Where What When

The Parnassa Dilemma, The Rise of Community Colleges

“What are you going to do for parnassa?” Parents like to ask this question, and young people worry about how to answer it.

“What are you going to do for parnassa?” Parents like to ask this question, and young people worry about how to answer it. This article is the first in what will hopefully be a series of articles about options for young and not-so-young frum people in doing just that: earning a living. It has been inspired by the work done by Dr. Moshay Cooper and her team at Bais Yaakov in organizing career days, where students visit a business of interest for a day, and career fairs, where professionals are available in booths to talk about their work.

We live in a time where our economy is going through drastic changes. Today, the top one percent income bracket owns proportionately more of the country’s wealth than ever before, and increasing numbers of dead-end jobs are being offered up to those entering the job market. It’s a tough time to make a living; it is no longer enough to “get a good education and find a good job” for life. Showing up at work and doing your job is no guarantee of a professional future. And yet, Hashem expects us to go through a reasonable hishtadlus (effort) to arrive at the blessing He has prepared. It seems to me that independent-minded, thoughtful research and networking among all the members of our community can give us more useful answers than simply relying on conventional wisdom.

What Kind of Work?

The goal of these articles is to identify ways that young people can do something productive and interesting right out of high school, or with a minimum amount of training, as well as to identify college courses that actually offer productive professional careers.

For the post-high school, quick education careers, I chose fields where I have detailed experience as a consumer or producer of business services: bookkeeping with QuickBooks, internet software development, graphic design, and writing. There are also many promising new careers in health care, as well as opportunities for paralegals, mortgage processors, sales, and many other occupations, but they are beyond my knowledge. Hopefully, this series will inspire professionals familiar with other fields to offer similar reviews to help guide students in these choices. In the meantime, I’ll be interviewing many savvy young people who have found exciting college opportunities, many of which are completely subsidized by the State of Maryland.

I write in an era when we do, fortunately, have the luxury of choice. As Malka Weintraub, a popular vocational counselor, explains, “Work, today, is more than just parnassa. Work can help a person achieve his or her higher purpose, the reason G-d put them here. If you can find work that fits, it can be a really big blessing. It’s a great joy to be living your purpose and contributing support for your family and, ultimately, your community, as you give tzedaka from the funds you receive for your work.”

The question these articles will address is this: What kind of jobs can students find that will pay them for the aptitude they already possess, give them the satisfaction of self-expression, and at the same time train them for a future of greater responsibility and professional growth?

College Degree: No Guarantee of Success

When the curriculum of a bachelor’s degree was developed, as early as the 16th century, it was intended to educate the children of the elite in cultural history and critical thinking. In the 1950s, college funding for veterans of WW II moved hundreds of thousands of American Jews (along with so many immigrant groups) out of the working class and into professional opportunities that no one in their families had ever dreamed possible. The upheavals of the 1960s changed the direction of most universities. The emphasis became a general questioning and overturning of established moral values of the past. By the 70s, perhaps because the U.S. government offered such generous college loans, college had become a place where liberal thinking about morality seemed to be the primary topic. This, along with a general lack of practical focus, caused many frum communities to look for alternatives to the B.A.; often, this was by creating our own college programs.

We were both lucky and smart to be skeptical of the traditional, four-year stint at a live-in college. There was a time when college was the entry point for virtually every white-collar career. That time is past. Today there are many, many people questioning the value of paying a $40,000 per year tuition for a degree that, at best, prepares the student to study for yet another degree – a master’s or doctorate – with more debt and further delay in entering the job market. A Princeton economics professor, giving a talk on health care economics, remarked, “University education has not yet been disciplined by the market.” In the meantime, students and parents are on their own in figuring out how to make the most out of their educational dollars.

Looking at Alternatives

I’m not writing this article to convince anyone to forgo getting a bachelor’s degree. The job picture is still better in the long run for people who complete some kind of B.A., and we have our own Orthodox institutions that will help us get them with minimum exposure to the negatives of the college environment. But, since many members of our community marry before or during their undergraduate years and have large families, I want to be realistic. I’m looking at jobs and careers that can be started instead of, or before, working on a B.A. And, since many of our young people, both male and female, want part-time jobs to facilitate learning or parenting, I looked for jobs that offer time flexibility and part-time work.

I’m also focusing on careers where students can get their start within frum businesses that are looking for workers at the entry level. These jobs can provide a buffer during the early years, as young people build skills and confidence. Some of the fields I’m discussing also have the potential to be developed into an independent business after a few years of working for others. Alternatively, they can be used as a way by which a single or a young family is able to finance training for the “gold standard” jobs, such as accountant, lawyer, doctor, dentist, nurse, psychologist, social worker, or engineer. Having skills outside the career track can often make the difference in surviving the long educational journey, even when a student is quite clear about his or her goals for higher education.

