Many people today are worried about losing their jobs, especially those with government jobs. In his recent speech to Congress, President Trump read a long list of wasteful and unnecessary spending on the part of the federal government and promised significant cuts. Even state and local government employees are worried since the loss of Federal grants might cause them to lose their jobs.
I know from experience that it is a hard thing to lose your job. Back in 1972 I lost my job as an Assistant Professor of History at a small Catholic college in Connecticut. The college had only come into existence ten years earlier as an experiment in Catholic higher education. It was to be run entirely by lay people although the local bishop would still head the Board of Directors. In addition, there would be no dorms, and the students would all be commuters or day hops.
Initially, the school flourished as students and parents took advantage of the low cost. Also, during the Vietnam war many young men enrolled to avoid the draft. However, by 1972 the war was winding down and enrollment was dropping. As a result, administration decided to cut costs by trimming the faculty and did so by declining to grant tenure to anyone eligible that year.
Seven of us were denied tenure that year. Tenure is an unfamiliar concept to most people. For academics, it meant that once you receive tenure, it was almost impossible to lose your position thereafter. You have a job for life. In effect, the seven years I had been teaching there were a probationary period.
I did have some paranoia about my dismissal. I thought that the administration had decided to terminate seven people just to get rid of me since I was the elected head of the faculty association. In academe it was not called a union, but it had some resemblance although there was no collective bargaining. I had also been overwhelmingly elected to the Faculty Senate during the years of student unrest that accompanied the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam.
Looking back now, I can see that while administrators might have been glad to see me go, I did not have a strong case for tenure. I was not a popular teacher since I had a reputation of being a hard grader. As an academic, it took seven years for me to complete my doctoral dissertation, and I had no publications to my credit. Coincidentally, I received my doctorate on the same day my tenure appeal was denied.
So, in the Spring of 1972, I was thirty-three years old and out of a job. Complicating things was the fact that my wife and I had five small children ranging in age from 8 to 2. We had bought a small house in Fairfield with help from my father who provided the $2000 down payment. We lived from paycheck to paycheck and had only meager savings. Teaching jobs were nonexistent in the area, and we did not want to relocate our family.
I had to find work out of academe, but my doctorate made me virtually unemployable. Prospective employers would only laugh and say that someone with your education would not be happy or useful working for them. Eventually, the only employers interested in me were insurance companies always on the lookout for new agents who basically worked on a commission basis. No sales meant no pay.
At that time, most academics looked down their noses at people engaged in business. Today, practically everyone goes to college to study business, but back in 1972 the business department at our school had only a few majors. Just as today, people in higher education tended to frown on those who worked for profit. Insurance agents were regarded as the lowest of the low in the business world, maybe just a notch above used car salesmen.
Nevertheless, I had no choice. I interviewed with a couple of companies but one seemed to have a novel approach. It was then among the leaders in the nascent mutual fund industry and offered low-cost life insurance as a supplement to mutual fund investing. I did fail their aptitude test that showed that I was an academic with no aptitude for sales. The office manager, whose contempt for academics matched mine for salesmen, informed me that he would not be able to take me on, but when I asked if I could borrow the study materials he had given me, he admired my persistence and immediately changed his mind. It was no skin off his nose since it was a commission only job. So, I became a salesman, a peddler of life insurance and mutual funds.
Needless to say, it was extremely difficult. Most new agents flunked out in weeks or months. The aptitude analysis was correct, but it only measured what I was and not what I could become. Only with the help and unflagging support of my wife, who went back to nursing, was I able to survive the first year and develop the knowledge, skills, and experience needed for success in this very competitive field. As the years went by, successful sales agents would morph into financial planners no longer dependent on commissions. Over the next 35 years I was able to build a very successful financial planning practice with hundreds of contented clients.
In my case, losing my job was one of the best things that ever happened to me and my family.
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