Where Paint Wears Thin

As I’ve grown older, I’ve questioned traditions, institutions, and societal norms at an exponential rate. These rules of thumb and established ways of thinking often have good intentions behind them, but like anything else, they can fall short as times and circumstances change.

There’s an old heuristic in chess: trade pieces when ahead in material. In a beginner’s match, this is typically sound advice. We cannot always visualize deep endgame tactics, so with our limitations, this simplification can come across as low-risk. Yet anyone who has played chess against a computer knows this advice quickly breaks down.

This example can be magnified in our current reality. For years, we’ve told people to go to college, get an education, and you’ll be successful. As a heuristic, it may come off as safe, but statistics show this is not quite true. Recent college graduates, ages 22–27, face unemployment rates around 5 percent. With roughly 22 million graduates in this age range, that equates to over 1 million without a job. Beyond this age range, 25 percent of all unemployed Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. According to Forbes, over 50 percent of recent college graduates work in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, while the median student loan debt has risen to nearly $25,000. Then there’s the sheer number of dropouts. As of mid-2023, about 43.1 million Americans, roughly one in six adults, had attended college but left without earning a credential.

I’ve seen this play out time and time again. My college roommate dropped out during his senior year after failing organic chemistry and went on to start a small carpentry business instead. A friend of mine left school with a degree in economics and nearly $60,000 in debt. He began losing hair from the stress before shaving it off and joining the Marines. He’s now a firefighter. I once had a former student graduate with a business degree and a near 4.0 GPA, only to find himself unable to secure an interview due to a lack of experience. In many cases, a college degree is simply not enough.

In the face of these statistics and experiences, I teach my juniors and seniors about alternative routes. I’ve been criticized for this. Some peers claim I’m discouraging college altogether; meanwhile, many still carry student loan debt a decade into their careers and are already considering leaving education. The heuristic that college equals success is no longer that simple, and our guidance should reflect that reality.

I don’t mean to question only the college and university model. I mean to question all entrenched systems and conventions: the 9–5 workday, our country’s two-party political system, established news sources. Question everything. The world changes rapidly, and individuals must adapt. Clinging to old systems simply for the sake of familiarity is rarely wise.

This is not a new subject. Robert Frost alludes to it in Mending Wall, where nature constantly challenges the walls we build. Unquestioning adherence can blind us to opportunity. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, we see how societal norms and conventions can be weaponized by bad actors. Literature is crucial in uncovering the errors of our old ways.

Chess is a game of adaptation. Trading pieces when ahead in material may work sometimes, but it fails in more complex situations. We, too, must assess our heuristics, traditions, and institutions critically. Success comes not from blindly following old guidance, but from understanding the nuances of the landscape we’re navigating.

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