A Matter of No Small Degree : Education: Should America re-examine its love affair with degrees and tap into the potential of students who aren’t college-bound?
It’s the salesman’s best pitch: “Invest now and you’ll have enough for your kids to go to college.” Who could say no? What parents don’t want diplomas for their children? With all the noise about the need for higher education, who dares dream that a child can succeed without benefit of a degree?
And what are the alternatives anyway?
Sure, some have climbed to the top without that degree. Lack of college did not stop Peter Jennings from becoming a top newscaster, or David Geffen from becoming Hollywood’s richest man, or Steve Jobs from pioneering personal computers, or Jess Mowry from writing award-winning fiction.
But aren’t Jobs and Jennings--and dozens of other high-profile types--exceptions to the rule? Perhaps they are genetically gifted with a talent, drive and/or intellect that is not standard issue.
Not so, say analysts studying education in this country. They are simply the obvious success stories in a nation of potential successes whose talents are not being tapped.
Mark Tucker, president of the nonprofit National Center on Education and the Economy in Rochester, N.Y., and other experts say talents of non-college-bound youngsters are not valued. They get no respect, are educationally abandoned or ignored--and leave high school with no preparation and no credentials to help them dive into the economy’s mainstream.
They say U.S. schools do not assess the average high school students’ talents or skills and there is no way to know what potential may lie beneath an undistinguished academic record.
“In the U.S., if you don’t go to college, you’re nothing. That’s absurd,” Tucker says. “This is abominable elitism.”
And it’s the hot new topic inside educational circles.
‘Diploma Test’
At the William Morris agency, for example, they won’t even hire you for the mail room if you haven’t finished college.
Says Larry Blaustein, vice president of the agency: “The mail room is part of our trainee program. We require a four-year degree, although many of our kids have also been to law school or have their master’s.”
Because so many corporations now use the “diploma test” to gauge whether applicants even get through the door to interview, the prognosis for much of the country’s youth seems cloudy: The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that less than 50% of young people start college, and only 50% of those ever graduate. This leaves approximately 75% of those seeking jobs without the one asset--a diploma--employers increasingly require.
Critics of the system say education need not be synonymous with college: You can be an educated person without a degree, or be a dunce with one.
Says Robert Reich, U.S. Secretary of Labor: “America may have the worst school-to-work transition system of any advanced industrial country. Short of a college degree, there is no way someone can signal to an employer that he or she possesses world-class skills.”
Unless, of course, you have the guts of Geffen, the billionaire music man.
Of his high school days in Brooklyn, Geffen recalls: “I wished I was a better, more motivated student. I knew I wasn’t dumb, but I didn’t know what to think about myself. I graduated in the lowest 10% of my class. The others were better--they had the discipline to study things that were of no interest to them.”
Geffen, now 50, tried brief stints in college but couldn’t get through his freshman year. So to get a start as an agent at William Morris, he lied and said he was a UCLA graduate. Knowing the company would check, he came to work early every day until he intercepted UCLA’s letter, steamed it open and substituted a note that said he had finished there.
“I’m not proud of that. For me it was survival . . . I was not going to let a silly rule keep me from a job at which I was clearly destined to be great.”
Geffen, who has taught classes in the entertainment field at UCLA and at Yale, still believes “it is not necessary to have a college degree to be a great agent. I totally believe in education. I’ve educated myself my whole life. But there are other kinds of schools besides college, and people come to success by different routes. Sometimes the best people do not have the best credentials.”
Maybe so, but if today’s attitudes continue, those who admit to no degrees will have little chance to make their mark. They will earn about 40% less in their lifetimes than those who have that piece of paper, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Meanwhile, the income gap between haves and have-nots continues to widen.
