bearing blog

So how did that whirlwind overview of Spanish for Latin speakers go, bearing?

We're halfway into our school year and I thought I'd report back on an idea I had earlier that gathered some interest in the combox.   A little more than a year ago I wrote:

The Memoria Press Latin programs that we are using -- Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, and First Form Latin -- all have a component that examines Latin-derived words in the English language.  It has seemed like a bit of a waste of time, sort of an afterthought, and we really haven't used it much at all.  But what if instead of learning about Latin-derived words in English, we looked at Latin-derived words in Spanish?  What if we studied Spanish as a specimen of late Latin -- very late Latin?  What if learning Spanish became an extension of our Latin study?

All the beginner's Spanish programs start from scratch.  But we're not starting from scratch:  we're starting from a few years of Latin.   Why can't we build on what they know already?  After all -- a great deal of the effort that English speakers have to make, when they learn their first Romance language -- we've already been through that.  Verbs are conjugated.  Nouns have gender.  Adjectives can come after nouns.  Adjectives agree with nouns.  And we've already talked about tense, and principal parts, and negation and interrogation... a lot of concepts that take up time grasping for the first time have already been grasped.  They just need to know how to do in Spanish what they already know to do in Latin.

I wrote here, a little later, about teaching pronunciation lessons based on Latin pronunciation:

I made a little chart of Latin words and Spanish words that are their cognates and that demonstrate the differences and some of the similarities between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish pronunciation rules.  For example: 

• In Latin gens (tribe), the g is pronounced like English /j/.  In Spanish la gente (race, nation), it's pronounced with a throaty /h/.
• In Latin hora (hour), the h is pronounced as in English.  In Spanish la hora, it's silent.
• In Latin signum (sign), the gn is pronounced as in English "lasagna."  In Spanish el signo, the g sound and n sound are distinct.
• Vowels are similar: A: pater/el padre (father), E: cena/la cena (dinner), I: vita/vida(life), O: oculus/el ojo (eye), U: mundus/el mundo (world) and aqua/agua (water).

So I figured I would work my way down the chart with the kids.  The emphasis is on similarities and differences between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish.  I thought maybe Hannah, who knows more about linguistics than I, could talk to the kids a little bit about consonant shift and things -- why filius became el hijo, why pax became la paz.

But I am taking seriously the need to hear a native Spanish speaker pronounce the words, so I went looking for an online audio dictionary....

H. found a neat article, which I described here, on which I constructed a pretty cool history-of-language lesson.    And then here's where I describe how we got started, just before last summer (summer's when I generally experiment with new subjects):

Lesson one was conjugating regular verbs ending in -ar -- those are very much like the verbs of the first conjugation in Latin. I picked "hablar" (to speak) as a model verb, not "amar," because I did not want to muck up the "amo, amas, amat" in Latin class. So I gave them about three dozen verbs, many of them derived directly from Latin verbs they know, and we practiced making sentences with those for a week. I had them translate from English to Spanish and Spanish to English and Spanish to Latin and Latin to Spanish.

Lesson two was the irregular verb "estar," one of the two verbs that translate "to be," and then using it to form the present progressive tense -- "I am speaking," "Estoy hablando" -- with the three dozen regular verbs. The kids liked that Spanish has this construction that they are so familiar with in English and that is missing in Latin.

What was great about it was that we could jump right in without having to explain about why verbs are conjugated, or how it can be that you do not need to use a subject pronoun, or what person and number and tense mean. The same recitation of the same meanings in the same order: hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablais, hablan. There are some differences to get used to, like the appearance of informal and polite forms of address, but most of it is comfortable already.

After my few experimental lessons, it turned out to take me approximately one semester to get a very basic Spanish grammar overview into them.  I have to tell you, I'm pleased with the results.  Let me tell you what I did.

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 I have three Latin students in this "class."  One's a ninth-grade girl, the other two are seventh-grade boys.  At the start of this year they had been doing Memoria Press Latin together for about 4 years; we had finished Latina Christiana I and were about halfway through First Form Latin, supplemented with translations I cobbled together from other sources and some other things I added along the way.  So they had had six tenses, two verb conjugations, three noun declensions, and some experience reading and writing Latin.

Here are the lessons I presented.  I teach two days a week; on Mondays we did a lesson, and on Thursdays I assigned a written exercise based on the lesson.

 

1- Pronunciation lesson, focusing on similarities and differences between Latin and Spanish.  Saves a ton of trouble as the vowel advice is all about the same, and there are only a handful of consonant differences.

 

2 - Regular -ar verbs like hablar, "to speak."  I presented our verbs, including hablar, exactly as we would learn a new Latin verb:  through recitation.  Hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan.  We compared it to the first conjugation in Latin.    I also gave them a little chart that contained the infinitive, gerund (hablando, "speaking"), and participle (hablado, "spoken").  And I gave them a lexicon of about thirty completely regular -ar verbs and their meanings, including all the ones I could find that are cognates of Latin words they know:  convocar and adorar and amar and habitar and laborar and navegar and narrar...

 3 - The irregular verb estar, which is one of two "to be" verbs.   Again, we recited it (estoy, estás, está, estamos, estáis, están), and I taught the gerund and the participle as well as the infinitive.  They learned a little bit about the usage difference between estar and ser (the other "to be" verb), and then I taught the present progressive tense, which uses estar + gerund just as in English:  hablo = "I speak," but estoy hablando = "I am studying."  

Three lessons in and already two ways to speak about what is happening now!

 

4 - Regular -er verbs like comer, "to eat."  I taught this lesson just the same as Lesson 2, but keyed to the second conjugation in Latin: Spanish deber is the exact cognate of Latin debere.  I explained that what we call the "stem" in Spanish is short one vowel -- for example, the Latin stem of debere is debe-, with endings -o, -s, -t, -mus and so on, but the Spanish stem of deber is deb- and the vowel is considered part of the endings -o, -es, -e, -emos and so on.  And I gave them more words for their lexicon -- about ten completely regular -er verbs.

 

5 - Irregular verb haber, the helping verb for the perfect tense.  I taught it like the other verbs (he, has, ha, hemos, habéis, han), and then showed them how to use it with the past participle to form the perfect tense (como = "I eat," he comido = "I have eaten, I ate.")  Also habiendo comido ("having eaten...") and haber de comer (to be supposed to eat, to "have to eat.")

 

6 - Regular -ir verbs like vivir = "to live."  Compared the conjugation to the two other families of verbs.  Added a dozen more verbs to their lexicon.

 

7 - The irregular verb ir, "to go."  Voy, vas, va, vamos, vaís, van.  I built on that to teach the immediate future construction, ir + a + infinitive, which is very much like English:  vamos a decidir = "we're going to decide."  

