Why Is College the Only Answer?

Is the binary of “college or failure” preventing young people from living happier lives?

Lately, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time with the delightful Netflix series Never Have I Ever. Loosely inspired by creator Mindy Kaling’s life, the show follows a South Asian teen named Devi and her friends and romantic suitors as they make their way through high school in Sherman Oaks, California. There was one episode in the second season, though, that got me thinking about matters far beyond the show’s central themes of dealing with grief, growing into an emotionally accountable person, and learning how to be. It left me pondering, Whatever happened to trade school?

In this second-season episode, titled “… Opened a Textbook,” the high school’s head jock (and Devi’s lifelong crush), Paxton Hall-Yoshida, has been hit by a car and broken his arm. Sidelined from the swim team for the season, Paxton finds his path after high school—a scholarship to a prestigious four-year college—in sudden peril. He’s quickly given a reality check that, without sports or a family with money to pay his way into a private college, Paxton only has the kind of grades that might get him into a [gasp in horror] community college. The way Paxton sees it, this means his options for his future boil down to working in his parents’ store or making YouTube videos for profit with his best friend. Faced with such grim prospects, Paxton sets out to try to be a good student and raise his GPA, in order to get into college on his own merit.

Paxton is, as you may have guessed, not adept at studying—especially not when left to his own devices. He struggles to memorize historical facts and at one point is so distracted by a wobbly table, he decides to trim the legs in the family’s woodshed rather than run through his boring science flash cards. Paxton, inexplicably shirtless (warning: He’s inexplicably shirtless for a lot of this show), skillfully brandishes a table saw. He relishes the precision and care it takes to sand down his table legs until they are perfectly even. He then goes back to being miserable studying his flashcards.

It’s a tiny scene, but it got me wondering: Why? Why is Paxton Hall-Yoshida’s vision for his future limited to a contortion of himself and his interests, where the only two foreseeable options are getting into a four-year college or a dead-end future? And, especially, why is this the case when he has interests and skills outside of academic performance?

This isn’t a diss on the show (which, as I said, is really delightful). Rather, the show so accurately mirrors society, it made me reflect on the status quo. In recent years, there’s been much criticism of college in the public arena, particularly around the debt that students incur relative to the options available to graduates afterward, but little conversation around exposing and creating alternative pathways for America’s young people.

I’m an alumna of several schools, but there is no place on Earth that I hold closer to my heart than my high school. Edward R. Murrow High School, particularly when I was there in the 1990s, operated unlike any other school in New York City—academically as well as socially. A communications magnet school, Murrow was founded in 1974 with the intention to provide academic instruction along with business and vocational training, side by side. There was no entry test; students either met residential requirements or hit certain marks on their reading or math scores. The school had a robust theater program as well as a TV studio, which meant that you could be academically focused, or you could discover an aptitude and develop a passion for set construction, camera work, lighting and electrical design, costume design, stage and broadcast production, stage management, and more.

The result of this educational experiment—and it was an experiment—was a social order that operated outside of conventional hierarchies. “Success” at Murrow took on many shapes. Yes, you could be a brainiac and win the Westinghouse Award for science research and be well on your way to Cornell. But of equal import in the school’s ecosystem was the head of the student costume shop.

After Murrow, many students, including myself, were college bound. But, for some, the path led toward technical training in an area of interest outside of academics. Others found employment directly out of high school, in some cases working for theaters, fabrication companies, or road and stage crews. But the sense that Murrow instilled in its students was that everyone has worth—that everyone is good at something (it’s just a matter of finding out what) and, most certainly, that if college wasn’t for you, there were other paths available.

Vocational education in America has long been on the decline, both in federal budget allocation to high schools and in public image. And there are many people who can advocate for both the individual and the larger economic benefit of reversing this trend, including closing the labor gap in the manufacturing and skilled-labor sectors. But my interest pertains purely to EQ.

Teenagers in America are experiencing a shortage of happiness. One really insightful piece that I read in New York magazine a few weeks ago attributed this, in part, to a sort of existential crisis. Young people are being pushed onto paths that their parents insist are the only way to ensure a successful future—only they see that their parents, themselves, seem dissatisfied with the lives those paths led them to.

College has become less a place to go for the intellectual or academically curious than a perceived stopgap measure to stave off a life of abject poverty and failure. Eighty-six percent of high-school students feel pressure from a parent or guardian, or from society at large, to attend college. But is college right for 86 percent of all high schoolers? I don’t just mean in terms of academic preparedness, but in terms of interests, passions, and a place to develop self-worth?

I take this back to Never Have I Ever. Devi, a star student who quite literally finds joy and satisfaction in academic overachievement, tells Paxton that school is something you can get better at with practice. At some point in the second season, Paxton gets a hard-earned B on an exam and a call from the guidance counselor saying that if he keeps this up, he can definitely get into college. But I kept wondering, should he? Would any college class make him feel as satisfied or happy as he looked when fixing that table? As he might be working with his hands, producing something? Apprenticing in a set shop and eventually joining the IATSE? Would he even think to do that if no one presented any option to him except a four-year college? Too many Paxtons will never know the answer.