It still remains true, especially for men, that we are valued primarily for what we earn.
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A Chicago bar that I really like and often write in has a sign in the corner that reads, If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?
The sign has obvious function in a pub. The bar projects blue-collar bravado, and the sign, along with others of similar tone, adds to an atmosphere that’s both whimsical and rugged. It can help to shut up a drunk blowhard—in fact, it often works as a deterrent.
However, I often imagine this sign outside the context of the bar. I imagine it hanging everywhere, in every work place and on the door of every business. It’s a question that floats between all the lines of American life even if we pretend it doesn’t. And it affects college students dramatically.
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Many Americans, myself included, carry around a sense of shame, at least subconsciously, for earning less than we might or should. I feel it still remains true, especially for men, that we are valued primarily for what we earn. And while our opinions or ideas on their own might be brilliant, they are far more interesting when it’s obvious we are also wealthy, or so we perceive.
I feel this notion is silently damaging to men, and I have heard as much from students here at the community college where I teach.
We live in a culture that values profit above all else. “Yeah, sure, we ripped them off, but we made a lot of money.”
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Young women who’ve yet to have children very often tell me they come to college to be able to support themselves, to be “independent” (I critique that notion of independence here.). It’s true that young men come to college to be able to move out of their parents’ homes. But many guys also say they come to college to gain overall value, to become more attractive to women by virtue of wealth, and to be able to provide for a family.
I teach the underclasses. Yes, I’ve had students (of both genders, mind you) who simply want to dick around for a while, or who come to college because some high school counselor said they should. Those people aside, the majority of students have social mobility in mind when they take community college classes.
I have lost count of all the times a young man has asked me which major ends up paying the best, and how often they’ll assume that “business” leads to better paying jobs than would engineering or math.
It’s interesting that young women rarely ask the question as bluntly. They’ll want to know if all nurses make the same starting salary, or they’ll wonder what they need to do to land a teaching job in a “rich neighborhood”. Without doubt, experiences in school and society have steered such women toward the nursing and teaching professions; on rarer but still consistent occasion they’ll study things like accounting or office management.
But the guys won’t have any major in mind. I don’t care what I take so long as it pays me the most money. (For the record, I avoid telling them anything about any particular course. Instead I ask them to tell me what lifestyle they consider a wealthy one and what they can see themselves doing on a daily basis for years at at time.)
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It should be obvious how damaging and limiting their kind of attitude is. Besides the self-fulfilling prophesy—if you don’t want to be treated like a human ATM, you should not aspire to become one—this point of view keeps young men from success, at least when success is defined as enjoyment of one’s daily work and the capacity to perform with skill. We generally do better at things we find engaging. Motivating people by dangling high salaries—the need for high salaries—keeps them from exploring their potential talents. They automatically reject about half of the courses of study. This dilutes the diversity and complexity of our society.
A lot of women fail out of our nursing program—this past semester, the numbers were staggering—when they realize nursing is not glorified babysitting of sick people. (Interestingly, the few men who enter nursing tend to do very well.) But the numbers are not as bad as the amount of men who fail out of our various technical programs.
Sometimes they simply cannot meet basic language and math requirements and would fail no matter what they studied. But very often they’re simply not interested in IT or Business, and they can’t find the energy to pretend to be. They enter the fields assuming they’ll be easy because high school was easy. Classes are just hoops; the professor will pass them because every teacher before has always passed them. The irony is tragic: these young men are trying to become rich instead of gaining an education or a proficiency, and they fail to see the relationship between wealth, discipline, focus and professional skill.
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It’s difficult to blame them for trying to “become rich”. We live in a culture that values profit above all else. “Yeah, sure, we ripped them off, but we made a lot of money.” As an end, profit now justifies all methods and models.
Near the top of the list of profit-hungry loons are colleges themselves who’ve milked the loan system to increase their own revenues. In the process, they’ve priced entire sections of society out, and their cost makes it difficult for students to rationalize the pursuit of passions or curiosities. How can someone be expected to read great books or study history when there’s no real profit in it, and when college requires going into at least some debt.
I wish we could get to the point where a bar might hang up a sign reading If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy? But we’re far from that, and we continue to put pressure on men to value themselves not as members of society but as powerful lords capable of affording anything they or their loved ones might desire. We’d go a long way toward teaching men to see the humanity before them, the society and network of relationships around them, if we could get them to see themselves as valuable for how they think and feel, not simply what materials they can gain or mini-empires they can build. Of course, there’s a way to do it, but that way does not present obvious financial profit.
In my classes, most men do not focus on cultivating their emotional health and intellectual capacity. They focus primarily or even entirely on earning money. Ironically, the college focuses on the same thing. In the process, a majority of students end up failing and thereby prolonging a cycle of poverty, sending another generation of students to a college that will happily collect their tuition.
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This post has been republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto
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True Community runs each Wednesday. Gint Aras explores his experiences as an instructor in a community college that serves a lower-middle to lower class district in Chicagoland.
Previous True Community articles:
The Young Man With No Guests At Commencement
Why Is It Wrong To Be Sexist, Racist or Homophobic?
I Had To Kill A Guy At Work Yesterday
Top 3 Education Myths and How They Affect Men
The Myth and False Lesson of Independence
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I totally disagree with the above statement: ‘If You’re So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich? — It still remains true, especially for men, that we are valued primarily for what we earn’. —– as do many awakened women I know. It saddens me when a message like that is spread around as it continues to cause division between the divine masculine and divine feminine; a division that is only in our minds and must be left behind if we are to rise out of the lies that have held us back for so long, from forming true and lasting intimate… Read more »
I’m afraid I disagree with this article. Funnily enough, I was reflecting on my past career earlier this evening, and concluded that my three years at university were a waste of time. I studied history, not because I thought it would get me a career but because I thought it was interesting. I still do, but I learned nothing at university that I could not have learned in a public library or online. I’ve now spent nearly fourteen years in various jobs that did not require my degree. My friends who are accountants, engineers and computer programmers earn double my… Read more »
Thanks for reading and commenting, Tom.
““If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy” …. best line I’ve heard in a long time.
Billy Goats, been there many times. Not so blue collar any more. 40 years ago was a different time.
Always happy to read your articles Gint. Take care
The quote “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy” really made me think. The dark side of being ‘rich’ is hardly ever discussed, but as several articles have pointed out male suicides are more likely among middle and upper middle class white males. We have killed the ideas of perfecting a craft and that all honest work is honorable, which is a loss not only for your students but for all society.
Excellent article. Thank you for articulating the issue so well.
This is a fine article Gint,
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?”. I have to say, social mobility was on my mind when I was an undergraduate. I would have ended up in advertising. Had I been encouraged to explore and recognise an obvious vocation, I would have saved myself a decade and a half, and pursued what made me happy in the first place. I am not rich, may never be, but I have conflated smart with happy, at least where my profession is concerned.
Being smart simply gives you options, you can see further and make more informed decisions regarding your life. Being wise means you pick the choices that are right for you. The jobs that make you lots of money generally aren’t the jobs that are interesting.
I much prefer interesting.