Guys Just Want to Have Fun

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The business world isn't totally hostile to higher education--an M.B.A. still counts for something. But as G.J. Meyer wrote in his classic 1995 book, Executive Blues: Down and Out in Corporate America, a higher degree in something other than business or law--or, worse, a stint of college teaching--can impart a deadly "academic stench" to one's résumé. And what are we to make of the growing corporate defiance of elementary grammar? At a job fair I attended, AT&T Wireless solicited sales reps with the question, if it was a question, "Are you ready to put your skills to work. Like the way you're a quick study. How you're good at finding solutions." Take that, you irritating, irrelevant English 101 professors!

Maybe we need a return to gender-segregated higher education, with the academic equivalent of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island for boys, where they can hone their "people skills" at keg parties. But we will need those high-achieving girls more than ever. Someone, after all, is going to have to figure out how to make an economy run by superannuated slacker boys competitive again in a world filled with Chinese and Indian brainiacs. I'd still major in physics if I were doing it again, just because there ought to be at least a few Americans, of whatever gender, who know something beyond the technology of beer bongs.

Ehrenreich is an essayist and the author of the books Bait and Switch and Nickel and Dimed