High School Dropouts

Success Without College: Why Your Child May Not Have to Go to College Right Now-and May Not Have to Go At All
by Linda Lee

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Almost half a million teenagers drop out of high school every year, according to the United States Department of Education. In New York City, half of the entering freshmen don't graduate from high school. There is every reason to be alarmed about high school dropouts.

Yet there is nothing stopping a high school dropout from becoming a plumber, or a computer programmer, and earning a great deal more than most holders of a degree in European history. One sixteen-year-old New Yorker, Cooper Small, dropped out of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in his junior year-over a bad grade in English, even though his GPA of 97.4 ranked him, he said, third in his class.

By that point he had begun working as a computer programmer, making $175 an hour. He then enrolled in Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as a freshman in college without a high school diploma.

That's the millennial example: a seventeen-year-old who is off to college without a high school diploma, making more than his professors and doing it through building web pages.

OK, so those are the computer geniuses, the ones who may not even need a college education. But what about the kids who want to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers? Fine, they should go to college, though I'll tell you, in the course of this book, about a medical school in the United States that takes students straight out of high school. Meanwhile, parents should be aware that in 1990, 75,000 people with college degrees were working as street vendors or door-to-door salesmen, 83,000 college graduates were working as maids, housemen, janitors or cleaners and 166,000 college grads were working as motor vehicle operators, according to the July 1992 issue of the Monthly Labor Review.

Jennifer might get that expensive degree in marine biology, but she also might just as easily end up a waitress/ski bum in Aspen who picks grapes in the south of France during the summer to pay for her room and board.

The Middle-Class Burden

Future doctors and lawyers constitute only a small portion of the students going to college. Going to college is epidemic, especially among middle-class families, whose students have nothing more in mind than just...going to college. These are students who have a sense of entitlement about the enterprise. They may enroll in business classes because that seems to be the way to get rich, or they may major in communications with some vague idea of getting into broadcasting.

They may buy term papers on the web (hey, dude, check out www.cheater.com, where term papers can be downloaded for free), argue with their teachers when too much reading is assigned in an English course and argue with their teachers again when they get a grade lower than a B-minus. These are the students who see their college degree as getting their ticket punched, so they can go out in the world and get a good job and become the consumers they have been raised to be.

Listen to Sarah Williams, who recently left a high position in marketing at Unilever to take a flier on an Internet start-up. "I found high school in Greenwich, Connecticut, pretty boring," she said. She enrolled in the University of Colorado and then dropped out. "I would never use 60 percent of what I needed in order to graduate," she said. "Jobs want people who are specialists," she concluded. "Not people who are well-rounded."

Or, as Mr. Karabell says in What's College For?, "Today's students represent a generation of pragmatists who want knowledge that they can apply to their lives." Mr. Karabell, who has taught at Harvard and Dartmouth, wrote that today's college students are looking for usable skills. And if they think that way at top schools, imagine the attitudes prevalent at the local community college.

Despite the fact that half of all college students matriculate at community colleges, which essentially offer training and remedial education, Mr. Karabell said, "The public still retains romantic notions of college and still sees a college degree as a special achievement."

Those romantic notions of success through college mean that parents treat all education up until college as mere prelude. Many middle-class parents buy homes in school districts where they are assured that 85 to 90 percent of graduates go to college-and where no guidance counselor would dare suggest otherwise.

At New York City's selective public high schools like Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and (in the humanities) Townsend Harris, the number of students heading off to college is close to 100 percent. And then there are the private prep schools, either day schools or boarding schools, for which parents pay up to $20,000 a year to guarantee that their children get into good colleges.

But here's a thought. College professors tel1 me that three-quarters of their freshmen have no business sitting in a college classroom. The professors were not talking about open enrollment, or remedial classes; they were primarily talking about spoiled, immature and lazy middle-class kids, the kind who are filling even some of the best college classrooms and who have no interest in studying what is being taught.

Saying that "everyone" needs to go to college (that is to say, everyone in the middle class) at age eighteen is just as arbitrary as saying that everyone at eighteen should become a race car driver or a concert pianist. Many kids just aren't ready. Some may never have the aptitude to do college-level work. And a surefire way to make sure that your reluctant son or daughter will never graduate from college (or experience the pleasure of learning for learning's sake) is to insist that he or she go to college "just to see what it's like." What they will see is that, for them, it's like hell.

Excerpted from Success Without College by Linda Lee. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Linda Lee is an editor and writer for the New York Times. She frequently contributes to the Style, Art & Leisure, and Business sections. The article she wrote for the education life supplement in 1998 entitled "What's the Rush? Why College Can Wait" generated an enormous amount of mail. In addition to the more than eighty articles she has written for the Times, Lee is the author of several books. She lives in New York City.