Indeterminate

My daughter, like a lot of the people she grew up with, has just started her senior year of college.

I have noticed two broad commonalities in this group of hard-working, intelligent, principled young people and their parents. One is that there is, generally speaking, an expectation that higher education will train them for a job that draws a specific minimum amount of money – nursing is common among their college majors, and teaching, and business. The other commonality is a general expectation that both for their education and for their subsequent employment, they will not go far from where they were raised.

There is a predetermined outcome to their childhood, and it exists within a thirty-mile radius of their childhood homes. There is a predetermined arc to their adulthood, and it exists within an established pool of employers.

In this crowd of parents I feel conspicuous, like a bright cardinal on a snow-covered roof, and vulnerable, like a twelve-point buck during deer season. I have never shared these expectations.

Ash is attending a liberal arts college. She is seeking a Bachelor of Arts degree. She started as a theater major, but changed majors to anthropology/sociology. She is interested in so many things, she has so many talents. Really, she could go in any direction, turn her hand to anything.

Neither of her majors would prepare her for a traditional job. Actors do work, but they work as independent professionals on seasonal contracts – and there’s no guarantee of that first contract, or of the next. As an anthropology/sociology major, her counselor seems not to know exactly what to do with her. His only suggestion is that she become a social worker, but she tells me that is a hard “no.” So, what and where are the endpoints here?

The fact that she doesn’t know, that I don’t know, is confusing to people. They know she’s going to a small, private, selective, liberal arts college. By itself, it sounds impractical. Coupled with a major that is not also an obvious job title, it sounds as if I’m pouring a lot of my money and her time into a useless wallhanging, partly subsidized by loans she might never be able to repay.

I suppose it could end up as that.

I doubt it, though, and here’s why I think so: because that’s not how Ash or I think about education, or about life.

The modern conception of education is mercenary, which is to say, about money. How much will you spend to get a degree? How much will you make as a result of it? It’s an investment; what’s the expected return?

On the one hand, I get the arguments about college costing too much, about twentysomething adults earning their credentials by incurring crippling debt. I’m not saying that’s a good system, or that it shouldn’t be changed. It should. And taking on crippling debt as a young person is certainly less than ideal.

But so is going into education with a purely mercenary attitude. A laser focus on financial outcomes risks missing a much bigger picture. Ash does not need to be prepared to work; she was already a hard worker long before she got to college. What she needs to be prepared for now is life. And life is more than a job.

We forget that. We forget it a lot.

We forget that once our basic needs are met, the thing we want from life is meaning. And while meaning may be connected to what we do for a living—many people choose their profession out of a sense of duty to others—it is not connected to money. Ask any mom who has freely chosen to stay home with her babies why she does it, despite the financial hardship, career sacrifices, social isolation, and physically and emotionally demanding labor that often accompany such a decision. Often the answer is that these parents—together with their partners who support their work—have chosen meaning over money. It’s a privileged choice – one that not everyone can afford to make – but one that women who can make it often do choose.

When we focus intently on the financial inputs and outcomes of education, risk losing this. We create a generation of adults who are conscious of their net worth, their debt load, and their income, but who may lack sensitivity to things that are less readily measurable, but no less important.

We forget, too, that there is much in life that we do not, cannot, and should not try to control. We can choose a good school and a potentially lucrative course of study and an employer close to home, but what happens when something doesn’t go according to our plan? We are all one health crisis away from bankruptcy, disability, or worse; we are all one economic crisis away from long-distance relocation that takes us out of our known community and into a new one, where we will have to make a life from scratch. Job loss is often coupled with identity loss: people who are unemployed may no longer feel that they know who they are. They may begin to feel that their life is no longer worth anything, no longer worthy. We have to remember to value people’s lives for more than their economic contribution. We need to make it an explicit part of education, and of everyday life. The value of a human life is intrinsic; the contribution of a person to the world’s great tapestry should not be measured in terms of they money they make.

The real value of Ash’s education has not been to prepare her to make money. She’ll find a job, she’ll figure out a way to meet her basic needs, with or without school. I’m not worried about that. The real value of her education has been to weave her into the human tapestry, first as someone who portrayed other humans in stories on the stage, and then as someone who has deeply studied the workings of people and societies. She knows who she is, and where she stands in history. She knows that whether she works as a barista or a tennis coach or a teacher, or even if she does not work a traditional job at all—whether by choice, like a stay-at-home mom, or not by choice, because of disabling health issues—she is someone who has something to offer to others. She knows how to leave one community and become a contributing part of a new one. She knows how to properly value herself and others.

These are the real life skills. Know who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what you do. Know that you are valued and valuable, utterly without reference to money. We don’t need college at all, to tell us this—but we do need the message to be consistent, from family to school to church to work. From established members of a community to new ones, from old to young, from fortunate to less fortunate.

We’ll all be better people, making a better world, if we remember it.