Paying for college with summer job earnings

This is how social justice is done. Not by government subsidizing it, but by young people making it happen with their own wits and initiative.

True story.  A beautiful young girl grows up in a very working-class, very Italian community.  She graduates high school.  Her parents expect, of course, that she will then go on to get a job.  She will get married to some nice young fellow.  She will have children.  She will make the parents happy grandparents.  All good stuff.

She does not go off and get a job—not a full-time job.  She and a cabal of high school girlfriends get the wild and crazy idea of going off to college.  But how to make that happen?  Living at home would cut costs.  Part-time work would pay for the rest.  Obviously.

Living at home, rent-free, might have its obvious advantages, but living at home with (possibly) disapproving parents could make for a bit of a fraught affair.  But she and some number of her friends follow through and make it happen. 

She attends a local Jesuit university, gets a degree, and gets a job in Washington, DC.  She makes new friends and experiences a different world.  In DC, she even meets her future husband.

This is the early 1950’s, a time dismissed in the dominant paradigm as a time of oppression by the “patriarchy.”

Oppressive or not, the time spent getting that college degree proves to be a ticket to a new life.  Meanwhile, the husband ends up going to business school.  Supporting all that makes for a bit a challenging affair, especially since the two of them already have one child.  But, they make it work, and they make it work with great cheer and optimism.  They enjoy the adventure.

One thing leads to another.  He ends up having a very illuminating experience in business school and decides to go on and get a Ph.D.  His vision of being an academic is modest.  It is beautiful.  He imagines that he could end up teaching at some leafy-green liberal arts college tucked away in the Midwest.  His wife agrees to go along with this vision.  The kid from Connecticut endorses it.  She is an adaptable spirit.

By this time, they have three kids.  Forty-seven years later, he bags a Nobel Prize in economics.  The headline in the paper from his hometown put it thusly: “Central [High School] Grad Nabs Nobel Prize.”  Who knew?  The beautiful young lady from a very working-class, very Italian community was thrilled.  She was a generous spirit.

The Nobel Prize business may be striking, but no less striking, I would suggest, is the fact that the beautiful young lady from the working-class, manufacturing town of Bristol, Connecticut—home to ESPN these last few decades—paid for her ticket to a new and bigger world with earnings from working at the corner café and with earnings from a summer job.  Who knew that one could secure a Ticket to a New World with low-wage labor?

That summer job involved working in the cultivation and processing of … tobacco.   “Connecticut” and “tobacco cultivation” are not two things I would have ever paired together in my mind, except that I did have a high school teacher who had done much the same: Work in the blazing summer for some outfit that cultivated and processed tobacco … in Connecticut.

A few years before our beautiful, young Italian friend found herself working in the tobacco fields, a young fellow ventured all the way up from Atlanta, Georgia to do the same.  (All the way from Atlanta? Why?)  And, his objective was the same: To pay for college.  He ended up spending “summers in 1944 and 1947 working on the Cullman Brothers' tobacco farm in Simsbury.”

It took some convincing for him to get his parents to let him come, and his mom still had her reservations when he set out on a train with his friend Emmett “Weasel” Proctor to head to the Hartford area.

Being a young black fellow coming from Atlanta, he had more than a few things to observe about his experience working in the fields in Connecticut.  “The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.”

I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford.  And we went to the largest shows there.

After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation.  It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow [racially restricted] car at the nation's capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta... I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a liberating experience working in the fields of a Connecticut tobacco farm with other people—Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, his classmates, all other Americans—laboring earnestly to secure for themselves a new life in a glorious new world.  And they had fun, and broke bread together at the “finest restaurants.”  The local NBC affiliate has reported thusly:

King's friends teased him that the hot sun in the tobacco fields caused him to preach, his sister, Christine King Farris, told The AP.  In her book, Through It All: Reflections on My Life, My Family, and My Faith, Farris wrote that her brother underwent a “metamorphosis” as a result of his time in Connecticut.

“That was quite an experience,” Farris said.

The Cullman Brothers tobacco farm had a partnership with Morehouse College and student salaries went toward their college tuition and housing, according to Simsbury's historical society. The farm also paid for students' train fare from the South if they stayed throughout the harvest season. It gave Morehouse students a chance to travel, interact with the community and experience freedom, …

Indeed.

So, America.  Maybe we should get out of the business of inflating the demand-side for ersatz “higher education.”  We are stuck in an equilibrium that features high government support for the debt financing of college degrees in social justice activism.  But, note, there was a time when we enjoyed an equilibrium in which college was inexpensive.  It was within the reach of people willing to literally work in the fields.  It was accessible to young people who were endowed with a spark to explore the world and, in their ways, both great and small, to make it a better place. 

We could live in such a world again.  But first we’d have to get the federal government out of the education business.