored or rudderless.
Was American education, as Professor Davenport avers, in its descendancy in the 1970s? There may be some truth to that claim, but I view it as exaggerated. I graduated university in 1970 and thought my education solid. My parents were both public school teachers and wanted their three sons to attend college. One brother dropped out in 11th grade and had a successful career building houses and writing practical guidebooks like "How to Grow Lavender for Profit" and "How to Start A Senior Transportation Business". My other brother enrolled in a couple of classes at the local community college, thought it a waste of time, and became a successful businessman. I had a successful career working in the medical trenches, for which a college degree was a requirement.
ReplyDeleteMy friend wouldn't pay for his granddaughter to go to college and insisted that she learn welding instead. So she went to trade school, qualified as a welder, and went to work for a manufacturer. After a year or so, the company gathered that the girl was smart and more valuable to them in the office than on the floor. Now she's working there as an administrator and making better money. As much as I appreciate the current trend toward trades rather than college, welding in particular has a strong association with Parkinson's disease and other disorders. There are trade-offs.
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