Higher Education Is a Gateway Drug
If you’re like me, then you’ve been told your whole life the same thing:
Be good. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job.
That’s a lot of repetition for the word “good.” But all of those conditions are not sufficient to produce the final result. This mantra is espoused by parents and society (teachers, advisors, etc.) as if it’s a logical conclusion: IF you’re good and get good grades and get into a good school THEN you’ll get a good job.
This is pretty faulty logic. For the P,Q logic geeks out there you can of course pick this apart pretty quickly. But the point here is that the good job doesn’t necessarily come from the previous conditions. They help, sure, but there’s an X factor somewhere. We can call it luck, ambition, drive, personal draw (the nature of someone being drawn to another or “taking a liking to” another), and I’m sure many others.
One thing is clear: getting a good education isn’t about getting a job. It’s about becoming a better thinker. I’m not sure when we decided that time spent in a college or university was job training, but that’s how people treat it now. I have been guilty of treating university education as job training. It usually presents itself in the following form: Why do I have to take class X? I’ll never have to use that in my future job. Well no kidding. If your focus is to only learn what you need for use on the job, go get a technical certificate and just work in the real world instead of going to university. The point of higher education is not to make better workers. That’s job training, technical training, conferences, and the like. Pursue those avenues for making a better or more knowledgeable worker. The purpose of higher education is to make better thinkers. It frustrates me to no end to hear about how an individual believes they have no need to take an English (that is, composition/rhetoric) course because it doesn’t apply to their mathematics degree.
Yes, it does.
Effectively communicating applies to all degrees and careers. If you can’t write, you’re at a disadvantage. If you can only perform basic math, you’re at a disadvantage. You also look foolish in a meeting where you’re discussing projections when you don’t understand how someone arrived at a particular conclusion based on some basic algebraic formula. I remember thinking to myself in a class on Natural Resources why would I possibly ever need to know what the silver lining on a cloud is called.
The reality is that having an education has intrinsic value. Humans have incredible powers of perception, but if you don’t have a broad base of information you can’t draw the same conclusions. The age of Google and instant access to information has enabled us to do more but has simultaneously resulted in lowered expectations of what we need to know. Rather than thinking about all the new things you can learn, instead our society takes the approach of not needing to know something because they know where to find it.
That’s good for the over-achieving crowd. But it’s bad for those who are disinterested. Those who can use that knowledge and conclude something more quickly are at an advantage in career competition. That’s not to say one should attempt to learn everything and always have it at the ready. There are exceptions such as high level theory/equations/etc. But if you have to learn a basic concept before using the higher one, you couldn’t plan on what higher level concept you needed. Competition for limited resources. Not much has changed in the world regarding that basic tenet of existence.
So what’s the point? Higher education isn’t job training. It’s teaching folks how to think. Becoming a better thinker has its own intrinsic value. Getting a major in a field focuses that thinking in a particular subject area. But thinking isn’t job training. And that’s lucky for those getting an education.
However, it’s a gateway drug. I made an error in choosing my undergrad, Political Science. Not because I don’t love the subject, but ultimately my path in life changed enough that the degree wouldn’t be put to use in my career. Except that I focused heavily on writing in my undergrad and I’m an effective communicator. I work in technology now, at a software company. And though I completed a year of classes for an MBA, I’m currently enrolled and seeking my second Bachelor’s - in Computer Science. I’m not positive I’ll complete the MBA, but as I began with Political Science and intended to pursue a JD/MBA, now I have altered my path to pursue a BS in Computer Science and potentially an MBA as well.
Education is intrinsically valuable. It is also a means to an end and we therefore often view it as onerous or irrational in some cases. But our collective goal should be to increase knowledge and understanding, not merely technical merits. The latter are important, but they’re not enough. Those committed to attaining credentials fit the post’s title. B.A. then M.B.A. and concurrent B.S. That’s definitely beginning a collection…