Back when I was a student majoring in the determinedly non-vocational humanities, I thought of college as a place to sharpen my reasoning and writing skills, expand my knowledge of the world and have some fun along the way. Coming from a comfortable home headed by two college-educated professionals, I didn’t think much about higher education as a path to a livelihood.

My obliviousness was a luxury, I was reminded recently, as I worked on my latest piece for CivicStory’s Humanities Reporting project—this one a look at the Newark City of Learning Collaborative (NCLC), a community coalition dedicated to increasing the proportion of city residents with a postsecondary degree or credential. NCLC grew out of years of concern that Newark residents with no more than a high school education were poorly positioned to get jobs with companies moving into the city.

My college years primed me to brand as reductionist any view of education as primarily a matter of employment viability--but that critique comes from a place of privilege, suggests Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. 

“I’ve heard it many, many times: We are focused on creating soldiers of capitalism,” says Smith, who coauthored a recent report arguing that by 2031, 72 percent of American jobs will require some form of postsecondary education or training. “The people who spend a lot of time talking about that usually do so from the warmth of their homes, next to their fireplace, while sipping coffee.”

The injustices and inequalities of the past take concrete economic shape in the present, Smith adds: Today, she says, the average white American has about $100,000 in wealth, compared with $8,000 for the average Hispanic American and $5,000 for the average Black American. “If there's no generational wealth in your past, you have to create it in your generation,” Smith says. “And the only way to do that is to actually get a job.”

Still, it’s important not to lose sight of intangible values, like those my humanities education inculcated, argues Ronald Chaluisán, the former director of the Newark Trust for Education, who chairs NCLC’s advisory board. Students may find meaning and fulfillment in a host of pursuits, from business to the arts, that don’t necessarily require formal schooling, Chaluisán says. “If we have only one definition of success, that means every single other person is not successful,” he says. “If we're telling them not going to college is not success, what are we doing to them--mentally, socially and emotionally?”

In other words: It’s complicated. Different kinds of students find different kinds of purpose in their educational journeys. I hope the story of NCLC’s work in Newark will give readers a chance to think about how education has shaped their own lives. 

 Humanities Reporter Deborah Yaffe is a freelance writer based in Princeton Junction, N.J. She worked as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and California for 14 years and is the author of two books: “Other People’s Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey’s Schools” (Rivergate Books, 2007) and “Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom” (Mariner Books, 2013).

Yaffe is the humanities reporter for an incubation grant funded in part by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.