Mike You don't seem to have an ounce of pretentiousness in you. I'm curious how someone like yourself with 6 years of schooling came to appreciate and respect the people that do the less glamorous jobs. Were you knocked out of your ivory tower, or did your parents chain you to the ground and raise you to appreciate everyone's struggle?
When I was going to college, my mother and her secretary friends lectured me often, reminding me that having a college degree doesn't mean you're any smarter or better than anyone else.
Seems like a simple point these days, but it's shocking how many people still think that schooling has anything to do with wisdom, knowledge or value to society. What's your opinion? Meech
My opinion is that, in general, a college experience will make you a much richer person. A college degree however, will not. As you suggest, the pursuit of knowledge is very different than the pursuit of accomplishment, and a degree can only speak to the latter.
We tell our kids that a college degree will elevate them above others. It wont. We tell ourselves that a degee makes us more credible than we were before receiving it. It doesn't. A sheepskin has no more signifigance than that which you assign to it, and probably a good deal less. Degrees are trophies, to be hung on the wall and admired, usually by the one who received it. Like the head of a dead deer, they stare back at us from above the mantle, leaving others to wonder about the rest of the animal. Fancy papers and severed heads tell us nothing of real life or real understanding - only about money and ego.
I missed my graduation in favor of a Pink Floyd concert at Madison Square Garden. My actual degree was sent to my parents house, and opened by my Dad. I remember the message he left me. "Hey Mike, you got something from the University. It looks like a receipt..."
We tell our kids that a college degree will elevate them above others. It wont. We tell ourselves that a degee makes us more credible than we were before receiving it. It doesn't. A sheepskin has no more signifigance than that which you assign to it, and probably a good deal less. Degrees are trophies, to be hung on the wall and admired, usually by the one who received it. Like the head of a dead deer, they stare back at us from above the mantle, leaving others to wonder about the rest of the animal. Fancy papers and severed heads tell us nothing of real life or real understanding - only about money and ego.
Mike Rowe
I personally agree with you, Mike, but the sad fact is, most employers don't. They see the degree as credibility, no matter when you earned it, or what you've done with it. Any look at the want ads is enough to make my point. "BA/BS required" is one of the most often used phrases. Although they do also put in "or equivalent experience", the reality is if you don't have a degree, they won't even look at you. Right or wrong, that's the way of the modern workaday world.
I just tried posting a serious response to Mike's post, quoting him, and it went to the word queue. I think (though who knows) the trigger word was the acronym for Bachelor of Science degree (B*), as in BA/B*. I did not deliberately use any trigger words.
My point was that right or wrong, employers look for those with degrees.
I'm really getting fed up with this trigger word business.
Fancy papers and severed heads tell us nothing of real life or real understanding - only about money and ego.
I don't often take exception to statements, but......I took the twelve-year route through grad school. Started in something called 'Personnel Services' because I wanted to get into a particular job field; changed to Psychology, then to Social Work. When I started looking at catalogues again and asked for my dad's opionion, his response was "just finish something!" Ultimately I ended up in Urban Anthropology, led there by a couple of jobs working with Southeast Asian refugees. Money? Hardly. Ego? Not really; I graduated once I realized I had taken too many classes to quit. And while the experiences I have had won't make it to the television screen, I don't know if everybody has had the opportunity and fun of teaching English to a Buddhist monk from Laos in a Vietnamese temple in Memphis, TN.
The need to label and categorize people based on the type of trophy they possess does seem kind of sad, but it's clearly the way that we are wired, and as you suggest, it does make the world go round. My point is not to suggest that degrees are not worth having - only that their importance is relative, and subject to huge misinterpretation and unrealistic expectations.
Puppet,
Aren't we're saying the same thing? That the experiences we've had in the course of study are not enhanced or diminished by an award? I believe that you have earned a "good degree" - one that comes about as a symptom of an honest journey. How long should that journey take? Two, four, six, twelve years? I don't really think it really matters.
I completely agree with what Mike is saying. Although it is necessary to obtain a degree to become a "professional", I can speak for myself and for others when I say that I've learned a lot more from my own study than I learned in college filling requirements. For instance, in college, if you want to learn to be a history or biology teacher, they won't teach you history or biology, they will require you to take child education classes, art classes, psychology, statistics, child psychology- nothing near the kind of knowledge you can obtain by just reading a few books.
After 6 years of college studying to be an architect, I felt like I had a lot of book knowledge and no street smarts. So I stepped back from the "career track" that was expected of me, and went out to learn about things that they had never taught me in school.
Three years later, after working retail jobs, politics, moving across the country, falling flat on my face, and crawling back up, I believe I was right. There is no better education of humanity than knowing how to sell them something in order to eat. Likewise, there is no better way of learning who you are than spending time with someone quite different than yourself, and realizing that differences make people interesting, not better or worse. And when you fall flat on your a** after trying something and failing, you realize that what really matters in life is people that help each other when they're down, and have fun for no reason when life is good. My degree is a piece of paper I use to get a job. It has nothing to do with who I am.
Accomplishment is a wonderful feeling, but sometimes just surviving and being able to laugh at yourself is important, too. Respect, caring and gratitude are necessities as well. They don't teach any of that in school.
How's this for an interesting coincidence? I had just finished reading this thread (and a couple of others) and then turned to another part of my desk to go through some mail from the past week. One of the things I had was a newsletter published by the office of the (TX) state comptroller's office. I scanned through it to see if there was anything worth reading in it and, what do you know, there's an article of interest to this thread.
Evidently the state is trying to pass a bill telling public universities to take measures to "encourage" students to graduate with a bachelor's degree in no more than 4 years. (And some of the universities already have such programs.) The article says that the universities are badly overcrowded and getting worse, and that the only way they can continue to function is either (a) do a lot of building/development, which of course means spend a lot of money, or (b) get rid of a bunch of students. They present it as if it's all for the students' good, saying that it'll save them money and let them start earning sooner. There's even a table showing the economic differences between graduating in 4 yrs and graduating in 5.5 yrs. If you read only the bold print on the table, it looks like that extra 1.5 yr is going to cost almost $55,000, but when you look at the fine print they've included an assumed $45,000 that the person could have earned in that time, and the real difference in cost is less than $10,000.
Oh, and what are the incentives for graduating on time? Possibilities listed are tuition rebates (ok, that one's not bad, as long as it's a reasonable amount, but it goes downhill fast after that), free football tickets, and preferential seating at graduation. Oh, joy. They push me out according to their timetable instead of letting me learn at my own speed, and in return I get to go to an event I probably would have attended anyway and I get a good seat at an event I have no interest in attending. *sigh*
Wow, mieledio, for being the wealthiest country in the world we sure seem to put very little emphasis on educating our people (vs. building suspension bridges in Alaska, million dollar landscaping jobs at the presidential libraries, going to Mars, building bigger bombs, and going to war).
i think a college degree isnt to important. you need too be school educated but you dont need a degree for every thing. i never went to college but ended up on a towboat. best thing i ever did. i made a good living for my family and was happy. what more do you need?
Originally posted by deckhanddon: i think a college degree isnt to important. you need too be school educated but you dont need a degree for every thing. i never went to college but ended up on a towboat. best thing i ever did. i made a good living for my family and was happy. what more do you need?
Personally I believe in working for a living but not living to work. If your job makes you enough money to pay your bills and doesn't drive you to drink you're ahead of the game.