Taking the slow path through the B.A. and other advanced degrees can help students make a more realistic assessment of the cost of acquiring these careers relative to their pay scale. Most of the high-level white-collar jobs require taking on debt in order to finish. Often, long apprenticeships or internships are degree requirements. During these apprenticeships, the pay scale is quite low or nonexistent, requiring more debt. Interns in accounting, engineering, psychology, medicine, and social work may find that they are in a full time, underpaid or unpaid job following the completion of a long degree.

Ner Israel Rabbinical College, Maalot, and Binah Institute make the college journey somewhat shorter by accepting credits for Torah studies to fulfill some of the B.A. requirements. There are many of these schools around the world. Their innovation is in explaining the Judaica curriculum to university standards committees and convincing them that critical thinking and general study skills can be acquired by learning Torah. These schools tend to be flexible, responsive, and open to adding new courses if the students and parents want them. They are not, however, in business to transform higher education. They make no claim that Judaic studies is a trade school or career training process, except where Jewish education is concerned.

The place where vocational education – how to do specific jobs – has really blossomed is in community colleges.

The Rise of Community Colleges

When I was in college, 30 years ago, the bright and promising students did not consider community colleges. Direct vocational training was viewed as something one did because he could not make it in college. As the traditional, residential B.A. programs have lost their appeal, however, community colleges have moved in to fill the gap. Community colleges offering two-year degrees or simple certification programs have created courses of study that are short, affordable, and lead directly to identifiable jobs. These credits can also be accumulated and transferred to a four-year college that grants the B.A.

Today we see more and more frum students in Baltimore City Community College (BCCC) and the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) at Catonsville. They are learning specific skills that qualify them for specific jobs for which they can apply as soon as they are finished, while also accumulating credits toward the B.A. Significantly, unlike the residential colleges, community colleges do not see themselves as a place for social networking and meeting the “important connections” that will drive your career. Teachers in community colleges are much less interested in teaching liberal values. They know that their job is to teach their students how to write an intelligible sentence, study for a test, or pass prerequisite courses like statistics, math, or physics. Contrary to the impression that the four-year institutions sometimes provide, community college course work isn’t easier, and it’s not an intellectual sell-out; it’s simply more focused.

It is interesting to note, in this context, that the so-called “gold standard” of evaluating colleges, the U.S. News and World Report annual survey, is completely enslaved to the existing, four-year college elite system. They rank schools based on the impressions of their peers, other four-year college presidents. Recently, it was reported in the New York Times that, even though a new system of evaluation has been created – a system created by community colleges, based on students’ feedback of whether the courses were helpful and the teachers good – it has been rejected by the educational elite.

To make it more complicated, there is an entire system of “for-profit” colleges that engage in aggressive selling and tuition collection with absolutely no regulation by any body. According to the university-based experts I consulted, these schools are predators and should be avoided.

We’re very lucky that Maryland’s universities have an excellent system that helps students know if a particular community college course can be transferred to a four-year Maryland university. Called ARTSYS (http://artweb.usmd.edu ), this computerized, online database indicates whether the course is transferable and, if so, what is the receiving institution’s equivalent course number, and what is its applicability towards elective credits. It also indicates which general education area is applicable to the course. By using ARTSYS, a student can take classes that are immediately useful, as well as work toward a degree, instead of taking a variety of general courses with no particular goal.

The Blessing of Options

As difficult as the economy might be today, we are blessed to have a choice. Rabbi Berel Wein often mentions in his history of Eastern European Jewry that, due to anti-Semitic laws, unemployment was as high as 40 percent among the men in the Jewish community. The many shul-based jobs – with multiple gaba’im, shamasim, and behelfers (who transported children to school), etc. – were often designed to maintain dignity for men who could not find alternative jobs, even if their families desperately needed the income.

We live in an era when the American Orthodox community is respected and there is minimal discrimination, allowing frum people to enter virtually every kind of career. Even halachic requirements are no longer an impediment to a job in the general marketplace. Many jobs allow for flexible schedules, permitting Shabbos and Yom Tov observance and time for parenting.

We’ve come a long way since the ghetto and the shtetl. While many of our best and brightest students are still choosing Jewish communal careers – becoming teachers, rabbis, shochtim, sofrim, or mohelim – now they have a choice. If they remain in the yeshiva world, it can be for idealistic reasons, not because the outside world offers no opportunities. Whether a young person goes into a Jewish occupation or works in the broader society – each can choose work that expresses his or her talents and values and allows for a life of fulfillment and an honorable parnassa.

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Article List - July 2008