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If I hear one more Hillary Clinton statement, or that of many, many others, about education being the "key to our future", I think I shall lose my lunch. We have legions of unemployed MBAs, PhDs, holders of Master's Degrees and eager four year graduates. Usually, the person urging others to get degrees is someone who has done well with their college experience. The assumption, and it is wildly out of whack with reality, is that, well, I went to college, I got my degree and a good job, so look where I am now and you should follow. For everyone who implies this, there are ten people with degrees who are out of work, out of luck and broke.
What if, tomorrow, 1/3 of the population suddenly had PhD degrees? Where would we put them? What would they do? What, more specifically, would they do in jobs that were at all commensurate with their level of training? The answer is obvious: nothing. You could assume, however, that some of those with the degrees would replace others who only had master's degrees or undergraduate degrees and, presto!, they'd be doing the job so much better that the whole society would benefit. Unfortunately, this is a false assumption. Piling degrees on degrees does not mean that person would do better than someone with less training. It depends, in part, on the job being tackled.
Degrees are to in some measure like money: if everyone in town has 100,000 dollars cash in their pockets, after a short while, it won't buy much. The rules of supply and demand apply. Once a four year college degree was held by fewer than ten percent of the population. As more people get more degrees, a master’s or a doctorate becomes the only way to set yourself apart from others.
Consider this, too: intelligence is a very over rated quality. We need it, but we only need so much of it. What we do need is a lot more are people who can do the work at hand and people who can lead the way toward new possibilities. We need people who can do all sorts of work and we must do a better job of matching up skills and jobs. It is incorrect to simply think of formal education as the opposite of ignorance. All of the people who were carefully and skillfully trained to program and operate big computers in the 1950s and ‘60s found their skill set virtually useless when personal computers hit in the 1980s. Would it have helped them to have more training on IBM mainframes?
There is another aspect to the insistence on education as a starting point. Employers, having choices, have made a four year degree the minimum ticket for many jobs. Do you really have to have that degree to do the job? In many, many cases, no.
My daughter, as but one example, has a four year degree in psychology which, I suppose, helps her about four minutes per year in the job she is doing. Without the degree, however, she probably would not have been considered. This is the ordinary thing: people working in areas where they have experience rather than a specific degree that can be applied to a job category. Degrees become barriers to entrance as well as opportunities and then everyone says, "You have to have the degree". It is self fulfilling. The education establishment would like us to believe it is an iron clad truth somehow determined by the laws of nature. It is not.
There are many things we need in our society that cannot be found in higher learning. Insight is one. It can be nurtured, like talent, but it can't be trained into someone who doesn't have it. Creative ability to see around problems to solutions is another. The ability to make a spontaneous leap across vast amounts of information to find and see connections is another. Churning out more degrees is unlikely to help in these matters.
Consider, also, this: in each generation, a substantial cohort skips college or skips out and often winds up making major contributions. Does anyone suggest that Bob Dylan's songs would be better if only he had stayed at the University of Minnesota? Or, the same, at different schools, for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? In an earlier time in a different field, the question could be asked about Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings and many others who did rather well in broadcasting. (It is also reasonable to ask, in the case of these last three, if they would even be considered for their first jobs now without degrees, in which case their companies would miss their valuable contributions.)
In seeking a degree, you are forced to learn what someone else thinks is important. What if you have better ideas and insights on your own? Too bad. Scientists and many others know that the most creative and interesting time of their lives almost always happens in their 20s, at the time when college falls. In some cases, college can replace this burst of creative energy with trudging to classes to learn out of date information.
UNEMPLOYED PHDS
Our governmental, non-profit and business culture currently has more qualified people than it can employ. This is true, in part, because once people have specific jobs, others are automatically locked out and therefore unable to prove they could do a better job. We have evolved a star system in America where people are divided into drones and stars. If you make it early as a star, and you can keep the star shinning even if you make huge mistakes, then your path is assured. Meanwhile, the drones are no dummies and overtime might know more than the so called stars.
None of this means that education is not valuable for a given person or in a particular field. As anyone who has established a career in a profession with difficult entrance requirements knows, it takes a lot of work and some luck, plus the degree, to get started and keep going. No matter the background and training, however, almost everyone faces the possibility that the job they are doing will one day be gone.
We need more people who are profoundly educated, not because this would assure them of opportunity, but because we don't know what benefits it might bring. We need, also, to make a new pathway for people who don't fit into four year colleges but who, nonetheless, are intelligent, capable and hard working. Beyond that, we need to increase our overall productivity.
The world is filled with problems that aren't being addressed. We need to find ways to put people to work solving some of those problems, regardless of how many degrees they might hold. Taking on the readily apparent problems of our society will produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Beyond that, having a lot more “highly educated” people in a work force that doesn’t necessarily need them is not going to guarantee prosperity for anyone.
Doug Terry, 3.7.11
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