Why People from the Nightlife Industry Struggle to Stay in Day Jobs—and the Real Value of the University System

There is something I have wondered about for some time at a small company run by an acquaintance of mine.

The owner had no prejudice against hiring people he met at hostess clubs and similar establishments, or people referred through those connections.

He did not judge anyone differently just because they had worked in the nightlife industry. If someone was willing to work, he would first hire them part-time, then offer them a permanent position once they had settled into the job. I thought he was quite a flexible employer.

But it did not work out.

The people he hired rarely stayed long. One day, they would simply stop showing up without a word. They would, in other words, ghost the company.

And apparently, both men and women left in the same way.

With women, I could imagine one reason: comparing the income available from nightlife work with the hourly wage of a day job might make the latter seem ridiculous. But the men left in exactly the same way.

It did not seem to be only about money.

In a World Where Leaving If You Do Not Like It Is Normal

Time management is strict in nightlife work too. Being late causes trouble for the establishment, and promises made to customers still have to be kept.

So I do not think these workers fail to settle into day jobs simply because they cannot be punctual.

What caught my attention instead was the structure of employment itself.

Nightlife work has features that differ from ordinary companies: the anonymity of working under an alias, the large number of people who move between establishments, and systems based on daily pay or short-term compensation.

Among the people my acquaintance encountered and those around them, there seemed to be a low psychological barrier to suddenly quitting and moving to another establishment.

If you dislike it, you leave. If it is not a good fit, you look for the next place. You get paid today for the work you did today.

Once someone becomes accustomed to that environment, perhaps the idea of staying with the same company for years, gradually learning the job, building trust, and earning raises no longer seems particularly attractive.

A day job requires a long-term perspective: even if the starting pay is low, experience eventually brings greater responsibility and better conditions.

But when you are used to the idea that you can move to another workplace tomorrow, today’s dissatisfaction can outweigh a raise that might come years from now.

The issue is not whether someone can be punctual. It is whether they see value in remaining part of one organization for a long time.

The business owner I know hired people with the intention of eventually making them permanent employees. But that does not mean the people he hired viewed work on the same timeline.

The employer is looking several years ahead. The employee is thinking about this month’s income and whether they still want to work there tomorrow.

That mismatch may be what eventually appears as someone suddenly ghosting the company.

What Is University For?

This suddenly made me think about university education.

“Nothing you learn at university is useful once you enter the working world.”

You hear that all the time.

I studied physics at university myself, but I have never once had occasion to do particle physics calculations at work.

So did that mean there was no point in attending university?

Recently, I have begun to think that may not be true.

Universities have another, less glamorous but more practical function besides teaching specialized knowledge.

They teach people the habit of spending a long time within one organization and completing the tasks assigned to them.

You attend scheduled classes. You earn credits even for lectures that do not interest you. You submit papers by their deadlines. You work for years toward graduation.

You cannot simply abandon it all the moment you lose interest.

In other words, school is also a place where people learn to work toward a goal—graduation—that lies years ahead, rather than focusing only on immediate rewards.

That is remarkably similar to the idea of staying with a company for a long time.

Why Do Companies Value Prestigious Universities?

Of course, graduating from university does not necessarily mean that someone studied seriously.

At some so-called F-rank universities—Japanese institutions regarded as having extremely low admissions standards—students can graduate without doing much studying. They attend classes half-heartedly, muddle through their exams, and before they know it, they have a diploma.

Even so, they still remained enrolled for four years and worked toward the goal of graduation. At the very least, that reflects a more long-term perspective than a way of working in which someone stops showing up the very next day because they have had enough.

For recruiters at major corporations, however, that alone is not enough.

That is where prestigious universities come in.

Some students at prestigious universities do nothing but have fun after they are admitted. But getting into a highly selective university requires making it through the long haul of entrance-exam preparation.

In other words, companies are evaluating the effort students made before entering university more than what they learned there.

They may not know whether an applicant studied at university. But the applicant must have studied to get in.

For companies, this saves the trouble of assessing every applicant’s perseverance and self-discipline from scratch.

In short, it is almost as if they have outsourced part of their hiring process to university entrance exams.

Is an Academic Record Proof That Someone Can Handle the Long Haul?

Seen this way, even academic credentialism begins to reveal a strange kind of logic.

What companies want is not necessarily the specialized knowledge people acquired at university.

They want people who will not abandon their work over an immediate frustration and who can continue working toward long-term goals.

The process of preparing for university entrance exams and making it through to graduation gives them one piece of evidence for assessing that ability.

What happened at my acquaintance’s company seems ultimately connected to the same issue.

This is not to say that people from the nightlife industry have not received a school education. But the habits and values they developed in their previous workplaces are not easy to change.

An employer hires them expecting them to stay. Yet they themselves may never have imagined a future in which they spend years working for a single company.

It does not appear on a resume, but it is a major concern for an employer.

What I Really Learned at University

Looking back, I have hardly ever used the specialized knowledge I acquired at university directly in my work.

But studying even when the subject did not interest me, finishing assignments by their deadlines, and continuing to work toward goals that were years away—these habits have helped me many times since I entered the working world.

Perhaps that is where the real value of a university education lies.

Still, thinking about it that way is a little infuriating.

I studied physics at university and went on to graduate school.

I wrestled with difficult equations and spent years acquiring specialized knowledge.

And yet, the ability that proved most useful once I entered the working world was the ability to put up with boring things and keep going.

Apparently, while I thought I was studying to become a physicist, I was actually undergoing endurance training to become a corporate employee.

And I paid the tuition myself.

They could at least have called it the “Corporate Drone Training Program” from the start.