Seven lessons in, and they have one way to speak of the past, two ways to speak of the present, and one way to speak of the future.  (And in case you're wondering, they were doing fine on the exercises, except that they kept forgetting to add accents.)

 

8 - Direct object pronouns.  We recited them in the same pattern as verbs (singular - 1st, 2nd, 3rd person; plural - 1st, 2nd, 3rd person):  me, te, lo/la, nos, os, los/las.  This came with a lesson on word order.  The usual order is S-V-DO just in English:  María lava la toga.   But when a pronoun replaces the direct object, it comes before the verb:  María la lava.  And when the verb is an infinitive, gerund, or command, the pronoun is attached to its end:  María debe lavarla, Maria should wash it; María está lavándola, Maria is washing it; Lávala, Wash it.

 

9 - Irregular verb dar, "to give."  I taught this with a long list of idiomatic expressions that use dar, like dar la hora, "to strike the hour," dar un paseo, "to take a walk,"  and dar a conocer, "to make known."  I used this lesson to introduce the idea of idioms that don't translate exactly, and the technique (from The Loom of Language) of learning to think in the target idiom -- to get it in your heads that whereas English speakers "take" a walk, Spanish speakers "give" one; that English clocks "chime" or "strike" the hour, but Spanish clocks "give" the hour; that in English you "make something known," in Spanish you "give to know" something.

 

 10 - Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, i.e., object pronouns that refer back to the subject:  me, te, se, nos, os, se.  As in, El gato se lava, "the cat washes itself."  I needed this lesson in order to teach the large class of ...

 

11 - Pronominal verbs, which have a reflexive pronoun as their object.  I felt I had to explain these before we could do any dictionary work, because they get their own entry in the dictionary with the pronoun stuck on the end, and I feared the kids wouldn't recognize them as verbs.  For example, llamarse, "to be called, to be named," so that you wind up saying Me llamo Juan, "I call myself Juan," instead of "My name's Juan."   I gave them a list, sorted into -ar, -er, and -ir families.

At this point I gave them a dictionary and began using words they didn't know in their exercises, forcing them to look them up.

12 - Irse, "to go away," an example of an irregular pronominal.  When you go, you go; but when you go away, you go yourself away.

 

13 - The imperfect tense.  We recited all the forms in all three verb-families.  Thanks to Latin, they already know the difference between imperfect and perfect, so I didn't have to get into that.

 

14 - The imperfect tense and the pluperfect tense.   Since the pluperfect is just made by adding the imperfect form of haber to the past participle of the verb (había lavado, I had washed) the two tenses go together quite nicely into the same lesson.  Thanks to Latin, they already know what the pluperfect is for and how to translate it.

 

15 - Dissecting the noun phrase.  I presented this lesson as a lecture, after which I gave them an open-notes pop quiz.  Here's the gist of it:

• The noun phrase is the part of a sentence that names participants in the action that's laid out in the verb phrase. 
•  All nouns have gender.  They know about that from Latin, and were cheered to find out that there were only masculine and feminine, not neuter.  
• All nouns have number.  
• Nouns do not have case.  (More cheering.)
• Common nouns need a "determiner" such as an article; proper nouns don't.  (Here I discovered that they were rusty on the proper-common distinction, so we veered into a general grammar lesson for a while.)    
• Determiners and adjectives must agree with the noun in gender and number.  
• Adjectives can come before or after the noun, and the placement affects the meaning.  
• The entire noun phase may be replaced by a pronoun.

 

16 - Plural forms.  Rules for making a singular word (noun or adjective) plural.

17 - Feminine forms.  Rules for making the feminine-singular form of an adjective when they know the masculine-singular form.  We compared this to what we know of 1st/2nd-declension adjectives in Latin.

And that's where I stopped.  By the end of that they were translating things along the lines of "Hace cuatro días la niña sufría.  Luego el médico la ha socorrido."  ("Four days ago the girl was suffering.  Later the doctor helped her.")  And "El espectáculo se ha acabado.  En seguida el auditorio ha aplaudido.  Luego lo loaban."  ("The show finished.  At once the audience applauded.  Later they were praising it.")

I think that's not bad for 17 lessons, eh?

Now we're starting something new:  we're using a Pimsleur audio course to work on spoken Spanish. I'm interspersing audio lessons with grammar and translation lessons based on the material in the audio course.  

For example, after the first audio lesson, which introduces the utterances Entiendo ("I understand") and ¿Entiende? ("Do you understand?"), I taught them on paper to conjugate entender, which has regular endings but, like many, many otherwise-regular Spanish verbs, undergoes a stem change ("in the boot", as my high school French teacher called it when French verbs did it)  to make entiendo, entiendes, entiende, entendemos, entendéis, entienden.  This is a recurring pattern, and is necessary to know if you're going to try to find verbs like this in the dictionary.  

After subsequent audio lessons, I did translation exercises based entirely on phrases that had been spoken in the most recent lesson.

I didn't have any goals, starting out, other than to see what would happen, how fast they could learn, if we built on what we already knew from Latin.   I'm really pleased with how it's going.

 

Review: The Mind at Work by Mike Rose.

I'm going to stay on the subject of vocational-oriented education vs. liberal-arts education long enough to post a review of a 2004 book I finished reading last night:  The Mind at Work:  Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker by Mike Rose.

This book is a quick read, not too scholarly, and full of anecdotes about the lives of working people:  waitresses, hairdressers, railroad men.  There are also those who teach future workers:  a woman who teaches welding at a trade school, a man who teaches high-school carpentry.  

I was prompted to read this book when I turned on NPR in the middle of an interview with the author on Weekend Edition.  It must have been a rerun, I guess, since the book was released eight years ago.   But I was drawn in by Mike Rose's description of interviewing his own mother at the kitchen table, inviting her to reminisce about her years as a waitress.

The work of Mike Rose's mother, uncle, and other relatives figure large in this book.   It's part family history and part social/educational essay.   Here are some of the themes:

(1) Calling attention to the mental work that so-called "low-skilled" jobs demand of their practitioners.  For instance, the waitress works for tips, so she can increase her income by honing her craft.  A good memory helps.  So do subtle manipulation skills, quick judgment about the priority of tasks, spatial sense, flexibility, and negotiation techniques.  The personal work histories that Rose uses to tell these stories are fascinating to read, a sort of glimpse behind the swinging door, for someone who's never waited tables or built one.

(2) Inviting the reader to look at these workers in a new way that demands more respect than we might be inclined to think.  Rose argues that many  wait staff act as individual entrepreneurs, and that a hairstylist  is a sort of creative consultant.  

