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CATHY WURZER: It's Morning Edition. I'm Cathy Wurzer. Thanks for joining us. We're going to check in with Bob Collins. Right now Bob has just finished the second leg of his Minnesota college tour. Bob's the creator of the News Cut Blog at minnesotapublicradio.org. You may remember he's traveling the state visiting one college a week to talk with students about how the economy is affecting them. Bob just returned from Vermilion Community College in beautiful Ely, Minnesota. I've never been to Vermilion. How was it?

BOB COLLINS: Really? And you been to Ely though--

CATHY WURZER: Oh, absolutely.

BOB COLLINS: --you're a daughter of the North country.

CATHY WURZER: I am, and it is a gorgeous place. I've never been to Vermilion Community College.

BOB COLLINS: Yeah, it's a great spot.

CATHY WURZER: Tell me about it.

BOB COLLINS: It's another two-year community college. It's one of the few community colleges. Might be the only one that actually has residents living there, dorms and such. As you might expect, it is centered around natural resources. And so you have a lot of folks that are up there, usually from somewhere else, who are exploring careers in something related to the environment or the ecology.

CATHY WURZER: And you wanted to find out how the economic downturn is affecting students.

BOB COLLINS: Yeah.

CATHY WURZER: And?

BOB COLLINS: Well, what I want to do is find out how they're living the economy. We hear the economy explained to us with academics and politicians, but the economy is actually made up of people who are experiencing it on whatever level. With last week, you may recall I was at Century College, and there were wonderful stories of people who've been out in the workplace and usually, on their own, came back and are filled with passion to get better jobs.

Here, we're at a lower demographic level. These are young people who haven't yet been out in the workplace. And so their motivation for deciding what they're going to do is somewhat different. They're actually applying values oriented judgment to deciding how they're going to approach things. And when they do that, they shrug their shoulders at the economy in this kind of faith that well, everything's going to be all right, or, I'm going to worry about it later.

One gentleman I talked to who was interesting was a guy named Jeff Swanson. He's 52 years old, and he was a Lutheran pastor for 20 years. And he says he really loved Sundays. It was Saturday or Tuesday through Saturday that was a problem for him, but he always loved nature. And so he's completely redirecting his life now. And I said to him, because, again, he's 52, what advice do you have to these whippersnappers?

JEFF SWANSON: Do what makes you happy, you, not mom and dad and aunts and uncles and-- I became a pastor because of three blue haired ladies in the front row at church. And I was a very good pastor. I was a very, very good pastor. But at the core of it was not what made me happy.

BOB COLLINS: And this is what I heard a lot, that the reason they're going with the kind of careers they want to go with is not related to money for the most part. It's related to something. Else and that something else has a big variety to it. I talked to Christian Gosselin. He's a Hibbing native who was in Iraq. He was in the army. And how he chose his profession or where he wants to go is entirely different application. And by the way, what he's gotten into is he wants to be the guy that works at the wastewater treatment plant, which is something you don't hear about every day when you're a kid, I want to grow up to work at the wastewater treatment plant.

CATHY WURZER: Really?

BOB COLLINS: Yeah, and this is how he came up with that idea.

CHRISTIAN GOSSELIN: Basically what I did was I just-- for some reason just decided to go on a tour of a couple different water treatment and wastewater treatment plants. Every time I went there, I noticed that all the employees were older and getting ready to retire. So it just kind of seemed like, hey, this is a job where they're going to need a lot of people. Nobody really knows about it, and it's still helping something out.

BOB COLLINS: How's that for research?

CATHY WURZER: Well, he's being strategic.

BOB COLLINS: And I hear that a lot too. Some folks have identified careers in which the people who are in them now are old, so this could-- so they're going to retire. And it's something they want to do. And in this case, he says since he came back from Iraq, he doesn't like being around people that much. And so the aspect of why it's a good fit is that you can work in a wastewater treatment plant. It's really interesting, he says, seeing brown become clear water, and there aren't that many people there.

CATHY WURZER: Where are you off to next?

BOB COLLINS: Next we're going to stay in town. We're going over to Minneapolis Community Technical College, because one of the things we're trying to do is hit such a variety of schools that the students were talking to and their journeys as they relate to the economy and their futures are quite different.

CATHY WURZER: We'll stop by when you get done.

BOB COLLINS: I'd love to.