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Class Dismissed: Why College Isn't the Answer
Today, a college degree is not necessary to achieve the American Dream and live a fiscally successful life.
You’re just about to graduate high school. Your parents, your friends, your teachers, and society all tell you that the next step is college, that without higher education, you won’t be able to get a quality job, you’ll struggle to pay your bills, and you’ll fail.
They’re wrong.
Sure, for many, college can be the perfect launching pad. The societal aspect of school can be transformative, and the exposure to different people, different thoughts, and different ideas is crucial.
But for millions of young Americans, college is not the answer. What about the teenager for whom sitting in a classroom is unfulfilling and frustrating? What about the kid with a skillset that can’t be nurtured on campus?
In Class Why College Isn’t the Answer , Nick Adams explains how you can achieve the American Dream without receiving a traditional education. An essential tool for parents and grandparents, this book discusses how families can recognize whether their child will get more from a trade school or a mentorship than they will from four years of study.
In a warm, engaging, and often humorous fashion, Adams will inspire individuals who want to march into their professional life with a sense of empowerment that can only be attained by recognizing and doing what’s right for you.
You’re just about to graduate high school. Your parents, your friends, your teachers, and society all tell you that the next step is college, that without higher education, you won’t be able to get a quality job, you’ll struggle to pay your bills, and you’ll fail.
They’re wrong.
Sure, for many, college can be the perfect launching pad. The societal aspect of school can be transformative, and the exposure to different people, different thoughts, and different ideas is crucial.
But for millions of young Americans, college is not the answer. What about the teenager for whom sitting in a classroom is unfulfilling and frustrating? What about the kid with a skillset that can’t be nurtured on campus?
In Class Why College Isn’t the Answer , Nick Adams explains how you can achieve the American Dream without receiving a traditional education. An essential tool for parents and grandparents, this book discusses how families can recognize whether their child will get more from a trade school or a mentorship than they will from four years of study.
In a warm, engaging, and often humorous fashion, Adams will inspire individuals who want to march into their professional life with a sense of empowerment that can only be attained by recognizing and doing what’s right for you.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published January 29, 2019
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January 27, 2021
Coming from a rural, working class, blue collar background, college was my gateway to the professional and managerial elite. I experienced firsthand some of the class bias embedded in the process. And I saw friends who should have gone to college not go and friends who shouldn’t have gone to college go.
The question at the heart of the book is more relevant—and higher stakes—for a people who are working class, blue-collar, first generation college students, or some combination of the three. Adams’ target audience is 17-year-olds trying to decide if they should go to college and their parents.
Of course I have a pretty big vested interest in all this. My college experience is as anecdotal as any of the stories Adams tells. I teach at a regional public university (you will see me stick up more than once for regional publics). The amount of money I’m putting into my baby daughter’s college fund every month shows I’m pretty confident she will go to college. I am a big proponent of the skilled trades—a large part of the impetus for writing this review. More money for skilled trades necessarily means less money for four-year universities. But I also feel like I can say what I think because I lack the power to bring the entire system crashing down around me even if I wanted to.
This is a big issue. Two-thirds of high school graduates go to college, but fewer than 40% graduate in four years. The other 60% have a problem. They borrow more money for school. And if they never finish they not only earn significantly less than the average holder of a bachelor’s degree but significantly less than the average holder of an associate’s degree. And there is a big class divide in that stat. Your parents earn more than $90k per year? You have a 1-in-2 chance of earning a bachelor’s degree by 24. Your parents earn less than $30k? Your chances drop to 1-in-17.
There is a regular cottage industry in running down our higher education system. I have seen too much commentary less interested in seriously engaging with the issues than with scoring cheap points, easy clicks, and book sales. From commentators who probably happily cash the checks and send their kids to Ivy League schools. Adams, at least, doesn’t fall into that group: for one, he doesn’t have kids. And he has the right basic approach to the book. It left me underwhelmed, nonetheless.