(3) The sometimes arbitrary distinction between "skilled" and "semi-skilled" and "skilled" workers; the historical role of labor unions in creating this distinction, and how gender and class have been used to funnel young people into prescribed roles.  (Sometimes the funneling can be a mixed blessing for a group:  he writes that "Girls were channeled into clerical courses," but points out that these were successful in leading to employment.)  

(4)  The artificial separation between "hands-on" or "practical" education, and "academic" education.   There is an interesting part of the book where Rose looks at the work of surgeons; they have, of course, a very technical and practical job involving the skilled use of the hands, but enjoy a much higher status than most other "hand" workers.  It makes for a thought-provoking comparison with the carpenters and welders that make up the larger part of the book.

(5) The mixed bag that is vocational and technical education today.   Vo-tech education might provide a place where a young person, disliking classroom work, can learn to strive for excellence and discover his own self-worth; or it might be a place where young people are shunted too early and where expectations are kept low, and where the intellectual development of the young people on the "job-training track" is unfairly neglected.  Rose writes a bit about his own experiences with the differences between "academic" and "vocational" education (he began high school as a working-class kid on the vocational track, and later moved to the college prep track), but most of this story is told by examples from the teachers and kids that Rose observed in their learning environment.  

Here's an excerpt from the back, criticizing the VocEd system's separation from the academic realm by pointing out a situation where, literally, a student needed to be guided to "see something from the other side:"

...[T]here were no bridging mechanisms...to enable creative interaction, to foster cross-disciplinary discussion that could expand and enlighten, for example, the use of tools or the development of literacy.  I think here of something I saw...that crystallized this... I was watching [Mr. Butler, a teacher,] as he was guiding two of his students inserting windows into a house frame.

They have just placed an assembled window into its space in the frame.  They are looking it over, eyeballing the edges, checking it with a spirit level.  They're following procedure, and everything seems OK.  They're ready to fasten the window in place.  Mr. Butler...asks them to come here a moment, to walk with him around to the other side of the window, inside the house.  "Take a look from here," he says. The boys inspect the edge of the frame---and see the problem.   The plywood that forms the frame on this side of the window assembly has been cut unevenly, and at several places there is not enough wood to receive the nails that the boys were about to drive from the other side.  They are visibly struck by this, say they wouldn't have thought of this.  But, geez, now that they see it....

In many ways, this is a small thing...But it also could be thought of as a metaphor for the vocational-academic divide.  Though a routine move, and though utterly functional...this strategic shifting of physical location represented for me the shifting in perspective that is such a key element of intellectual development.  It contributes to the solving of problems in many domains, to a more complex understanding of human behavior, to adopting a point of view in literature and the arts.  A lot could emerge from this moment.  The day-to-day at the...job site was full of such episodes, and their cross-disciplinary potential was, for the most part, lost to the English teacher or the psychology teacher, sealed off by the physical and conceptual barriers in the curriculum. [emphasis mine]

The result is separate professional spheres, each narrowly defined.  And it is the academic curriculum, not the vocational, that has gotten identified as the place where intelligence is manifest.

I think this episode is a good one to pull out, particularly as Darwin and I continue our banter on the meaning, utility, and limits of the "liberal arts education."  The episode with the window -- thinking of a "shift in perspective" that is literal and using it to jump off and think of metaphorical shifts of perspective -- is pretty emblematic of how I like to say that my technical education serves me as a "liberal" education.  I have a toolbox of metaphors and allusions too:  mine contains concepts like Schroedinger's cat, "black boxes," diffusion, parallel and series, material and energy balances, instabilities, damping, deformation, boundary layers.  Problem-solving of all kinds.  I call on the mental associations linked to concepts like these every day.  

I think much of this book would be a good assignment for a high school student.  There is certainly material there that might encourage thoughtful consideration of one's future, but more importantly, I think the anecdotes serve to inculcate respect and admiration for the people whose work (often behind the scenes) contributes to our health, safety, leisure, and comfort.

The chapters on vocational education are probably worth reading for any educator -- including the homeschooler.  I have gotten so used to thinking of vocational education as a good solution to much of the education bubble's excesses, that I had forgotten to consider how it really plays out in real schools, where the "academic" and the "vocational" sphere are completely isolated from one another.   But in  the homeschool, we can round out the liberal arts education with a good dose of skills training, or we can make sure that our trades-minded children still receive a firm grounding in classical liberal arts.  We don't have to make the trade-offs that the institutional schools have had to make -- nor the mistakes they've chosen.

 

Postsecondary education questions: A summary of what I have learned so far, before moving on to entirely different aspects.

So, here's a rough summary of what I think I've figured out for myself (your mileage may vary) while I've been writing this series so far.

Education is by definition "the development of the right use of reason and the right use of freedom."  TEducation necessarily includes moral and theological understanding, the transmission of culture, and an especially firm grounding in human sexuality.  A detailed list of features of education is here.  

Education includes features like skills-training and home economics.  I believe this is supported by Catholic doctrine: an individual who will likely marry must be educated so that, by means of that education, he can "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic circumstances."  

When it comes to determining if your education is adequate, "latent competency" counts.  I wrote about latent competency here.  Basically, if you've learned how to learn, and you possess the intrinsic motivation to learn, then education has done its job.  You'll acquire what you need to know when you need it.  

The parts of a liberal-arts education that are truly necessary for full human development must be included before high school graduation.  When young people are legally emancipated at an arbitrary age, parents have a positive duty to present and develop (at least to latent competency) all the necessary components of a whole education by then; or to cultivate successfully in their children the values that will motivate their children to go on to acquire those competencies at older ages.  Otherwise they may fail in their task of education, when a legally-adult son or daughter abandons it unfinished. 

Parents do have a positive duty to support their sons' and daughters' education beyond age 18 if they haven't acquired at least "latent" ability to establish a family in favorable circumstances.  I believe it's contrary to Catholic understanding of the purpose of education to declare that parents can morally declare children "on their own" at an age that's derived from the civil government's arbitrary definition of the age of majority.  But this "latent ability" can be quite broadly defined.  A 19-year-old who's secured a scholarship and has a prudent plan for her education and future employment, and is possessed of character traits that are maturing towards healthy adulthood, can be assumed to have it, only because she's on a track that is likely to be successful.

Parents also have a positive duty to make decisions concerning the good of the whole family, including their own needs (present and anticipated).  This creates a tension between what a single individual might demand of the parents and what parents ought prudently offer.  

Adult sons and daughters who are so supported by their parents retain the moral duty of filial obedience.  This extends to all matters decided by the parents for the good of the family, and continues until they become "emancipated" and are living outside the parents' home.  Pragmatically speaking, this means that parents rightly place judiciously chosen conditions upon financial support of their offspring's continuing education.  The parents choose these conditions to the end of helping their son or daughter acquire the ability to "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions," within the limits set by the good of the whole family.

