FORMAL SCHOOLING VS YOU: PART III
What do you hope to get out of formal schooling? More specifically, what do you hope to get from higher education? Is it a lucrative career? A well-rounded personality? The ability to converse with almost anyone about almost any topic? Acceptance in certain social circles? The chance to meet people who can help you succeed?
Whatever your goal, it’s entirely possible to meet it without spending years in a stifling classroom environment, and without piling up tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
High school students are told, over and over again, that a good career is impossible without a college degree. But is this true? Most often, the time spent in pursuit of a degree would otherwise be spent in the labor force, in travel, or in business ventures. Whether they succeed or not, these pursuits are learning opportunities. After a few years of them, assuming we’ve put forth reasonable effort, we are likely to have contacts, referrals, and experience producing products or services of real value. These traits are often valued more highly by employers than college degrees.
Even if we don’t learn much through formal schooling, the degree is a necessary credential, isn’t it? Don’t the best jobs require degrees? This may have been true for many years. When college graduates were rare, degrees may have indicated unusual merit. With millions of baccalaureates flooding the job market every year, though, the degree means less than it once did. The degree is a much less reliable signal of experience, knowledge, or effort than it once was. Many employers, therefore, are looking for other measures of career fitness. A LinkedIn profile and five minute Google search may reveals more about an applicant’s communication ability, work ethic, and commitment to completion of tasks than a degree will.
At the very least, some would say, the formal schooling environment offers effective networking. This is questionable, though. College students typically spend most of their time with people of roughly the same age. Most of the student’s acquaintances are studying the same subjects, and are doing the same things with their time. Almost nobody the student knows is active in business or the labor market. His social network is too narrow to benefit him very much. If he wants to cultivate contacts that will help him find employment, the college environment is the wrong place for it.
Whatever you hope to get from higher education, the formal school setting might not be the best place for it. If you look for them, you are likely to find other ways of meeting your goals. And these other ways are likely to cost much less- in time and money.
(To get the most out of informal learning, you need a reliable broadband connection. Talk to us. We can help.)