A Vital Link in National Security

Recently, a friend posted to his blog a discussion about college, about how necessary it is to the jobs most of us college graduates hold. Not to disparage the institution, of course; he, like I, would fain go back and do college all over again in a heartbeat. Rather, he was curious about what he would do had he not gone to college, and about how necessary a college education is to many jobs available today.

I commented that I really could do my job without any college education at all, and I stand by that. In subsequent conversations with other people, this topic has come up, and lots of folks have expressed surprise that I would say such a thing. Why, I’m an Air Force pilot! Of course we need all that education. Flying is tough. Or, something. I don’t really know what people think. But I think you should follow the jump.


‘Pilot’ is a rather mysterious career. Because few people in general society have ever piloted an airplane, and because pilots on the only airplanes most folks have been on are sequestered away up in the cockpit, behind closed doors, and (back when it was still allowed) a trip up to sit in the cockpit was a rare special treat, most folks tend to think of pilotage as requiring some terrific skill or knowledge. In fact, it requires little beyond the ability to read and obey instructions. Until you are in the landing phase, no part of flying is or should be particularly mysterious.

So of course when I tell someone I don’t need my degree for what I do, there is of course some amount of surprise. Of course, if folks knew that in our squadron alone we have, in addition to the expected aeronautical and mechanical engineers, history, architecture, English, and economics majors, perhaps that would help. Clearly there’s no need of an advanced engineering degree to be a pilot. Nothing mystical occurs in the course of earning a college degree that suddenly qualifies you to fly a plane. In reality, pilots are required to be officers (and hence to have degrees) mostly as a way of granting a privilege to graduates of the Air Force Academy, who’ve put up with four years of crap and deserve a reward.

Of course, I’m not flying presently. I’m doing desk work. Like most people in America. Do I need a college degree for this? Let’s see.

Today, I arrived at work 45 minutes late because I was up late last night and knew nothing was going on at the office. I immediately commenced checking emails that came in during the morning or late last night after I’d gone to the gym. Nothing important there. For the next two hours I engaged in an email conversation with a coworker stationed in Diego Garcia, who when he is here at home does the same job I do with only 24 hours of college credit to his name.

Meanwhile, I surfed the internet. I read two newspapers (or the worthwhile parts thereof), checked a few of my favorite news blogs (How Appealing, SCOTUSBlog, and Political Wire, on my blogroll), then started picking my way through Wikipedia to pass the time until lunch. Around 9’30 someone came in and handed me three sheets of paper, each with a single credit-card sized phone list printed on it. “The OG wants these laminated.”

I assumed, of course, the OG merely wanted the card-sized bits laminated, not the entire sheet, which means that today, the million-odd dollars of training expense, my college degree, and my wonderful brain, were used by the Air Force to do some arts and crafts. Does the OG office not have anybody qualified to use a fucking pair of scissors? Or is it just easier to dump your shit work on me because, hey, the laminator is in my office anyway so I might as well do the rest of it?

That said, I have already shown that I wasn’t exactly doing anything useful today, so it’s not as if this was a major imposition on my time. I brought Chinese food back to the office for lunch and wrote this post while I ate. That’s almost certainly illegal, but given the value of the other work I was paid to do today by the Air Force, I don’t think they’d have much of a leg to stand on if they wanted to complain. I don’t actually post these from work, since I can’t reach my blog what with the strict content controls designed to stop us doing naughty things at work. Like not working.

(Not that these controls are all that effective anyway. For over a year, you could Google into any site that was blocked if you tried to go their directly by typing in the URL, or from a link in your bookmarks. They fixed that. And, of course, only this summer we had a major porn scandal on base (major in the sense of it’s being so big as to not be in the base paper, because it would embarrass the base itself instead of just a few people), and if nothing else you’d think the content controls would stop people downloading porn on government computers. Then again, you’d think a little brain wattage would be sufficient to stop people doing that, but evidently not.)

In the afternoon, after writing an email to the entire squadron threatening physical violence to the next person who steals one of my bottles of grapefruit juice out of the squadron fridge, I finally received an email that required actual work to be accomplished. Of course, this work hardly required a college degree. What it required was the ability to manage your written tone about halfway between jocular and irritated, possibly the most important skill I’ve learned in the Air Force.

Once a month, a report comes to my office detailing who in my squadron is not eligible to deploy for some sort of medical reason. I have a handful of repeat offenders, who I yell at, which accomplishes nothing. The rest of the people know that I hate this part of my job, because, really, I hate yelling at people. Even really stupid people; I’d just as lief ignore them as yell at them. So for all the non-repeat-offenders, I have to manage my irritation at their incapacity to take care of annual physicals and dental checkups on their own, so as not to piss them off and turn them into repeat offenders. The repeat offenders I could care less about. One of them I swore at and then told him if he hadn’t taken care of the matter by Friday I was going to show up at his dorm room, drag him to the hospital, and stick the needle in him myself. Maybe that will work; again, not anything requiring a college degree.

In any event, I was done 1’15 and, once again, forced to surf the internet for mental sustenance. For example, I learned that the term “halcyon,” as an adjective or noun, far predates the drug Halcyon. I had always assumed the word followed the drug. Shows how much I know, huh?

