Could it be that we’re asking the wrong questions?
It’s been almost two years since I graduated from college. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Geography-Anthropology. I love my degree and I loved earning it. College was a really great experience. I could have done without Algebra, but my classes were interesting, I met a lot of amazing people, and I gained new perspectives that have shaped me as a person. I liked school.
And I could have gone to graduate school. I certainly thought about it. When people would ask me “Well, what now?”, graduate school was the safe answer. And it would have been the safe choice. Not the easy choice, but the safe choice. I would have worked very hard and been able to chart, with some predictability, the course of my life. Which is pretty nice…if anthropology were truly my passion.
Instead, I made a much more difficult and far riskier decision. I took the chance to chart my own course, following something I was truly passionate about. Something I didn’t need a degree for. Something that wouldn’t be predictable.
I am very fortunate, as a young woman, to have the option of advanced education so open to me. Universities used to be only for an elite few. Degrees were rarer and therefore college education was highly valued. We’ve gained a lot, as a society, by having a college education accessible to almost anyone. But we’ve changed a lot, too.
Because now college is something different: it’s the default.
It’s nice to imagine that higher education is so valued that we want it for everyone. But that’s not how college is sold, is it? College is sold as the key to unlocking your true purpose. The place where you discover your passion. Your path to adulthood. Your only chance of finding a job. Your ticket to earning WAY MORE MONEY than those poor schmoes who didn’t go to school.
And all of those things are true…for some people.
But what about most people?
The people who go through four years and earn a degree that they will never use.
The people who leave college expecting employment and wind up working the same job they could have worked before…only now they’re thousands of dollars in debt.
The people who simply put off leaving school because they haven’t found IT yet: their passion, the thing that fires them up inside.
The people who put off leaving school because they can’t afford to start paying off loans.
The people who get a degree, get a high-earning job, and then burn-out. Because making more money doesn’t mean a whole lot when it’s draining you dry.
We have been sold the idea of college as the answer to our existential angst: why am I here and what I am supposed to do with my life. Don’t know what to do? Go to school! We go into college not knowing what to do and we come out expecting someone to give us a job. That it is an achievement does not rule out the fact that, for so many people, the process is entirely passive.
To suggest that someone not go to college is akin to suggesting that they doom themselves to a life of menial labor. Is that really true? That tends to be the consensus among my peers. Friends who never went to school, or never finished school, practically apologize for it. But among the older people I know, this issue is not nearly so simple.
I’ll be posting more on this over the next few weeks. I want to have this conversation here on my blog. I want to have it here for my younger siblings. My brilliant and artistic sister, who is still deciding where (if anywhere) college fits into her future, and my musically talented brother, who is making the same scary choice I am but without my five year interlude.
They’re discovering now what most people won’t discover until much later in life: that college isn’t always the answer.
