Work ended on a downer when a coworker vehemently claimed that we were not a horticultural institution, and so whether my potential new boss was qualified for that part of her job (as Director of Hort) was irrelevant.

I almost cried.

Thanks, I feel unvalued and obsolete. I'll go find another job and y'all can hire contracted landscrapers. Glad to see you've caved to the unofficial mission that is not board approved. I'd like to stand my grand while I'm still here.

Suffice it to say that four-year college degrees (liberal arts education) confer a lot of benefits, many of which are not job training. this has become less so as many degrees become more vocational in nature, but even the vocational degrees (e.g. engineering) aspire to something more than "make this widget"

I'd assume that's the case. I think most of my students would benefit from college not because it increases their job chances (though it certainly does, in looking at unemployment rates of those with 4 year degrees and those without), but because there is something ineffable that matters in being an educated person.

But I'm an educator so I fall in the school-is-good camp pretty unsurprisingly.

But 100% of my students will be, if they go to college, the first person who attends college at all from their family. Demographically the education rate of the parents of my students (at least those that are self reported to the District) is less significantly less than 10 years of formal schooling. So that means most finished 8th grade and were out. Those families see education as primarily something that should relate to making money.

I meant to add... the result of the familial pressure is that students feel compelled to major in something that is deemed big money than they hit, say, organic chem or Calc II and it all goes to shit.

I'm not saying don't get an education, though. I'm saying, for me, with kids to think about, it's a little late to spend a lot on a degree that doesn't have significant ROI. But there are also ways to be educated that won't leave you in crippling debt.

I just think not every kid who's going to college -- and I agree that most of them should, and that it's a valuable experience -- should come out with hundreds of thousands in debt because they went to Harvard, whether or not they can find a job better than Starbucks.

My students come out with some debt, but certainly not crippling. Often their loan totals are less than $2,000/year because they have so much other aid because their families are in the bottom 25% of wager earners in the US.

They also are always shocked when we read a study that says roughy 8% of students in their income bracket will graduate college before age 24. I don't know why, but I find that to be a startling and depressing statistic.

Those families see education as primarily something that should relate to making money

Just about everyone in my parent's generation has one (usually more) degree. The generation before that was probably 0% with respects to higher education. Such is our third world experience.

My mother would kill puppies to get me in grad school, possibly one puppy if I went back for another bachelor's. But if it wasn't something tied into professional development somehow, no animals would be harmed in the earning of the degree.

What she has been forced to give on is that I haven't stopped learning just because I stopped going to school, so she had to back down on her definition of "educated person" since I'm still the only one in the family who grasps the difficulty of world map projections.

Or other random bullshit.

I was offered my first full time job in IT before I graduated high school, but I knew I couldn't get out that early.

Completely unrelatedly I can't find that interesting comic I read yesterday about a girl coming to terms with her best friend coming out as a gay transman. It was really touching except for how it seemed to hinge on her friend *not* coming out as liking girls. Like, what she realised wasn't a "betrayal" only went so far.

Kat,

your discussion is not an unfamiliar one. Among the things I'm interested in is what kind of educational interventions can help students in that socioeconomic bracket. In my view I think good mentoring programs with professionals who originally were in those backgrounds can help students see future employment possibilities in a variety of majors. There are hundreds of careers most people have never heard of, but you don't get exposure to them by accident.

Fairly typical, these days, actually.

Thanks Connie. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around "heart attack" and to have her hubby say she may be home tomorrow...just feels whirlwind. And I'm 3 states away. I can't imagine how her family feels.

Those families see education as primarily something that should relate to making money

Oh yeah. My roommate who was the first in her immediate family to go to college switched from engineering to business -- there was no way she wasn't going to get a practical degree. And of course, my other friend whose mother was a makeup lady graduated with the least debt. (Except for our friend who was apparently secret-rich, I guess.)

What I want to do is tell kids who are first-generation or generally poor but excelling in high school that they should apply to fancier schools than they might know about, for the best financial aid.

I would agree with the fancy schools. I am the first person in my family to go to college, and I am pretty sure I am still the only one with a four year degree, including my cousins' children. I did not necessarily do practical (theatre is actually more practical than English), but I think if I went to a fancy school, I would have been able to make more connections and move into something other than office work.