College-Attendance Fallacy

I’m not a manual-labor guy. I know that from experience — around the time I turned 13, my parents insisted that if I wanted to have money during the school year, I had damn well better find a summer job. With no marketable skills to speak of, my options were slim; between sixth and eighth grades, I spent the summer months on a farm near my grandparents’ house in New Hampshire, making the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In high school, I found a far more lucrative $15-per-hour summer gig working construction in my hometown of Portland, Ore.

I was bad at construction. Like, really bad. I was bad at farmwork too, but you can really be only so inadequate at picking beans and corn. In construction, on the other hand, it’s impossible to hide your incompetence. When the site manager showed up at the end of the day to find that, for all my genuine, increasingly desperate efforts, I had finished only half of the work he expected, there was no excuse. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had — back-breaking work that began at the crack of dawn, often on exposed, shade-less roofs under the beating 90-plus-degree heat of the midday sun. A soft, private-school kid like me wasn’t cut out for it — as my colleagues often made sure to remind me.

About the Author

Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

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I’m not a manual-labor guy. I know that from experience — around the time I turned 13, my parents insisted that if I wanted to have money during the school year, I had damn well better find a summer job. With no marketable skills to speak of, my options were slim; between sixth and eighth grades, I spent the summer months on a farm near my grandparents’ house in New Hampshire, making the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In high school, I found a far more lucrative $15-per-hour summer gig working construction in my hometown of Portland, Ore.

I was bad at construction. Like, really bad. I was bad at farmwork too, but you can really be only so inadequate at picking beans and corn. In construction, on the other hand, it’s impossible to hide your incompetence. When the site manager showed up at the end of the day to find that, for all my genuine, increasingly desperate efforts, I had finished only half of the work he expected, there was no excuse. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had — back-breaking work that began at the crack of dawn, often on exposed, shade-less roofs under the beating 90-plus-degree heat of the midday sun. A soft, private-school kid like me wasn’t cut out for it — as my colleagues often made sure to remind me.