I’ve seen a position put forward by people in the Obama administration and others attempting to anticipate the future of education in America that, just as 30 years ago it was important that all youth graduated from high school to find a reasonably good job, today it is equally important that all youth graduate from some sort of two or four year college program to achieve a similar work readiness in today’s world.

On the one hand, since more and more jobs seem to require computer and other technical skills, and society in general seems to be getting more complex, it seems pretty obvious there is truth to this position. Like it or not… everyone now needs fourteen to sixteen years of mandatory education. If you throw in kindergarten, which is pretty universally attended these days, we are talking about fifteen to seventeen years. And what about pre-school, and all the efforts around the country to make available (or even require) universal pre-school attendance for all kids prior to kindergarten? Let’s tack on another year to that requirement.

Okay so let’s look again at our ledger…

* One year of pre-school
* One year of kindergarten
* Five years of elementary school
* Three years of middle school
* Four years of high school
* Two (preferably four) years of college

… and then maybe you are ready to be a minimally employable adult. That’s sixteen to eighteen years folks, of what is more and more being pitched as mandatory schooling for everybody.

Really focusing on the implications of this brings an array of concerns and other thoughts into my head, and I’m interested if it does for you as well. If you will indulge and forgive me if I go into somewhat of a rant, here are some of my thoughts…

By the time I came to Los Angeles at age 23 I had had the full array of 18 years of education listed above (I actually skipped kindergarten but took five years getting my college degree), from pre-school through a university bachelor’s degree. Since I attended public schools for K-12, and went to a state university making use of financial need grants, my home state of Michigan probably invested at least $100K for their contribution to my 18 years.

So what did Michigan and I have to show for all this treasure and time? Well, I now had what most consider a well-rounded education. I could read well, write fairly well, had the ability to do higher math like algebra and geometry, had a working knowledge of history, aspects of American culture and exposure to some literary classics, and had some basic TV and film production skills.

But the jobs I ended up getting with this education, after coming to Los Angeles, were as a cook at a restaurant and a “gofer” at a film distribution company. Jobs paying at or close to minimum wage and really involving very little of what I learned in school (other than drivers ed). If you look at it this way, that’s a lot of the public’s money and my time invested for not much economic value gained, other than contributing to the salaries of all those teachers along the way that taught the classes I attended and the administrators, clerical and custodial staff that maintained the schools I attended.

Okay, you say, maybe that is not a fair analysis. After those 18 years of schooling – say averaging six hours a day for 200 days a year or a total of more than 21,000 hours of formal education – I was at least an informed citizen who was active in local political groups. Maybe the focus I chose for my college education, TV and film production, was not a wise choice economically speaking. Maybe I (and the public coffers) would have gotten more economic value out of my education if I had majored in accounting, math or computer science.

Maybe if I had it to do over again I would have made other choices in my first go-through in college. I did in fact have the opportunity to do a “mulligan” of sorts. After three years of rattling around in low-level film business jobs in Los Angeles, I went back to college – community college for two years and then two more years at university – and got a second bachelor’s degree in computer science, which allowed me to finally secure higher paying jobs, buying a house and supporting a family.

So what contributed to me choosing, arguably, the wrong path forward in my first four (actually five) years of college in Michigan? Maybe it took those three years of “real world” work experience in Los Angeles – running errands and deliveries in my car or boiling lobsters as a “sauté cook” at a local eatery, struggling to pay rent, wondering what I was going to do with my life, pondering partnering for life and having a family – before I had the agency and worldly wisdom to plot out a pragmatic path forward for myself in college.

Or should I just write off those first five years of college as “the new high school”? Was it a lengthy rite of passage that everybody has to get through before they really start living their life and figuring out what they really want to do? Or maybe did it serve some grand economic purpose keeping me out of the high-paying labor force while keeping me consuming an ever expanding educational product?

So is my story just the off instance of bad planning or bad luck, where as most people on the standard path of high school and then immediately into college make the right choice and come out the other end ready to contribute to society and be appropriately compensated with a well-paying career?

Following a fairly conventional academic path, my partner Sally transitioned directly from high school to college and got an undergraduate degree in Psychology. Still unsure of her path forward, she took a year of medical technologist training and worked for five years in a blood bank. When that proved an unsatisfying career, she enrolled in graduate school for two years and earned a master’s degree in Health Planning. Counting from kindergarten, that was over 20 years of formal schooling, and she never used that graduate degree to get a job in the health planning or a related field. After 20 years of education, over 30 years of her life, and all the money she, her family, and the various states she lived in had invested in her, she still in need of additional real-world experiences before she began to amass enough wisdom of experience to start figuring out “what I want to be when I grow up.”

Admittedly, so far I’m fashioning an indictment of our educational system’s “path of least resistance” based on just a couple people’s anecdotal experience, but I have heard similar tales from other people of my generation. What I find more troubling is that I’m hearing these sorts of stories from the young adult peers of my son and daughter who are late into their pursuit of an undergraduate degree, are no longer interested in the subject they are majoring in, and are struggling with the decision whether to continue and complete their degrees, and even if they hang in there and get their diplomas, what the heck to do next.

So you might say, isn’t any college good college. Ten years ago I might have agreed with you, but based on honest reassessment of my own educational journey and the journeys of others, I really am having some serious doubts. For one thing, because college has already become, in many people’s minds, “the new high school”, higher education has become a seller’s market and the costs of a four year university seem much higher (even adjusting for overall inflation) than when I was going to school in the 1970s and 1980s. If you come out of school saddled with debt, having learned a professional skill that you are no longer interested in pursuing, and generally tired and confused, that feels to me more like a net negative than a positive.

So it may seem like it, but I don’t mean to be anti-college here. Though now with the Internet, you can have access to much of the wisdom of the world that is provided in college classes, there are talented mentors and colleagues that you can have access to and build a network with in college like nowhere else, and credentials awarded that are required to open the doors to many professions. What I am concerned about is investing your time and money in college before you have had a chance to develop your internal compass, a sense of who you really are, the agency to chart your own course, and a clear goal for that college education based on your real-life experience… not just doing college because it is the path of least resistance and “the new high school”.

As I said earlier in the piece, these are rough new thoughts that I am throwing out there, looking for your wisdom perhaps to help me refine them into a more cohesive argument for a new approach to higher education, and education in general, going forward in this new age.