With the burgeoning student debt and rising unemployment rates among recent graduates, Some millennials are facing a hard time where previous generations had a brighter outlook. On top of it all, a decrease in physical and emotional well-being has been documented among indebted Millenials. There is decreasing confidence in college career-centers as avenues for job placement, and college graduates are recognizing the need to compensate for skills they did not hone in their undergraduate years. Initiatives to make instructional material accessible to the public such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the edX platform have lessened incentives to attend college solely for educational purposes albeit increasing the probability that some students will achieve more than previously possible. For undergraduate students disillusioned by the student debt crisis and an unpredictable job market, entrepreneurship during college can provide viable alternatives to conventional career paths due to trends in the academic landscape favoring students with the ability to capitalize on its abundance of resources.
“Oh God, Mr Titus Hoyt, where you learn all these big words and them? You sure you spelling them right?”
Funny enough, I wrote that stuff for a college paper of all things. What I really wanted to say in the paper was that some students are better off going the entrepreneurial route, foregoing college altogether. The question you must be asking is, what could possibly give a student the audacity to write a college paper about the failure of college. It makes sense if you read "abundance of resources" as bread and circuses.
I first recognized this flaw before deciding on any schools. I recall overhearing my mom say to a friend on the phone with a sigh, "I don't think he wants to go to college." I guess the sentiments I was expressing at the time were like the overall sentiment Tyler was describing in that one Fight Club scene:
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables... We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
Maybe 16 year old me wasn't exactly "pissed off", but the fact I was slowly learning was that this magical place called college I had heard about all these years was just not going to give me the tools to succeed in the job market of the 21st century. Of course, it is debatable whether one should place emphasis on employment but that's for another post.
After getting my acceptance letters, I neglected my misgivings. I was going to be a Civil Engineering major. That was recession proof guaranteed, right? A Real Degree, they say. It turned out that I wouldn't be a guinea pig for the engineering degree experiment after all, since the curriculum proved to be an intellectual space in which the uninitiated flail around hopelessly trying to figure things out. Talk about filtering classes. I had been too late to the party. No amount of Amazon Prime documentaries or moments of awe in New York City or Dubai could inspire me to like engineering, at least the way my curriculum worked. This wasn't for me, it was tailored to those who knew they would be engineers for years prior to college, I thought. Couple that with the stereotype that engineers have uni-dimensional personalities and you get a whole heap of turn off. (Obviously, engineering is an occupation which is neither inherently cool nor inherently drab. It all depends on what you personally find interesting. I still think that through learning about a subject from a non-academic context first can help in developing appreciation, but more on that in another post.)
Cue Macroeconomics. I was always interested in economics, but could never fancy myself an economics scholar nor economic analyst. But oh did I enjoy studying economics, because when it comes to higher education economists will tell it to you straight, without resorting to some transcendental woo behind a college degree. Not many others would offer information that potentially jeopardizes their own industry or at least the positions their academic peers enjoy.
More on the economics of higher education and what I actually learned at college, in part 2...
Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Jimmy Wales on Frugality
Here's what Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, had to say to Millenials: "I think one of the most important pieces of advice I can give young people is that you should try to arrange your life in such a fashion that you minimize your consumption expenses as much as is practical so that you take on as little debt as possible."
Growing up, I came in contact with very few who shared this perspective. In Belize (as with the rest of the world, basically) ownership of certain commodities signal security against the backdrop of a developing economy. At least this environment incentivized a sort of business savvy among my peers and I, constantly selling, importing and buying items from each other. Ironically, it wasn't until moving to the US that I came across the notion of minimalism. Against both the ascetic ideals of self-deprivation, and the indulgences of consumerism, minimalism upholds the value of living deliberately and actively seeking out the things which provide measurable improvements to your life in the long run. It is often superficially conceived of as restriction based ethos in which people pick an arbitrary number of items they wish to own, and proceed to pare down their possessions until they reach that magic number, but writers on the subject have expressed disagreement with that version.
In the entrepreneurial community, the ability to cut back on waste and focus on that which is most important is one deliberate safeguard against uncertainties. After all Wales himself is more or less an entrepreneur even while Wikipedia has towed the hard line against monetizing in any way. The quote from Wales came from the site Quora. Yes, the same place where users give each other advice on how to accomplish anything from learning a new skill in 10 minutes to buying the cheapest car possible to live in and moving to the Silicon Valley area. I find it to be useful advice, perhaps because I came to the same conclusions myself. Who could argue with a co-founder of Wikipedia.