Parents may not pressure their sons and daughters in the choice of vocation, profession, or spouse.   But I think this still allows them to prudently offer different kinds of support to different children, tailored to the young person's particular plans, abilities, and circumstances.  This is so even if this creates the appearance of offering more money to support some choices than others.  Some choices need more money; some choices might suck money into a black hole, never to be seen again.   Some young people might achieve maturity with a little more hand-holding and direct support; some young people might need to learn from the experience of trying to support themselves.   Education is not one-size-fits-all.

Though parents have the duty to begin education and carry it to a certain point, the adult learner bears the responsibility for a great deal of his education.   I divided the tasks up here.  Certain professional specializations; self-education through choice of leisure; retaining an understanding of the whole human person; cultivating appropriate patriotism; all these are assigned not to the parents, but to the adult.  They tend to be what you might classify as "lifelong learning."

Large amounts of education debt are positively to be avoided.   Debt is anti-vocational.  There are probably a very few circumstances in which it is warranted, but always with caution.

The old assumptions about the value of college don't hold firm anymore.  While in the aggregate college graduates earn more and suffer less unemployment, it's not clear that a given individual will significantly raise his future earnings (enough to justify the cost) by enrolling in a four-year university.   Different degree programs offer widely varying prospects.  The "signal" of a quality employee that used to be conferred by any college degree is getting diluted by sheer numbers.   Particular individuals might do better economically if they choose an alternative to four-year-college-right-out-of-high-school; for other individuals, choosing a different path might be morally safer or might more securely develop a mature character.  Finally, the quality of the education (measured in the richness and quality of the culture it promotes; the variety and vividness of the intellectual atmosphere; the commitment to authentic human values; the challenge to an engaged student) varies from institution to institution, department to department, so that many students graduate seemingly intellectually unchanged.

 It makes sense to delay spending any money at all on postsecondary education until the young person has a plan that is ordered to establishing a family in favorable moral, social, and economic circumstances. Without a plan, the education cannot be tailored to the vocation, and the money spent has a high probability of returning low value, either in tangibles or in intangibles.  The delay can be spent in productive work, and if that's not much fun, then it is itself a motivation to come up with a plan.  While you're at it, it's a good idea to have an "escape hatch" plan in case the first one becomes unfeasible.  As Darwin said, "Borrowing tens of thousands of dollars is a bad way to avoid making decisions;" in my opinion, from the point of view of parents, "spending tens of thousands of dollars is a bad way to enable someone else to avoid making decisions."

Just as young people ought to consider alternative means of self-development, parents ought to consider alternative ways of materially supporting young people.  I outlined some thoughts about that here.

Consider whether you'll actually get the four things you might be buying when you pay for college:  a signal of quality; a required credential; a set of vocational skills; and a difficult-to-measure acquisition of other experience, skills, and knowledge.  Will you be paying too much for a poor signal, or will you be "found out" for flying a false-flag signal (because you're really not the kind of person that employers are looking for in a college graduate?)  Do you have what it takes to obtain the required credential, or will you pay a lot of money and then drop out before getting there?  Will the education really develop the skills you are hoping for, or is it a bunch of empty promises?   How much are you willing to pay for returns that you think you'll value, but that are unmeasurable?

 

I think that's a good summary.  I'm going to shift gears in my next post and consider... The Case Where Money is No Object.

Balance and the buffet.

Last evening we all got back late from the gym after swimming lessons.  I knew there were lots of leftovers in the fridge, so I didn't make dinner; instead, I pulled out all the soup and deli meat and cheese and breads and fruit and arranged it on the kitchen peninsula to make a sort of buffet.  It was an unusually good set of leftovers because we'd been feeding houseguests over the weekend.

I've learned that it engenders a panicky rush if we set all the children on the Leftover Buffet at once, so we called them up one at a time (beginning with the pickiest) to choose items for their plate.  Mark and I were tired and not in a mood to argue, so we didn't bother "helping" them, or enforcing any rules about vegetables, and let them put together anything they wanted.

I always think it's kind of interesting what they come up with.  I think we must be doing okay in the "how to make a balanced meal" department.  This is what they chose (in order):

The 8-year-old boy:  

• Peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread
• an orange

Two-year-old boy (okay, he had help):  

• Part of a homemade blueberry muffin
• Rolled-up slice of deli ham
• Sliced oranges

Six-year-old girl:

• Three corn tortillas
•  spread with cold canned refried black beans 
• and rolled up with lettuce and diced red bell pepper

Twelve-year-old boy:

• Homemade bean-and-ham soup
• Turkey, muenster, and tomato sandwich on a bought whole wheat bagel

Me, I had curried butternut squash soup with added diced raw cabbage and peppers; some Scottish cheddar cheese; a wedge of cornbread; and a widget-can of English ale.  I think Mark had a dinner similar to Oscar's, plus an ale like mine.  

In our house we have a rule that the children may have juice boxes with dinner if Mark and I are opening a bottle of wine or if we're each having our own beer (standard practice is to split one, since I am a horrendously light lightweight).  This keeps the juice-box consumption low while retaining a sort of celebratory feeling about it.  Also it leads to the children constantly asking us, "Don't you think some beer would go really well with that dinner, Mama?"  So they had juice box with their leftover buffet as well.

I guess they are internalizing the things we teach them after all.  We really weren't supervising much, and they could have chosen nothing but blueberry muffins if they'd wanted that.

(Here's another post about leftovers:  Leftovers with Attitude.  Contains links to a few good ideas for leftover night.)

Postsecondary education: Can the signalling game be fixed?

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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In my last post about postsecondary education, I enumerated the four things you're buying when you buy education:

1. Signals of quality
2. Required credentials
3. Vocational skills
4. Valued experiences

After I finished the post, I got up from the computer and sat down next to Mark, and explained what I had come up with to him.  He thought maybe I should have lumped "required credentials" in with "signal value" -- and there is some good reason for that, as you'll see -- but otherwise agreed with the list.

"So, if those are the four things you're buying, then how do you game the system?  How do you win the game?" I asked him.

"I guess you do it by paying as little as possible for the signal," he said.

And this seemed pretty reasonable to me at the time.

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But I wanted to know more about the signaling model, so I started googling around.  I found out two useful things.  

First, I learned that the model was devised in the 1970's by American economist Michael Spence, who developed it -- in part -- around the same scenario that we are discussing here:  that employers use education level as a proxy for valuable abilities.  

Second, that Spence, along with two others, won the "Nobel economics prize" (technically it is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for this work, and his acceptance lecture is online and gives an overview of the work.

