I grew up in a very affluent town in New Jersey. My parents moved to a little house on the wrong side of tracks, so we could attend the fancy public school in town. But with their blue collar roots and my dad’s professor salary, my parents never really fit in. My mom would come home from PTA meetings with stories about the strutting moms who would brag about their son, the doctor and their daughter, the attorney. The strutters had big plans for their other kids to go to Harvard and choose the doctor/lawyer route also. By eighth grade, most of my classmates had memorized Barron’s list of elite schools and had begun SAT test prep classes.
Well, doctors and lawyers are no longer the blue chip professions. It seems that the definition of "prestige" has shifted. "Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably
linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to
seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago."
The Internet has also helped kill the status of doctors, because they no longer have a monopoly on information. Anyone can log onto WEBMD and come armed to their appointment with print outs of the latest studies and reports.
The article really overstates matters. A good number of my college students are applying to law school next year. You don’t hear too many kids saying that they are planning on launching a computer start up after graduation. The path towards being a lawyer or a doctor is more well traveled and less risky.
Still, this small shift is very interesting. I’m amused that the snobby PTA moms in my old town can’t brag as loudly as they used to. I love that prestige is now connected with flexible living, rather 80 hours in an office. I love that creativity and entrepreneurship is prestigious.
Question of the Day: What careers would you steer my college students towards?
Apt. 11d 
I don’t think it’s changed all that much. If anything, it’s just that the range of things you can brag about has become larger. Doctors and lawyers are still stable, respectable jobs that people are happy for their children to pursue. Really what people like is when their kids do jobs that are readily understandable to their friends. Although people don’t really know what it is a professor actually does, it’s certainly recognizable and something my mother can talk about proudly. My husband is harder–he’s an engineer at a small tech company. In his case, if he worked at IBM or Apple or Google, people would be fine, but explaining what his company does is harder. Thus, less satisfying to his family.
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Well, people still bow down before me…
Seriously, I think Richard Florida’s quote about creativity is much weaker (surprise!) than the article’s points about relative compensation. Not only is the training / apprenticeship path long (and getting longer all the time), but the payoff hasn’t kept pace with those in fields that can tap directly into the capital markets. (This is more true in medicine due to decreasing Medicare reimbursements, etc., which will likely only accelerate once health care is “reformed.”) Shorter training period, bigger payoff – what’s not to love?
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Also, I think (yes, I am too lazy to check) that medical school and law school applications have bounced up and down a lot over the last decade-plus, depending on how the stock market was doing – I recall they dipped markedly during the dot-com bubble and rose thereafter. So I wouldn’t use application trends over the past couple of years as evidencing trends in working conditions in the noble professions.
Finally, I have trouble relating to anyone who goes into law practice thinking it’ll be like “L.A. Law” or “Ally McBeal.”
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Marc Andreessen – yes, that Mark Andreessen (i.e., the inventor of the Web browser that became Netscape) has a blog which has a really fascinating series of posts on career guidance – what he would have wanted to be told upon starting college. Not sure if you think your students will be interested (it is definitely from a techie/entrepreneur viewpoint, which I am the opposite of in every respect), but I think it makes for a fascinating discussion for everyone in terms of what you want out of a career. His posts are here, here and here.
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I teach at a different kind of university known for some really specific career paths. My students don’t want to be doctors, lawyers, or teachers. It’s kind of fun, honestly. My students want to work in hotels and restaurants, become cops, plan events, work in sports management, and yes, found some sort of technology start-up. Our students haven’t really had a lot of success in traditional institutions, so the can-do, entrepreneurial spirit is pretty high. It’s nice to be around. I like my job a lot, even though I’ll never teach English majors.
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I’d stear your kids towards risk: try working at a start up or small business or even their own business.
Learn to fall flat on your face and jump up. You’ll have plenty of time sucking up to the man later in life.
Start ups are all over the world and even the east coast has some hot beds such as NYC and Boston.
Another idea is to have them read blogs of people in the field they want to work in and encourage them contact and ask questions about their position.
Lastly, have them try interning during the school year. Its a great way to get an idea of the enviornment and to develop some skills. Companies know that they have to pay for good people even if its paltry so tell them not to take an unpaid internship.
You can always go back to school. You can always be a lawyer. You can always go to medical school after 4 or 5 years of trying somethign else. You can always get an MBA but you’ll never make up the oppourtunity cost of actually living your life.
BTW- Given the oppourtunity cost, I think I would prefer my kid to be a business owner rather than a doctor anyday. I’m not looking forard to paying for 4 years of college let alone graduate degrees.
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My impression of those who apply to law school is that they’re often liberal arts majors who do not clearly see how their education can apply to anything else. This to me is more about a general lack of imagination on the part of the marketplace about how to use a good liberal arts graduate. (It may also reflect the extremely low status of teaching.)
I agree that law has totally lost its cache. Even those who make a good buck at law trade off with horrible quality of life. What’s not to hate?
Like Kip, I believe the best place for a young person to learn quickly is in a small business or a start-up. It gives you a good broad foundation and positions you to either scale up in an area of your choice (i.e. finance for a larger firm, or perhaps, I don’t know, marketing maybe), or to stay general and start your own business. But then again, I live in a pretty entrepreneurial town (Chicago) where there are lots of locally-owned small businesses flourishing and hiring people in.
Also, the time to work at a small business is while you’re young and healthy. They often don’t offer medical insurance.
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That’s not his. Steve’s is black*_*
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