Higher education is now widely accepted as an essential step to future success. But at what price can we justify the gain we get from this — at least — four-year experience?
I recently watched an insightful and personally inspirational video on YouTube by a spoken word poet named Suli Breaks, entitled “Why I Hate School but Love Education,” which questions if school is necessarily a means to education. Breaks says that many who became successful without a college education were educated, but not necessarily in the fields that can be taught.
He cites Richard Branson and Henry Ford, educated in business, innovation and entrepreneurship, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, educated in technological innovation and Vincent van Gogh, educated in making art. Thomas Edison, Wolfgang Puck, Michael J. Fox, Sean Connery, Halle Berry, Ellen DeGeneres and entrepreneurs Mary Kay Ash and Debbi Fields never attended or never graduated college. Even Brown’s Ted Turner ’60 was expelled before completing his degree.
Some of these people were products of less education-centered times, and these are all rare cases of successes out of millions of failures, but the point is still there: What can we do with our degrees that we cannot do without them? What is the relevance and purpose of a college degree in today’s society?
Today, college degrees are required more universally than ever, and a struggling economy gives us far fewer job prospects and less security than were afforded generations past. How many years of school, how many extracurriculars, how much experience and how many connections must we accumulate before achieving “success”?
In today’s economy, employment remains uncertain even after attaining degrees of certification from institutions of higher learning. It is common to hear of bachelor’s degree holders working as waiters and baristas, of law school graduates being unable to find relevant positions, of unemployment and underemployment that leave former students wallowing in debt. A report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity concluded that, of college-educated Americans, “many of the jobs they do have aren’t worth the price of their diplomas,” and that “of 41.7 million working college graduates in 2010, about 48 percent of the class of 2010 work jobs that require less than a bachelor’s degree and 38 percent … didn’t even need high school diplomas.”
Many positions that could be attained a decade or two ago with a high school degree or some college now require associate’s and bachelor’s degrees at the least, often also calling for years of work in the relevant field. In 1973, “only 25.5 million jobs or 28 percent of jobs required a college degree.” By 2018, that number is expected to rise to 102.9 million, an increase of 63 percent in the number of all positions in America requiring a degree since 1973.
And when we get that job, how long do we stay? That halcyon career of yesteryear, where one stays in one place for decades, no longer exists. According to an article published in Forbes in August, “the average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years ... but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that.”
So why pursue an advanced education? Breaks argues that many, if not most, of those who attend college will go on to work to enrich others. What, then, is the purpose of gaining a college degree in respect to our personal ambitions? Are we truly gaining an education and learning new perspectives and ideas so that our lives will be self-guided, or are we just passing through these four years so that we can further our future employers’ agendas? Will we continue to pursue innovation and originality, or will we give it up for professionalism?
I’m not implying that seeking a professional career is in any way “selling out to the man,” but we must seek never to allow the essence of our existences to be shrunk down to a sentence-long description or occupation. My interpretation of the “spirit of Brown” is that our goals should not be to necessarily accumulate wealth, but rather for us to acheive positive change in the world due to our efforts.
What will you do with your hard work and your huge financial investment? Life should not be a tug-of-war between personal fulfillment and economic stability. Breaks says this: “Decide what your life is worth: your passion or your paycheck.” But there should not be a choice between passions and paychecks, between the dreary and unfulfilling working experience and personal accomplishments and fulfillment. Rather, there should be opportunity to do both simultaneously. In regard to our education and life pursuits, we should not be defined or limited by precedent or external expectations.
Armani Madison ’16 has an affinity for holding conversations over topics like these in a Southern accent. He can be reached at armani_madison@brown.edu.
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