I haven't tried to digest the entire thing, but I read enough of it to find something funny about Mark's suggestion.  In the simplest signalling model, Spence explains, there are two kinds of workers:  those with high productivity, and those with low productivity.  There are two salient features that distinguish the  two groups:

1. Employers are willing to pay more to get high-productivity workers.
2. Each "unit of education" costs a low-productivity worker more than it does a high-productivity worker.

This is the whole reason why -- in the simplest, pure signalling model -- education serves as a "signal" of productivity:  because it costs the undesirable workers more to acquire each unit of education, at each successive level of education the pool of employees is more concentrated in the desirable employees.  Employers will pay higher wages for more-highly-educated employees because at those levels a randomly chosen employee has a higher chance of being one of the desirable ones.

But the whole reason this works, in the simple signalling theory, is that low-productivity workers pay more for education.  This is almost like defining a low-productivity worker as "one who pays too much for education."

So when Mark suggested that you could beat the signalling game by "not paying too much for the signal," he was basically suggesting that you could beat the game by being the kind of worker that employers want to hire.

Which rather gets you back to your starting point, doesn't it?

Those who have, get more.  Those who have not, lose what they have.  I think I have heard this before.

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Anyway, that is about a pure-signal system, where education confers zero added value on a worker -- its whole value is to the employer as a sorting mechanism.  In reality, education can confer value on a student -- though whether it can turn a low-productivity worker into a high-productivity worker is questionable, and it may be that some students gain no valuable skills at all (or that they have difficulty getting connected with the employers who might value what they have gained).  

I'm tempted to go off on a tirade about the inefficiencies in the system.  Spence's theory, if you go on reading it, is that the signalling system is made more efficient if you tax education (which in the theory doesn't confer any value, only signals it).   This raises the cost of education, so people buy less of it with the same out-of-pocket costs, and the tax revenues can be distributed to all the people as refunds; but it preserves the signal.  Of course, we don't tax it, we subsidize it, which is the opposite of taxing it, and maybe that makes the system the opposite of efficient.  

And of course there is the problem of the third party not mentioned in Spence's theory (at least as far as I read), namely, the people who are selling the education; they don't have an incentive either to make the signal more useful or to confer skills on people; you might say that they have an incentive to attract as many low-productivity customers as possible, because those are the ones who spend the most for what they get.  Maybe, if you are selling educational units for their signal value, you only want as many high-productivity people at your educational institution as you need to keep the prestige of your institution high, so you can attract lots of low-productivity people, who are paying your bills.  It costs less to sell them education.

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But the question before us is not whether we should change the current system; it's what kind of education the individual should buy, given the system that we have.

It seems like it might be useful to know yourself.  Are you low-productivity or high-productivity by nature?  Are you already the kind of person that employers want?   Will you be paying too much for a signal that  says "I'm high-quality goods?"  Will you be found out in the end anyway as the impostor you are?  Or are you the real deal, and will stand out from the crowd?

It seems like it might be useful to know whether you have what it takes to get the required credential.    What are the chances that you'll sink a lot of money and time into education, only to drop out before acquiring the degree/certificate/license that the gatekeepers require?

It seems like it might be useful to consider how education might build your measurable skill-set.  And watch out for promises that education will build a set of skills that are "intangible" or "unmeasurable" but that are nevertheless, supposedly, valuable... the emperor may not have any clothes.

Finally, what about those valued experiences?  It seems like it might be useful to consider how much you are willing to pay for each year of a multi-year vacation.  Because, you know, you could spend your money getting valuable experiences a lot of other ways, too.

Postsecondary education questions: Alternative means of parental support past 18.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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At age eighteen, a young American acquires the legal right to leave his family of origin and strike out on his own. But it is a rare young American who awakens on his eighteenth birthday ready to "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions."  

Oh, sure, there's a few situations where a young person will by age eighteen have something approaching latent competency to establish a family.   That is, the fundamentals have been learned, "financial means" are secured one way or another, and the path is clear to acquire the rest.  Mark and I sort of had that, each of us, when we finished high school, before we met each other.  We had a lot of maturing still to do, but each of us started college with a full scholarship, a decent work ethic, and a declared major in a fairly practical field.  It wouldn't have been wise for us to get married and start a family at age 18 or 20!  But neither would it have been crazy to look at either of us and assume that we would make it out all right, assuming we didn't screw it up along the way.  

(Now, of course, we shake our head and wonder how we managed NOT to screw it up.  But that is another story.)

Lucky individuals aside, most eighteen-year-olds aren't all set for the future.  If it's the parents' moral obligation to educate a child until they can "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions," then I think we parents maybe should expect to continue offering educational, financial, moral, and social support past age eighteen. 

But...

Because an eighteen-year-old is legally free from his parents' control, he can decline that support.  And so at age eighteen, the parent-child relationship enters a new and strange phase:  one in which the parents have a responsibility to offer appropriate, judicious guidance and support, but the son or daughter no longer has the obligation to accept it.

It is easy to see how the mutual responsibilities can become confusing, particularly if communication is poor.  It's also easy to see how new power struggles can develop.  The young person may need her parents' help and support acutely as she tries to cement the skills of independent living; but at the same time she may resent much of their advice and the things they ask of her.   The parents may be eager to see their children move on to independence, and eager to help; but at the same time they may feel dismay at their sons' and daughters' choices, and wonder if they ought to use the power of the purse to compel "right" choices.

The Catholic documents give some guidelines about the mutual responsibilities of parents and children.  (See here and here.)  But ultimately, parents and their grown children have to find shared values in order to move forward in a way that satisfies both. 

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What kinds of support might parents provide for their children past the age of eighteen in order to help them complete their education so that they might "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic circumstances?"

The one that most of us are talking about around here is paying for college.   After (maybe) receiving a need-based offer of a financial aid package from a school, there's usually still a price to be paid.   

Paying for college, for an eighteen-and-over son or daughter, is the functional, continuing equivalent of delegating your underage child's education to an elementary or secondary school, or of putting in the work of homeschooling them.  And parents must delegate that education responsibly:  they maintain some responsibility over this education, because a young person is not "emancipated" in any sense of the word if his parents are paying thousands of dollars a year for his upkeep.

• "As far as possible parents have the duty of choosing schools that will best help them in their task as Christian educators" and that correspond "to their own convictions" [CCC2229].   
• It isn't a foregone conclusion that the school they choose will be a school friendly to the faith:  If "ideologies opposed to the Christian faith are taught in the schools," parents ought to "join with other families and ... help the young not to depart from the faith" [FC40]. 
• But at the same time, "parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children."
•  They should cultivate "a simple and austere lifestyle" to promote the correct attitude towards material goods [FC37].  
• Parents must "consult the interests of the family group, of temporal society, and of the Church," in order to "thoughtfully take into account both their own welfare and that of their children, those already born and those the future may bring" [GS50] 

I read in this that parents who are paying for a postsecondary education have the right and the responsibility to take part in the selection of a college.   It would not be appropriate for a parent to completely control their son's or daughter's education, because "parents should be careful not to exert pressure on their children... in the choice of a profession,"  but they are perfectly within their rights to "set a good example" by carefully considering whether the money is well spent according to their own values.

