Get Smart – A Look at Education
Learning as a cognitive process is something that starts at birth and continues throughout our entire lives. We do it whether we really want to or not. We pick up little pieces of information every minute of every day that culminates in defining our personality. What we know and the opinions we’ve come to hold based on our intake of limitless new information is what sculpts who we are. That’s the most basic form of what we can call education. But once we surpass the simple definition that everyone surely understands whether they’ve been asked to define it or not, we delve into the education “system” and what the process of becoming “educated” really means in America today.
The American Dream. We all know what it is, at least to some cliché degree; a job, a family, a car, and a house. Some of the houses have white picket fences or tire swings or even in-ground swimming pools, but the idea is usually the same. It all starts with a good job; a career. Back in the day when the manufacturing industry in this country was actually existent one could go to high school, get a diploma, then go right into the labor industry. A job in the mill or something similar could pay enough to lay the foundation for a good life and a family. Nowadays the process is a little different. It generally goes something like going to high school, going to college, then at some point after college getting a job that can be a career. Getting a college degree is what they say makes it possible to be successful in a time when the mills aren’t there for everyday people anymore.
The standard path to success that most of us are aware of makes sense, right? I mean, it does work for a good bit of people. Depending on what kind of degree you shoot for out of high school sometimes it can be fairly easy. Some of the big ones like medicine, law, and things like that are pretty intense. But the general goal is to get some degree, any degree, so employers will hire you. This is what the generation that is fresh out of college right now has been told by their parents since the get-go. Sometimes a parent was the first in the family to get a degree and it opened the door for their success and having a family that’s well-off. It’s generally safe to say that that generation included a smaller percentage of college graduates than the generation of recent grads today. This can be because of many factors; the economy and the job market were much different in those days. Wars that were fought during those years also played a huge roll in determining a young person’s path after high school. None of this is necessarily a bad thing. Parents of the twenty-somethings nowadays don’t want their kids to have to work in the mills or join the military or undertake any of the back-breaking endeavors they had at that age. Given modern technology there are also tons of jobs and courses of study that didn’t even exist 20-or-so years ago, and conversely there are jobs from that time that don’t exist or are endangered today.
So this is where the dissection of this higher education idea comes in. We can all agree that there is value in scarcity, right? It’s the idea that has been around in some way or another since inception. It’s what gives gold and silver and Babe Ruth baseball cards their worth. They don’t exist in mass quantities, so they’re worth quite a bit. Be it money, regard, or whatever else, they’re worth a lot. If you go into a pet store you can get a school of goldfish for whatever change you have in your pocket, but if you tell the salesperson that you’re looking for an albino dodo bird you’re looking at selling off your Fortune 500 company to pay for it. This applies to pretty much anything these days, including college educations. How many people do you know that are set up with college funds and enrolling before they even graduate high school? Quite a bit. So there are tons of people in college, tons of things to major in, and tons of people leaving with degrees. By the simple logic we just talked about this would decrease the value of those degrees, wouldn’t it? There are increasing numbers of analysts, journalists, and commentators that would surely say so, and have been saying so over the past couple of years. There are tons of statistics out there showing that the vast majority of college grads will go back home to live with their parents once they leave college and work in job fields that are in no way related to their degrees.
Though it’s something that is happening exponentially these days and more people than just yours truly are taking notice, every case is unique. So many different factors determining each person’s future makes it impossible for the timeline I’m talking about to be that of everyone’s life. So let’s look at what it’s like for people for whom the American Dream in terms of college-then-career does work out. Say you go to college, get an internship, then graduate and go to work for that company. You’re starting off at a nice salary and life is really looking up after all that studying and toga partying. But in terms of net worth at this point you’re in the red. You paid tons of money to get the degree you have, most times it isn’t even your money to spend, but now is when you’re going to make it back, right? Well, over a long, long time you’ll eventually pay off your loans. But what comes into play before that? You just got the degree and the job, now that you’ve got a cozy career in the making and it’s time to start a family what do you need? A new car. Every successful person needs a nice, new car. Then once you have a kid or two, if that’s what you choose to do, what do the spouse and kid(s) need? A house. Amid paying off your loans that have a ridiculously high interest rate and keeping up with the general cost of living you now have a car payment and a house payment. If you’re lucky you actually break even every year in financial terms. It feels like things are good because your paychecks have a lot of numbers on them, but if you look at the long-term you’ve fallen into a pretty big hole.
That system sounds pretty rough. It’s a gamble putting all your money on the college plan, and an equally big gamble trying to be an entrepreneur and become successful on your own. Life in general, actually, every day you step outside, is a gamble.
Here’s an idea, remember a hundred or so years ago when there were those little schoolhouses instead of big ones with auditoriums and football fields? Those days it was difficult to become educated and most people were lucky if they could read and write. Books were hard to come by because printing them was costly and time consuming. Given those factors it only makes sense that the best and brightest go to the schoolhouse and have a teacher read the few books there to them. Look at how different it is today. Books barely exist anymore with today’s technology. Now all you have to do to learn about something is search it on the internet and you have an unlimited supply of mostly free information at your fingertips. Given that, doesn’t it seem a little silly to still act like the pilgrims and go to the schoolhouse? So many other systems have been updated and made more streamline for people of today, so why not the education system? Sure, it’s changed. It’s gotten bigger than ever and more expensive than ever. A lot of companies hire immigrants with college degrees over Americans not because they work cheaper, but because the quality of the education here isn’t so hot anymore. America is supposed to be the best, right? So why does its system of making people smarter pretty much defraud them of real training that can be found abroad and defraud the business community of valuable workers? Okay, that might sound harsh, but think about it. Is education a privilege or a right in an age where we have unlimited access to information in our pocket every day with smartphones?
No matter which route you take, it’s fun to learn about things that interest you. It keeps the mind sharp and sure makes conversation more enjoyable. I guess what it comes down to is two things – how much is it worth to you? And if you value it, do you trust in yourself to achieve it on your own?
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