Bachelor of Barista?

Today, a friend of mine posted this question: “Education for the new economy...Bachelors of Barista?” 

Good question.  Heck, why not?  You see all these twentysomethings these days pour coffee after ringing up five and six-figure debt getting some fatuous degree. 

Bud Light actually had a tribute to them on the radio a few years back:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyEvTDurudw

Another friend who did a couple of years in Asheville told me that he was blown away when he first moved there by how all the sweatiest jobs like picking up rubbish and trimming hedges were done by dudes with degrees. Places like Asheville, though, have tuned into keeping their people's self-esteem high, so they've invented professions like Artisan Plumbing.  That’s a college town for you, but you’re starting to see that more and more in average towns as economic downturn dovetailing with market saturation for liberal arts majors begins to take its toll.  

There’s this dude in my town whose hook is that he delivers his hand-roasted, micro-batch coffee by bicycle.  Well, why not?  Somebody should do it.  If delivering arugula by wheelbarrow pays the bills (you are free to steal this idea), go for it.  There’s a lot of folks who tingle at the idea of an urban scene filled with the kind of street hawkers and micro markets that they pay to look at on vacations to Europe, and they revere it accordingly, much like the way the EU government gets worked up in debates about the terroir.  I don’t blame them.  When my son and I went to the Euro outpost of Quebec, my gluttonous self was in nirvana at all the fromageries and fruiteries I saw, with not a one of their storefronts more than twenty feet wide.  Micro indeed.

One way today’s young deal with finding out their true market value is to get an internship at an organic farm or "institute".  You could be swinging a hoe all day, but if the dirt’s organic and the payoff includes smoking a bowl  at the end of the day, then you are interning.  I’ve seen one place not only hire interns rather than “laborers”, but even charge folks for the experience of feeding their goats and spreading mud on a daub hut. When I was a kid reading Tom Sawyer, I thought it was nuts that boys were lining up to pay Tom to whitewash his fence for him, but now I know that he was just clever at marketing.

Meanwhile, there’s other proletarian work out there that pays a whole lot more, though it’s short on cool.  If you’ve got the stones to work with 84,000 volts of alternating current, the International Brotherhood of ElectricalWorkers might be for you.  $74,200 Transgender Studies bill? Heck,  my friend Cary will clear that and then some this year as he hooks himself to a high voltage cable that delivers the power that’s running my laptop right now.  It’s enough to make an ironic moustache curl even harder.   It takes serious delayed gratification, with a five year apprenticeship program, and has some genuine safety hazards, but the pay and benefits are good, and the IBEW is better at organizing than your affinity group is.