How to Tell when You Are too Late to the Party

Recently, the NY Times did an article on law student debt and the lack of jobs in that once profitable field. Who would have thought that the country would ever have too many lawyers. What will John Grisham write about now?

The interesting part of the NY Times article was that law schools are ignoring reality out of the usual profit motive and encouraging gullible students to dive into a quarter million dollars in debt. Regardless of the bleak prospects their students face after college, law schools are promoting a future that doesn't exist because they can get away with it. Berklee College of Music published the results of a survey on ProSound News a while back that stank of the same phony statistics.

It's a tough world out there, especially for the "lost generation" that was sacrificed by the pseudo-conservative movement starting in Reagan's administration and continuing through Bush I and Clinton and really going into overdrive during the Bush II "no child's behind left alone" programs. No only have they had their self-esteem hyped by the K-12 education system's touchy-feely psycho-babble, but they've been dumped into the most vicious economic depression (it's only a "recession" to the 75% who still have jobs) but they're being suckered by a desperate corporate education system that could care less about their future opportunities.

There is a plethora of education money-sinks advertised on late night television. Everything from chef schools to motorcycle mechanic schools to recording and live sound engineering. How does the modern student find a real career among the imaginary prospects? I have to think back to my electrical engineering education in the 1970s for my answer. When I was a young (yes, I was young once), all of my professors were of two types: old or part-time. The old guys were mostly teaching basic electronics, math, and theory classes. They had once been real engineers, many working in power electricity or tube electronics, but were now relegated to education because their skills were obsolete. The younger guys (and none were younger than 40-something) were working engineers who had some weird compulsion to teach the technology they were working with. As a student, you would work your way through the legion of old professors, getting basic concepts and mathematics under your belt, chomping at the bit to take the few classes offered with the adjunct instructors.

I realize now that I under-appreciated the old guys because I couldn't identify with their work history. I over-appreciated the adjunct instructors because they often tried to skip the messy steps to understanding and just talked about the cool stuff they were working on. Their tips-and-tricks were often really useful, but many students weren't even close to ready to design guidelines. While the classes were often fun, they weren't often valuable or useful for the work many of us would be doing. The basic classes taught by the old guys were the core of what many of us (definitely me) would use as engineers all through our careers.


So, with that background, this is my suggestion for picking a career field: If the instructors at your prospective school are young, talented, and in the prime of their careers, run-don't-walk away from formal training in that career path as fast as you can. 

At best and if you really want to do that kind of work, just go do it. You won't need a degree if the best people in the business aren't able to make a good living doing the work. The education system is all about security, not opportunity. Instructor salaries are low. Choosing a career in education instead of the field being taught is an admission that you are either not good enough to work in that field or that the field is economically bereft. If the best people in a field choose to teach a field instead of work in it, you know something is wrong.

What this situation tells us is that the best years of that particular career are in the past; or they never existed, but the glamor attached to that business is still hanging on. Going for that glamor isn't an insane move, unless you attach a few tens of thousands in student loans or a few hundreds of thousands in the case of the law students. The education system is slow, inbred, and self-referential, so it is rarely able to see a trend before the trend is in the dust and the rear view mirror. If you think about the history of popular music, for example, it's obvious how slow academia is. When pop music was in its prime, electric instruments were about as welcome in colleges as venereal diseases. When there were staff recording engineering jobs, there were no programs (outside of the major record labels) to train engineers. The only booming part of the music industry is in the live sound area and that is only life-like in the "house of worship" business. There are substantial differences between live sound for a rock band and sound reinforcement in a modern church. By the time this becomes common knowledge, academia will have waited until the next Enlightenment to get with that program.