You might think that any comments from President Eisenhower would be hopelessly irrelevant and outdated. And yet, what he has to say about college seems particularly relevant to me in the economic situation of the early 21st century. Read his essay and my comments. Do you agree?

By Dwight D. Eisenhower, then President of Columbia University

Condensed from the October 1948 issue of Reader’s Digest

Dear Jack—or Margaret: You say you wonder if it is worth-while for you to go on with high school. You particularly wonder if it is worthwhile to enter and finish college. The tedium of study, nose buried in the books, seems a waste of time compared with a job and the stimulus of productive work.

This is not a trifling problem. Your decision will affect your whole life; similar decisions by millions of other young Americans will affect the total life of our county. And I know how deeply it must worry you. It worried me and a lot of my schoolmates when I was your age.

In a small Kansas town, 40 years ago, a reasonably strong case could be put up in favor of leaving school early. Outside of those few who could afford to pick a profession, most of us knew our lives would be spent on the farm, or in one of the local stores, or at the creamery or elevator.

We could be good farmers, good storekeepers, and good mill hands without much book learning. The quickest road to practical knowledge was to do. That was the way we might have argued; and we would have been right if there were no more successful living than plowing a straight furrow, wrapping a neat package, keeping a machine well oiled.

Fortunately, we came of stock that set the school on the same plane as the home and the church. The value of education, above and beyond the immediate return in dollars and cents, had been bred into us. Our families stinted themselves to keep us in school a while longer; and most of us worked, and worked hard, to prolong that while.

Today the business of living is far more complex than it was in my boyhood. No one of us can hope to comprehend all its complexity in a lifetime of study. But each day profitably spent in schools will help you understand better your personal relationship to country and world. If your generation fails to understand that the human individual is still the center of the universe and is still the sole reason for the existence of all man-made institutions, then complexity will become chaos.

Consequently, I feel firmly that you should continue your schooling—if you can—right to the end of high school and right to the end of college. You say you are “not too good at books.” But from books—under the guidance of your teachers—you can get a grasp on the thing that you most ought to understand before you go to work.

It is expressed in a moving letter I got the other day from a young girl halfway through high school. She said that in her studies she seemed to be a failure all along the line, always trailing everyone else. But then she ended by saying: “I still think I could learn to be a good American.”

That’s the vital point. School, of course, should train you in the two great basic tools of the mind: the use or words and the use of numbers. And school can properly give you a start toward the special skills you may need in the trade or business or profession you may plan to enter…

Never forget that self-interest and patriotism go together. You have to look out for yourself, and you have to look out for your country. Self-interest and patriotism, rightly considered, are not contradictory ideas. They are partners.

The very earth of our country is gradually getting lost to us. One third of the fertile top layer of our soil has already been washed away into rivers and the sea. This must be stopped, or someday our county will be too barren to yield us a living. That is one national problem crying for solution; if affects you directly and decisively.

In our cities there a millions of people who have little between them and hunger except a daily job, which they may lose. They might someday undermine your security, no matter how personally successful you might be in your own working life. That’s another problem—and there are innumerable others—whose solution requires the thought and good will of every American.

[The rest of the article departs from the question of college education and slides into politics. I’ll include it at a later date.]

My thoughts

I’ve never seriously considered not sending my son, 17, to college but I could certainly make a case for it.

Eisenhower wrote this essay in an era where high-school dropouts were common and college attendance was only 15%. It was a time when the need for a more college-educated workforce was vital to national growth and security.

Perhaps, 60 years later, we have taken the path to college too far.

Consider the numbers: unemployment/underemployment is high among recent college grads, 53.6% according to the Huffington Post, and many are forced to live at home with their parents.

On the other hand, plumbers have a relatively low 5.2% unemployment according to studentscholarships.com.

That’s bad enough, but add to that the debt that college grads are carrying (over $25,000 on average in 2010) and college seems like a bad financial investment; right up there with investing in a Rupert Murdoch portfolio.

Have we set school on too high a pedestal to be practical anymore?

Eisenhower’s argument for advanced education has become de-rigueur but is that now an outdated notion?

Should we reconsider underemployment: should our kids go to college to understand the complexity of the world—to become “better Americans”— and then should they, and us, be comfortable if they pursue a career as a plumber?





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