by George Lorenzo, editor-in-chief, The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies
Working Hard Toward College Completion & Earning the College Payoff
I have always considered my four years as an undergraduate some of the best times of my life. I had all this energy and maturity to learn and grow. I was not a student who came to class and left. In addition to working on and off as a night auditor on the graveyard shift, I joined the student newspaper, first as a copy editor and moving up to editor-in-chief. I wrote prodigiously about everything and anything and was proud to see my byline on cover stories and my name in the student newspaper staff box.
There were times when I spent the entire weekend in the student newspaper office, sleeping on a beat-up couch. I got to know all of my professors and took advantage of their office hours, spending time asking about homework assignments and papers to write. I participated in class, talking vigorously about literature, philosophy, psychology and political science. I read one great piece of literature after another (no Cliff notes). I spent a great deal of time in the campus library conducting research. The first full-blown paper I wrote was on the history of the English language, and my professor gave me an A+, noting that my work was at the graduate level. What a blast, indeed!
As a kind of sidebar to this, I remember going on a date with a young women who lived on campus and drove a new Mercedes Benz. We got into a discussion about grades, and, come to find out, she was failing, despite that everything in her life was being taken care of by her wealthy parents and all she had to worry about were her grades. That was our one and only date.
All the work I did as an undergraduate led to getting a journalism scholarship, a stipend and tuition fee-waiver for being editor, and a paid summer internship with a major metropolitan newspaper. All my clips from writing and editing for the student newspaper had paid off, saving me money and enabling me to more easily afford the price of going to college. I also took advantage of a work-study program in which I tutored English composition.
During my last semester as a senior I took 20 credits and earned a 3.8 GPA. After I had taken my last exam, I threw my backpack filled with all its notebooks from 20 credits of study, into a garbage bin. I did not attend the graduation ceremony because I was alone, and there were not any family members or close friends to celebrate with me. I did, however, take a lot of self pride, and obviously still do, in the fact that I had earned a BA in English entirely on my own without incurring all kinds of unneeded student-loan debt. I did not need a commencement ceremony to validate anything.
Next, I was awarded a Teaching Assistantship in the English Department, and the following semester I started to pursue a master’s in English with an emphasis in creative writing. As part of the assistantship I taught Freshman English 101 and 102 – an enlightening experience.
I stayed in the graduate program for one year and then dropped out. I was 32 and tired of being a poor student and I was over anxious to get out into the so-called real world. I had come to the conclusion that I did not want to be a low-paid teacher or newspaper journalist, and I set my sites on finding gainful employment as soon as possible, perhaps in some kind of business-marketing field.
The First Payoff
Without making this story too long, I will simply explain that I wound up getting hired in what could easily be considered a stable, life-career-oriented position as director of communications and publications for a small community college in a small town in Northern New York State. This was my first job with all the retirement, health insurance, vacation and education-reimbursement benefits one could possibly want. I had made it to the “College Payoff” Promised Land. Before long, I had a decent car, nice clothes, a nice apartment, and a respectable job with an office that had a beautiful view of the entire campus.
I resigned after about 8 months and moved back to Las Vegas. Small town life in Northern New York State was not where I wanted to spend my days.
The Second Payoff
So, there I was driving across country back to Las Vegas, thinking about what I was going to do next. I had a very lucky moment on the second day after my arrival, landing another relatively decent job as a marketing and communications manager for a newly opened sports and entertainment arena on the UNLV campus. Again, in hindsight, I should have immediately re-enrolled in graduate school and completed my master’s degree. Instead, I was pretty much enjoying the fruits of my labor, living a bachelor’s life. After about one year of irresponsibility, I met my future wife. We got married in 1989. I was 35 years old. Together we bootstrapped a small advertising and marketing agency that was launched out of the townhouse we lived in. I had now officially entered the ranks of a self-employed entrepreneur. Everything I learned in college and on the job had now culminated into this new career pathway. Our clients included casinos, real estate companies, banks and my alma mater. At one point we had a small executive office located on the 11th floor of a bank building with a panoramic view of the Las Vegas city lights.
The Third Payoff
Our daughter arrived in 1991, and our son arrived in 1994. The advertising and marketing business was growing, especially with the real estate boom happening in Las Vegas at that time. Nonetheless, we decided that our children should grow up where most of our extended family lived in Buffalo, NY, so we sold the townhouse and packed up the business and our belongings when our son was six-weeks- old and our daughter three-years old, and headed back East.
