“Learning and Earning:  A Lifetime Experience” by Michael Murphy

Community College Journal, June/July 1999, Vol. 69, No. 6

If you think about he way the economy is going and the direction that the workforce is taking, what we once believed to be a linear relationship between learning and earning doesn’t exist any more. To a significant degree, people are combing learning and working over a lifetime.  I think students have figured this out long before our systems have adjusted.

My college is on the quarter system.  In a recent conversation, I was told, “Well, if you got off the quarter system, students would be able to find summer jobs sooner.”  My response was, “Eighty percent of our students already are working.  Summer jobs don’t mean anything to them.”

In community colleges in particular, students do not dedicate their total energies toward their education to the exclusion of other parts of their lives.  The percentage of students who earn a degree in two years probably is in single digits.  That’s not in their life plan, which is a combination of work and family and learning.

Learning is going to extend beyond the time that people traditionally commit to college—roughly between the ages of 18 and 22.  People will learn much of what they need to know over a lifetime, whether formally through community colleges or other kinds of institutions, or less formally through places of employment or the military or wherever life takes them.  They’ll re-educate themselves on a continuous basis.

So, what does it mean to possess an associate or bachelor’s degree in that environment?  The best that can happen in the period of time devoted to earning an associate degree is building a foundation for continuous learning and perhaps a skill set to get started down a path.  Beyond that, as new technologies emerge and new relationships develop between business units, as globalization takes hold, the many additional skills that will be required will not be covered adequately in what passes now for the initial postsecondary experience.

We keep fighting the notion that too many high schoolers are working.  I don’t know whether anyone ahs the power to change that.  I’m also not sure it’s bad, if managed properly—if the working experience becomes a learning experience and the two are tied together to teach a sense of responsibility, how to function in teams.  If our systems of education take the working and learning experience into account instead of pretending it doesn’t or shouldn’t exist, we have a better chance of developing young men and women with the basics they need to build over a lifetime.

Also in this country, we still don’t do a good job of helping people determine that options exist for them, not just in careers but in lifestyles.  There is a bias toward certain types of careers and lifestyles, and a prejudice against others, that is most unfortunate.  When high schools present awards, there is no recognition of the young men and women who have developed their talents to the fullest, but whose talents are not leading to Ivy League scholarships or appointments to the military academies.  There is no recognition of those who have developed talents in a craft or trade or skill set.

Sooner or later, society pays a terrible price for that, not just in terms of less diverse workforce but also in the significant emotional cost of people who spend their lives in careers they do not enjoy.  They don’t enjoy getting up and going to work in the morning.  They do it not out of passion but because they saw it, perhaps though parent’s eyes, as a way to earn a living or maintain a lifestyle that turns out to be not so rewarding after all.

Fortunately, the lower ceilings that used to exist aren’t there any more.  It used to be that for someone who set out pursuing a trade, the chances of ultimately pursuing undergraduate study were remote.  Now, many colleges and employers will accept the responsibility for an employee’s continuing his or her education—using their background in a skill or trade to pursue a degree.  Germany is finding that many young men and women who began down a vocational path do quite well when given an opportunity for a university education.  It presents some meaning for them that would not have existed earlier in their lives.  We could do worse than to recognize that in this country.

Michael Murphy is president of the College of DuPage, Illinois.