Dear Michael,

First of all, I am a fan who rarely misses one of your telecasts and who thinks the people who denounce you as being a toady of one side or the other are full of crap.

That established, I need to dissent from some–not all-you had to say about college education recently. For the moment I will mostly ignore AI which is obviously going to be a very big thing in the future–beginning about now–but which is not directly related to my complaint.

My dissents are mainly two, one small and one large. The small or at least smaller one is that the number of jobs where you don’t need college to earn a lot of money will never take up all the people who are not college educated. There will always be those who because of ability, intelligence or refusal/inability to learn will not qualify for those jobs. They have mostly gone into “laboring” jobs in the past, mostly industrial manufacturing over the last century or so. But despite Trump or anyone else those jobs are not coming back in large numbers. There may be a bounce back but not a big one So what about those people who aren’t college or technical material? By the way, I have no real answer on this, but I think it’s worth noting.

The bigger complaint and one I know a bit more about is this. One could listen to your pronouncements on college education and not realize that there are OTHER REASONS for going to college than learning to do a job that will earn you more money. No, you haven’t said that specifically, but it seems a reasonable assumption based upon your often correct, but wholly economic arguments.

And these can have a great influence on a society and indeed, may have some economic and/or social impact of their own, indirectly and later. Now what I mainly am trying to say is this. Suppose a young person enrolls in a good university and does a major in literature and a minor in philosophy. He(no, I won’t play the he, she, they game– you know I mean anyone of whatever sex)will not be able to step into a high paying job as easily as someone with a degree in engineering or computer science, etc. Of course he might get some good bucks in communications and/or publishing, but those jobs are admittedly fewer in number than the tech stuff.

Nonetheless, he will be a different person because of his education. He will be more civilized and “smoother.” He will have better manners. He will speak his native language much better and understand its meaning and nuances more easily than the less educated. He will, in short, be more “sophisticated.” and will even be able to pass for upper middle or upper class,(even if he is not) for a time in some circumstances. In other words his education based style will open doors for him.

I hope I am not a snob based on class or anything else, but I am also a realist, and hey, it’s easier to get into desirable places and social circles when you’re more civilized. This may be heresy today in our “everybody’s equal no matter how big a jerk he acts like” society, but I prefer the realistic view. The one that looks good coming through the door and treats the hostess with respect and dignity is going to come off a lot better. This is simply how it is.

To be sure some of our cultures, particularly some of our TV commercials, have been working hard to make slobbery behavior amusing and acceptable. This may be amusing to some people but I am not among them nor am I impressed by the implied suggestion that this makes and will make things better.

As the expense of sounding like a conservative–I’m not in the ordinarily accepted sense–ask me about my voting record–I still prefer to be in a restaurant where the customers dress, look, and act like Myrna Loy and Melvin Douglas–yeah, OK, I’m stuck on old movies, but so what? I do believe that in the long run their type of more civilized behavior is likely to win out. The tendency of recent decades to simplify and de-formalize everything did a lot of good at the beginning, when our society was too stiff and over-organized,. But it has gone way too far and as usual has thrown out the baby with the bath water. I would like to bring back the former, but not the latter.

I think that by teaching people to read, write and think–and not incidentally, also speak–in more civilized ways is an important kind of education. It’s lack has led our public manners to decline seriously in recent decades and has made the US a less pleasant place to be. Yes, to some extent it’s a world wide tendency, but I think we started it and maybe we can end it too.

Now I am perfectly aware that many who emphasize only the monetary advantages of education are well bred themselves and would likely agree with some of what I have said. This is by no means a simple or obvious issue. But I guess I’m calling on people to think–think seriously about this. I suggest that one thing they think about, could be this–after all my above rant about civilization and good behavior making a society more pleasant, I will add this. It may have economic advantages too. That guy at the cocktail party(uh, they still have them, don’t they?) may have liked Plato when he was at Harvard and be inclined to hire someone else who liked him assuming the other qualifications are correct. And, by the way, studying Plato just might teach a person to think and reason carefully and logically–and that might be a ticket to, well a job in a brokerage firm? A law degree? Hey, who knows?

But this is a complicated issue, and it deserves consideration. College IS to a large extent a matter of learning to ear a good salary. But it may be also a place to learn something to go with that–how to spend and save it, and how to spend it wisely. You never know.