From a business and financial point of view, the opportunities in Buffalo were very limited, especially in comparison to what was then a very positive business climate in Las Vegas. After two years of attending Rotary meetings and trying everything I could to get an advertising and marketing business up and running successfully, I was forced to go back into the job market and was again lucky enough to land a decent job, this time as marketing director for a major manufacturing company.
The new job included education benefits, so I enrolled in a graduate-level seminar at the University of Buffalo called “Communications in the 21st Century.” During one seminar meeting we were visited by a professor who talked extensively about a relatively new development in the world of higher education, online learning. I was fascinated, and this one lecture became the impetus of my future career as an education writer/researcher/publisher from that point forward.
End of Part II
Part III: The Rest of the Story and Its Relation to the College Payoff
August 2011
08/29/2011
08/28/2011
Part I: A Personal Story Illustrating College Readiness, the Completion Agenda and the Great American College Payoff
This is the first post of SOURCE Scholars, a group blog that will feature opinions, essays, and various other information resources from some of the Editorial Board members of The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies.
This first relatively long post is from George Lorenzo, editor-in-chief of The SOURCE.
If you were paying even a little attention to the news about higher education on Thursday, August 4 and up through the weeks after, you probably would have noticed a major buzz that was first generated by a telephone press conference featuring Tony Carnevale from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, along with Jamie Merisotis from Lumina, talking about the Center’s latest report, “The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings.”
The report covered a lot of ground about education-attainment levels as they relate to income over a lifetime, presenting findings in 2009 dollars of full-time workers over 40 years of their lives, from 25 to 64 years old. The findings/data in the Center’s report were culled from the authors’ (Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose and Ban Cheah) analysis of the 2007-2009 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
The Big Payoff of a Bachelor’s Degree
For this informal blog post I am going to focus only on one sentence of the report about earning a bachelor’s degree: “With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor’s degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate’s degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma.”
First, I think it is very important to note that the aforementioned focused on “median earnings,” not “average earnings.” Second, the American Community Survey that this report was based on questions about 3 million households each year.
I don’t know how many people actually filled out the American Community Survey that was mailed to them, but even if everyone did fill out the survey, it means that the Center’s report data is based on about 9 million households from 2007 to 2009. According to 2005-2009 figures from the Census Bureau, the US has a little more than 112 million households.
WARNING: THIS IS A LONG STORY in Three Parts
During the telephone press conference, Carnevale and Merisotis repeatedly pointed out that, from a lifetime perspective, what you earn with a degree under your belt most definitely pays off, even if you are like many Americans who must go into deep debt to complete a bachelor’s degree - which brings me to my personal “college payoff” story.
I think my story is a microcosmic slice of American life as it pertains to the so-called completion agenda, college readiness and their relationship to earning a living and what people end up doing with their career pathways after they earn, or not earn, a bachelor’s degree.
My College Readiness
I grew up in a small, lower-middle-class, city neighborhood on the east side of Buffalo, NY that was comprised mostly of blue-collar working families. I graduated from high school in 1971. I am a first-generation college graduate with a BA in English that I earned in 1985 at the age of 31.
I was not a good high school student. I attended an all-boys Catholic high school that I hated, resulting in a grade point average somewhere below 2.0. This included a final grade of 65 in Geometry (the highest level of math I took), giving me the distinction of having earned a high school diploma through sheer luck. My high school teachers were mostly Franciscan priests, whom, in those days, were allowed to use corporal punishment. I quite vividly recall being punched in the face once for talking out of turn in class, getting whipped across the back of my head numerous times with the rope that circled the waistline and hung down the side of the customary Franciscan cassock, as well as having to kneel on my hands after school as punishment for getting into a fight.
I also attended K through 12 in the Catholic education system, where pulling sideburns was a fairly common practice among the nunnery (Ouch!).
All this, and more, resulted in a lack of enthusiasm for academics, but I was smart enough to understand that I would need to go to college. My parents, however, did not have the funds to support any kind of higher education endeavor, nor did they encourage it. My father suggested that I go apply for a job at the steel mill, auto plant or railroad, all of which accepted my application form and nothing else. So, off to the local community college I went. Thank goodness for open enrollment!