Understand, of course, that I’m not exactly complaining here. I could certainly make much better use of my time at work by, for example, not going to work at all and spending the day writing, or at the clay studio, or perhaps even moonlighting as a drywall repairman. I can skip all the work I want and not get fired, since the military doesn’t fire people—but there’s no free pass. Instead of getting fired I’d get marked AWOL, busted down a few ranks, and sent to Leavenworth. However, they no longer spend their days at Leavenworth making little rocks out of big ones; nowadays the inmates in the military’s largest prison for its own homegrown offenders spend their days making the flak vests and helmets that protect their brethren in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is some sort of delicious irony in that, but I’m not sure I can tell what flavor.

In an effort to maximize the amount of irritation I might cause in the squadron, I spent the afternoon playing Christmas music. I also spent about 40 minutes having a conversation with one of our deployers, a new mother. I don’t like being gone for 2 months; I can only imagine how it is for her.

The Commander in Chief’s Policy Letter on Air Force fitness gives every member of the AF an hour during the workday (not coincident with lunch) to work out, so I cut out at 2’30 to go to the gym. And here, finally, is the one thing I do in a day where college probably helped. It helped because, in college, I studied political science in addition to my actual major (architecture), and studying poli sci under the professorial staff at Clemson with their divergent views taught me to be hypercritical of anything that is presented as expert testimony. It is easy to invent an expert; students of law, politics, and architecture are well aware of this. And no industry invents more experts and dispenses more “expert” advice than the fitness industry, nearly every scrap of information that comes out of which is a blatant lie. Using my critical reasoning skills allows me to cut through the chaff to find the one or two occasional kernels of wisdom in any fitness publication (though that is a high estimate, two kernels per magazine. It’s more like two magazines per kernel).

On the way home from the gym, I was able to put those critical reasoning skills to work yet again at the grocery store, where I had to purchase bread, orange juice, milk, and yogurt. Should I buy the expensive, tasty orange juice (Uncle Matt’s Organic), or the regular kind? I might be poor soon, so I bought the cheaper juice. Of course, if I was really thinking, I’d have shopped at the commissary instead of the Platt St. Publix, which is surely the most expensive grocery in town. And I’d probably forgo the yogurt, and the protein shakes, and buy cheap sandwich bread instead of something nice from the bakery, but, ah hell. I’m not poor yet.

This is not, of course, meant as an indictment of college. As I said earlier, if I had a chance, I’d go back to 1995 and go through the entire experience again. I might change some things I did in college, but nothing important, certainly nothing that would have affected the friends and memories I’d make there. But that means, of course, that I’d study the same major—which I will never use—and that I would, thus, graduate with a degree, but not much else. And what about that degree? Is it really that important? Does the degree prove anything that my extended family of friends doesn’t?

When my sister was at college, one of her advisors was an old family friend, and had been teaching for many years. He once told her that she was in college to get a degree, and that education really happened out in the wider world. At the time I think this was a rather off-putting remark, but as time has gone along I think my sister and I have both come to see the truth in it. I got a degree in college. I didn’t learn much about what I need to do in the world until I’d had that degree for a few years already, and wasn’t using the knowledge I’d gained in classes. But I did get that degree, and the degree itself, not the education, is what people wanted to see. Could I have applied for grad school or my internship in Fort Lauderdale without it? No. Could I have applied to Officer Training School without it? Certainly not. The degree confers a certain amount of respect, respect that does not have to be otherwise earned by the degree-bearer. And it is that respect that so many jobs seem to require.

It is, however, somewhat absurd that the degree provides the foot in the door that is required to get a job that then does not require the degree. There are but precious few of us working in fields that require frequent application of knowledge gained in study at college; for the rest of us, college was a pleasant diversion, probably the last time we’d really have the chance to learn for the sake of learning, to have so much time to ourselves and so little responsibility. That’s really what college is about; it’s a last fling before the crushing weight of responsibility settles on our shoulders and infects all aspects of our lives.

There’s also much to be said for study merely for the sake of study. Philosophical discussions aren’t efficient uses of time, really, but they are exceedingly enjoyable and very hard to engage in at work. College allows that. It allows us to exercise our minds, to think about arguments, persuasion, and logic, and how to use those to proper effect. There are not enough opportunities for that out in the wider world.

The greater concern, rather than whether college is worthwhile or not, is whether the use of the college degree as a bar for potential employees to leap is appropriate, given the difficulty of paying for college. Kids who grow up poor and don’t ever consider going to college are locking themselves out of a lot of jobs that they’d be perfectly capable of doing, but incapable of getting hired for. With all the handwringing in the higher media about how Katrina has laid bare the class differences in American society, this seems an important issue.

But by the time I’d started thinking about that, I arrived home with the groceries. I had a trunk to unload, a shower to take, dinner to fix, and there was no more time left to consider that. If I was in college, I could have skipped the shower and ordered pizza for dinner and spent all night talking about this topic with my friends over a tasty Belgian ale or some cheap Miller Lite. We might have even solved the problem. Alas, it was not to be. I repotted a plant, cut the cat’s toenails, and settled onto the couch to read. It’s tough, spending all day at the office and accomplishing 11 minutes worth of actual work. I’m beat.