Craig Kingsbury writes:

"I thought your piece on 'graduating slaves' made some interesting points that deserve a lot more attention these days. It's possible that I'm not a great person to get involved in this debate; I'm a 28yo WM whose father put the money away to pay all my bills, so "it's easy for me to say" a lot of things, some of which may even be true. That being said...

1. There is no question in my mind that there is too much college going around these days. This could perhaps be corrected by raising standards; I went to Tufts, which is ostensibly an elite school, but even there the most substantial thing a large (30%?) portion of the kids did was to get in. All downhill from there.

2. Interesting new alternatives are emerging (c.f. University of Phoenix) which change some aspects of the equation by eliminating the full-time-residential aspect of college, which forces people to shoulder the massive opportunity cost of not working fulltime. Which coincidentally guarantees that students graduate with no work experience and thus suffer from huge disadvantages particularly in a down market.

3. If I were President of Harvard (ha!) I'd be inclined to announce that, beginning five years from now, we will not accept any student directly out of high school. You must be out a minimum of one year before you can apply. In practice this would mean a lot more kids going on backpacking trips through Europe and Thailand for a year, but even this would be an improvement. Kids at that age need to blow off a certain amount of steam. I think this worked very well with the baby boomers' parents because they were largely people who had been involved in WWII/Korea, where by your early twenties you'd had enough excitement and were ready to settle down.

4. Working in technology in Boston, I have been at the forefront of some of the changes (e.g. off shoring) that are causing many to question (rightly) long-held maxims of how one can obtain the Good Life. I mentioned to a friend, who was desperately unemployed as a low-level computer programmer of the kind now routinely shipped off to South Asia, that he ought to consider becoming an auto mechanic. I knew from consulting for a GM unit that one of the biggest problems all carmakers were facing was that service technicians were becoming largely unable to cope with the complexity for newer cars which had more computers than greasy parts. The result was that diagnosing and fixing problems could take many hours, all of which was being done under warranty at cost to the manufacturer. Now, this fellow absolutely loved high-performance European cars, talked of them day and night, and fantasized about maybe one day being able to afford one. S'truth, he could as a service tech make upwards of $50/hour, with many managers earning well into the 100k range around here, at least a third more than he was likely to make in IT, and besides, you can't have a guy in India fixing a car sitting in Worcester, so your job's more secure to boot. Similar arguments could be made for plenty of other trades, electricians and plumbers in particular.

But! Those are grubby-hands jobs with dirt under your fingernails. and what college-edumacated parent would be proud to say their son was an *auto mechanic*, even if he's got a nicer house than Bob's son the engineer because he didn't have 50k in loans to pay off?"