Great essay from HVAC technician Albert Morgan writing at The Den:
Confessions of an Overeducated A/C Man
There is a specter haunting Middle America—the specter of higher education.
For a young person in America, college is the thing to aspire to. It’s the go-to option for virtually every American looking to maintain or enhance his station in life. Higher education embodies the values, hopes and dreams of millions of young people and their families. The stories write themselves. Here a first generation freshman, out to do his family proud. There a young woman out to better herself and shatter a glass ceiling or two. Everywhere the expectation that “This Is How You Get The Good Life.” Why, without the credentials offered by as prestigious as institution as one’s ability, tenacity, savings and, yes, connections can muster, you’re liable to be stuck with the dregs—working dead end jobs with no hope of advancement, living wages, or health insurance!
What tripe.
Next time you’re in a coffee shop, ask your barista if they’re going to school and for what. Or better still ask if they’ve graduated. Ask your bartender. Ask your server. Ask the guy stocking groceries at the Whole Foods. If they’re not still in high school, odds are they’re enrolled, in school or recent grads. Odds are good they’ll find themselves doing something similar after graduation.
A bit more:
Of course none of that was the case for Boomers. By the relative rarity of their degrees and the acknowledgment that it took real work and talent to earn them, a Bachelors of the Arts was a viable meal ticket. Compare this to our current situation, where 40%+ of college grads take jobs that don’t require a college degree. Most of them will be liberal arts degrees and possibly even more pitiable degrees in laughable disciplines such as the aforementioned victim studies.
Who is to blame for this mess? Why did it get this way? Boomer cultural norms simultaneously incentivised college and dumbed it down. Other forms of honest, well paid work such as trades or skilled labor were frowned upon, putting them out of sight, out of mind for many young people, especially young men. Many such jobs were offshored along with the American manufacturing, thus eliminating them as an option to begin with in some cases.
Millennials are not innocent either. Despite being, as a generation, coddled, insulated from criticism or failure, they are now becoming the masters of their destiny, and many are proving every bit as selfish and clueless as their piggish forebears. Demands for ever more state intervention to subsidize college are very common. Blame for the situation, although rightly put upon a number of factors outside of their control, rarely includes any agency on their part. An expectation of upper middle class wealth, status and jobs right after graduation with little to no effort, seems ubiquitous.
Albert went to technical college, became an HVAC technician and concludes his essay with the following:
How many men have been deprived of the chance to do honest, useful, empowering work to instead play status games, take drugs, and wind up indebted and underemployed by following the advice given in increasingly bad faith by society’s elite? How many young women fritter away some of their best years on preparation for sterile office jobs while degrading their ability to ever pair bond with a husband by engaging in equally sterile rutting with men who value her little beyond sexual access? How many families are being delayed or never formed from this arrangement? How many billions of dollars and man hours are being squandered on an egalitarian pipe dream?
The answer is “Too many.”
Change is in the air, however. College enrollment has flatlined. Editorials, replete with stories like mine and statistics to back them up are slowly filtering into middle America. The dour, prissy, hysterical atmosphere of political correctness that wafts over virtually every college campus in America is repellent to young men, who are turning away in greater numbers every year.
Where a society channels the energy of its young men is drastically important, and, as the farce of higher education in early 21st Century America begins to be known, fewer of those young men will put their energies into it. There is ample opportunity for them to put it elsewhere. Into learning skills that will render them better men mentally and physically, into their own pursuits according to their own values, into discovering what else they were misled about by their leaders. And from there, perhaps, into kinship with the Right.
Talk about truth to power. Indeed!
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