College Conundrum
The other day I noticed an article [Link] “Is a college degree worthless?” by Jack Hough. I have been mulling this and yesterday noted Alexa Harrington, Educated Nation, had a blot on the article [Link]. This article is essentially an economic analysis that indicates one is economically better off to skip college, eneter the workforce, and save more of your pay than you can. As usual, she has done a masterful job and I heartily recommend her words and ideas to your attention span.
Nonetheless, I am moved to float my own ideas, however poorly they will stand by comparison. Simply and summarily put, I find the article itself a moving argument against attending college.
I reach this assessment because of the total vacuity of the article. In effect, it is a paradigm of the philosophy that the only purpose humans have is to make money. And if money is the only reason that someone attends college, then that person should indeed not do so. In the terms of the old adage about teaching the jackass to sing, it has two faults – it wastes the teacher’s time and it infuriates the jackass. In this case, attendance of college by those whose only reason for life is money is a waste of their time and a degradation of the institution for those who may benefit from it.
I shall withhold any conjecture or observation that such people satisfy the Sturgeon-da Vinci criterion of doing nothing productive except produce crap, largely because I have not exhaustedly sampled the population of such people. There may be some who do something beside metabolizing.
One does not attend college for monetary gain although one may gain monetarily by attending college, but only derivatively. The idea that one benefits monetarily directly from attending college is one of the myths of college democratization. The actuality is that one attends college for change.
No, this is not a declamation for or against the current administration. Change is not the province of politicians although its appellation may be.
One attends college to change oneself, and , perhaps, if one is to fail the Sturgeon-da Vinci criterion, to change some aspect of the species. The personal gain involved is not a matter of the contemporary social construct of the market, but in one’s head. College is about gaining new ideas, and information substantiating and fulfilling those ideas, and methods of using and expanding those ideas, and even, for a few, of coming up with new ideas. And it may be that one can use that to propagate in the social construct and enrich oneself with money but that derives from what one becomes by attending college, not directly by doing so.
So yes, if all you want to do is have a large amount of money to consume with, college is a poor choice. If you want to fail the Sturgeon-da Vinci criterion and do something that matters, college may be for you.
I don’t know what planet you’re living on Bud.
Many colleges charge $40,000 a year in tuition these days. There are people who can afford to blow $160,000 to “change;” they’re the children of the elite who will have wealth and position passed down to them from their families.
They’re only a slighly above average lot when it comes to say, SAT scores, or ability to handle an introductory physics course. Quite a few of them are dumb as a post.
You’ve got to dig into the general population (wealthwise) if you want to start getting bright people, people who’d you’d like to have in a classroom, and they just can’t afford the prices you’re asking — unless they’re looking at it from an economic perspective.
Honestly, landlords don’t care if you’re producing anything better than s**t, neither do banks, neither do supermarkets. All they care is that they get a check from you.
A. F. Mann
2 July 2009 at 12:29
QED
Simple Country Physicist
2 July 2009 at 13:58