Why Force Career Specialization on Teenagers?

While the spinoff television show Daria never quite reached the self-mocking genius of its predecessor Beavis and Butthead, a scene by title character Daria Morgendorffer has made the rounds on the internet recently.

Daria, a sarcastic, intelligent, and prematurely jaded student sitting in a college classroom, is prompted to tell the classroom what her goals are. To this, she provides a bitter and incisive response.

Though this is just a quote from a cartoon, it captures a lesson that seems to escape educators and policymakers across the country.

A recent example of this generational amnesia shows itself in a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. In this article, the college presidents of Lewis & Clark College and Northwestern University join forces to advocate for students to make better decisions about where to earn their undergraduate degrees. While they include good messages about the value of discomfort as a tool for education, they then go on to list a number of reasons they think students should pick schools.

If you want a career in theater, pick a school in a community with a vibrant local theater scene...If you want to become a global titan of industry,...pick a place that forces you to gain global literacy...If you're a nerd who has already invented great new apps and wants to be a tech entrepreneur,...go where you can take great courses in design.

The issue with Glassner and Schapiro's analysis here is that they assume that most 18-year-olds have the slightest clue what the job market looks like. If they are enrolling in college, they likely have never held a job that comes close to a career field they would be interested in entering in the long run. Yet we assume they should be making decisions like they have a thorough understanding of what it is to have a job and what it is to look for one in a post-graduate phase of life. But as a city councilmember here in Omaha said earlier this week, most young people don't want to become dentists and accountants, they want to be actors, rappers, and athletes.

American Enterprise Institute Fellow Richard Vedder makes a similar mistake in his recent op-ed where he belittles "anthropology and drama" as the "fields the economy values the least" as opposed to "engineering and math." In an economy in which the average college graduate holds eleven jobs in her first twenty years out of college (I'm on my fifth currently) and the average person changes her career three times in her lifetime, why do we assume the best thing for an 18-year-old is specialized career training? I am sure that someone studying computer programming in college ten years ago does not use a bit of what they learned as an undergraduate in their work today.

Higher education, at least at the undergraduate level, needs to be focused on developing thinkers, communicators, and citizens. While we may change our specific career paths throughout our lives, these three qualities are what will stay with us throughout any vocational experience we have. On top of this, democracies (and, in the long run, markets) needs thinkers, communicators, and citizens instead of cogs to plug into a stagnant economic system. Let us not make the mistake of believing that once someone hits that special age of eighteen that they suddenly become those three things on their own.

Why Liberals Would Love to See Christie on the Ballot in 2016 -- And Maybe in the White House too.

In a poll released earlier today, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ranked as the "hottest" politician in America, beating out #2 in the poll, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by one "degree." Yes, the terminology is a little silly, but it points to a possible 2016 match-up that bodes nothing but good news for liberals in America.

Firstly, post-Obama administration Hillary Clinton left her post at the State department as one of the most popular politicians in the country. If she ran, she would have a good shot at becoming the first woman president in United States history as well as marking the Democrats' first 3-term streak holding the presidency since Harry Truman occupied the White House.

While Christie is popular amongst independents according to a Public Policy Polling survey, the last candidate to hold such broad appeal across ideologies was John McCain in 2008, and we remember what happened to him. The Republican party has twice chosen centrist candidates over more right-wing opposition in 2008 and 2012, but have nonetheless been unsuccessful at turning that into victories. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the independent vote, but was still unsuccessful at winning the presidency. Assuming he locks up the nomination on grounds of this appeal, Christie would still have to somehow win the independent vote decisively while also turning out a Republican base that he is alienating with his rhetoric against the still-powerful tea party wing of the GOP.

But if Christie were to overcome these odds and pull off the victory against Clinton in the general election, it still would likely spell out long-term benefits for Democrats. A cycle cited by some political scientists is the opposite-party moderate who cements an ideological pendulum swing in American political affairs.

An example of this is FDR to Eisenhower. FDR cemented the modern welfare state and Keynesian, big-government approach that dominated American policy throughout near the end of the Cold War. It was Republican Dwight Eisenhower, however, who took the steps of instituting the national highway system and forced integration of schools that cemented FDR's pro-government, anti-segregation policies as more than just partisan choices. This swung the other way when Reagan was followed up by Clinton, a Democrat who reformed welfare and signed NAFTA, the most extensive free trade treaty in US history. Clinton's actions reinforced neoliberalism as the ideology of contemporary American policy.

The difference between these developments and election 2016 is that a one-term same party president (Truman and Bush I) sat between the great ideology-shifter and the opposite-party reinforcer. But if Christie won the presidency, would he be going for an Obamacare repeal? Would he dial back on his rhetoric and suddenly support the "cut at all costs" approach of the Tea Party? No, Christie would likely be an Eisenhower or a Clinton: a popular individual who sells out his party radicals by pushing the center a little bit in the other direction.