In leading up to today's unintelligent question, I'd like to tell a little story about something I received in the mail a few weeks back. It was a letter asking me to fill out an enclosed survey for recent university graduates. Frankly, the survey seemed rather lengthy, and in the end I decided it wasn't in my best interest to fill it out. Why? Well, based on the questions being asked of me, including what my level if income was at present, it seemed that a goal of the survey might have been to establish some sort of "cause and effect" relationship between the education I received and my ability to earn a living in the open marketplace.
Frankly, I consider myself to be a sort of economic outlier, because I made the decision to enter the workforce early and continue my university studies part time, over the course of eight or so years. Therefore, for anybody to suggest that my economic output in the workplace had largely to do with my university studies is to be making an absurd, and frankly insulting statement. An even more insulting proposition is that administrators of a "survey" would attempt to leverage my own blood, sweat and tears in the workplace, which put me on the career path I am on today, and potentially make a claim that my university or college degree somehow magically "caused" all of this to happen. But, am I the only one who thinks this way? Sometimes, I wonder about this, and hence today's unintelligent question:
Does a university or college degree pay our bills and put food on the table, or do we?
This question arises from a couple of previous blog posts, where I suggested that one of the major flaws in modern workplace design was the inability for employees to recognize a direct relationship between their productive outputs and the value they receive in exchange as consideration. Based on this conclusion, I began wondering if the attitudes and beliefs necessary for people to accept this type of system were somehow taught and reinforced at an earlier stage in life, such as when they are preparing to enter the workforce. The formal education system, it turns out, is quite possibly the ideal environment for these notions to take hold, since as students we are essentially programmed to believe that we can expect higher monetary returns in the workplace if we "earn" a college or university degree. Once again, we see an example of how we learn to accept an indirect relationship between our actual productive outputs and what we receive in return for them. How deep does this little rabbit hole go?
Instead of exploring this issue in detail today, I'd like to sidetrack a little and suggest you have a look at the following video: "College Conspiracy".
It examines a set of preconceptions that students may have around the actual value of a college education, and presents some alternative points of view on the true merits of a post-secondary education. I won't say that I endorse the whole content of the film, but I found that it offered a refreshing look at the topic at hand. Might there be a student loan "bubble" in a few years, similar in proportion to the housing bubble the US finds itself in presently? You be the judge!
