Getting a REAL education

Recently my older brother and I have been exchanging emails on the cost and/or benefit of a college education. My brother has a bachelor's and a master's degree in engineering, and worked as an engineer for decades -- the "golden era" of engineering, he's now calling it.

"Worked" -- as in, past tense -- is the key word here. It seems older and more experienced engineers are no longer wanted in the marketplace. After dodging the layoffs for years, my brother finally got the pink slip about a year ago, along with nearly the entire rest of the senior engineering staff at his company. The trend in Silicon Valley, he reports, is to fire older staff and hire cheap imported engineers from other countries. Now he is forcibly retired. I say "forcibly" because he's spent the last 12 months interviewing for different jobs, and no one is biting despite his vast qualifications.

While my brother is somewhat bitter over this practice of laying off senior engineers, he has one extraordinary piece of good fortune in his favor: he saw the handwriting on the wall twenty years ago. He knew he could be laid off at any time. Therefore he spent his productive years purchasing properties, promptly paying off the mortgages, and staying out of every other kind of debt. Now he has income from renting out the three houses he purchased and paid off. This is his retirement strategy.

My brother is fortunate that he got his college degrees at a time when college was expensive, but not nearly as inflated as now. According to this article, the cost of higher education has surged more than five hundred percent since 1985. I'm beginning to think it's an enormous blessing-in-disguise that our girls have been priced out of the college market.

My brother just sent me a link to this article, which outlines how a student who majors in film could easily emerge with up to $182,000 in student loan debt. "This is too much borrowing!" chides the author. "You can’t repay that kind of debt on a film major’s starting salary, and you can’t get rid of student loans in bankruptcy."

All this is a lead-up to an outstanding article I recently read on SurvivalBlog entitled Getting A Real Education– Why Becoming Self-Sufficient Is Better Than Going To College. As far as I'm concerned, every word of this article is pure gold for young people just starting their adult life.

The premise of the article is that instead of spending four years of time and oodles of money acquiring a dubious college degree in a field that may not be hiring, young people should spend the next four years acquiring a work ethic and job skills, squirreling away money, and making intelligent long-term purchases.

Some quoted highlights:

[I]t is better to learn to become self-sufficient rather than spend your precious time and money going to college, at least for now. In fact, if you follow this alternate path of education, in order to be best prepared for the new reality, in four years time you will be well on the way to financial independence; you’ll also be healthier, have a nest-egg to invest, and have well-developed multiple skills. You will be at least a decade ahead of your high school pals who went directly to college.

Here’s what you should be doing during the next four years, to be better prepared to meet the emerging “New Realty”:

• Learn to find or create a job to earn money,
• Negotiate a place to live until you can move into your own home,
• Plan how to invest the money you are saving,
• Learn to grow food,
• Learn to buy real estate, and
• Develop multiple means of income. (I will explain this later on.)

The goal of accomplishing the list above is to:

• Work and save as much as you can,
• Find a property you can purchase with some of your savings to own it free and clear,
• Learn to garden or provide other legitimate means to drastically reduce your grocery costs,
• Develop your property to its highest and best purpose, which will enable you to be financially free,

Having accomplished all this, you will have learned multiple skills and the means to provide yourself and others with food and shelter. This will give you more choices, and allow you to become financially free, while you are still able to enjoy it.

The best way to accomplish all of this is to think of it as your “real education” and to commit to working your plan for four years as if you were attending college, only this is your practical education. Without a real commitment to accomplishing each step of the plan, you won’t reap the benefits it will deliver. So resolve right now to commit to the process.

At the end of your real education you will:

• Be living in a home that you own free and clear, eliminating major housing costs,

• Be able to save more money by growing your own food,
• Be healthier, because you’ve been eating healthier food instead of the GMO’d food sold in the grocery stores,
• Be able to have a nest-egg to invest,
• Be in a position to help others, financially and materially,
• Possess the real skills needed to successfully meet the challenges of an uncertain future, and
• Ultimately have more choices and greater control over your life!

This is definitely an article I'm printing out in its entirety in hopes our girls will take it to heart. In this day and age, it makes far more sense than studying something stooopid in college such as Gender Studies or Peace and Social Justice.

The college-industrial complex

Here's an interesting article off Yahoo entitled Dear Class of ‘13: You’ve Been Scammed.

According to this writer, college costs three times as much (adjusted for inflation) as it did 30 years ago. "Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago," writes author Brett Arends. "That’s in constant dollars -- in other words, after accounting for inflation. There is no evidence that you have received a degree three times as good. Some would wonder if you have received a degree even one times as good."

And this doesn't count dorms, food, apartment costs, etc. This is just the cost of teaching. The writer calls this the "College-Industrial Complex."

Our girls have been priced out of the college market. If we can't afford $10,000 in health insurance costs, we sure as heck can't afford $40,000 a year for college costs. And what's the alternative? Saddle our girls with anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 in student loan debt? What an awful way to start their adult lives.

Older Daughter's choice to attend nanny school is, we feel, sensible and practical. The cost is moderate and her chances of employment are superb. Younger Daughter is still trying to figure out what she wants to do, so we haven't had to face the issue of higher education for her yet.

"Some members of the College-Industrial Complex are now talking about a new solution to bring down costs," notes Arends. "They want to reduce, or eliminate, the amount spent on the actual teaching. Instead, students will watch online videos."

I see. So material you could get for free on YouTube is worth nothing, but material you see at home on your computer through a college for a mere $40,000/year is critical to an adult's earning potential. Got it.