Self Support and Freedom
I was working as a pizza delivery guy, driving a junky Oldsmobile that got me where I needed to go, making enough money to rent a room (that I shared with an international student from “Bombay”) in a nice suburban home located near campus that was owned by a friendly senior-aged couple. I also took out a small student loan to help make ends meet. I managed to figure out how to be free and on my own, but I was also a naïve 18-year-old that did not seek out any advice in relation to academic achievement and career advancement. Like most 18-year-olds, I had no idea whatsoever about what I wanted to do with myself, except that I had this sincere desire in my heart to travel the world.
Dropping Out and “Studies” Abroad
During my second semester, while walking past a bulletin board, I spotted an advertisement from a company called “Student Overseas Services.” Not long after that, during the middle of my second semester as a community college student, I was sitting in coach on an Icelandic Airline flight to Luxembourg, on a one-way ticket, with, if I recall correctly, about $500 dollars in my pocket.
The Student Overseas Service on rue des Etats-Unis in downtown Luxembourg was overflowing with students like me from all over the U.S., waiting to be assigned a job somewhere in Europe. The letter they had sent to all of us duly noted that they had “tentative” work available (mine happened to stipulate that it was located in Switzerland) if we just filled out the application that cost $60 to process and got our asses over to Luxembourg.
The waiting period for actual deployment to a real job took about two weeks. During that period, myself and two fellow New Yorkers that I befriended at the Student Overseas Office pooled our meager financial resources together in order to rent an inexpensive room, including breakfast, in a home nearby that was owned and managed by an extraordinarily warm-hearted and friendly elderly couple. We had a place to sleep, shower and eat breakfast.
Days were spent at the Student Overseas Office waiting. Nights were spent at the local downtown disco where we nursed beers and danced with European women. Soon a dozen drifting young American men temporarily stuck in Luxembourg (myself obviously included) were offered employment at a steel mill in a small town in Northern Germany. The job included a dormitory setting where migrant workers from all over Europe lived and worked. I stayed there for two months, earning Deutsche Marks and learning a lot about German culture first hand. I then spent about one month traveling up and down the Rhine until I got homesick and was left with just enough money to purchase another one-way ticket back to Buffalo on Icelandic Airlines.
In hindsight, this became my unique, self-funded study-abroad program that my wealthier student counterparts were able to take advantage of through the generosity of their parents, and earn credit for, at actual higher institutions of learning located overseas. I learned about European society as an “Amerikaner” working hand-in-hand with hard-working Italians, French, Yugoslavs, Turks and Persians at the steel mill, as well as from sleeping in youth hostels and at camp sites, and drinking white wine with locals at beautiful inns along the Rhine and Mosel rivers.
Back to Square One and Onward
After returning home from my European exploits, I did not go back to school (but should have). I got a job as a waiter and bartender at the neighborhood Italian restaurant. I had temporarily lost my desire for academics and was still feeling a strong desire for more traveling and sowing of wild oats. Always wanting to get out from the Buffalo winters, I went to Florida; I lived in Arizona; I lived in California; I lived in Hawaii; and I wound up in Las Vegas in 1981, where I first shared an apartment with a Buffalo neighborhood friend. The apartment was within walking distance from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I was 27-years old and enrolled as a non-matriculating student in English 101, and I got a full-time job as a night auditor at a small hotel located on the Las Vegas Strip. During my days in Hawaii and Arizona, I had worked in the hospitality industry as a bus boy, room service waiter, desk clerk and night auditor, so my experience got me hired, but not exactly at a high wage.
I was able to transfer over the one semester of community college credit I had earned years back. In relatively short order, I was considered a full-time matriculated student majoring in English, with an unofficial minor in communications studies with an emphasis in journalism.
By now I was mature enough to realize that if I did not get a bachelor’s degree I would probably be stuck behind a hotel desk working the graveyard shift for most of my life. Some of my peers who had completed college by now were working in decent jobs, raising families and buying homes, while I was struggling to pay tuition and clothe, feed and shelter myself.
I eventually moved into my own place, a very small studio apartment near the campus. Thankfully, it wasn’t as hard as it sounds, primarily because I was single at the time. Plus, I had a lot of energy and self discipline to push myself forward. Still, through most of my undergraduate years, I could not afford a decent and reliable automobile and was often forced to transport myself back and forth from school to work and home via a ten-speed bicycle or taxi cabs.
End of Part I
Part II : “Working Hard Toward College Completion”