FRAMING THE QUESTION
My biggest gripe is that while Adams tries to break the college-or-bust mentality, he accepts the college material-not college material false dichotomy. People don’t wash out of college for lack of cognitive ability. Sure, you probably don’t have the math chops for an engineering program at Rice. But you aren’t getting into the engineering program at Rice. The days of “look to your right and look to your left” are over (not necessarily for good reasons, but still). Far more likely to end a college career than lack of cognitive ability is lack of money, desire, or maturity. But talking about “college material” assumes many people do lack the ability. And there is a lot of class bias embedded in there. (The number of college graduates has increased, but it has increased the least among the bottom income quintile). The truth is that a lot of high school guidance counselors think less about your transcript than about who your parents and siblings are. (I was pushed toward cow colleges despite a score on the Verbal portion of the SAT well over my Math score because, well, my people are the sort of people that go to colleges derisively labeled as cow colleges.)
So it’s false, for one, because it makes bad assumptions about ability and class. It is also false because it treats the decision as go-to-college v. don’t-go-to-college. College should instead be viewed one of a suite of options, each with their own risks and rewards. And it’s even more complicated than that. You can do a swing through the military as a way to gain maturity, defer committing to an option, and eventually financing a college degree. Or you can start at a community college to build maturity, defer your decision, save money, and facilitate an easy exit if you decide not to go to college. (The community college-to-university pipeline is underappreciated, in part due to class bias against community colleges and in part due to disincentives for universities to promote it given that it takes away students (and their tuition dollars). But it is a very attractive option for a lot of people, especially boys.)
There is also a lot of talk about how risky college is. This is true. It costs money, and you may have to borrow that money, which means not just paying back the principal but paying interest on it. A good paying job—or any job at all—is not guaranteed. You may not finish, leaving you with college debt and high school job prospects. Does this mean you shouldn’t go to college? Maybe.
High school probably didn’t teach you this, because high schools are bad at fulfilling their purpose, but to talk intelligently about risk you need to talk about return, and you need to talk about alternatives. Let’s start with the return. The lifetime earnings premium for college graduates is over $1 million. And it’s going up. That isn’t guaranteed, but it is significant. And you have some control over that. Get a degree in engineering or accounting and your earnings prospects are better than if you get a degree in education or criminal justice.
We have seen a vast increase in the cost of college over the last several decades. (This is mostly because we’ve been flooding federal money into our higher education system, but an increase in cost was inevitable, I think, given the lifetime earnings premium for college grads.) That makes the math worse. But the measure isn’t how college today compares to college 20 years ago, but how college today compares to not-college options today. And the impact of rising tuition is offset by a rising lifetime earnings premium. What rising tuition really does is making starting college and then quitting before graduation an even worse path. So, yeah, you have a pretty important choice in front of you, and now is the time to think long and hard about it.
Adams provides some math, but the less said about it, the better. It’s . . . egregiously bad. He, for example, cites a source in support of a claim that college graduate Millennials make up 40% of the unemployed in the US. But then he turns around and says that 40% of Millennials with college degrees are unemployed. But that is a different statistic. And if you look at his source, it appears to be referring to all Millennials, not just Millennials with college degrees. And, indeed, the unemployment rate for Millennials ages 25-32 is much higher for high school graduates with no college degree than for holders of a bachelor’s degree. Remember what I said about the need to consider the alternative?
Adams arguments, in general, encourage short-term thinking. There is a lot of you-could-be-earning-money-now-instead-of-running-up-debt. There are plenty of people who will rant on the subject of debt (Dave Ramsey comes to mind). As a general matter, sure, saving is better than borrowing. But sometimes we should lump them together—they both can lead to delayed gratification, a very powerful thing. Foregoing earnings and borrowing money now to go to college can be a very wise decision in the long-run.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND TRADE SCHOOL
Adams is a big booster for starting your business and for attending a trade school. I am big, big fan of both as well, but I still have my gripes.
Adams gives some dubious advice on entrepreneurship. Sure, you can get someone else to handle the bookkeeping, but you dang well better have the facility with accounting you need to monitor their work. And you probably won’t be able to afford—at least at first—to hire someone to run your social media or pitch your business for you.
He is a little too rah rah entrepreneurship, in an almost Ayn Randian way. Entrepreneurs are great and play a huge role in American exceptionalism, dynamism, and wealth (and not just the Bill Gateses of the world—the mom-and-pops too). But they are not the sole contributors to all that. Cops and teachers and pastors and all sorts of people who work for a wage do too.
