CSotD: Bright promise
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I'm becoming a fan of Vladimir Kazanevsky, who I featured here just a month ago with another cartoon published on the Cartoon Movement site, of which I am also a fan.
That cartoon had a great metaphor, but employed it in terms of a specific situation in his native Ukraine. This one, by contrast, is sadly universal and will resonate with a great many young people, wherever they live.
In fact, I've seen two other cartoons in the last 24 hours on the cost of college and its potential payoff that approached the topic from different points of view.
Randy Glasbergen posted this hopeful fantasy to his Facebook page just yesterday, while Detroit News cartoonist Henry Payne attacks OWS protesters as pampered slackers with his current cartoon.
But both cartoons miss the point Kazanevsky nails so well.
Glasbergen's panel is simply a gag and thus much less tied to the present moment, and it did make me laugh.
I remember graduating with a fair certainty that, for all their high-toned yak about the importance of a liberal-arts education, no guy in a suit was going to greet me with the offer of a job where my classically trained ability to problem-solve was going to make me a valued member of his team. (Note, by the way, what is missing from that list of promises. Better hope that wife has a good one.)
In fact, I remember putting up an index card on a university job board headlined "Philosopher King Wanted For Small Island Nation," and hoping a few frustrated grads would at least get a laugh that day.
But I recognized at the time the gulf between those of us who had chosen "starving artist" as a profession and those who had planned to hit the ground running with more practical and tangible goals in mind.
That was before a lot of things changed in the world. The cost of college was a little more manageable, and the requirement for a sheepskin had not spread. Professors were loathe to flunk anyone, since the result might well be enrollment in field studies at the University of Southeast Asia, but we were also starting to see young people whose career goals should not have required four years of college being told they needed to be there, and not simply for the deferment.
Today, you need that diploma in order to qualify for the jobs that don't exist.
I'd like to see high school administrators who boast each year at commencement about the percentage of graduates who are headed to college forced to also report on the enrollment status and graduation rates of previous classes. And maybe now we could add "percentage working in the field they studied," but the social workers on food stamps would skew the results.
I don't know how much overthinking Kazavensky did on this, but overthinking cartoons and pounding metaphors into the ground is my job.
To that end, I would note that Icarus's goal was to escape the prison of the Labyrinth, and his wings were more than adequate for that purpose. Had he not been distracted from the practical and achievable plan originally set out, he would not have perished.
In at least several other countries — I don't have the information needed to use a word like "most" — college is more heavily subsidized by the government than it is here, and student loans are not repaid until and unless the student is gainfully employed, and then at a percentage of income, not a fixed amount.
And I don't know where that Ethiopian cab driver is enrolled, but it may well be in one of those schools that strips away your Pell grants and veteran's benefits and then kicks you to the curb holding a substantial student debt and with no more potential for employment than you had when you walked in the door.
If he is going to a legitimate school, by the way, I certainly hope he doesn't think a double-major in art and political science, combined with drawing editorial cartoons for the student paper, is going to land him any sort of job at an American newspaper related to his interests and education.
Enough.
The beauty of Kazanevsky's vision is its simplicity: Foolish, ambitious youth, blinded by an unattainable vision and pursuing a goal it will never reach.
Worth a thousand words, indeed, and yours today for only 733.
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