High school grads say 'Frack it' and skip college

Meet your fellow freshmen. Photo by J.P. Clayton

After filling us in on the depressing new trend of basing your love life around your credit score, the Times has found recent high school graduates forgoing college to hit the oil towns of Montana and North Dakota for jobs. Comparing the towns popping up around oil and fracking fields to the gold and silver rush towns of the old West, the Times spoke to high school guidance counselors, parents and recent high school graduates about the decision to skip college for jobs that pay forty grand a year out of high school.

Unlike cities that are working at getting college-educated, debt-ridden people to move there, oil and gas towns are attracting kids that are closer to them and have no interest in college. Even the ones that don’t work for energy companies directly can find jobs building and maintaining oil wells, doing construction for all the new housing necessary for crews or even working in gas stations for $24/hour.

There’s a sense of handwringing concern running through the article, but there shouldn’t be. If these kids aren’t sure about what they want to do with their lives, why should they pick up a $100,000 debt when they can make forty or fifty thousand dollars a year without college? All someone should be doing is teaching these kids some financial literacy, since the paper spoke to one who’s used his salary to buy a flat screen TV, a dirt bike and a Silverado. Which is all very normal and teenage, don’t get us wrong. But doing this work can’t last forever, and if you put yourself on the road to debt anyway, you may as well enjoy yourself at college instead of killing yourself with 15 hour days on an oil field.

Buried in the article is also opportunity for those of you who have already gone into debt in college: the population booms of the oil towns are straining class sizes in schools, which are desperate to hire new teachers. So maybe that English degree can be less of an albatross around your neck.

4 Comments

Conal Darcy Dec 27, 2012

Ah, but if the oil runs out, you’re just a kid without a college education or a job. Luckily, the oil will never run out.

Dec 27, 2012 at 11:14 am

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- Peter Dec 27, 2012
  
  Lol. Conal, you speak as if the college education would somehow secure you a job in the first place. The whole point of the article is rather than waste thousands going into debt only to end up working for little pay, you might as well work first, temporarily, and maybe figure out what you’d want to study, if at all.
  
  Dec 27, 2012 at 1:23 pm
  
  Reply
  - Conal Darcy Dec 27, 2012
    
    Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
    
    Dec 27, 2012 at 1:58 pm
    
    Reply
bvllets Dec 27, 2012

To some, grueling work in a harsh climate might be more satisfying than sitting behind a computer with a degree.

Dec 27, 2012 at 11:23 am

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