There are a couple other problems with encouraging people to start a business instead of going to college. Want to start a law firm or an accounting firm? You’re going to need to go to college. Even if college isn’t strictly necessary, it is a great place to pick up skills that are enormously valuable to entrepreneurs. The other problem is that starting a business tends to require capital. (Capital is an enormously valuable thing. Marx was wrong.) Wings Etc. demands you have $200k in cash and a minimum net worth of $500k if you want to open up a Wings Etc. restaurant.
I won’t be heartbroken if my daughter takes her college fund and uses it to start a business instead. But I didn’t have any capital when I was 17, and my parents didn’t have any capital to give me. But I’ve been able to make far more because I went to college (and professional school) than I would have been able to with just a college degree. Starting a business is more within reach now than it was 20 years ago.
Adams provides a long list of enormously successful people who didn’t graduate from college. But virtually everyone on the list is an entrepreneur or entertainer. And most of the people on the list dropped out of college. That is exactly what we want to avoid here. We want high schoolers to make better decisions in the first place so they aren’t in the position of dropping out. If you start a business and it booms before you graduate—a la Zuckerberg or Dell—dropping out is a valid choice. But that is a tiny, tiny sliver of people. And it isn’t the only choice. The founders of theglobe dot com decided to stick it out and graduate, which was probably a good idea, considering that you’ve never heard of theglobe dot com.
One area where I heartily agree with Adams is on the value of trade schools and the skilled trades. We have a lot of work to do to remove the stigma of the trades (this is a good start). And where Mike Rowe’s influence has me mostly focused on traditional skilled trades like carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work, Adams makes clear that trade school options are far, far broader, listing dozens of trade school options.
There is some dubious information in the list. Adams seems to conflate college- (and pharmacy school-) educated pharmacists with pharmacy techs. We may always need lawyers, but automation and a tight legal market has been very hard on jobs for legal assistants. PR is one of the options, but my wife works in PR and she doesn’t know a single person in PR without a four-year degree (it also took her four internships before she could find a permanent position, and she graduated from a top-flight public university—PR is a tough nut to crack). If you’re thinking about going down one of these roads, you’re going to need to do a lot more research (as Adams himself admits).
MORE GRIPES
Adams gives too many platitudes. “You’ve got to work very hard for as long as it’s going to take, and eventually you’re going to get there”? If you want to just put your head down and work, then college is probably your best bet. Entrepreneurship isn’t. That requires you to work hard, but also to work smart. The decision we’re talking about here isn’t about hard work. You can go to college and work hard or you can forego college and work hard. This is a strategic decision.
Adams raises political correctness on college campuses and rampant bias in the professoriate. These are serious issues, but they aren’t necessarily issues that should change your decision to go to college. They might degrade the aggregate value of college, but that should only change the decision of people at the margins, i.e., people teetering on the edge of go or don’t go. (Admittedly, the people at the margins are Adams’ target audience.)
Keep in mind that both issues can be serious issues but still not significantly affect your college experience. One, they are concentrated on certain campuses. If you are particularly concerned about free speech, you can check universities’ records on speech and due process issues at The Foundation for Individual Rights’ website. If you are particularly concerned about political bias, you can attend Hillsdale or a university religious in more than name only or one with a long history of respecting heterogeneous views like the University of Chicago or George Mason. But business and STEM programs at regional public universities—the programs that add the most valuable and the ones the target audience for this book should be considering most strongly—are the least likely place to find these issues.
Adams makes some other bad arguments. So-and-so didn’t think they got much out of college. So what? One, it’s anecdotal. Two, not getting much out of college isn’t much of an accomplishment. You, too, could achieve the same with relatively little effort. The answer to that isn’t necessarily to skip college; the likely answer is to approach college differently. You pay a (relatively) fixed price to the college; what you get in return is very much up to you.
Adams gives bad information. In America, we do not “tend to choose the college that is the furthest from where you live.” The median distance from home-to-college is just 94 miles.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
For all my gripes, I like this bit of advice at the end a lot:
“Consider the investment. Consider the uncertainty. Consider the inflexibility. Consider the inconsistency.
“But mostly, consider the children.
