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Years ago, I used to mock myself for being unmarried and broke. “Never hath God given a man so much,” I would derisively scold myself, “and seen so little come of it.”
And one of the prime causes of my abject futility in life was my “education.” Here’s the skinny on my formal education:
| Education Phase | Years in Phase | Field of Study | Number of Concrete Skills Gained That Were Valued by Employers |
|---|---|---|---|
| K-12 | 13 | General | 0 |
| Undergraduate – Round 1 | 4 | Sociology | 0 |
| Undergraduate – Round 2 | 2 | Journalism | 0 |
| Graduate | 2 | Public Administration | 0 |
| Totals | 21 | 4 | 0 |
I emerged from each phase of my formal education with no economically valuable skills. When I finished the K-12 phase, no employer hired me to solve quadratic equations or throw a football. When I finished the undergrad round one phase, no employer hired me to study how Americans and the communities they create tick. When I finished the undergrad round two phase, no employer hired me to report on anything—not even banal local stories such as the opening of a new car wash. And when I finished the graduate phase, no employer hired me to administer anything—not even a pretzel stand at the mall.
The only thing my 21 years of “education” across four different fields qualified me for was entry-level work that required no particular skills or knowledge. My degrees merely signaled to employers that I wasn’t a complete moron and that I could be trained for glorified monkey work.
Now contrast my formal education with my nephew’s. Like me, he obtained the useless high school degree. But unlike me, his post-secondary education entailed trade school rather than college. My nephew just got his CDL license. It cost him $4,000 and consumed four months of effort. His starting salary? Sixty thousand dollars. That’s nearly as much as I was making in 2016, my last year of gainful employment before I retired.
At the very least, education should provide you with at least one concrete skill that is valued in the labor market. My eight years of post-secondary education didn’t do that. My nephew’s four months of post-secondary education did. I was thus schooled—I spent a lot of time and money devouring and regurgitating knowledge that no one in the real world cared about. My nephew, on the other hand, was educated.
A big part of America’s problem right now is that too many of its young people are being schooled rather than educated. And an even bigger problem for America is that so few realize it.
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