We find ourselves this month over midway through yet another riveting semester here at LSU.  The leaves are starting to change, the co-eds are switching from miniskirts and jogging shorts with tube tops to tight jeans with sweaters, and the sweltering nights are actually cooler and more manageable.  My weekends are preoccupied with football and homework, and studying has becoming the grout that fills my weekday schedule where free time used to permeate from.

The one pleasure that I continue to enjoy on campus as the seasons change is people watching.  Spend some time in the Quad; sit a spell in the library, watching students study (or trying to); even go so far as to look at the fanatics in Free Speech Alley, trying to get you to come to their way of thinking.  After months of killing time watching the students, I can now pick out both the general education majors and the doe-in-the-headlights freshmen, and I have to say … some people just don’t need to be in college.

There is nothing wrong with higher education.  I’m proof of that.  I’ve failed out of LSU twice, I’m thirty-two years old, and I am looking at graduating in less than seven months with a civil engineering degree.  But I wanted that degree.  Years of waiting to go back, years of suffering through the gauntlet of math classes, and years of late-night and early-morning cram sessions have left me battle-scarred and weathered, ready to build the roads and highways that you, the commoner, will just bitch and complain about.  But that’s what I want to do.

Too many times, students just graduate with the attitude that college is four more years of high school, that it’s what’s expected of them, or even worse, that they are guaranteed high-paying jobs if they graduate.  I honestly think that some of the business majors that lurk the hallways with me think that, when they graduate, they will become CEOs, VPs, or even managers with six-figure salaries the minute they graduate, as if IBM is waiting for their 3.2-GPA, Starbucks-interning, tan-twice-a-day, drunken-Facebook-picture-taking butts to graduate so they can take over the company from the guys that have been doing it successfully for decades, as if the key to its survival was something they slept though and crammed in at the last minute before their ECON 2030 final.

Some of the ones that I talk to don’t even know what they want to do or where they want to work; it doesn’t matter as long as the money is good enough to pay off the credit card bills they ran up in college and they can still drink every weekend.  As far as they are concerned, they could work at a slaughterhouse that kills baby puppies and kicks newborns as long as it offers medical and 401(k) plans.

Guys and gals, your business degree is just a fancy G.E.D. without a masters or a PhD.  Hell, my engineering degree is useless without me passing my Fundamentals of Engineering exam.

But there is nothing wrong with not getting a higher education.  I’m not advocating that you sit home and do nothing if you don’t want to work, mainly because I am not a spokesperson for the Democratic Party.  I’m saying that we don’t all need to be engineers, lawyers, doctors, and accountants.

Almost gone are the days of vo-tech schools that teach a trade.  Almost gone are the parents that are proud of their child that pulled down a successful living and never set foot onto a university campus. Defiantly gone are the days when only the brightest and smartest went to college and excelled.

In the interim between my most recent failure at LSU and when I went back this time, I worked in the industrial-electrical field in the chemical plants that dot the banks of the Mississippi River.  The summer before I returned to school this time around, I worked in the residential air conditioner installation field, and I worked hard.  The money wasn’t as good as that of an LSU graduate, but it was well beyond the poverty level.  Had I gone to a couple of vo-tech classes, I would have easily made more than teachers (who have a degree), much more than retail clerks, and a substantial amount more than those who deal with grease and want you to upsize your fries.

The state needs carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and other manual laborers.  And those jobs pay well.  Do you remember how much the plumber charged the last time a pipe started leaking?  Do you think he only gets paid minimum wage?

My future father-in-law took vo-tech classes when he was young, never went to college, and now owns his own business and makes more than I can working for the government as a civil engineer.  Do I envy him?  No; he busted his hump for decades to get where he is today, and I couldn’t be happier for him.  But he didn’t need a college degree, just drive and a good work ethic.  There is nothing wrong with manual labor, as long as you take pride in your work.

With that being said, I think that there should be more options to high school students upon graduation.  I say there should be a mandatory, one-year waiting period before you can attend college.  I think the universities should say to the students, “Look, you don’t know how hard it is to earn a buck and what is out there.  Work for a year and see how hard the real world is, and if you want to come here, we will see you in a year, after you learn how bad it sucks to earn minimum wage and make ends meet.”

I bet several of those that find a good job will see that a decent living can be made if they work hard, as opposed to having to work through college to get a degree you aren’t excited about.  After all, you really don’t need that business degree to be the dayshift manager of Domino’s Pizza (did that for a while, too), and hard work will always trump that four-years-of-slacking-off-to-graduate-in-the-bottom-third-of-your-class diploma that you barely earned.

So in the end, ask yourself if you can save yourself and your family thousands of dollars by avoiding college and maybe taking a couple of vo-tech classes.  After all, a good stripper will make as much as a mediocre doctor (without the decade in schools and hundreds of thousands’ worth of student loans); Glenn the mechanic is smoking hand-rolled cigars while you are bumming smokes with your poli sci diploma; and that manager of Starbucks, who started as a barista out of high school when you started college (to get that liberal arts degree) and is now your boss, makes a lot more than you.  Enjoy, and be thankful.