“This decision—this momentous decision—isn’t about the parents. It’s all about the teenager about to enter the adult world. Check that: it’s all about the teenager entering the adult world in the manner that’s best for them.”
It was always abundantly obvious to everyone, dirt under my ancestral fingernails notwithstanding, that I was “college material.” And I could always do basic math. So college was always the assumed path. But my parents were into free-range parenting before it was cool, frankly they weren’t well equipped to advise me, and we were all distracted. My dad spent most of my senior year of high school at M.D. Anderson in Houston. He died a couple months before I graduated. My mom first got diagnosed with MS that same year, and I went a week with both my parents in the hospital.
My mom was smart enough to see the strain on me and to tell me it was okay if I didn’t go to college, starting at the local community college instead. I was smart enough to know that I really needed to get out of my hometown. She was wise enough to accept my decision.
The question at the heart of the book is more relevant—and higher stakes—for a people who are working class, blue-collar, first generation college students, or some combination of the three. Adams’ target audience is 17-year-olds trying to decide if they should go to college and their parents.
Of course I have a pretty big vested interest in all this. My college experience is as anecdotal as any of the stories Adams tells. I teach at a regional public university (you will see me stick up more than once for regional publics). The amount of money I’m putting into my baby daughter’s college fund every month shows I’m pretty confident she will go to college. I am a big proponent of the skilled trades—a large part of the impetus for writing this review. More money for skilled trades necessarily means less money for four-year universities. But I also feel like I can say what I think because I lack the power to bring the entire system crashing down around me even if I wanted to.
This is a big issue. Two-thirds of high school graduates go to college, but fewer than 40% graduate in four years. The other 60% have a problem. They borrow more money for school. And if they never finish they not only earn significantly less than the average holder of a bachelor’s degree but significantly less than the average holder of an associate’s degree. And there is a big class divide in that stat. Your parents earn more than $90k per year? You have a 1-in-2 chance of earning a bachelor’s degree by 24. Your parents earn less than $30k? Your chances drop to 1-in-17.
There is a regular cottage industry in running down our higher education system. I have seen too much commentary less interested in seriously engaging with the issues than with scoring cheap points, easy clicks, and book sales. From commentators who probably happily cash the checks and send their kids to Ivy League schools. Adams, at least, doesn’t fall into that group: for one, he doesn’t have kids. And he has the right basic approach to the book. It left me underwhelmed, nonetheless.
FRAMING THE QUESTION
My biggest gripe is that while Adams tries to break the college-or-bust mentality, he accepts the college material-not college material false dichotomy. People don’t wash out of college for lack of cognitive ability. Sure, you probably don’t have the math chops for an engineering program at Rice. But you aren’t getting into the engineering program at Rice. The days of “look to your right and look to your left” are over (not necessarily for good reasons, but still). Far more likely to end a college career than lack of cognitive ability is lack of money, desire, or maturity. But talking about “college material” assumes many people do lack the ability. And there is a lot of class bias embedded in there. (The number of college graduates has increased, but it has increased the least among the bottom income quintile). The truth is that a lot of high school guidance counselors think less about your transcript than about who your parents and siblings are. (I was pushed toward cow colleges despite a score on the Verbal portion of the SAT well over my Math score because, well, my people are the sort of people that go to colleges derisively labeled as cow colleges.)
So it’s false, for one, because it makes bad assumptions about ability and class. It is also false because it treats the decision as go-to-college v. don’t-go-to-college. College should instead be viewed one of a suite of options, each with their own risks and rewards. And it’s even more complicated than that. You can do a swing through the military as a way to gain maturity, defer committing to an option, and eventually financing a college degree. Or you can start at a community college to build maturity, defer your decision, save money, and facilitate an easy exit if you decide not to go to college. (The community college-to-university pipeline is underappreciated, in part due to class bias against community colleges and in part due to disincentives for universities to promote it given that it takes away students (and their tuition dollars). But it is a very attractive option for a lot of people, especially boys.)
There is also a lot of talk about how risky college is. This is true. It costs money, and you may have to borrow that money, which means not just paying back the principal but paying interest on it. A good paying job—or any job at all—is not guaranteed. You may not finish, leaving you with college debt and high school job prospects. Does this mean you shouldn’t go to college? Maybe.
