The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [9]
Beyond the grim scene for recently minted JDs, MBAs, MAs, and PhDs, the picture was no brighter for fresh college graduates. We now live in an age when it is likely that the person pouring you your coffee at the café in the morning has spent four years studying literature, or even business and marketing, in a degreegranting institution. That person is likely to be carrying tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, and more in credit card debt accrued in college, for the privilege of having studied to pour you your coffee with such literary and business acumen.
A New York Times article entitled “Jobs Wanted, Any Jobs at All” describes Katie and Kerry Barry, twins who were then seventeen months past their Rutgers graduation, as living in “an unwelcome continuum of mass rejection.” The twins had collectively applied to 150 jobs: “a magazine for diabetics, a Web site about board games and a commercial for green tea-flavored gum; fact-checking at Scholastic Books, copy editing for the celebrity baby section of People.com, road-tripping for College Sports Television. They did not get any of these. More than a year has lapsed without so much as an interview. Apparently, even a canned response was impossible in New York.”8
While the recent bust times will have hopefully passed by the time this book comes out, more and more people of all ages are beginning to question traditional assumptions about how to make a mark in the world. Throughout most of the last century, large bureaucratic organizations dominated the path of social mobility, from school age to retirement. If you wanted to be successful and have an impact, you studied hard in high school, got into a good college, got an entry-level job at a large corporate or government bureaucracy, and rose through the ranks of middle management.
It is now widely understood that the latter portion of this timeline—getting an entry-level job and rising through the ranks of middle management at a large bureaucracy—is no longer the best way to do things, for two reasons.
First, job security is dead, as anyone who has had a job recently knows. You’re going to have many different jobs, employers, and even careers in your life. So where you get your first, entry-level one—the single thing that a BA credential really helps with—becomes less and less relevant. Building a portfolio of real-world results and impacts you’ve created, over time, becomes more and more relevant.
Second, the Internet, cell phones, and virtually free longdistance calling have created new opportunities for flexible, self-created, independent careers; this trend has been helped along by the gathering storms of millions of hungry, highly educated young men and women in India, China, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and elsewhere, happy to do the work that entry-level Organization Men would have done in years past, for a fraction of the cost. This emerging competition has encouraged many people in the West to “think outside the organization” to create careers for themselves that can’t be outsourced, offshored, or automated.
More and more Americans of all ages are waking up to the reality that you don’t need a nine-to-five job to be a valuable, contributing member of society and to create wealth for yourself and others. Millions of small-business owners, entrepreneurs, computer programmers, graphic designers, independent consultants, writers, and freelancers make valuable contributions to society (creating four out of ten new jobs in the economy), outside the realm of working for a boss nine to five (or eight to eight).
Until the last decade, the kinds of opportunities that got you ahead in the world—medicine, law, engineering, or rising up through the ranks of a large corporation—were all guarded by “gatekeepers” who checked your formal credentials vigorously before letting you in.
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