PREPARE YOURSELF FOR COMMERCIAL FAILURE
An article posted last September on something called Higher Ed Dive bears the headline, “Students Still Value Career-Oriented Education over Liberal Arts Experiences, Research Finds.”
Not exactly breaking news, but about as dismal as most these days. “Students and families have grown skeptical of the merits of a liberal arts education, often pursuing majors with clearer links to the job market, such as STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and math…. Art & Science Group found in 2017 that only 38% of students believed liberal arts was the best type of education for them, versus 35% who disagreed with that sentiment. The remaining 27% had no opinion or didn’t know.”
I want to write here to that 27%, the undecideds, but I don’t want to remain within the paradigm which the authors of Higher Ed Dive seem to have accepted. It is the paradigm which says that commercial, or financial, success is the proper measure for the value of a college education. The authors are proponents of the liberal arts tradition but they clearly show acceptance of the wrong paradigm when they make this claim: “The positive value of the liberal arts has been documented. Liberal arts colleges often offer a better return on investment than other institution types – though not immediately, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found in 2020. Students at liberal arts institutions have a median return of investment of $62,000 after a decade, lower than many other colleges. However, after 40 years, their median return on investment rises to $918,000 versus a median $723,000 for all institutions.”
I wish to speak a word for early commercial failure; I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of commercial success: the Chamber of Commerce, and the school counselor, and most anyone who bothers to read these words will take care of it.
I’m writing in the cadences of Henry David Thoreau in that last paragraph above – paraphrasing the start of his essay “Walking” – because Thoreau wrote a veritable instruction manual on preparing oneself for commercial failure. It was known as Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, a landmark demonstration on how to avoid success by any conventional measure. Contrary to what many have said, Thoreau does not urge his reader to follow his steps to a tiny cabin in the woods. Instead, he takes pains to report on his Walden Pond experiment of two years, two months, and two days – an experiment in simple living. The point is to find your own experiment. What he does urge upon his reader – in very certain terms – is a life dedicated to disobeying convention. Thoreau held a college degree – from Harvard, no less – but never succeeded in putting it to work in ways that led to a lucrative career, or really any career. After a short stint as a schoolteacher and tutor, he became the township surveyor more or less by default, making a paying job of something he was simply good at – something which did not require a degree.
But while he never put his degree to work, his education sustained him for the rest of his life. The results poured into his writing: five books, a few dozen essays and lectures, and a journal of more than two million words, the largest known literary journal in existence and a lot of it dedicated to his increasingly close studies of wild species and the habitats they lived in. All of that by the age of forty-four when he died. If that record does not demonstrate erudition, diligence, and self-discipline, I’m not sure what does. Thoreau out-worked everyone in town, but by conventional measure, accomplished little and earned less.
Not that he lacked ambition. Ironically, but not cynically, Thoreau held high hopes that Walden, which he knew to be his landmark work, would be a marketplace hit, his ticket to the kind of literary stardom his friend and mentor Emerson enjoyed. Alas, Walden sold poorly, and Thoreau died young only eight years after its release, so he never saw the legendary status his masterpiece finally enjoyed. He did not live to tally the eventual rich returns on the substantial investment his family had made in his education. What he wanted from his work after college was an ethical life, a modest living, and an existence dedicated to the ceaseless tasks of learning. Harvard was Thoreau’s elementary school, more or less. The rest of his education, which never ceased, took place mostly outdoors.
I taught in the liberal arts tradition for thirty-two years, most of that at a private college. Over that span, I found myself doubling down on my advice to students – some of whom would appear in my office in pain, seeking counsel. Lots of parents wanted STEM majors, and some threw the high tuition price tag of our academy in the faces of their kids, forcing them into the cold calculus of return-on-investment thinking. What on earth are you going to do, Dear, with your Religious Studies major, your Philosophy major, your attachment to literature?
My advice was simple. Follow the path of your greatest joy. Trust that the path will lead you eventually toward a sustaining occupation of some kind – it will – but make occupation secondary; make of your career an avocation. Make your true vocation the free play of the mind – the nurturing of your deepest and most satisfying creativity and a commitment to learning for the rest of your days. In Walden, it starts with the understanding that the only true currency we possess is our time, and our time is limited to the span of one human life. Henry often expressed his most profound observations in quips. Like this one: “as if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
There is some strong likelihood that preparing for a lucrative career as early as age eighteen will point you toward the life of quiet desperation Thoreau warned of. Resist! There is plenty of world and time for career, but eternity culminates now. Get on that train first, and the rest will follow. For life.
Copyright © Don Snow, 2023