I guess growing up in fairly middle class suburbia in the Pacific Northwest, I got the typical “You WILL go to college and become successful!” indoctrination as I grew up. I went to college, did the suit and nametag thing for two years, and dropped out. I went to work for a small software company doing bug testing and content for a company that made ESL teaching software. It was okay as entry level jobs go, but the company treated its bottom level employees like dirt, which I always thought was strange for a small company (only about 40 employees). I left that job to work at Novell, which treated their employees incredibly, with onsite banking, a subsidized cafeteria, great offices, and was right across from a golf course. Everyone working at Novell during the .com crash era walked around with this permanent shell-shocked look on their face, expecting layoffs around any corner. When mine came, I finally decided to go back to school, accomplishing the Tommy Boy plan of getting my bachelor’s in 8 years.

I graduated, moved home with nothing in my pocket (fortunately, no student loans either, though). I got a job in my field of expertise, mental health. I worked in adolescent addictions, then corrections addictions, and finally case management in acute community mental health. People have heard plenty of my war stories about the highs and lows of working with the severely mentally ill. While I loved my jobs (still do), and I love the field, it’s a really bad industry to be in, at least out on the west coast. Companies are unstable at best and corrupt at worst, and the governmental agencies involved are inept and bloated. It’s a really broken system, and too volatile to depend on for a career.

So here I am about to go to grad school to make a career change. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, whether it was teaching missionaries Japanese or teaching groups in rehab or prison, so teaching high school didn’t seem like a huge leap, and something I could find rewarding. I realized when I did the thinking about making this move that I was doing it for these basic reasons:

1 – Job stability.
As a teacher, once you have tenure, I’d basically have to do drugs with or have sex with a student to lose my job. This appeals, as I’ve spent a good chunk of time in some pretty volatile industries.
2- Pay.
If I keep teaching, I will get paid more. I’ve never been huge on money. I like to travel, but I like to do it on the cheap. I’ve figured having an income in the 50-60k range would be alright as long as the cost of living wasn’t too high in my area of residence.
3- Enjoyment
I would enjoy what I do on a day to day basis. I don’t think anyone is happy all the time in their job. The two guys I know who “made it” to the NFL hated their “job”. There’s always something that we don’t like about our jobs. I know there will be things I don’t like about teaching, but the basic premise of discovery and learning and helping people through the learning process is something I’ve always loved.

That got me thinking again about the educational process, and the push in America to “go to college and become a success!”, and we’re fed a bunch of statistics about how people with college degrees make more in their lifetimes. I think perhaps those results are skewed, though. It doesn’t take into account how much you owe, as nearly everyone with an advanced degree is carrying 30k-120k in loan debt. You also have a statistically smaller sample size, with the bulk of the wealth in America concentrated in it. Sure I have a degree, but Mark Cuban’s billions are being averaged with mine, it makes my income look a lot more respectable than it is. I think if you’re going to college because you think that’s what you need to do to become successful, you’re making a mistake.

If your goal is to make money and support your family, I think a person’s initiative and intelligence will carry them a lot further than a BA in English will. Do you know how much a commercial electrician makes? Lots! A trim carpenter? Tons! A certified HVAC technician makes a heck of a lot more than I ever will, and they don’t even need a high school diploma!

Obviously, a degree is worth something and working to better one’s self is important, but I wonder when it was that we, as a society, stopped valuing actual work. Economically we sure as heck haven’t stopped valuing blue collar work (have you gotten your car repaired lately?). But somehow you’d be viewed as an underachiever if you went in to your guidance councilor and said “I wanna be an auto mechanic”, like it’s something that only dropouts go and do. Granted, we’ve all met some pretty stupid mechanics or drywall guys or whatever, but on the other hand, if you were someone who could read, write, communicate well, and actually responsibly keep a schedule, do you know how much of a killing you could make as a contractor? I’ve occasionally thought about just chucking the whole school thing and starting a contracting company (the motto: “We actually return a phone call and show up when we say we’re going to”)

I’m going into teaching because I’d enjoy what I do on a day to day basis, and I could pay the bills and hopefully someday buy a house. Most of the rest of my life goals lie outside of things that take money to do. Obviously I could come up with ways to spend a million bucks easily, I’m not Gandhi. But I guess one thing I missed when I was growing up was perspective. To understand why I’m doing what I do, and how the choices I make affect my ability to do what I wish. Now that I have a decent amount of it, I guess that makes me a grownup now. Who would have thought it of me?