Why Didn't Anybody Whisper "Plastics" in My Ear?

If I had the following graph back 40+ years ago, I might have taken a different track in life. Instead, blissfully ignorant, I got a Liberal Arts education with a degree in philosophy. As you can see from the following chart, that was a bad mistake. Philosophy majors come in dead last in starting salaries:

The good news is that I ended up working with computer software (which was a young field and open to non-degreed people), so I was saved from own foolishness.

For those not around in the 1960s, the title for this entry relates to the film "The Graduate" where Dustin Hoffman is pulled aside and given the career advice "plastics". I was into philosophy, but at least with somebody whispering "plastics", I might have had second thoughts about my ill-informed life choice.

Still, the question I have asked many times: Why do high schools spend so much effort teaching academic subjects and spend so little time preparing kids for the "real world". The sex education course I got was a joke, taught by a coach who didn't even stay in the room and certainly wasn't prepared for the material. There was nothing on career choice. Nothing on college choice. Even a short course of maybe 10 hours would have made a vast difference by giving me perspective and facts, but schools don't teach that kind of useful life skills and general "street smarts" material. It is a puzzle to me why they don't.

The schools did have civics and vocational courses, so they did recognize the need for non-academic topics. But there was nothing on love, marriage, college, life-long education, resume-writing, dealing with the social dynamics of a workplace, climbing the corporate ladder, etc. They taught nothing about skills for the workaday world. Odd. You would think there would be a recognition that you could get a lot of "bang for the buck" by providing education in an area where the average kid has no great clue how to cope, let along succeed.