My good friend and colleague TK Coleman tells a story about a guy he used to work with at Applebee’s. This guy ran the show. He was cool, customers loved him, staff loved him, he had a way with the ladies and he was clearly the alpha dog. He’d been a cook at the location since it opened and was still a cook. If you wanted to be cool at Applebee’s, you had to get him to think you were cool.
But that was at Applebee’s during working hours. This guy had worked there way too long and hadn’t really done anything else with his life. Outside of that tiny local venue, he had little social standing. All the specific things rewarded at Applebee’s didn’t matter much in the real world.
College campuses have a similar effect.
Why are there so many crazy protests and ideas and shenanigans and crackpot philosophies at universities? It’s not because there’s a critical mass of thinkers. It’s because there’s a critical mass of people not earning a real paycheck.
Without market incentives and real profit and loss, campus currency evolves. “College cool” or social points are counted in ways totally disconnected from the real world. In the real world, anyone who shouts down a speaker at a public event is probably going to suffer high costs with little benefit. On campus, you can score points. You have no real financial risk during your time there, so you can afford to get weird.
When people exit higher ed. and enter the real world something interesting happens. They stop joining causes and marches and saying weird stuff in public. This isn’t primarily because they “sold out”, it’s because they started earning a paycheck.
A group of young Praxis participants was gathered recently and a conversation about current controversial events came up. A few of them said they were really concerned about this or that political movement. A participant who’d been in an apprenticeship for a while spoke up. He said he used to be really worried about this stuff too, and he’d spend hours scouring the web keeping up on it, forming opinions about who’s right and wrong, and getting into debates. Then something happened. He got an apprenticeship at an awesome, fast-growing startup that’s creating real world value with a great product. He said, “Suddenly, all that stuff ceased to matter. I’m enamored in crushing it in my role. I’m obsessed with new ways to make the mission of the company succeed. What I’m daydreaming about is how we could document and systematize and optimize this conversation, not who’s right and wrong in some news event!”
He started earning a paycheck. He entered the real world and became an independent producer, not a dependent consumer.
Fears of what’s being done and said on campuses are as overblown as that cook’s cool factor at Applebee’s. Once people eventually move on and have to earn a paycheck, they attain an entirely different cost/benefit structure.