The Plight of the Teenage Pretzel-Heads

The Plight of the Teenage Pretzel-Heads

Mixed messages about the value of education and hard work are causing some twisted thinking.

By ERIC ROPER

As a small business owner, whose main line of work is selling ice cream in local sporting venues, I have hired many high-school and college students in the six years I've been in business. Slinging ice cream on hot summer days or hawking lemonade at a ballpark have been classic summer jobs for young Americans for well over a century.

I recently asked one of my workers, a high-school student, what he was interested in doing after he graduated. "My head's all tied up like a pretzel," he replied. "I got a pretzel in my head!"

I laughed, recognizing the line from the Will Ferrell comedy "Talladega Nights." I also recognized the bewilderment about what lies on the other side of high school and college for many young people. I see plenty of my employees suffering from the same malady, and now it has a name: Pretzel Head.

as the diagnosis sounds, I don't think Pretzel Head is incurable. Many young people are understandably confused by the path ahead of them. With skyrocketing education costs, stalled job growth, technology edging out jobs that used to be held by people, and baby boomers not planning on retiring soon, it's tough to see where young people fit in.

Worse yet, kids are getting completely mixed signals about the value of education and work.

We hear constantly about Silicon Valley success stories who dropped out of college—in the tradition of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg—to toil away making apps. One day they're dreaming up a game about angry birds or fruit ninja, and the next—poof!—they're millionaires. Or so it seems.

Forbes magazine helped things along in February with its cover story, "Who Wants to Be a Billionaire," focusing on 31-year-old Brian Chesky, co-founder of the online room-renting site Airbnb (and a college graduate). Articles like this make it all seem so simple—especially for young people who think they've already been made semi-famous by their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat accounts. The cult of instant tech success devalues education and hard work.

Yet even as we hail famous dropouts and overnight millionaires, we also tell young people that nothing is more important than education. If you don't get that college degree, you'll likely end up plunging toilets.

Again it seems so simple: A four-year vacation (interrupted occasionally by lectures and tests) for roughly $200,000 will get you a piece of paper that guarantees you'll land a secure job for the rest of your life. Except it won't. Those secure careers are getting scarce, and they're harder than ever to enter. So the real value of education has taken a hit too.

Given all these mixed signals, coming down with a severe case of Pretzel Head seems inevitable. So what's the prescription? New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg got it right the other day when he encouraged kids to think about forgoing college and becoming plumbers instead. Not everyone needs to go to college.

After all, what's wrong with plunging those toilets? You get good at the job, do it for a few years, and maybe you open your own plumbing business and hire people to work for you. Sometimes it seems like America has lost sight of the kind of entrepreneurship that elevated the nation from a colony to the world's superpower.

Young people today are independent-minded and entrepreneurial. The problem is they don't know what that means. Entrepreneurship does not equal innovation. It doesn't necessarily mean creating the next Twitter—though it could. Entrepreneurship is the carpenter laying a foundation, the electrician fixing a lamppost, the ice-cream man pushing his product in the middle of July. It's building upon hard work, experience, success—and even failure—to create opportunities for yourself and others.

I suspect that it's also the cure for Pretzel Head.

Mr. Roper is the founder and CEO of Wahoo Food Group.

A version of this article appeared July 15, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Plight of the Teenage Pretzel-Heads.