Ed Issues Thursdays: What Job Can You Get With Your College Education?

My first weekend back from university, my freshman year, my dad sat me down after breakfast and plopped the LA Times help wanted ads in front of me saying, “I want you to circle all of the jobs that you can apply for with what you’ve learned in college so far.” Ah, what? I tried to explain to him that that’s not really how college works. One month at LMU wasn’t going to translate into career X. What he thought college would result in and what I thought college would result in never quite got discussed and that’s too bad. It just stayed one of those things that neither one of us ever got to a place where we understood each other. But then again, the role of a college education directly resulting in career X was a bit mystical crap shoot in the 1970s for working class folk.

It probably didn’t help that they wanted me to study engineering or at least business and I was a religious studies major. Oops. This particular disconnect isn’t the point of this post. My dad built a life based on the experiences that he saw from the adults around him. He was a dreamer and a hard worker and found a way to translate that into working in landscaping. My parents were one generation removed from being migrant farm workers and my mom said that her father was a gardener. As is often true, the desire to be a person of the soil skipped a generation and I have a nephew and my son being closer to my father’s profession than anything I ever wanted for myself. I fell in love with words and music and learning, but I didn’t see how that could become some kind of career.

My dad looked at the good and bad examples around him and figured it out. I looked around and saw priests and professors and just didn’t see how I’d fit in this picture. So, toward the end of my first bachelor’s degree I took a summer job with the phone company. Then at the end of the summer I contacted someone my sister knew in HR and got promoted to a communications technician position and watched the next 15 years scoot by (but I also stayed in school and completed my first and second bachelor’s degrees, began and quit a master’s program and got my teaching credential). The one thing that might have made a difference at any stage of my journey was someone stepping up and providing a bit of guidance or mentorship. Of course, I question whether I would have been ready to accept said guidance/mentorship.

Several years ago I heard the story about the director of the movie, The Good Dinosaur, and it spoke to me about the importance of young people connecting to or at least seeing adults doing the thing that they want to do. Director Peter Sohn told the story to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that he was the son of immigrant Korean shopkeepers and that one of the turning points in his journey was when his father met someone, someone shopping in his store, who also happened to be an animator who worked for the real ghostbusters cartoon show. At this point Peter had been drawing every chance he got, and this encounter with the professional animator showed his father that someone could make a good living drawing. That one random encounter changed everything for Peter Sohn. It was just enough to convince Sohn’s working class parents that people in America could make a living drawing, like the drawings that their son, Peter, had been doing. I never met anyone growing up who did what I wanted to do. Granted I was kind of all over the place as far as thinking about life after school. But I never felt like I connected with anyone whom I could model my career journey after.

Coming back to pubic education in 2016, I saw a lot of students with interests and talents all over the spectrum. But in Las Vegas, the vast majority of these kids come from homes where the working adults are probably in the service industry, working retail or for one of the hotels and casinos. Nothing wrong with that. But what happens to the kids who aspire to something different than retail or the service industries. How many of them are going to take whatever job they thought they could do and never assume that they could do anything else. And how about the girls, the ones who showed a knack for building their team’s robots or working through programming issues but never imagined that they could be engineers making real autonomous robots or figuring doing advanced engineering. The basic problem being that they didn’t have the random interaction with someone doing what they want to do, especially someone who might look like them.

When I was teaching my dream job at Full Sail University, I came to understand that it’s a mistake to make a one-to-one connection between education and future careers. But, it’s also a mistake to not be aware of how or whether the courses you’re taking are contributing to whatever future goals you might have. Few of us are or were in the position that we could just take university courses because they sounded cool. As a religious studies student at Loyola Marymount I had no clue how my eventual degree would translate into a career. I loved the scholarship but no longer defining myself as Roman Catholic was probably going to work against future career plans. And when I transferred to Biola University as a Biblical Studies major I was just as clueless how that was going to be a career starter. I ended my master’s in Theology efforts because it seemed clear to me that all of this had become one ridiculously expensive hobby. In the back of my head I remembered that Saturday morning sitting down with the LA Times Help Wanted section and being at a loss for where I could apply anything I’d learned in the ten-years since I left Mission Viejo to go to university.

Several decades later, at Full Sail, I saw that the connections you make as a students with professors and other students are a huge part in finding career success. They cannot teach you what doesn’t yet exist. And being a technology teacher most of my career I’ve know that we establish fundamentals, we create structures for learning, but the end goal isn’t the grade on the final exam. It’s pushing you or enabling you to begin something that you never could have done, had you stayed at home and never gone on the journey that university provided. I should have spend a hell of a lot more time in the career offices connected to whatever major I was pursuing at the time.

I’m reminded of a wonderful TED Talk by Sir Kenneth Robinson that spoke to some failures and cultural errors embedded in our educational systems. Enjoy.