Obama's Message to Young People

While some of you keep your kids home today because the President might deliver a speech directed at non voting age kids, please understand that you are doing your kids a disservice. The message is mainly 'stay in school'. As radical as this concept might be to some people, it hardly warrants the frenzy of those who are afraid of "socialism".

In the early part of the 20th century, completing high school was considered a real honor and generally left many people prepared to get a good job at a decent wage. My maternal grandfather got a bachelor's degree in 1925, almost unheard of among the middle classes at that time. It made it possible for him to remain employed throughout the Great Depression. For women - even wealthy women - high school (and perhaps a brief stint at a "finishing school") was a ticket to a better life. Few women, unless they came from wealthy families, completed an undergraduate degree.

By the end of WWII, jobs were already becoming more complex and the GI Bill permitted hundreds of thousands of men to finish college. Unless they were wealthy, far fewer women (or their parents) saw the utility of completing college, much less graduate school. The three jobs that were considered appropriate for middle class women (unless of course they chose to have children) were secretary, nurse or teacher. Even with that kind of training, until the 1970s, most of the better educated women stayed home to raise their kids, at least until they were in school themselves. In 1960, fewer than 10% of women held a bachelor's degree. Most of them were teachers. Today, women outnumber men in undergraduate colleges and make up nearly 50% of law students. Not only did it permit women more career choices, it gave them the freedom to walk away from bad marriages and still feed their kids.

Let's face it. The world changed. Good manufacturing jobs began to disappear, so much so that by the early 1970s it became increasingly rare to see a one-earner household that was not struggling to make ends meet, especially if they stopped their education at high school graduation. One easy way to find out how important education became is to look at your own community. People who live in the nicest parts of your town are far more likely to have two parents who completed college. Frankly, it's because they are paid better, have more stable jobs and usually enjoy their work more. They may be no smarter than many people who did not go on to college but the fact is, it made a huge difference in their ability to live where they wanted to live and get prepared to give their children a chance to do even better than they did.

Barack Obama's message to young students is the best advice they could possibly receive. I will agree that it is both a practical and political message. It's practical because more education (except, ironically, those with PhDs) usually results in better pay. It's political because there are people who remain convinced that it is a waste of time and money.

Last year, I said a few words at my stepfather's wake. In my remarks, I remembered what he told me and my sister: "Stay in school as long as you can. You won't regret it. The adult world is tough enough as it is." My mother worked her tail off for 35+ years teaching English in a rural high school. She had a few terrible years, as many teachers do, but she stuck with it. Some of her colleagues were astonished that I was permitted to go to Cornell University, a pretty expensive proposition in 1983. I worked for several years after graduation and then completed law school in 1993. My sister, 15 years younger, just started her medical residency in pediatrics. We are not better than anyone else but my parents helped to buy me and my sister the freedom to be anything we wanted to be (except perhaps a pole dancer) and did not try to influence the decisions we made. I once apologized to my parents that we had drained a lot of their resources. My mother said at the time a fractured quote that Jacqueline Kennedy said over 40 years ago. The real quote is that "If you bungle raising your children, nothing else you do makes much of a difference."

If that is Barack Obama's message, he's doing all of us a favor. The next time you speak to a female friend who is stuck in a loveless marriage because she lacks the credentials necessary to take a well-paid job, go ahead and tell her that you think Barack Obama is a socialist. Then tell her to go back to school anyway.