Learning to Earn

If you ask many students their reason for attending college, they'd tell you it was to get a good job and make more money than they would without. And it's true, one of the main ploys we use to entice young people to attend college is future earning potential. Self-improvement is simply icing on the cake to success and financial stability.

Yet with the job market as stagnant as it has been the past few years, and the proliferation of BAs competing for jobs that may not even require it, are we able to keep our promises of better employment and brighter futures?

The University of Regina in Saskatchewan is working hard to keep this promise. The university has started an employment guarantee program where students who fail to gain employment within six months of graduation can get another year of free tuition to pursue other certification and/or vocational training toward their chosen field.

Yet is more class time truly going to make someone more employable?

Paul Krugman discusses this in a recent column in The New York Times. He makes the argument that education cannot be the be-all, end-all to attaining livable, stable employment. Education is important, but can only be expected to do so much. The rest is up to us; if we value stable employment, affordable health care, and safe working conditions, we need to work as a society to make these greater changes. Providing more college degrees cannot directly solve greater market issues around labor and employment.

And there's the case for not attending college. Recently James Altucher, a well-known hedge fund manager and author, infamously implored parents not to send their children to college. He argued that entrepreneurial skills were far more important for young people to learn, that colleges were not teaching these marketable skills, and that the money parents spend on college could net much more if invested over their offsprings' lifetimes. While I am careful to take advice on matters of what to do with my life from a hedge fund manager, I do have to agree that the skills and attitudes learned through entrepreneurship--independence, self-motivation, confidence, to name a few--are extremely important for anyone looking to shape their own future to know.

So, if obtaining a college degree isn't about getting a better job, and a good argument can be made to not attend college, maybe we should be asking a different question. What is the purpose of getting a college degree?

This discussion about the purpose of college reminds me of conversations I used to have with classmates in my Master's program about the reason for our Master's degree. Many of my colleagues wanted more practical training in our grad program, such as budgeting, supervision, and other on-the-job skills, to be more marketable in searching for Student Affairs positions. I could appreciate my classmates' concern for a successful job search after graduation, but I also believed that if our program truly shifted in focus it would devolve into a professional certification program rather than a Master's degree level program of study. Much of this has gone into my reflection on why a Master's degree is important to our field--if it isn't about being "certified" to work in Student Affairs, it must serve some other greater purpose of relevance and importance to our field (see my earlier post on the matter).

Why did you go to college? If you pursued graduate study, why did you choose to continue your education?

Did you go to college to get a better job, or did you consider potential career fields because you wanted to get a college degree (and you wanted it to be relevant to your work)?

My answers to these questions may appear in future blog posts...

Bryce