The role, price, and value of a university degree has been constantly changing.
The role, price and value of college and a degree are three aspects of post-secondary education should be considered objectively in order to keep an up to date, relevant perspective of education.
The Role of a Degree
The role of college is vastly different than it was fifty years ago. Fifty years ago, people attended college as a source for information because that was the only place that you could get it. The information given at school would prepare you for a career in the field of your choosing. College trained you to be a worker.
College degrees used to be seen as an elite sign of mastery and preparedness to work the job that you were trained for. In certain cases such as law or medicine, this is still the case. However, for all other cases, this has changed. The barrier of entry for many careers are now beginning to drop the requirement of a college degree.
College used to be the only way for people to get into or rise above the middle class, because it was seen as the way to secure a better future. There has even been claims that students who graduate from college make one million dollars more in their lifetime than people who don’t have a college degree.
However, in today’s world, the role of college is not as clear. Some people claim that college is a rite of passage for teenagers; a transition between childhood and adulthood. I’ve heard arguments that college is about learning to manage your own time, learning how to interact with people, and developing yourself personally.
One thing is for sure though, college today plays a very different role than it did fifty years ago, challenging a lot of the traditional notions of education.
The Price of a Degree
The next reason, price, doesn’t have too much debate around it. The cost of getting a degree has skyrocketed beyond belief. In fact, Chase is no longer making new student loans because the student loan market is no longer sustainable.
This is sad, because the price of a degree continues to rise. It isn’t uncommon for parents to begin saving up for their child’s college education the moment their child is born, or teenagers signing themselves into decades of debt to pursue a degree.
The Value of a Degree
In today’s world, a degree may help you get your foot in the door, but it doesn’t do much more than that. Millions of students are graduating with degrees, saturating society with an overabundance of students who have internship experience, degrees, and other things that make it difficult to properly assess a job applicant.
The general trend is that when more people have access to a certain product or service, the competitive edge of the product or service diminishes. The same is true for college degrees. The more people that have degrees, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish talent.
The fact that someone has a degree today doesn’t mean terribly much. Having a degree simply tells me that an individual spent a few years of their life doing homework and taking tests from an institution, and they did well enough on their exams to receive a piece of paper. A degree tells me nothing about a person’s work ethic, their dreams, their ability to communicate and work in a team, or even how much they actually know.
Ultimately, college isn’t for everyone, and I would argue that based on the price, value, and role, that it isn’t meant for most people.