In 1957 in my Civics class in Secondary School we had a free copy of the NY Times each morning. We were to read it and write a few paragraphs on an important article, attaching it to our writing. By 1979 I started to look for colleges. But first, I had to see what college would "buy" me, namely a job. Thus each Sunday I would get the NY Times and look at the job ads in the Weekly review section. These were professional ads. That way I could see where the jobs were and what I needed to study to get one. Seemed logical. College was a gateway to a real job, instead of collecting garbage for the Sanitation Department in NY.
That is where I saw lots of jobs for engineers. My father had studied a bit before he was drafted into the Navy in WW II so I had a few old books around. I could understand some of it. So off I went looking for colleges that taught engineering and were "free". I had accumulated a few scholarships, remember MIT was then just $750 per year and my parents were not capable of contributing. No loans back then, but if one worked their butt off one could attain scholarships.
Now getting in and paying for it were just two of the necessary steps. The next was studying and succeeding so that the job would be there. Little did I know it would be almost ten years and a bunch of degrees latter that by May of 1971 the same NY Times section was empty, no jobs! Nixon has crushed the economy totally, helped by Johnson and his war and domestic spending. Great Plan in 1959, lousy execution in 1971.
But I had skills which I could parlay, namely I also was a trained electrician. So when my Advisor at MIT asked what I was doing after all my degrees I said I was working as an electrician in New York City, wiring the Staten Island Dump for methane extraction. Needless to say there was a fear that I would end up on Page 1 of the NY Times as an example of Nixon's economy! Thus I got a faculty appointment! Much lower paying but it had "dignity", namely it hid the worst effects of the economy.
Now along comes the flighty professors of some ilk saying that my efforts of getting a job were wrong, I should have had fun. leisure. Perhaps the author would like to recall Viet Nam and the Draft, the leisure alternative. The NY Times notes:
But the expectation that college will help them land a job has led too many students to approach college like a job in its own right: a series of grim tasks that, once completed, qualifies them to perform grimmer but better-paid tasks until retirement. That’s a shame, because this mentality leaves no room for what college should primarily be about: not work, but leisure.
Thus the leisure quote. My reply, are you out of your mind! If MIT is now almost $75,000 a year, 100 times what it was back when I first looked, you better find a job and a good one. A student is spending four or more years at an extortionary level of payments solely to gain employment. If one wants leisure then get rich and dumb parents, ones who would allow such indulgence. For almost all of us, colleges is a job to get a job, and it is a job where one pays the employer. This nonsensical attitude is what results in $2 trillion in college debt!
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