To my surprise, the one place in America in which this attitude should be exemplified hasn't gotten the memo (at least in my experience). That place is the American university. Contrary to the image of starving academics huddled over cups of Ramen noodles and passing the time away cogitating on hefty tomes packed with the very best of human insight, what I experienced at college in my very first semester was an appalling amount of glut.
What Wales is saying is not directed at college students per se. But the painstakingly obvious is that being a college student is often antithetical to following his advice. To illustrate this indulgence literally, here's an example of what I saw at college: At the end of every week, students who had signed up for meal plans would have almost half or more of their "swipes" left over and would go to the cafeterias, food courts and restaurants to spend the remainder only to stock it away one of the many mini-fridges in the dorms. This food would then be given away, thrown out, played with, etc. or sometimes eaten. Many opted for the non-perishable foods to avoid having to throw it out, so these processed foods eventually become a big part of the student's diet. To be fair, there were some great health food options in at least one of the cafeterias. Kudos to the school's dietitian. (If you're a student trying to avoid the "freshman 15" or an athlete, these people can help you make healthy choices. If you're too lazy to meet with them, take Michael Pollan's advice: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" Emphasis mine.)
Let's face it though, no one really cares about whether college students themselves are underfed Ramen noodle repositories or overfed dwellers of the dining hall. I mean, let the scholars enjoy some aspect of their stressed out lives, right? The point is that as a college student, one must take a serious interest in living deliberately, otherwise you end up with too many meal swipes, taking the wrong sections of a class, spending upwards of 6 years on a Bachelor's degree, etc. Little things like that...
Growing up, I came in contact with very few who shared this perspective. In Belize (as with the rest of the world, basically) ownership of certain commodities signal security against the backdrop of a developing economy. At least this environment incentivized a sort of business savvy among my peers and I, constantly selling, importing and buying items from each other. Ironically, it wasn't until moving to the US that I came across the notion of minimalism. Against both the ascetic ideals of self-deprivation, and the indulgences of consumerism, minimalism upholds the value of living deliberately and actively seeking out the things which provide measurable improvements to your life in the long run. It is often superficially conceived of as restriction based ethos in which people pick an arbitrary number of items they wish to own, and proceed to pare down their possessions until they reach that magic number, but writers on the subject have expressed disagreement with that version.
In the entrepreneurial community, the ability to cut back on waste and focus on that which is most important is one deliberate safeguard against uncertainties. After all Wales himself is more or less an entrepreneur even while Wikipedia has towed the hard line against monetizing in any way. The quote from Wales came from the site Quora. Yes, the same place where users give each other advice on how to accomplish anything from learning a new skill in 10 minutes to buying the cheapest car possible to live in and moving to the Silicon Valley area. I find it to be useful advice, perhaps because I came to the same conclusions myself. Who could argue with a co-founder of Wikipedia.
To my surprise, the one place in America in which this attitude should be exemplified hasn't gotten the memo (at least in my experience). That place is the American university. Contrary to the image of starving academics huddled over cups of Ramen noodles and passing the time away cogitating on hefty tomes packed with the very best of human insight, what I experienced at college in my very first semester was an appalling amount of glut.
What Wales is saying is not directed at college students per se. But the painstakingly obvious is that being a college student is often antithetical to following his advice. To illustrate this indulgence literally, here's an example of what I saw at college: At the end of every week, students who had signed up for meal plans would have almost half or more of their "swipes" left over and would go to the cafeterias, food courts and restaurants to spend the remainder only to stock it away one of the many mini-fridges in the dorms. This food would then be given away, thrown out, played with, etc. or sometimes eaten. Many opted for the non-perishable foods to avoid having to throw it out, so these processed foods eventually become a big part of the student's diet. To be fair, there were some great health food options in at least one of the cafeterias. Kudos to the school's dietitian. (If you're a student trying to avoid the "freshman 15" or an athlete, these people can help you make healthy choices. If you're too lazy to meet with them, take Michael Pollan's advice: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" Emphasis mine.)
Let's face it though, no one really cares about whether college students themselves are underfed Ramen noodle repositories or overfed dwellers of the dining hall. I mean, let the scholars enjoy some aspect of their stressed out lives, right? The point is that as a college student, one must take a serious interest in living deliberately, otherwise you end up with too many meal swipes, taking the wrong sections of a class, spending upwards of 6 years on a Bachelor's degree, etc. Little things like that...
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