High school probably didn’t teach you this, because high schools are bad at fulfilling their purpose, but to talk intelligently about risk you need to talk about return, and you need to talk about alternatives. Let’s start with the return. The lifetime earnings premium for college graduates is over $1 million. And it’s going up. That isn’t guaranteed, but it is significant. And you have some control over that. Get a degree in engineering or accounting and your earnings prospects are better than if you get a degree in education or criminal justice.
We have seen a vast increase in the cost of college over the last several decades. (This is mostly because we’ve been flooding federal money into our higher education system, but an increase in cost was inevitable, I think, given the lifetime earnings premium for college grads.) That makes the math worse. But the measure isn’t how college today compares to college 20 years ago, but how college today compares to not-college options today. And the impact of rising tuition is offset by a rising lifetime earnings premium. What rising tuition really does is making starting college and then quitting before graduation an even worse path. So, yeah, you have a pretty important choice in front of you, and now is the time to think long and hard about it.
Adams provides some math, but the less said about it, the better. It’s . . . egregiously bad. He, for example, cites a source in support of a claim that college graduate Millennials make up 40% of the unemployed in the US. But then he turns around and says that 40% of Millennials with college degrees are unemployed. But that is a different statistic. And if you look at his source, it appears to be referring to all Millennials, not just Millennials with college degrees. And, indeed, the unemployment rate for Millennials ages 25-32 is much higher for high school graduates with no college degree than for holders of a bachelor’s degree. Remember what I said about the need to consider the alternative?
Adams arguments, in general, encourage short-term thinking. There is a lot of you-could-be-earning-money-now-instead-of-running-up-debt. There are plenty of people who will rant on the subject of debt (Dave Ramsey comes to mind). As a general matter, sure, saving is better than borrowing. But sometimes we should lump them together—they both can lead to delayed gratification, a very powerful thing. Foregoing earnings and borrowing money now to go to college can be a very wise decision in the long-run.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND TRADE SCHOOL
Adams is a big booster for starting your business and for attending a trade school. I am big, big fan of both as well, but I still have my gripes.
Adams gives some dubious advice on entrepreneurship. Sure, you can get someone else to handle the bookkeeping, but you dang well better have the facility with accounting you need to monitor their work. And you probably won’t be able to afford—at least at first—to hire someone to run your social media or pitch your business for you.
He is a little too rah rah entrepreneurship, in an almost Ayn Randian way. Entrepreneurs are great and play a huge role in American exceptionalism, dynamism, and wealth (and not just the Bill Gateses of the world—the mom-and-pops too). But they are not the sole contributors to all that. Cops and teachers and pastors and all sorts of people who work for a wage do too.
There are a couple other problems with encouraging people to start a business instead of going to college. Want to start a law firm or an accounting firm? You’re going to need to go to college. Even if college isn’t strictly necessary, it is a great place to pick up skills that are enormously valuable to entrepreneurs. The other problem is that starting a business tends to require capital. (Capital is an enormously valuable thing. Marx was wrong.) Wings Etc. demands you have $200k in cash and a minimum net worth of $500k if you want to open up a Wings Etc. restaurant.
I won’t be heartbroken if my daughter takes her college fund and uses it to start a business instead. But I didn’t have any capital when I was 17, and my parents didn’t have any capital to give me. But I’ve been able to make far more because I went to college (and professional school) than I would have been able to with just a college degree. Starting a business is more within reach now than it was 20 years ago.
Adams provides a long list of enormously successful people who didn’t graduate from college. But virtually everyone on the list is an entrepreneur or entertainer. And most of the people on the list dropped out of college. That is exactly what we want to avoid here. We want high schoolers to make better decisions in the first place so they aren’t in the position of dropping out. If you start a business and it booms before you graduate—a la Zuckerberg or Dell—dropping out is a valid choice. But that is a tiny, tiny sliver of people. And it isn’t the only choice. The founders of theglobe dot com decided to stick it out and graduate, which was probably a good idea, considering that you’ve never heard of theglobe dot com.
One area where I heartily agree with Adams is on the value of trade schools and the skilled trades. We have a lot of work to do to remove the stigma of the trades (this is a good start). And where Mike Rowe’s influence has me mostly focused on traditional skilled trades like carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work, Adams makes clear that trade school options are far, far broader, listing dozens of trade school options.
