Learning to Earn

If you ask many students their reason for attending college, they'd tell you it was to get a good job and make more money than they would without. And it's true, one of the main ploys we use to entice young people to attend college is future earning potential. Self-improvement is simply icing on the cake to success and financial stability.

Yet with the job market as stagnant as it has been the past few years, and the proliferation of BAs competing for jobs that may not even require it, are we able to keep our promises of better employment and brighter futures?

The University of Regina in Saskatchewan is working hard to keep this promise. The university has started an employment guarantee program where students who fail to gain employment within six months of graduation can get another year of free tuition to pursue other certification and/or vocational training toward their chosen field.

Yet is more class time truly going to make someone more employable?

Paul Krugman discusses this in a recent column in The New York Times. He makes the argument that education cannot be the be-all, end-all to attaining livable, stable employment. Education is important, but can only be expected to do so much. The rest is up to us; if we value stable employment, affordable health care, and safe working conditions, we need to work as a society to make these greater changes. Providing more college degrees cannot directly solve greater market issues around labor and employment.

And there's the case for not attending college. Recently James Altucher, a well-known hedge fund manager and author, infamously implored parents not to send their children to college. He argued that entrepreneurial skills were far more important for young people to learn, that colleges were not teaching these marketable skills, and that the money parents spend on college could net much more if invested over their offsprings' lifetimes. While I am careful to take advice on matters of what to do with my life from a hedge fund manager, I do have to agree that the skills and attitudes learned through entrepreneurship--independence, self-motivation, confidence, to name a few--are extremely important for anyone looking to shape their own future to know.

So, if obtaining a college degree isn't about getting a better job, and a good argument can be made to not attend college, maybe we should be asking a different question. What is the purpose of getting a college degree?

This discussion about the purpose of college reminds me of conversations I used to have with classmates in my Master's program about the reason for our Master's degree. Many of my colleagues wanted more practical training in our grad program, such as budgeting, supervision, and other on-the-job skills, to be more marketable in searching for Student Affairs positions. I could appreciate my classmates' concern for a successful job search after graduation, but I also believed that if our program truly shifted in focus it would devolve into a professional certification program rather than a Master's degree level program of study. Much of this has gone into my reflection on why a Master's degree is important to our field--if it isn't about being "certified" to work in Student Affairs, it must serve some other greater purpose of relevance and importance to our field (see my earlier post on the matter).

Why did you go to college? If you pursued graduate study, why did you choose to continue your education?

Did you go to college to get a better job, or did you consider potential career fields because you wanted to get a college degree (and you wanted it to be relevant to your work)?

My answers to these questions may appear in future blog posts...

Bryce

Student Affairs as Vocation

Last week, after the tragedy in Omaha and the campus shooting episode of Grey's Anatomy, I considered writing a post reflecting on my reactions to such incidents. But with Saturday morning's tragedy in Arizona as well, I don't think I have it in me right now. Plus I'd still want to focus on campus incidents rather than making a broader statement which may seem odd if I didn't mention it. That post may still be forthcoming, but not just yet.

Instead, I thought I would launch into the subject I wanted to write about most--how my decision to work in the field of student affairs (and possibly higher education in general) was not just a career decision, or even a lifestyle choice (as many Residence Life professionals may attest), but a vocational discernment. Allow me to unpack that phrase for you, at least as I understand it.

For many, the word "vocation" refers specifically to religious life, and for me, coming from my Catholic background, whenever my church hosted a "Vocation Talk," it was to foster an interest in the priesthood among us youth (read: young men; women are still not allowed to be ordained). The context in which we use the word is almost always religious--yet as I've come to understand the definition of "vocation," also speaks closely to the commitment those of us in higher education (especially student affairs) have made to our chosen field of work.

One of the meanings of the word vocation, from the Latin vocare (meaning "to call"), according to Dictionary.com, is "a strong impulse or inclination to follow a particular activity or career; a calling." When you speak to people who work in student affairs about what they do for a living, while you may never fully understand exactly what they do (and some of us are still figuring that out!), you will notice the intense passion they have for their work. And often that passion is contagious!

For me, my decision to become a student affairs professional was both unintentional and intentional. Like many of my colleagues, I did not graduate high school hoping to enter student affairs after finishing my undergraduate degree. I actually have a Bachelor's in engineering! But it was my campus involvement that led me to realize my passions and interests lay elsewhere--and the opportunity to establish an LGBT Resource Center at my alma mater (Gonzaga University) cemented that epiphany.

At the same time, though, my decision was also very intentional. While I was running the center, I took part in the Spiritual Exercises, essentially a long "retreat" that was created by the founder of the Jesuit order of Catholic priests, St. Ignatius of Loyola. (Gonzaga is a Jesuit university, and one of the religious studies classes I took was on Ignatian spirituality, so I knew what I was getting into.) While the Jesuits will go into a full month of silence to engage with the exercises, I opted for the less-intensive but just-as-fulfilling Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Living (affectionately known as SEEL). Instead of one month, participants engage over the course of nine months and only spend time twice a day in quiet reflection. It was during this time that I had the chance to deeply reflect on what I was doing for a career and how that spoke to me as a person.

And so to me, it began to feel more like a "calling" than a career choice. Granted, ultimately I plan not to become a senior student affairs officer (SSAO)--I plan to research and teach in Higher Education and Student Affairs--but higher education speaks deeply to who I am as a person, especially the developmental impact it has on students. Perhaps within your framework you may call this integrity, the synchronization of the external and internal worlds, but to me it feels like answering a voice speaking from deep within. And that is the basis of discernment--listening to those inner movements and seeing the path that you are being led toward (by God, in my case, or through whatever means with which you connect to the greater around you).

I plan to come back to this topic in future posts, particularly in how reading Parker Palmer has reinforced my belief that this truly is a vocation for me, and not just a career. In the meantime, do you see your work in student affairs as a job? Or is it also something bigger for you?

Bryce