The pursuit of the American Dream places a great deal of emphasis on a person's job or profession. In some cases, someone's entire dream can consist of attaining a certain title or position. How many of us have ever dreamed of becoming a doctor? A professional athlete? An actress? A musician? We tend to think of our jobs as defining large chunks of our identities. What you do for work, in large part, defines who you are in America. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. You may know an auto mechanic with only a high school diploma who happens to be far more intelligent and interesting than many people you know who might have fancy graduate degrees from prestigious colleges and universities.
My father-in-law is such a person. He emigrated to the United States from Israel at the age of 12 and graduated from high school the mid-1960's. By that time, the Vietnam War was on and he volunteered to serve in the United States Marine Corp when many young men of that time were either drafted involuntarily into the service, or found loop holes to get out of serving in the war. Although he would never say this, I believe that his incredible sense of duty and honor compelled him to sign up for the Marines in the 1960s. Also, he grew up in Israel for the first 12 years of his life, a country where all men and women are required by law to serve in the military for a set number of years. Regardless of the reason, he proudly and bravely served in the military, and in doing so, he acquired a sought-after skillset in learning how to fix and maintain vehicles. When he returned from the war, he began working in an auto garage in Dorchester, and since he was making enough money to provide for his family, he did not end up going to college. He didn't need to. To this day, he still works at the same garage he began working at forty years ago. And he is not only one of the smartest people I know, he is also someone for whom I have the utmost respect. But there are many in America who might automatically look down their noses at anybody who has not finished college. After all, we are programmed in America to believe that going to college is always better than not going to college, and that somebody who attends college is necessarily better off than somebody who has not.
But we should perhaps conduct a cost/benefit analysis of going to college; after all, eduation is not cheap. In fact, it is highly expensive and, according to some, not worth the money. First of all, there are student loans to think about. Survey a random selection of adult professionals (people who work in jobs that required them to complete some sort of graduate or professional degree- doctors, lawyers, accountants, scientists, nurses, teachers, among others), and you will most likely talk to many people who carry around a certain amount of student loan debt. Student loans are funds provided to individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for all or some of their college expenses, and with private college tuition often approaching or even exceeding $50,000 per year nowadays, there are many people who must borrow money to attend college. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 65% of all undergraduates require some sort of financial support in order to achieve the goal of attending college. And while student loans are free while you attend college, you soon find out that they are quite costly in the long run. You had better hope that the extra money your college degree entitles you to earn is enough to offset the monthly payment of several hundred dollars.
So why do we teachers (and your parents) harp so much on the importance of going to college, especially when college is expensive, and often prohibitively so? The answer lies in one of the fundamental tenets of the American Dream: the notion of upward mobility. The Puritans viewed themselves as being upwardly mobile; in their eyes, they were building a new society free from corruption and excess fat. They set the trend for upward mobility in America, paving the way for countless rags-to-riches stories of poor imigrants like Andrew Carnegie who arrived from Scotland with little more than the shirt on his back, and who eventually became one of the wealthiest men in the history of our country. No matter where one starts out, the expectation in America is that a person will be able to rise up (usually in the economic sense) through hard work and determination. And while it is possible for a person to become wildly successful without the completion of a college degree (look at Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Lebron James and Will Smith), the amount of raw talent required to achieve such success without higher education is extremely rare.
Education allows us to fill in the gaps in the areas where our raw talent might be lacking, and it allows us to hone and perfect the skills that we might naturally possess. Education makes a person whole, and provides the foundation for personal growth. Without the options that education opens up, it becomes much more difficult to achieve the upward mobility that is part of every American Dream.
Mr. Bresnick, you're father sounds like a great person. I also agree with you that there are alot of unfortunate people who didn't have the money to get into college but who were smart as if not smarter than many people who went to college, and although this is true, it is increasingly harder to get a job without some sort of degree. This makes it very important to attend college.
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