Because parents owe their unemancipated children discipline:   Paying parents are also perfectly within their rights to set conditions on the money, such as maintaining a certain academic performance, sticking to an agreed-upon plan to graduate on time, or staying out of certain kinds of trouble.  The choice of conditions requires careful thought, though.  The catechism implies strongly that parents should not require obedience except for the good of the child or the good of the family, and that instructions to the child should be reasonable [CCC2217.]  Parents must not provoke their children to anger [CCC2223].  Parents must not force a person "to act contrary to his conscience" or "prevent him from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters" [CCC1782].

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Parents can also support sons and daughters during the postsecondary education years by allowing them to continue living at home.  In some ways, this arrangement can look very much like it did before the child's eighteenth birthday, but really something fundamental has changed, because the arrangement is now, legally and morally speaking, voluntary on both sides.  Either parents or young adult could choose for the good of the family to terminate the arrangement; and the young adult is free to terminate the arrangement in order to establish a new family.  Because it's voluntary, it's appropriate to negotiate the terms.

There are a lot of economic and social benefits to the living-at-home-with-parents arrangement.  The family who considers this option presumably already knows how to live together in some peace, so there are no unknowns associated with finding new roommates; the total rent/mortgage cost paid by the family members is smaller; there are no transaction costs associated with obtaining a new living space; many common items can be shared instead of new ones having to be bought; economies of scale are preserved in the purchasing of food and groceries. 

Offering to pay for college is an economically significant gift to the young person, at a steep cost to the parent; welcoming their son or daughter's continued presence in their home is also economically significant to the young person but (unless they would otherwise downsize to a smaller home or rent out a bedroom) at a quite low cost to the parent.  

If the young person is living at home and has not yet learned how to have "stable work, sufficient financial resources, sensible administration, [and] notions of housekeeping" -- part of the necessary content of education -- then a period of living at home after age eighteen is a good, if late, time to start.  Acquisition of these skills by contributing to the running of the household and demonstrating progress on a plan towards self-emancipation (working and saving money, studying for a degree or certificate, rehabilitating oneself, etc.)  can be a condition of this kind of support.  Remember, parents have a responsibility to educate their children who are living at home, and children living at home still have the duty of obedience towards their parents' just requirements.

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A third means of support that parents can provide are certain incidentals that are often of low cost to the parent but high value to the young person.  Two common examples are health insurance coverage on the family plan (where the young person is eligible) and use of a family-owned  and insured automobile.    These aren't generally cost-free to the parents (for example, health insurance premiums for an employer-provided plan are higher if they include dependents), but they are often much, much less expensive than a separate plan for the young person, and so it may make common sense for parents to provide them -- even if they require the young person to reimburse them for some of the extra cost.

Depending on the total amount of support, it doesn't strike me that a young person's accepting this kind of help from his parents necessarily means that he isn't emancipated from them (particularly if he reimburses them their out-of-pocket costs). 

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 Some parents may be so positioned as to be able to offer their son or daughter a job.  Maybe they are business owners, or own rental properties that require management.  Maybe the parents hope the young person will join the family business and eventually take it over; maybe it is just a good means to help him ride out a recession with a secure job.  Or maybe there's a service that they could really use -- caring for younger siblings or other relatives still at home, cooking and household projects for the family, etc.  Either way, it's an opportunity to directly help the young person acquire work experience or life skills. 

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But what to do if there is some money to help the kids get started in life -- a "college fund," if you will -- but college doesn't look like the way to go?  There's always straight-up gifts of cash.  The difference between a gift that's enough to pay for college tuition, and "paying for college," is that a gift doesn't have strings attached.  Except, of course, on the honor system:  "This gift is for you to use wisely so that you can establish stable work and sufficient means to support a family."

This is the ultimate in "being careful not to pressure" young people, and it communicates a lot of trust in the young person's wisdom and willingness to listen to advice.  

Probably not a good idea for some young adults.  Maybe a good idea for others.

A similar option, a little safer, might be to set up a trust fund.  Let a young adult start off with a nest egg, and encourage him to learn about investment strategies and long-term money management, so that he can turn it into something meaningful.

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But besides paying for college, there are other strings that could be attached to cash money -- always remembering that the goal is to give the young person the means to, by way of his education, "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic circumstances."  

Maybe the parents would be willing to put up seed money for a business start-up (perhaps in exchange for a share in its ownership).  

An alternative to paying for college, if the son or daughter's college "plans" are nebulous and unformed or suspiciously low in bang-for-the-buck, might be to subsidize -- not the college semesters themselves -- but tuition for a shorter-term vocational degree or certificate intended to bump up the wages that the young person can command before going to college.  The average student doesn't graduate in four years anyway -- why not make the first year or two as lucrative as possible, by making them years of vocational training?   There will still be time to go to college afterward, but the difference is that (a) the young person has a skill she can fall back on to support a family if need be and (b) the young person might actually be able to command a high enough wage to work his way through school or to pay off the loans he might take out. By the time the vocational program is complete, the student will be emancipated -- a couple of years sooner than he might have been had he depended on his parents to pay his way through four-plus years of college -- so young people who are itching for true and total independence may prefer this option.

 

Beer for beginners, part VI: Belgian witbier.

(part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V)

I can't decide whether it's apropos or just silly that I am simultaneously working on one series about college and another about beer.

At any rate, I finally finished all the witbier that I bought the last time I was in a nice big beer store, and I'm ready to comment on it.

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Belgian wheat beer, a.k.a. witbier, a.k.a. bière blanche, is similar to German hefeweizen except it is typically less hoppy and a little lighter, and it is brewed with citrus peel and spices such as coriander.  I have had some mass-produced American versions (Blue Moon, which is really a Coors beer, is the most famous), and found them drinkable; Mark generally turned up his nose at the idea of spiced beer.

Garrett Oliver recommends drinking witbier with salads of all sorts, especially those with citrusy vinaigrettes.  This seemed so odd that I was eager to get started, especially back in the heat of August.

I picked up a six-pack of Hoegaarden Original White Ale first.  Hoegaarden is pretty easy to find in the U. S., it seems.  We had the first bottle with a homemade Caesar salad, which worked great, actually.   The beer had a lemony kick to it.  

