When I Was A Child….

Psst pic.twitter.com/4ucJFQPX4P

— Liam Nissan™ (@theliamnissan) December 29, 2025

When my bachelor’s degree was barely a few months old, I was teaching Freshman English on the strength of my freshly certified knowledge, and having embarked on a course of graduate study in the same field. And I had an epiphany, which I shared with my students.

In those days of broadcast TeeVee there were things called “PSA’s” meant to justify the private use of the public airwaves. A prominent one used the tagline: “To Get A Good Job, Get A Good Education.” I had an epiphany midway through a semester (my first as a teacher, I think. This was just three years shy of 50 years ago now.), and basically told my students that advice was bullshit.

Not literally, of course. Although I did literally tell them that if they were there for a guarantee of a good job, they should save their parents the money, leave now, and get jobs they could learn to do until retirement. No one took my advice, of course. What did I know? I was a superannuated senior talking to freshman, after all. What did I know?

My father was never rich, but he was a licensed professional. He couldn’t have done that without a college degree. But he was the first person in his family, ever, to go to college. His parents lived in a house his uncle built for them. I mean literally. Built it as a carpenter, with hand tool; not power tools. With a plumber for the plumbing, an electrician for the lighting, and probably an ad hic crew if laborers for things a single carpenter couldn’t do alone. My grandfather was a used car salesman. I still remember the sign from his car lot, hanging in their garage.

My mother’s father was a farmer. He moved his family around, wound up in Dallas working municipal construction for the city, in the days when the city did those jobs themselves. He ran a ditch-digging machine, a sort of pre-backhoe. My mother did not go to college.

The other side of this is my college tuition (for a state school) was the smallest portion of my costs for 7 years (four in undergrad, three in graduate school). I regularly paid more for books, and the biggest expense was always housing. Student loans were for the destitute, who deserved the education, too. Now you do have to be rich not to rely on loans.

Add that to the message of the picture above. The rich will always find ways to perpetuate generational wealth, even when “rich” just means they can afford a bit more than you can.

So my point has two prongs. I should note that all my friends went to college. We all turned out fine. But it’s a close call that college did that. I will argue (to the death, if necessary) that it worked better when college was “affordable.” That is, compared to what it costs now. You need to be very rich , going in or going out, for a college degree to mean something now. M.D.’s are facing trouble if Trump decides to call in all student loans. Today even doctors work years to pay for their education. This drives them into low risk careers, and away from careers as OB/GYN’s, among other things. We’ve accepted that doctors are rich (mostly due to third party payers, I.e., insurance companies. Ironies abound.). But if they can’t afford college until they are near retirement age by the time they do, what hope is there for the rest of us?

My point is, that picture above is the 21st century version of that PSA I heard so many times I can’t forget it now. But it wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. The world needs carpenters. And plumbers. And lots of people for whom a college degree is an expensive piece of paper. 

When I taught English, I taught people who couldn’t understand why they needed any liberal arts in their education. I knew why; but they wanted gilt-edged technical degrees, because that’s what we had sold them. My high school friend and college roommate studied business, because he was going to run his father’s machine shop. But he was a gifted mechanic. Not enough to be an engineer, but is “business” really a college degree? He learned enough to do a good job running the business, I heard. Did he need four years for that? Nowadays his BBA is considered useless. Now you get an MBA, or don’t even start. My brother graduated three years after I did, and got a Masters of Environmental Design so he could be an architect. The seeds of degree inflation were sown even then. I was odd only graduate program. My MA was supposed to be transitive, barely a train station stop on the way to a Ph.D. Those were for college professors. Now you can’t get a a faculty position in a community college without one.

Oh, don’t get me started on another topic. Let’s stick with this one, it’s bad enough on its own.

College degrees are now gilt-edged technical degrees. How could they not be?  You’re going to college to get rich, remember? Not to get a good education, but to get a good job. And good luck with that, because a good education doesn’t guarantee you a good job. I mentioned my educated friends. Education opened doors for them; but it didn’t make them rich, set them up in good jobs that reflected the worlds of Updike or Cheever, or made life as easy for them as Millennials and Gen Z all imagine it was for Boomers. I don’t really know anybody in my generation who reached cruising altitude after college and stayed there into retirement. That was the other myth we were sold on, and why the “generations” since think we sucked dry and didn’t leave anything for them except the rinds and peels. They were sold on it, too.

College is not the gateway into the comfortable life and the comfortable suburbs. It was never meant to be; and that’s part of the problem. That problem led to this problem: that middle class life requires a college diploma. More and more, that’s a cruel joke. We owe it to ourselves to do better.

If a liberal arts education was more widespread and more basic to a college education, we might well have thought more critically about this over the years, and thought more lucidly; about many things.

(Another irony: in late season 3 of “The West Wing,” a conspiracy theorist comes forward to demand access to Fort Knox, because the gold that’s supposed to be there…isn’t there. And he wants to prove it. Well, on behalf of two U.S.Senators. Ironies abound.)