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My first serious employer, the Dallas (Texas) Water Department provided a decent education benefit to full-time employees in 1968 and that was my first exposure to having someone else pay for my college education. The “new employee” packet, that I’d received when I got the water department job, mentioned the education benefit. When I asked the HR lady how to take advantage of that benefit, she told me “Nobody has ever asked me that question. I’ll have to do some research.” She did and, when I checked back with her, she helped me navigate the city employee system to get my class reimbursement. After my 6-month probation, I signed up for my first couple of classes at El Centro Community College and at the end of that first semester I was rewarded with a check covering my tuition and textbook expenses. All I had to do was get a C-or-better grade in the classes. In 1968, the tuition and books reimbursement were a bit more than $200, which was pretty impressive because my total income that year as a full time, salaried meter reader was $1,271. I kept that job for another year, leaving about ½ way through the next tax year and taking two more classes. Since the 2nd half of that year was spent going to a Kansas tech school full time and working nights as a welder and, later, an electronics tech, my 1969 total income was $899, but I still knocked off 6 more college credits before leaving Texas and receiving another $200 reimbursement.
Our next six years took us to places, and me to jobs, where education opportunities were scarce-to-non-existent. I did take a few classes, when I got the chance, but I didn’t see another paid education opportunity until 1977. I went to work for an ag manufacturing company in eastern Nebraska as a test engineer. My engineering salary that first year was a smokin’ $14,000, but after the probation period I started taking night classes at the University of Nebraska, Omaha any time one of the classes I needed to graduate was offered after 5:30PM (the earliest I could make it from work to class). And work paid for all of my expenses, even giving me a travel allowance for the mileage from work to class. The HR department was really helpful and generous with their support, again, because “nobody had ever asked about the education benefit.” My supervisor had almost unlimited freedom to reward me with education opportunities because, since I didn’t have a EE, he couldn’t give me an engineering title and I was underpaid be a couple thousand dollars. He could send me to seminars, pay for my college expenses and help adjust my work schedule to accommodate my classes, and buy me any work-related educational material I requested. And he did all of that willingly and regularly.
One of the opportunities at that company was a free night class, delivered in one of the company offices after 5PM for ten weeks: the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course. The course guaranteed “double your reading speed or your money back” (without any reduction in comprehension). For me, the only outlay would be time, since it was company-paid education, and it wasn’t in conflict with a college class. I was a pretty fast reader, 500wpm, to start with, but I ended up reading closer to 4,500wpm and didn’t get to test the Evelyn Wood warranty refund policy. It was an extremely expensive course, at the time. The company had 1600 employees and the class was advertised as being “open to everyone.” There were 8 of us in the class, which had the facilities and the instructors for up to 50 students. We had two instructors for the 8 of us and did more than double the assignments the course typically covered. I still read pretty quickly and that skill made a world of difference in my career and life.
My next employer was a southern California audio equipment manufacturer and, in the 80s, California was a student’s wet dream. Community college classes cost me $60/semester for all the classes I could choke down. The schools had great instructors, with real-world experience and theoretical background, who were also inspiring and talented teachers. After my probation period, I helped the HR lady write the often-expressed but never defined “company education policy.” Then, I was the first employee to use it. It covered the paltry California state tuition, but it also covered 90% of the cost of “books and materials.” This was long before Amazon and eBay and a semester’s textbooks could exceed $1,000. I finished my Associates and knocked off my Batchelor’s in about 8 years, including two majors. My last semester at California State University, Long Beach cost me $360 tuition and about $600 in books and my employer reimbursed me for all of that. In 1991, my total Social Security Earnings were $35,000 in 1991 and my education benefit was more than $1,000 added to that. By the time I left that company, after 10 years, one other employee had used the education benefit. He worked for me.
My next three employers had varying educational opportunities with few takers, which caused almost no expenses to those employers for a fairly generous benefit. Today, company education benefits are scarce and difficult to access. That might be cause for one more millennial-X-Y-Z generation complaint, but the fact is that I suspect most companies abandoned education benefits because they weren’t being used. I imagine that every year a benefit isn’t used, it will have a lower budget the next year. That is the way every other budget expense works. The decline will go on until it becomes a serious risk to disrupting the budget if anyone ever does use it. Then, it vanishes from the employee manual, never to be seen again.
One of the many things that mystifies me about most human beings is the lack of curiosity. Most of the dumb things people believe, do, and are fooled by are due to their lack of curiosity. The main quality, I believe, people in a modern society need to survive and thrive and adapt is curiosity. You don’t get much out of education without curiosity. From my experience, I wouldn’t have gotten much out of life without curiosity. All of my friends are (it seems to me) almost infinitely curious about everything around them, including themselves. The dumb side of Dunning-Kruger is well-known, but the contrary side of that is that “people who are at the top of their game in a certain subject area don’t have the ability to notice their own skill . . . Rather than underestimating themselves, they overestimate that everyone else’s abilities match their own.” One result of that attitude is that those people keep looking for what they don’t know, rather than being satisfied that “they know it all.” Again, the polar opposite of the Trump/MAGA mindset of “the less I know, the more I think I know.”
Curiosity is a prefrontal cortex function and, as such, it requires literal physical effort and burned calories. When you are unwilling to study and learn, it is totally appropriate for a teacher to call you “lazy,” because you are. Failing to take advantage of the free K-12 education provided to every American child, resulting in a stunted economic adulthood is the outcome from that lethargy and slothfulness. Blaming others, especially those who weren’t in the protected, entitled white middle class, and who struggled against odds to use more limited resources to teach themselves until their achievement allowed them scholarships and opportunity is just more laziness. But, obviously, being lazy is an animal instinct (along with fighting, fleeing, freezing, fawning, and fucking) and at least half of most populations fall back on their animal natures rather than doing the work to actually “think.” And that is why offering an education benefit is the cheapest perk a company can put on the list of employee attractions. It is unlikely to cost anything, based on my experience.
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