For some reason, as I put my nose into the glass and inhaled, I was transported back to the scent of beer from my childhood.  I haven't the foggiest idea which of the adults around me, if any, would have been drinking wheat beer or spiced beer when I was a little girl; maybe it was just that its pale crisp scent reminded me of whatever pale yellow beers were around in Southwestern Ohio at the time.  I have no explanation for that one.  I may have to ask my dad.

I liked the Hoegaarden a lot.  Here is where I have to admit -- in case you can't tell already -- I actually kind of like pale yellow beer.  No, I'm not a fan of Miller or Bud, but I have been known to suck back a Corona with my enchiladas from time to time.  This beer was light and crisp, so you could drink it cold and have it be refreshing; but the spices were present, along with an obvious citrusy tang.  It really did go with the salad, garlic and parmesan and all.

+ + +

The second beer I tried was Ommegang Witte, an American witbier from New York State.  The first time I had it was all by itself, and I noted:  "Very boring and flat."

But the second time I had it, I was eating crackers and herb cheese spread and buttered asparagus tips (it was lunch), and I noted "Pretty good!"

So I have decided that this is a good rule for witbier:   Do not drink a witbier without food unless you know it.

Or, I guess, unless you are thirsty and hot.  It'd probably be good then.

+ + +

The third witbier I tried was a large-format bottle of Dogfish Head Namaste.  The bagger at the large foodie supermarket in Ohio where I bought it got all excited about my cart full of beer (witbiers and stouts) and told me I had excellent taste (duh, everything I was buying was on recommendation), and got even MORE excited when one of the beers was the Dogfish Head.  He really talked it up.  Now that I think about it, maybe he was trying to hit on me.  But that's neither here nor there, because I decided that the Dogfish Head was another BORING beer.  That is all that I wrote in my notebook:  BORING, double underlined, like the Ommegang was before I had it with some food.  Only I was having the Dogfish Head with food.  And it was so boring I didn't bother to write down what food it was.

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And the fourth one I tried just the other day:  Epic Brewing Co. Wit Beer out of Salt Lake City.  I had only a single large-format bottle to try, but after we finished it I wished I had more.  This beer pleased both me and Mark, because while it was nicely spiced, it had a more pungent hoppiness than the other Belgians we had been drinking.  That hop bitterness, plus the lemony crispness, was perfect for the evening's dinner.  We were having a light supper of French bread and salad -- a "BLT salad" with, well, lots of bacon and lettuce and tomato, plus red onion and cucumber, tossed in a creamy avocado-lime-basil dressing.

(This recipe is close, except WTF?  Only four slices of bacon?  I used half a pound.)  

Bitter, hop-dominant beers are supposed to be good with rich, fatty food, while the witbier is supposed to be great with all things citrus-vinaigrette, and so this hoppier-than-usual witbier was really quite perfect with a fatty avocado-lime dressing and all that crunchy bacon.  I would happily buy it again, and pour it at a party, and the thing I would serve it with would be a giant bowl of guacamole and some good salty tortilla chips.  I bet it would be good with tabbouli, too.  If there was bacon in it.  And I bet it would be good with something quiche-like, too.

All in all, though, the Hoegaarden will probably be my go-to witbier, because it's easy to find and not terribly expensive (the Epic Wit Beer is a limited edition beer that is produced in rotation).  The style really does work with citrusy salads, and since I love citrusy salads, I think we'll be having Belgian wheat beer again.

Postsecondary education questions: Megan McArdle on "Is College a Lousy Investment?"

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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Ah, this is timely.

While you wait for my next post (which will be about parents' options for meaningful support past age 18), and possibly another guest post by Mark, take a look at this week's Newsweek article by Megan McArdle entitled, "Is College a Lousy Investment?"  

A lot of ink has been spilled over the terrifying plight of students with $100,000 in loans and a job that will not cover their $900-a-month payment. Usually these stories treat this massive debt as an unfortunate side effect of spiraling college costs. But in another view, the spiraling college costs are themselves an unfortunate side effect of all that debt....

Unsurprisingly those 18-year-olds often don’t look quite so hard at the education they’re getting. In Academically Adrift, their recent study of undergraduate learning, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their four years in college. For the remainder who do, the gains are usually minimal. For many students, college is less about providing an education than a credential—a certificate testifying that they are smart enough to get into college, conformist enough to go, and compliant enough to stay there for four years.

When I was a senior, one of my professors asked wonderingly, “Why is it that you guys spend so much time trying to get as little as possible for your money?” The answer, [economist Bryan] Caplan says, is that they’re mostly there for a credential, not learning. “Why does cheating work?” he points out. If you were really just in college to learn skills, it would be totally counterproductive. “If you don’t learn the material, then you will have less human capital and the market will punish you—there’s no reason for us to do it.” But since they think the credential matters more than the education, they look for ways to get the credential as painlessly as possible.

She has a companion blog post up here:  Are We Paying Too Much for Higher Education?

A sample from the blog post:

It’s not necessarily a problem that we’re spending so much on education--and putting more people through school--if we’re actually adding value to the workforce.  In fact, if education is adding value to workers, then maybe it’s great: we’re upskilling our workforce, preparing them and our country for the 21st century.  That’s basically the thinking behind the president’s goal--now, I believe, part of the Democratic Party platform--of having the highest percentage of college graduates in the world in 2020.

But there’s a fly in the ointment, which is that higher education doesn’t only provide education: it also provides a credential.  This is known in economics as the “signalling model”: it’s hard to prove to employers that you’re intelligent, conscientious and persistent, and so you use a diploma to demonstrate it.

If you think signalling is a small component of degrees, then the extra investment in education is probably a good thing (although we might look askance at athletics and other non-curricular amenities, which have clearly been getting nicer and nicer over the years).  If you think that signalling is a large component of the value of a diploma, then the extra spending is worrying: we’re mostly just bidding up the cost of the credential, not investing in greater economic productivity.

There’s no slam-dunk data on how much of higher education is signal value...

(McArdle is one of my favorite econ-bloggers.  She used to be an excellent writer for the intelligent Atlantic Monthly and now, oddly enough, is part of Newsweek.)

Any comments, or is this just more of the same?

 

Postsecondary education: Darwin weighs in, and I explain the pitfalls I'm trying to avoid.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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Check out Darwin's take at DarwinCatholic.  I'll probably have comments later in an update, but I have to go read a bedtime story.

.....LATER.....

Every once in a while, a critic will say of some hawkish Senator, "Well, is he going to send his kids off to war?"

This rhetorical device annoys me, because in this country, no one sends his own kids off to war.  Adults (and sometimes older teens) decide for themselves whether or not to enlist in the U. S. armed forces and to accept the possibility of combat.     "Sending someone off to war" is the purview of the DOD, not of parents.

When we imagine helicopter parents, we are generally not thinking of Black Hawks.

