Hi [%first_name | Quartz member%],
Welcome back to your leveled-up email experience! As a reminder, every Thursday we’ll be diving into a different topic, and bringing you the smartest voices from inside our newsroom. Today we’re talking education—but first, a recap:
This week we’ve been watching as the Great Firewall comes to Hong Kong’s internet, and keeping 👀 on surging US imports from China. The cannabis industry doesn’t have a monopoly problem—we checked—and Quartz at Work swears the four-day workweek is catching on. TikTok is still banned in India, but that has yet to turn the fortunes of any homegrown competitors.
Your most-read story this week: Covid-19’s hidden mental health crisis. And the award for most relatable member goes to whoever was watching Are you an exceptional multitasker—or are you just lying to yourself?
Okay, please open your textbooks and turn to chapter one.
Degrees of difficulty
Colleges and universities across the US are beginning to unveil their fall-semester plans and, frankly, it looks pretty bleak.
Many institutions will open with extremely reduced capacity—only 40% of Harvard undergraduates will be welcomed back on campus—while most students are expected to take classes online. Athletics, clubs, activities, and parties will be curtailed, if not eliminated outright. Students are being asked to fork over as much as $50,000, or enter decades of debt, for the privilege of streaming lessons from their childhood bedrooms.
American higher education has been inching toward unsustainability for decades now. A combination of skyrocketing costs and a mismatch between curricula and job-market demands has many asking whether there’s a better way to prepare young people for careers and adulthood. Online degrees, coding bootcamps, and a startup culture that eschews formal learning in favor of real-world experience have all chipped away at the inevitability of traditional four-year degrees.
But while there are lots of good reasons not to go to college, there have been two large obstacles to dismantling it as a societal expectation for young people. One is the value of the credential: So long as employers demand a bachelor’s degree, job-seekers will pursue them. The other is the college experience itself. For a century, American universities had served as halfway houses, transitioning teenagers into functioning adults. College is an opportunity to explore new identities and develop meaningful relationships that can last a lifetime.
Coronavirus could call both of those functions into question. With no campus experience to speak of, many students and parents will rightly ask why they’re paying so much. And as a growing number of students opt out, either by taking gap years or pursuing alternative means of training, the pipeline of job-ready college seniors may attenuate. With fewer degree holders entering the job market, employers could be forced to reconsider their insistence on college credentials.
It took centuries for higher education to grow into a nearly $700 billion industry, and it won’t crumble because of coronavirus. But the pandemic may force institutions of higher learning to start answering questions they have long avoided. —Oliver Staley, culture & lifestyle editor
🎓😬🎓
Imagine yourself as a high school senior, headed to your university of choice come fall. Then bam! Coronavirus. Would the prospect of an all-virtual education change your calculus on college? (Or, if this is not a hypothetical: How are you and your family weighing the options?)
Don’t mind the gap
One way to kick the college can down the road: Take a gap year. A relatively common practice in Europe, the yearlong break after high school got its most recent dose of US side-eye in 2016, when Malia Obama took a year off before Harvard. (Spoiler: She turned out fine!)
You’ll find no greater advocate for the gap year than Quartz’s Jackie Bischof, who swears by the life lessons she learned during her own:
The year away quickly shocked me into understanding how diverse people’s views and interpretations of the world could be. It turned me from a naive, sheltered, and self-involved teenager into a much more open-minded person who understood how big the world really was. I also went from being a typical 17-year-old slob into a neat freak and organizing whiz in a few months. This transformation was in response to the precise requirements of the housework I was doing in exchange for accommodations (think military-style ironing techniques), the limitations of my budget, and the planning for my solo travels.
Earned wisdom
When job prospects are bleak, graduate school can seem like an appealing option. But how do you know it’s worthwhile? (Other than our handy calculator, of course.) Quartz at Work’s Sarah Todd—a grad school survivor herself—advises steering clear unless you meet one of the following criteria:
🇦 Your program offers funding that will allow you to graduate with minimal (or ideally zero) debt.
🇧 You are required to get an advanced degree in order to practice your profession of choice.
🇨 Getting the advanced degree will lead to a substantial increase in your earning power (this is the case for many degrees, but by no means all of them).
🇩 You are independently wealthy, footloose, fancy-free, and drinking a martini right now.
Copy these notes
Young people contemplating an uncertain future have one thing going for them: plenty of wisdom from past generations. In the weeks after Massachusetts’ Smith College closed due to coronavirus, Stacie Hagenbaugh, director of the school’s Lazarus Center for Career Development, reached out to the class of 2008 for advice to give the class of 2020. Here’s what they shared:
- There’s no shame in a patchwork quilt of experience. Little gigs strung together are a pattern of little successes that serve to keep you going—and forward movement is always better than standing still.
- Now, about graduate school…As mentioned, jumping into grad school to wait out a recession can be a bad idea. Taking time to work and hone your professional focus is a critical step in making decisions about additional degrees.
- Yes, there’s the networking thing. Building a professional circle is important, and the class of 2020 shouldn’t hesitate to reach out to people working in their fields of interest. Just remember the circumstances—illness, furloughs, and layoffs abound—and lead with empathy.
- Build a strong community around you. Good friends are essential, especially when the world is harsh. Lean on yours to celebrate victories and find relief amid setbacks.
Basic training
Whether making college decisions or simply trying to get by, you can look to Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind for wisdom. By temporarily setting aside our knowledge and preconceptions and adopting a “beginner’s mind,” the argument goes, we will be more open to new ideas and possibilities. Here are seven words to help turn that concept into action:
🤔 Flex. Deconstruct ideas. Question everything.
🏃 Stretch. Move your body more.
🎢 Shift. Do new things that scare you on the regular.
🍟 Hone. Curb your reliance on beloved things.
🧘️ Observe. Try practices like journaling and meditation.
🔬 Test. If you’re always alone, spend time with people. Or vice versa.
🔨 Disrupt. Break rules, real and imagined, big and small.
As always, we want to hear from you: feedback, questions, topic ideas, and your best (or worst) advice on education.
Thanks for reading! And best wishes for an instructive end to your week,
Jackie Bischof
Deputy membership editor
Kira Bindrim
Executive editor