I'm fully aware that a wide variety of fields require extensive higher education. I don't want my doctor learning his skills through YouTube videos. But what about other fields? Can a businessman learn business skills by going into business or working for a business, rather than earning a business degree? I don't know, but it sure seems like a possibility.

So dear readers, what are your thoughts? Are you in college or facing college options for your children? What is your experience on this issue? Is college worth it?

A few random thoughts

A few things have caught my attention lately that I thought I would combine into a single blog post.

Tim Tebow

I'm not a football fan. Neither is my husband. The sport absolutely leaves me cold. But I must admit, I'm delighted with Tim Tebow's "buck the system" approach to the game. Not only is this young man a devout Christian, but he isn't fazed by the good-natured and not-so-good-natured teasing and heckling he gets about "Tebowing."

And darn it, he's a GOOD football player. As in, incredible. That's what annoys the hecklers the most.

Keep it up, Tim -- even non-football fans are rooting for you.

Black Friday from the Trenches
I have a friend who works in a large department store, specifically the fragrance department. She was required to report to work on Thanksgiving evening since the store was opening at midnight.

Here's what she wrote about her experience:

Yup, I'm alive. I survived black Friday.

It was simply stunning to me at midnight when all of us [department store] associates were ready for the doors to be opened and there were actually people, hundreds of them waiting to come in the store AT MIDNIGHT ON TURKEY DAY!!!! I was thinking: "Are all you people nuts??? Apparently not.

Because they spent like drunken sailors. Where is all this money coming from? Who knows??? I personally sold over $1600 today during my 11:30pm to 9:30 am shift.

Honestly unless I hadn't already experienced it I would never known we were in a virtual depression in this country! If I was Jim (her outspoken husband) I'd be having a soapbox moment. I'm just too tired. I got home from work at 10:15am and was fast asleep by 10:30 easy. Got up at 2 and tried to pretend it was a normal day.

Passing on the Baton
In response to a blog post called Preserving the Work of Five Millennia, a young homeschooling mom named Sara wrote me the following email. I was so delighted with the idea of this woman passing the baton of knowledge to neighborhood kids -- a true Titus 2 woman -- that I thought I'd pass it on to you.

My 6 year old home schooled daughter, Ella, wanted to start a club. So, we spent some time brainstorming and this is what we came up with: Ella's Edible Club. Several of her friends come over once a quarter and they learn how to make something from scratch. Ella had the idea to make food based on seasons.

We met for the first time in October and made small pumpkin pies and applesauce. Several of the girls had never cracked an egg much less mold a pie crust in to a pan. They did not realize that you could make your own applesauce. We all live in a suburb of Houston, Texas and are far removed from the food chain. None of her friends home school and most of their moms make cookies with frozen pre-sliced cookie dough. They all had a great time and we able to take their goodies home to share with their families.

Other items that I will be teaching them are making your own hot cocoa mix, Christmas finger food type dessert (good to give away as gifts), sugar cookies decorated with icing, pick strawberries and make jam, and bread (no mixers involved). That should get us through the summer.

It's the little things that we contribute to society -- like this mom's efforts to teach other children that food doesn't grow in grocery stores -- that is our culture's salvation.

Good for you, Sara! Keep it up.

Preserving the work of five millennia

As a homeschooling mom, sometimes I am overwhelmed with the amount of information still left to impart to our 13 and 15 year old daughters before they leave home.

Yet I forget how much information I learned as an adult. My girls will not cease to learn once they are no longer under our guidance. We've raised them to understand that education is not confined to formal circumstances, but is instead a lifelong process.

Recently a reader directed my attention to an article called A Culture in Regression. The opening paragraphs are eerie:

The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?

No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millennia. They cannot. They do not even know why.

Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year...

That's a serious responsibility, don't you think? To preserve the work of five millennia?

To me, education isn't just cramming my kids' heads with algebra and chemistry. It's learning to appreciate the five thousand years of civilization preceding us that allows us to live the life of ease we live today. It's an appreciation of the incremental bits and pieces of information that are added to that General Body Of Knowledge from which we all draw. Like the slow building of a coral reef, this General Body of Knowledge can only grow through the contributions, large or small, of everyone.

I frequently lament how we've lost 5000 years of basic skills in only the last hundred years of easy living. Three generations ago, our forefathers collectively still knew much of the wisdom of five millennia. But do you think the texting monkeys you see hanging around malls know anything at all, except an intimate knowledge of their personal electronic devices? Maybe I'm wrong, but somehow I don't think so.

So education must be more than algebra and chemistry. It must be more than texting and social networking. It must include cooking, food preservation, carpentry, building, livestock care, gardening, basic medicine, and a zillion other things.

Do I know all those things? Of course not. But as the author of that column points out, older generations had "respect for learning whether one had it or not." Our young people have no respect, either for learning, or for their elders, or for societal norms, or any other gauge of civilization. All they can do, it seems, is text. Gaze at their little screens. Twiddle.

I may not be able to teach my girls everything I know. I may not have time, before they're old enough to leave the nest. But if I've taught them nothing else, I've taught them to be curious. We've filled our home with over 5000 books of every subject imaginable, from the light and frothy to the weighty and serious. Raising our kids in such an atmosphere, I hope we've done some good towards appreciating the work of five millennia.

My girls will leave the nest able to write clearly and distinctly; able to appreciate the birth of our nation and all the blood that went into it; able to dress appropriately and speak respectfully; able to work a job with diligence and high ethics; able to understand the sanctity of marriage; and able to recognize the blessings of God.

The rest is up to them. The work of five millennia will soon be resting on their shoulders, ready to impart to future generations.