Education

the cost of it, the value of it

I have a college degree from a state university. I had a great time getting it. I was fortunate enough to have financial support. I got a well-rounded liberal arts degree. I use it. 

But I don’t use it for my job. The experience of college at 18-22 years old was less about what I was learning in class and more about what I was learning about myself and the world around me. I knew I wanted to write, so I studied writing. 

Beyond that, I had little direction. 

Ten years after I graduated I finally found direction in a place I never expected to be. I was 32 and living with my parents when I decided to take two classes at the local community college in McKinney, Texas. 

I took pre-calculus and chemistry. It had been years since I had been in a classroom and even longer since I’d attempted any math or science. I was surprised to learn I had an aptitude for it, which I had not realized before. 

Before, I thought I was bad at math. I began to wonder if I was not actually bad at it, but if it’s possible I was too preoccupied with other things when I was in high school and undergrad to really focus on what I was being taught. 

This opened up worlds to me that I previously thought I would never be able to enter. This was more profound and more valuable to me than anything I learned in class between the ages of 18 and 22. 

At 32, I was steadier, had sought to understand what made me anxious and “killed those darlings,” so to speak. I had seen some things. Not a lot of things, but the thirst for life experience had been well quenched. 

And this was, drumroll please, at community college. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough. 

When I was a teenager considering my options for higher education, there was so much ridiculous competition surrounding where we–all 611 of us in my graduating class–were going to go to school. It was not a competition of value, rather a competition of brand name. And we were all sucked into it. 

I don’t regret my time at LSU. I loved that time. 

Looking back, however, I do wonder at the value given to this time in a cultural sense. After all, we’re sending teens to college, encouraging them to take on an often upwards-of-six-figure commitment  for which I would argue they are not ready. Not only are they not ready, but they can’t afford it. Frankly, very few people can. 

A better way, in my opinion, would be to encourage them to get jobs. Take a class here or there, sure. Study what strikes your fancy. But to expect them to figure it out by the age of eighteen is ludicrous.

As is the increasingly rising price of brand-name education. If there is a system in the United States that needs to be overhauled, it’s the education system. I think this starts with parents encouraging their kids to think long-term and stop pushing them to figure out what they’d like to “be.” There are so many more important questions, such as, in what sort of environment do you thrive? Are you at your best working with a lot of people, or, like some of us, are you better in a background role, such as coding or research or a mechanical trade?

How much money do you want to make, and do you understand debt?

Do you want to travel, do you want to be able to work from home?

These are all questions I would have found valuable. They’re  less about how your education or job or career look from the outside and more about what makes you feel like a million bucks. 

Some eighteen year old pre-law students at Harvard feel like a million bucks, I’m sure. I was not one of them. And the older I get, and the more of my cohorts I talk to, the less I think about this system in which I was chewed up and spit out. 

Education? Yes. Big business education? No thanks. 

Go to community college. Go to trade school. Learn a skill and enter the work force with less debt. Work a job and get some life under your feet before you thrust yourself into something as serious as a degree path. 

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court turned down an executive order that would have forgiven student debt for some Americans. Understandable that a lot of folks were outraged and disappointed by this. Hopes were high some kind of relief program would emerge to relieve the ever-growing student debt issue. 

But what about the front end? Why is it so expensive in the first place?

The answer, as you know, is longer than my 1000 word column will allow. I could write a thesis on it. But suffice it to say that college, at some point, became less about education and more about making money, like a lot of other things in the United States. (Churches, looking at you). (Also healthcare and the insurance debacle). (Media, can’t leave you out).

To say that it shouldn’t be this way seems trite, because it is this way. It’s so far out of control that most days, I wonder if we have the ability to get ahead of it at all. Maybe, like student debt, we’ll have to try to bandage it at the tail end. 

I know that these things are not easy. I know that you reading this little column may yourself be one of the people who was hoping to see student debt relief enter the realm of possibility. This issue, like many others, will oscillate many more times before any sort of answer or relief is offered, and then it may not be the answer we hoped for. 

I’ll end by sharing a quote from Joan Littlewood, the theater director called “the mother of modern theater.” You might be wondering, what does a theater director, much less a dead one, have to say about student debt that could possibly be relevant? 

It’s often the artists who are able to draw the scope back for us so that we see how similar our struggles are, and that they are often more relatable than we think. 

“If we don’t get lost, we’ll never find a new route,” she said. And I think we’re well on our way to being properly lost.