On educating the young ones

We are all to some extent victims of our parent's misplaced ambitions for us. Much of that ambition has centered around college education lately: parents work extra hard, and pay through the nose, to have their offspring educated; and in the process commit their children to anything between four and nine years of economically unproductive and demoralizing, financially dependent existence in order to earn them an education which often turns out economically unworthwhile.

Consider, as an illustration of that, my two friends: Malgosia, 35, with a master's degree in architecture, who works at the city magistrate's approving construction plans at 450 euros a month and just bought her first car on credit; and Edith, 33, with barely a high school degree, a dry-cleaning queen, with a house and car paid off and a 250K a year business. Whose parents' have done a better job preparing their daughter for life?

Clearly, Malgosia's parents messed up; they should have seen that the highly reputable but fiercely competitive profession of architect is not appropriate for their laid back, somewhat dreamy, ungrasping daughter; and have tried to secure for her a renumerative profession she might enjoy: as a baker, for example, a shoe-maker, a weaver. Edith's parents on the other hand have done well: they have trained her in a renumerative profession and have set her to work for herself in it by the age of 17. Byt the time Malgosia got her degree and set about looking for a job, Edith already had 100K to her name.

Yet, Edith regrets not having college education: I wanted to go to college, she said, and my father simply, flatly said no. It is such a pity: I know I would have done well at it! I will educate my sons.

Ominous words: well, yes, she would have done well at it -- the college education -- but would she have done well by it?

It is precisely because so much college degree does nothing economically for us these days that special theories are developed in its favor: my father insisted on my degree (to which I was opposed) on the theory that college transforms the mind and makes for a totally different person. I wonder whether this is true: talking to yet another friend, Hedwig, immensely educated (two master's degrees, one in math and another in chemistry), a fantastically quick-witted, hard-working, ambitious and successful researcher in a biotech firm, seems typical of my encounters with the college educated. I do not see the transformative power of the college degree: I find Hedwig boring (she doesn't have time for art or opera or literature and therefore can't talk about them; in fact, in most things she is profoundly ignorant, knowing most things at best half-well or not at all). Worse, she is deeply unhappy: she's harried by her job, her duties as a working mother of three, and her ho-hum marriage. If her college degree has transformed her mind, it's hard to see positive effects of that transformation.