Across the nation, graduates are tossing their caps into the air and investing their hopes of success in their sheepskins. Not since the Magna Carta has so much faith been put into a piece of paper; indeed, belief in the college diploma seems these days to outpace belief in the document that binds a man and a woman.

For the past couple of generations, conventional wisdom has said that a college degree is the golden ticket to a great job. For a time, because of the simple laws of supply and demand, this was true. In 1947, when just 5 percent of Americans age 25 and over held at least a bachelor's degree, the supply was low, making demand for degreed employees higher. However, with easier access to college through taxpayer-funded student loans, today's bachelor's degree has become yesterday's high-school diploma. Now that over 30 percent of Americans 25 and over have a college degree—and the President has called for that figure to grow to 60 percent—the supply is up, which might help explain why 53 percent of recent graduates are unemployed or underemployed.

What's more, the burgeoning cost of college means that even for those who do land good jobs after graduation, payoff on their investment will be diminished and take more time. The graduation rates tripled between 1980 and 2010, rising 37 percent between 1999 and 2010. Two-thirds of bachelor's degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. The average debt for last year's college was $24,000, while the total outstanding national student debt has passed $1 trillion, more than the nation's credit card debt. Not surprisingly then, the national student loan default rate is on the rise, too, hitting 8.8 percent for the 2009 budget year. Even the number of Ph.D. holders on public assistance has made recent headlines.

If it sounds like I wish to discourage the pursuit of education, this is far from the case. As a college professor and a lifelong lover of learning, I believe in education, especially in education for education's sake, as my colleague Marybeth Davis recently advocated. But with more students today attending college not to be educated, but to get a job, the costs need to be counted more than ever.

Nor do I aim to perpetuate the strain of anti-intellectualism that is part of the history of American evangelicalism. For while we all are called to love the Lord with our minds, attainment of a liberal arts degree is not the only way to do so. Indeed, hoisting Dostoevsky on some people is as unavailing as arming me with a nail gun.

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Fortunately, the pursuit of learning can take various forms. And for the Christian, learning should be pursued with vocation in mind. Wendell Berry describes it this way: "The old and honorable idea of vocation is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted." Like so many things in life, the key is fit.

I'm married to a building trades teacher who works every day with students who might chafe at studying the liberal arts but have skills that can meet the needs of the current workforce and produce satisfaction and dignity as those gifts are used. Indeed the latest research shows that jobs requiring an associate's degree, vocational training, and on-the-job training are among the greatest current workforce needs. As the poet W. H. Auden put it, "You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at."

Yet, before one can pursue one's vocation, one must know what that vocation is, which is no simple matter for most of us.

One obstacle to discerning one's vocation is the excessive individualism of our age. Gene Edward Veith writes in God at Work, "Vocation is not something we choose for ourselves. It is something to which we are called." Hearing an inward call without the outward confirmation of the community (and your mother doesn't count) might be only your inner voice, not the call of God. As Ferguson and Weston explain in Called to Teach, "It is in community that we begin to discover our vocation … It is in community that we begin to grasp who we are, where we are going, and how we might get there."

Furthermore, one must know one's neighbors in order to love them by serving them. One must know what the world (or at least one's given corner of the world in one's given time) needs. One might desire more than anything to be a typewriter repairman, but pursuing such work today is likely to fail at least half of the definition of vocation. As Frederick Beuchner says, "The vocation for you is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need—something that not only makes you happy but that the world needs to have done."

Finally, the Christian is called to not just one but multiple vocations over time, within the family, the church, the state, and the workplace. Jesus not only taught in the temple, but he worked with his hands, too. He was a son and a Savior, all vocations to which God had called him.

"To degree or not degree?" is not the question. But rather, "What work has God fitted and called me to do?" And therein lies true success.

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