I kept on getting flashes of deja vu the whole time I was reading it. I studied astronomy in 1964, a totally worthless field for job prospects, unless I became one of the 500 professional PhD astronomers then working on the planet. But I was infused with the 60s zeitgeist--to develop my own potential to the utmost, even if it led me into a blind alley. I was not going to grow up to be a doctor, lawyer, architect, dentist, engineer, businessman, teacher--the hierarchical catalogue of decreasingly prestigious professions perceived by the enlightened Cuban working class parent.

As it turned out, my major accomplishment in the sciences was to learn that I had great devotion but little aptitude for advanced work in it, but I somehow managed to pick up sufficient practical skills, like basic math, physics and computing, to eventually earn a fairly decent and comfortable living. My education was a great success, even though I never became what I studied. But my degrees meant nothing, I needed to pass a harsh apprenticeship on the blue collar assembly line first.

After an immersion in the cold waters of the industrial work force, I went back to school and undertook a strictly vocational course of studies leading to a Master's in Geography. Here the situation was totally reversed. I now had academic credentials that opened industrial and professional doors even though my graduate degree never provided me with one fact or concept I ever actually used on the job. Geography was no longer the interdisciplinary social science I studied in college, it had become a branch of engineering. I essentially coasted on to retirement on the back of my high school algebra, freshman physics, and a Fortran course I took as a lark in 1965.

The university system did not fail me, but neither did the industrial economy ever efficiently use my knowledge, or evaluate my academic skills appropriately. There isn't anything I did in 40 years in the work force that I didn't already know when I got out of high school, or that I couldn't have picked up from my recreational science fiction reading. The Fortran is a skill, like writing, that you can pick up on your own, as did most programmers in the 70s. As for the math degree I picked up on the way to become an astronomer--the most complex algorithmic feats of my entire vocational history has been a little trigonometry, and I once had to solve two simultaneous equations.

What worked for me then probably wouldn't be a successful career strategy today. I can't get work in my field now, not because of any lack of competence, but because the entire job market has changed in ways I really can't comprehend. My story offers little in the way of advice for a young man or woman contemplating going to college now. But it worked for me, just through dumb luck.

But most important was not the fact that I could now do basic math and knew the difference between an atom and a molecule. College taught me to think, how to learn, and what really mattered. It taught me how I fit in to the world and to history. My teachers were incredibly dedicated and I will be eternally grateful to them. I learned that life, personal and collective, is about process, not conspiracy; that there is a reason for everything but a purpose to nothing. It was the most useful and important, most valuable experience of my entire life--more important to me than growing up bi-culturally, going in the military, mastering two blue collar trades, working overseas, or eventually becoming an ASPRS Certified Mapping Scientist in Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing with diplomas on my wall and intials after my name.

And by the way, those two blue collar trades I mastered, small craft navigation and stereo plotter operator, are now both obsolete.

So in that sense, college was an incredible success. And it troubles me when I hear the advice our young people are getting today: "You don't need a college degree, you can earn a good living as a plumber." If I had children I would warn them,
"They may need plumbers now, but they don't give a damn about your tomorrows."