A better question would be, "Well, is he going to teach his own kids to value the contributions of the U. S. military and to consider it as a potential calling or career?  Is he going to communicate to his kids that the choice to serve in one of the branches of the U. S. military is an honorable one, that to take on the risks of combat is brave and selfless, and that he would be proud to call a sailor, soldier, or officer Son or Daughter?"

But somehow the critics never phrase it that way.

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As Mark and I have been writing our pieces on postsecondary education questions, I find myself imagining an imaginary reader challenging us,

"Well, if college is such a bad deal for America, and if there are as they say too many college students, are Mark and Bearing going to keep their kids out of college?  Are they going to send them to trade schools instead, or send them off to one of the other alternatives Bearing mentioned?"

And of course we can't keep our kids out of college, even if we wanted to, because eventually they'll be adults.  We can't send them to trade schools either. (Although we could offer to pay for one and not the other).

But a better set of questions might be:

Are we going to encourage our children to take a broad view of "post-secondary education" that includes alternatives to college?

Are we going to encourage our children to view all kinds of productive human labor as honorable and their practitioners worthy of respect? 

Are we going to give them a chance to work with their hands during childhood as well as with their minds?

Are we going to encourage our children to consider the costs as well as the benefits of the different educational paths open to them?

Are we going to encourage our children to delay spending money on education until they have a plan for how to establish themselves, and eventually a family, in favorable financial conditions?

Are we going to encourage them to have a backup plan, or an escape hatch, in case their first plan unexpectedly becomes untenable?

Are we going to try to communicate to them that our approval and love is not contingent upon the "status" of their chosen profession?

Are we going to try to raise them to strive for excellence, and not limit "excellence" to mean only academic achievement or prestige?

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As Darwin points out, it's pretty likely that each of our children will have the inclination and the necessary preparation to attend a four-year college right out of high school.  Mark and I both graduated from college, and I hold an advanced degree; we directly supervise their education and are inclined ourselves to make that education a college-preparatory one; we have some funds to support post-secondary education, including college; in short, we come from a "college culture."  

But we want to avoid the pitfall of assuming that four-year college will be the default choice, or even the best choice, for each of our children.  

In his post, Darwin has identified some bad outcomes of this assumption.  

(1)  Many people start college who are not actually able to finish, and these people "end up with debt and lost time, but don't have appreciably higher income and lower unemployment than those with only high school [diplomas]."  

I add to that:   it's not just "lost time" -- lost time in the workforce represents lost wages, lost savings, lost interest on those savings, lost experience that could have been leveraged into higher income now.  It's not just that they failed to gain economic benefits.  They really lost an economic good.

(2) Those who graduate but who were in the bottom quintile of academic ability also end up with debt and lost time (and lost wages, lost savings, lost interest, lost experience....) but are unemployed at rates similar to those with only high school diplomas.   These people also really lost an economic good.  You might well argue that as a group they would have been economically better off if they had dropped out (like the group in point one), also known as "knowing when to quit," because they would have sunk less of their time and money into an endeavor which wasn't paying off.

(3) "Borrowing tens of thousands of dollars is a bad way to avoid making decisions." Darwin is referring to graduate school, not undergrad, but I think the point stands for undergraduate education as well, because many people go to college after high school only because they have to do something while they figure out what they want to do with their lives, and college is the default option.  How many people start their college career with their major "undecided?"  How smart can that be?  Wouldn't it be better to do something that made money instead of  cost money while you are trying to decide what to do when you finally grow up?

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And here are some more pitfalls:

(4) If you assume that four-year college is the best choice, then you won't devote much time to learning about other kinds of careers and training paths.  If you are ignorant of these, you may miss something that would have been a perfect fit for your personality and talents.

(5) Assuming that four-year college is the default choice, especially insisting that it is the only acceptable choice as many families do, communicates that people who choose different paths are less worthy.  Darwin implicitly identifies this when he points out that people make "unspoken assumptions" about those who don't have college degrees.  It's true that we have to teach our children to navigate a world that makes value judgments about people based on their occupations and education level, but we don't have to contribute to it.

(6) Assuming that four-year-college immediately follows high school -- the so-called "traditional student model"  -- is to reject a number of viable paths in which alternative education precedes  or leads into a bachelor's degree from a traditional institution.

For instance, Darwin writes that "urging [kids] to skip the college degree they want and get a certification in some skill like plumbing or welding instead is probably not a good idea."  Well -- who says it has to be "instead?"  A welding certificate could be the means to earn a high hourly wage with which to "work your way through school."  It could be the backup plan so you know you'll always have a skill to fall back on if that English degree doesn't work out. (Most students don't graduate on time anyway -- why not spend one year getting a certificate and four years getting a degree, instead of five years getting a degree?) Or it could be the first half of an associates degree in welding, which itself could lead to a bachelor's degree in welding engineering from a traditional four-year university.

 

UPDATE FROM THE COMMENTS:  " I just wish I had felt like there were other options for a nice upper middle class girl."

 

Post secondary education questions: Alternatives to college.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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This might be a good time to switch gears and consider what a young person, high school diploma in hand, might do other than enroll immediately in a four-year university.

I'm going to start a list. Help me finish it in the comments.

Alternatives to College (or at least to "college right away")

Learn a trade. This can be done through local unions (in my area, for example, the St. Paul electricians' union has a five-year on-the-job apprenticeship program) or postsecondary trade schools and institutes. Some programs take less than a year, while others culminate in associates degrees, still others can lead into specific bachelors programs, and others are multiyear apprenticeship-journeyman-master sequences. Acquiring a valuable skill could boost your hourly wages enough to let you work your way through traditional college afterward.

Start a business. It takes initiative and research, and sometimes several failures precede success, but it's open to anyone.

Join a national or community service initiative, either public or private. On the public side, for instance, Americorps is still around; private organizations such as religious denominations may have service programs too; and there may be something in your community.

Join the military. Technical or professional training is often paid for by the government, and there's job security and benefits; the level and length of commitment varies.

Work hard and save money for a while. Instead of going straight to university, spend a year or two in the workforce, wherever a job can be found. Acquire an appreciation for the value of money and time; learn about an industry or business from the bottom up; see your own community through the eyes of a responsible adult.

Self-education. If you happen to have a source of funds, consider whether part of it could be put towards supporting yourself while you pursue a non-traditional means of broadening your horizons -- travel? Community-based language learning? Self-guided study? Fine arts? Some kind of internship?

Local government and politics. Run for office, or work in the office of a local official, or throw your lot in with a candidate, or with an organized political group or party.

Take a health year.  Break an addiction -- or just some bad habits.  Run a marathon -- or just get off the couch.  Set a year-end goal, plus some medium- and short-term ones, and arrange your life to support them.  Invest in a longer and better-quality life.

 

Any more ideas?