“No one knows which white-collar jobs are still going to exist 10 years from now, so it’s even riskier to take on debt.”

John Johnson, 30, grew up in western Illinois in a town of about 250 people. He graduated from Western Illinois University in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in history and political science. In 2015, he got master’s in political science from the University of Chicago. Today, he works as a researcher on housing, demographics and political trends with Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.

Graham Thomas: What do you think is different about graduating college now compared to when you graduated? 

John Johnson: I think it’s even more expensive now than it was when I graduated 10 years ago. For a lot of fields, the returns are more uncertain too because of AI, I think. No one knows which white-collar jobs are still going to exist 10 years from now, and so I think it’s even riskier to take on debt. I think getting a college degree is still a good thing to do if you can do it in a way that doesn’t incur a lot of debt, but if I had a kid who was thinking about college, I would be reluctant to encourage them to go to a really expensive school.

Q: There is a lot of debate in academia about STEM versus humanities and social sciences. As someone with degrees in history and political science, do you have any thoughts on that debate?

A: I enjoyed the humanities aspect of studying history the most out of anything I did in school. Since then, I’ve found work doing more technical stuff – a lot of light statistics and quantitative research – which I also enjoy, although I like to think that I bring a bit more of a qualitative lens to that kind of work, let’s hope.

I do think a lot about the risk of studying something that doesn’t lead directly to a degree. I feel like some of the advice I see is like, “study the humanities and you’ll find a job afterwards and you’ll learn critical thinking,” or whatever. Sometimes I feel like that advice is given by people who have family connections that help them find work when they’re done.

Q: Do you think there’s any hope for students going into non-STEM-related fields?

A: I mean, we still need people to do thoughtful work. Journalism, for instance, is still important. But I think that, because of the way that I grew up, I have a really strong sense of college being about income mobility and trying to make your life better in that way. So I hesitate to give purely idealistic advice.

I think about a friend of mine who went to UWM. He and his twin brother were two of six graduates from Bradley Tech High School to go to college from his year. He graduated with an economics degree from UWM because he thought, “that seems like a thing that has to do with jobs.” His dad worked third shift at Harley his whole career, and so there wasn’t a lot of family knowledge about what college meant. He graduated from UWM with that degree and had absolutely no idea how you might get a job with that. He ended up working as a dishwasher at Northwestern Mutual for a while. He eventually worked his way up and ended up managing both kitchens at their two campuses – not really anything to do at all with his degree.

I don’t think he regrets it, but he is still kind of mad at UWM for offering basically no support for how to translate the degree you’re earning here into a career. In a sense, he thought, “I did what I was told.” “I went to college.” “I got a degree in something I thought was practical.” But, at least at the time that he went to UWM, he didn’t find that there was much in the way of career preparation.

Q: Did you take out loans for your undergrad? 

A: The American welfare state is very small, but if you’re a rural, white, son of a widow, it comes through for you if you go to the cheapest school. So actually, scholarships, Pell Grants and Illinois’ Monetary Award Program pretty nearly covered my college education because I didn’t live in the dorms. I took the cheapest option I could find and actually managed to pay for it, mostly with state assistance, which is pretty uncommon in America, I think.

Q: What are your thoughts on student loan forgiveness? 

A: There’s been some interesting research I’ve read that shows it’s still worth it to have a college degree, and that the lifetime earnings from having a college degree make it a smart financial decision for the majority of people who get one. If you go to college and don’t graduate, those people tend to be worse off than their peers who never went to college at all. Other studies have shown the same thing. I really feel for people who find themselves in that situation.

I think, as a general matter, it makes more sense to target loan forgiveness programs to the people who need their loans forgiven. People who took out loans to pay for Marquette Law School probably just ought to pay those loans off from their large salaries they’re receiving as lawyers.

As for the people who are taking out debt to go to UWM in hopes of reaching the middle class, particularly when they don’t graduate, that can turn out to be a crippling set of financial circumstances. As I understand it, the majority of students at UWM do not graduate.

Q: As you moved through high school and college and into your career, what were you told about the value of a college education? What about what you were told wasn’t true and what was true?

A: That’s a really good question. I have two things to say about that.

First, growing up it was expected that I would go to college. There was a real value placed on that, even though my family was very working class. My mom had gotten a degree in social work, and so she cared about college a lot. Her dad, my grandpa, had finished college after three tries. The first try was interrupted by World War II and then, when he came back from the war, he went back to college and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He went to a sanitarium because they just learned how to cure that. And then, once he was cured, he went back, finished his degree and farmed in western Illinois for the rest of his life. He loved college and specifically the University of Illinois, and so there was this feeling of like, “yeah, college is great and you should do it,” kind of a thing.

I also remember, back in high school, our guidance counselor coming into one of my classes and giving us this speech about how college wasn’t really worth it. I remember her saying that if she could do it again, she would run a mobile dog grooming business instead of having gone to college, which I don’t think any of us really knew what to make of at that time. I guess she was ahead of the curve, maybe. So those were the main two memories I have of people telling me things about the value of college. 

Q: Do you have any regrets about the path that you took? 

A: I think it would have been, in some sense, smarter for me to try to go to a better school and potentially even take on debt to do that. I was so afraid of debt that I wasn’t willing to try to go to a Big Ten school or the University of Chicago or something like that. But I think for most people, the networking value of going to a more selective school, if you can get into it, might be worth the higher cost. But that wasn’t how I was thinking at the time. Ultimately it worked out for me, but it’s hard to extrapolate from an N of 1.

Q: Finally, do you have any advice for college students? 

A: I think the only real advice I can give is to do independent projects on the thing that you care about and want to do as a job. If there’s a kind of research you enjoy, do some of that on your own and write about it or make audiovisual stuff about it. Whatever the thing is that you want to do, do it on your own. I think you’ll learn more and differently than the way you receive instruction in class, which is valuable too, but you just learn it in a new way when you’re doing it yourself. That’s what will impress potential employers. It’s like, “oh, this is a person who can think of a thing they want to exist in the world and go out and create it.” That’s what employers are looking for in a lot of cases. I think that’s everything.