I finished my first Bachelor’s degree in 2002, which turned out to be a very bad time to graduate. I had a year of unemployment, then went back to school to retrain in something I thought would be more likely to get me work. I was wrong; the present Great Recession sent me back for a Masters degree just so I could avoid being totally underemployed for the last two years.

I’m 32, and like a generation of people around my age I have gone underemployed (and, in many cases, over-educated) for most of our adult lives. This isn’t changing, but there is a silver lining: The economy has now gotten bad enough that it equally risky to search for regular full-time work as it is to pursue one’s own dreams. I know which one I’d rather be doing.

Anyway, great post. One of the things I feel strongly is that, you know, a college education isn’t necessary a trade school. I know you might get a degree in engineering, and that’s the job you’re looking for, but hopefully your education was still broad enough that you can do other things.

My degree was in microbiology and public health. Now, 20+ years after getting the degree, I’m a full-time freelance writer. Yes, much of what I write about relates to medicine, but not exclusively. And I write fiction. The fact is, I’ve tried to treat my college education less as training me for a trade, but for training me to educate myself. So I educated myself how to be a professional writer. And within that I’ve educated myself on how to write market research reports and how to educate technical articles and how to write novels, etc.

People, especially college-educated people, would be far better off if they kept their minds opened and continued to learn.

Quite a number of years ago my cousin married a gentleman from Beirut, Lebanon. When we met the extended family, we were introduced to his uncle, who at one time was the mayor of Beirut apparently. Now, in the US, he ran a bakery, a very successful bakery of pitas and other Middle Eastern breads, and he was distributing all over the midwest. My brother asked him if he’d ever worked in a baker before he started the business. He said, “No.” His background was, I believe, in political science. So how did he learn to bake and run a bakery? And this I can quote verbatim because it’s stuck with me over the last 25+ years. “Books. You can find everything in books.”