I’ve been meaning to get back to the subject of societal categorization (starts here, previous here), but time constraints, etc. An article by Zachary Slayback, published on LinkedIn, caught my attention, however, with a title which rather summarizes the problem from my point of view: “It’s Time To Admit College Is Driven By Speculation — Not Investment.”
The unspoken assumption is not that the private sector (as defined here) has primacy, but that it has become the only viewpoint from which activity is to be evaluated. Right from the get-go:
One of the most popular tropes among career advisors, guidance counselors, school officials, and college recruiters today is that going to college is an investment. As more and more options for work experience and education outside of the higher education cartel crop up, those pushing the college option on young people are forced to fall back on telling the young that, though it may look costly now, it will pay off in the future. Like their Housing Crisis predecessors, they urge young people to take on the seemingly-unimaginable cost with some statistics and graphics showing that, in the recent past, a college degree pays for itself over a lifetime.
Sounds like he’s on the right track, doesn’t it?
It’s time that we admit that this isn’t the case.
The “it’s an investment!” strategy of sending young people to universities is one of the last options available to those urging people to take on this stodgy, quickly-outdated, and inefficient way to build the life that they want. If anything, this idea that it will pay off in the long run is mere speculation, not investment.
By retaining the language and thought patterns of the private sector, he cedes the entirety of society to the private sector, even though much of society is ill-suited to the operations of the private sector. Education should be desirable and celebrated because of how it improves society in so many ways – not just because it may make you more money.
(Says the guy who went into Computer Science because he didn’t want to live under an overpass.)
Many students attend college to get a good job without asking why they are going in the first place, what kind of job they want to have, what kind of life they want to live, and what they want to make of themselves. They think in general terms. This applies to their spending and saving habits once they get out of college. Why should they save now? The money has always been there for them, they can get loans to go to college, buy a house, get a car, etc.
This leads people to speculate not only with their educations but with their careers, too. Speculating with your career leads to speculating with your family life, your hobbies, your friends, and generally leads to an indefinite, unstable future.
I can’t help but note that most college students are what we like to call “young adults”, only beginning to learn how to think. Part of the college experience is learning how to think, how to recognize your interests and how to pursue them in a environment constructed to facilitate learning – and to learn things that maybe don’t seem interesting, or pertinent.
This article is fixated on the individual to an extent that I find somewhat unsettling. There’s, of course, much more to it, but I found it rather boring because he’s approaching the educational sector using the lens of the private sector, rather than understanding that the goal of the educational sector is different from the goal of the private sector – and so of course there’ll be some disappointment if your life is constructed around that paradigm.