The New World Order
“In the 1950s it was perfectly possible for a middle-class Canadian teen-ager like me to leave school and find a job in banking,” says Peter Jennings, ABC-TV’s top-ranked anchor. “I started doing the cash book, then became a teller. I truly loved the work. There were a number of children of respectable families who started there with me and have since risen to the top in the Canadian banking system. But the field has become so complicated now that it requires specialists. This is true about life in general, and it is certainly true about journalism.
“In the ‘50s, an itinerant character like myself could get a beginning job on a small-town radio station and work himself up, as I did. It was not unlike baseball’s farm system. But so many people want to get into TV today that we don’t even look at anybody who doesn’t have a resume. I, by the way, don’t think we necessarily always get better people this way.”
Jennings says it’s “naive” for even the most gutsy or self-motivated people to assume they will be able to flourish without college nowadays. “In the agricultural era, you could earn a decent living and lead a good life without college. After that, in the industrial era, you could leave school early and still prosper as an industrial worker. Now those jobs are all done by machines.”
Since the 1970s, Jennings says, possibilities have dwindled for those with no college. “In the new world order, the imperative is for higher education.”
But whose imperative is it?
Steve Jobs, who pioneered personal computers and created the Apple, says it’s not his.
Learning From the Masters
“I was lucky. I grew up in Silicon Valley,” says Jobs. “When I was 5, the guy next door was one of the inventors of the solar cell. When I was 12, I was going to Hewlett Packard every Tuesday. Some of their best scientists gave us kids lectures on whatever was new. I would always call the guy back and ask for a sample. One summer, I called Bill Hewlett himself. He picked up the phone, and I said, ‘Hi, I’m Steve Jobs and I’m 12. I want to build a frequency counter.’ Not only did he give me spare parts for it, but he gave me a summer job--at 12. That really shaped my view of corporations--those values really left a mark.”
Jobs, 38, went to Reed College in Oregon for six months but dropped out because he “ran out of money.” Then he took a job at Atari where, at age 18, he invented the game, Simon. “Everything I knew about electronics I had taught myself,” he says.
“I mean college is a wonderful thing--don’t get me wrong. But so is hanging out with people that are really good. If I wanted to be a sculptor, I’d go find Noguchi or Brancusi and hang out with them. Doing things is not a bad way to learn about them.”
Jaron Lanier, computer whiz and “the father of virtual reality,” left school at 14 because “it was killing me.” He educated himself by “managing to get into things” that interested him and by attending classes off and on at Bard College and New Mexico State University, although he never finished anywhere. Now 33, he says that in relatively young industries such as computer sciences, “actions speak louder than degrees. In the case of (computer science) engineers, for example, what they’ve done is vastly more important” than their credentials on paper.
A degree becomes important only when there’s no other way to measure a person’s talent or potential, he says. “For someone like me,” he is on an advisory committee of the National Academy of Sciences, among other honors, “my degree status doesn’t seem to have been an issue.”
Elitist Learning System
Mark Tucker, of the National Center on Education and the Economy and an adviser on education to the Clinton Administration, focuses on the impact the educational system has on society. He is not pleased with what he sees.
“Ours is one of the most elitist educational systems of all the advanced industrial world. We concentrate all resources on college-bound kids” while the others “leave high school having achieved only a seventh- or eighth- grade level of literacy. The result is that we are forced to compete not with Japan and Germany on quality, but with Thailand and Mexico on wages and hours.”
Tucker says “other nations educate almost everybody to the standard which we in the U.S. think appropriate only for those who are going to college.” That is why real wages in those nations go up while here they go down. “It is also why our income distribution pattern in the past 20 years has changed in shape from the diamond (equitable) to the pyramid--which is what you would find in a banana republic.”
Tucker concludes: “Any sensible soul would realize we must find a way to educate the 70% of youngsters who are not likely to get a college degree almost as well as we educate those who are going to get one.
“It’s essential,” he adds, “or our country will be torn apart.”
Let’s Educate All
Guilbert Hentschke, Ph.D, dean of the University of Southern California School of Education, says Americans have been brainwashed to think no one can succeed without college. The focus should be on a good education for every person--and how to achieve that is a major argument in education today.