There is some dubious information in the list. Adams seems to conflate college- (and pharmacy school-) educated pharmacists with pharmacy techs. We may always need lawyers, but automation and a tight legal market has been very hard on jobs for legal assistants. PR is one of the options, but my wife works in PR and she doesn’t know a single person in PR without a four-year degree (it also took her four internships before she could find a permanent position, and she graduated from a top-flight public university—PR is a tough nut to crack). If you’re thinking about going down one of these roads, you’re going to need to do a lot more research (as Adams himself admits).
MORE GRIPES
Adams gives too many platitudes. “You’ve got to work very hard for as long as it’s going to take, and eventually you’re going to get there”? If you want to just put your head down and work, then college is probably your best bet. Entrepreneurship isn’t. That requires you to work hard, but also to work smart. The decision we’re talking about here isn’t about hard work. You can go to college and work hard or you can forego college and work hard. This is a strategic decision.
Adams raises political correctness on college campuses and rampant bias in the professoriate. These are serious issues, but they aren’t necessarily issues that should change your decision to go to college. They might degrade the aggregate value of college, but that should only change the decision of people at the margins, i.e., people teetering on the edge of go or don’t go. (Admittedly, the people at the margins are Adams’ target audience.)
Keep in mind that both issues can be serious issues but still not significantly affect your college experience. One, they are concentrated on certain campuses. If you are particularly concerned about free speech, you can check universities’ records on speech and due process issues at The Foundation for Individual Rights’ website. If you are particularly concerned about political bias, you can attend Hillsdale or a university religious in more than name only or one with a long history of respecting heterogeneous views like the University of Chicago or George Mason. But business and STEM programs at regional public universities—the programs that add the most valuable and the ones the target audience for this book should be considering most strongly—are the least likely place to find these issues.
Adams makes some other bad arguments. So-and-so didn’t think they got much out of college. So what? One, it’s anecdotal. Two, not getting much out of college isn’t much of an accomplishment. You, too, could achieve the same with relatively little effort. The answer to that isn’t necessarily to skip college; the likely answer is to approach college differently. You pay a (relatively) fixed price to the college; what you get in return is very much up to you.
Adams gives bad information. In America, we do not “tend to choose the college that is the furthest from where you live.” The median distance from home-to-college is just 94 miles.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
For all my gripes, I like this bit of advice at the end a lot:
“Consider the investment. Consider the uncertainty. Consider the inflexibility. Consider the inconsistency.
“But mostly, consider the children.
“This decision—this momentous decision—isn’t about the parents. It’s all about the teenager about to enter the adult world. Check that: it’s all about the teenager entering the adult world in the manner that’s best for them.”
It was always abundantly obvious to everyone, dirt under my ancestral fingernails notwithstanding, that I was “college material.” And I could always do basic math. So college was always the assumed path. But my parents were into free-range parenting before it was cool, frankly they weren’t well equipped to advise me, and we were all distracted. My dad spent most of my senior year of high school at M.D. Anderson in Houston. He died a couple months before I graduated. My mom first got diagnosed with MS that same year, and I went a week with both my parents in the hospital.
My mom was smart enough to see the strain on me and to tell me it was okay if I didn’t go to college, starting at the local community college instead. I was smart enough to know that I really needed to get out of my hometown. She was wise enough to accept my decision.
March 26, 2019
A good, informative and thought-provoking book.
A must-read for teenagers and parents of high school students who are close to make the decision about their future profession.
A must-read for teenagers and parents of high school students who are close to make the decision about their future profession.
January 15, 2020
This is another book I'd rate at two stars and a half. I totally agree with Adams that there are many kids who shouldn't go to college, and many ways they can make a decent living if they don't. But I have to disagree with his assertion that it's easy to be an entrepreneur in the US today. It's not. You need startup money, but banks won't lend it to you unless you don't need it. You have to file reams of paperwork with about 30 different regulatory agencies, mostly Federal, most of them stupid, silly, unnecessary, or redundant. You can have a drop-in inspector any time, and since he's a bureaucrat covering his tail, he's going to find *something* wrong just to prove to his bosses that he's doing his job.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews