varjohaltia | Oct. 23rd, 2004

Prompted by a friend's LJ entry on hesitating whether he should go back to school to get a degree or not, I decided to share a couple of thoughts.

Does a college degree increase your earnings potential?: Depends on the degree and the field. A liberal arts degree, likely not, particularly considering the amount of money spent to get it. An engineering degree, certainly. An arts degree, maybe. There are also fields, such as universities and many other government and state jobs, which require a degree for no particularly good reason.
So... Why should anyone get one of those useless degrees?: Some people can learn on their own. My hat's off to them. To learn things such as language and history, I must have the framework of a class, or otherwise I just slack off. So, no school, no real learning about things I should know but can't be bothered to look up on my own.

Also, it opens your horizons. You have to read things you otherwise wouldn't, discuss topics you otherwise wouldn't, speak with people you otherwise wouldn't speak with, and write papers that make you think about things, hopefully in ways that will surprise yourself.

College, much more so than any other educational forum, (alas, increasingly little so,) teaches learning, even if this is incidental. You will get comfortable with online databases, libraries, and gathering information to be condensed into a paper, with proper citations and style. Many of these details are particularly academic, but ultimately they will help you regardless of what kind of writing and for what medium you do. In particular, knowledge of the underlying rules of citing are important in any publication.

It teaches deadlines and time management. You get assigned a project, and you have to do it before a given time. (I should be critiquing a book right now, for example, instead of writing this.) You won't loose your job over not getting it done, but it'll hopefully eventually teach to deal with planning ahead enough that projects get done on time.

Finally, it proves something. It proves that you can stick with a goal and finish it. That's it. That's the most important feature of a degree. It shows a prospective employer that you do have the skills to express yourself, to finish tasks, to work in a structured work environment. Boring, perhaps, but that's 'em beans. Well, that, and it shows you that you can do these things. Self confidence!
But the degree I want leaves me poorer off in the end, why bother?: Because you want to. I cringe every time I hear myself say things like those in the last chapter, or earnings potential. Money is important in modern society, but happiness is much more so. If you want to learn, you should. If you think that a degree in something useless (political science?) makes you feel accomplished, go for it! The key is that you should do whatever you think makes you feel better as a person. More self-confident, more at ease with the worth of your life, a better human being (or anything else, in case this race doesn't cover all my readership.)

I'm all for abuse of our tax dollars in way of education. People should educate themselves in what they feel they should be educated in, not in what allows them to buy the nicest suburban home, one and a half kids, two cars and dog. Those realities will intrude on their own strongly enough as is. Education for direct vocational gain is dandy in a macroeconomic sense and sociological sense, but education in what people feel is important and makes them more whole is civilization, and unless we have that, there's not much point to anything else.