“Other countries have programs where kids and adults develop skills, trades and experiences that make them very employable without college. They go off to lead productive and dignified lives. They probably don’t get very deeply into the classic arts, but neither do many students in the 3,200 colleges in this country. We tend to think college is the one-stop-shopping fix for every problem.”
When did higher education become such a must?
Up until World War II, America wasn’t concerned about going to college, says Arthur Levine, chairman of the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University. In 1900, about 4% of 18- to 21-year-olds went to college; in 1941, about 18% went.
But the GI Bill of 1944 guaranteed tuition and a stipend to every returning serviceman. The bill wasn’t really designed to get people into college, Levine says, but to keep them out of the labor market. It was meant to prevent what occurred after World War I when veterans bloated the labor market. The bill created more than 2 million college students--more than the entire college population before the war, Levine adds.
And higher education has been a growth industry ever since, he says.
‘Disposable Kids’
Herbert Kohl, author of 32 books on education, says we’ve developed “a nation of disposable kids, whom we see as a problem rather than a possibility.” It is not possible to believe that all these kids are uneducable, he says. “We have this whole group who are very poor, who grew up in a hard world, and who find more immediate financial reward on the streets. But you could never call them dumb.”
Kohl thinks the big question is to find out what each person can do with dignity and what each person’s talent is.
Informal apprenticeship is one possible route. Some youngsters who have done that “have worked their way into decent jobs or have formed small independent businesses,” he says.
Another route is the trade school, Kohl says: “There is a new wave of these community-based schools starting around the country. The goal is to create an option for kids coming out of junior high by offering small, public high schools each centered around a specific vocational theme. Each school also provides an excellent basic education while it offers opportunity to hook into some aspect of work. If the kids want to go on to college, they can. If not, they’ll have a trade to go right into.”
No College, No Regrets
Novelist Jackie Collins says if she were a kid today with a chance to go to college, she’d do it. But she’s “never regretted (being) expelled from school in England at 15; that’s when my real education began.”
Kendall Hailey, 26, who left L.A.’s private Oakwood School 10 years ago to pursue self-education, has no regrets either.
“I was frustrated by the way my favorite subject, English, was being taught--it was so over-analyzed. Also, there is so much pressure in high school about getting into the right college that everyone loses sight of learning for learning’s sake.”
So Hailey’s parents allowed her to spend her “college years” in their Studio City home, pursuing her own intellectual interests. In 1988, Hailey’s journal of her learning odyssey was published as “The Day I Became an Autodidact.” It is still in print, and she has since written two novels, a screenplay and a children’s book.
“The best education you can get is the one that comes from your own passion. If a person starts with what interests them, it will lead to other good things.”
If Jess Mowry has any regrets, he isn’t admitting them. The award-winning author, 33, had few options. He lived with his father in Oakland, where he quit elementary school at 14.
“I mostly just hung out on the street and helped my dad at his job in the scrap yard. He’d go around in his GMC flatbed picking up cans and scrap. But he always brought home books. He was always reading things, it didn’t matter what. And I’m exactly the same as him. I would read anything--even the manual that came with his crane.
“Education, to me, is 90% being able and willing to read. It’s like you’re down at the small end of a funnel looking out. From ‘Winnie the Pooh’ to ‘Mein Kampf,’ the more you read the more you can make your own decisions.”
Mowry’s first short stories book won a PEN award for excellence in literature. His 1992 novel, “Way Past Cool,” is on the American Library Assn.’s list of best books for teen-agers and was optioned for a film by Disney studios. (With the option money, Mowry pulled his four children out of public school and put them in a private one.)
“America has sold out its kids,” Mowry says. “And it’s getting worse. We treat them as children for 18 years, tell them they can’t do this and can’t do that. Then we kick them out in the world and wonder why they can’t do anything.”
