It being graduation season, the air is abuzz with newly released studies evaluating the ROI’s and CBA’s of PhD’s and MSc’s. Each new finding stirs up a fresh flurry of discourse about the ‘worth’ and ‘value’ of a university education.
It’s not a new discussion.
The debate over whether a university education is ‘worth it’ has been around for decades, certainly since before I enrolled in my alma mater over forty years ago. Even then, people questioned my purposes: “Why bother? There are hundreds of PhD’s driving taxis. An education is worth nothing.”
I disagree. Education – any and all education – is priceless. But back to our story.
So why did I go? First, there was a family culture that valued ‘higher learning’. One of my paternal grandmother’s proudest boasts (she was English) was that ‘All my boys went to Oxford’. (Her lone daughter did not, but married a doctor, which given the times and circumstances, was the next best thing.) Whether or not the actual degrees they earned played a significant role in their eventual lives is debatable, but that was not the point. The learning, the education, (and, this being England, the social prestige) was value unto itself.
Second, through a mixture of circumstance and luck (and, ok, a little bit of academic power-lifting) I found myself at the age of 16 newly arrived back in Canada from a stint in English grammar school with the equivalent of a high school diploma, fully qualified to begin university a full two years earlier than most of my north American peers, which sounded far more appealing than starting to work for a living. So off I went.
Forty-plus years later, I retain not only fond memories of my university years but also some timeless lessons. One of my favourite and most memorable came from an early history course. We’d always been taught that history was a series of dates and events to be memorized. No, said the professor. History is a theoretical construct based on interpretation of a series of known facts. All history is, basically, fiction. That’s why history is an art, not a science. This professor challenged us to look at the facts of an event and formulate our own interpretation of what occurred, rather than simply parroting back what we’d been told or taught. What a revelation.
There was a geography professor whose lectures were so notoriously off the rails that dozens of undergrads sat in on them just for the experience. A friend told me of a moment in which, describing the dawn of agriculture, he framed this phase of human civilisation as having to ‘scratch in the dirt, or die’. Hundreds of undergrads feverishly scribed his words in their Hilroys: scratch in dirt or die.
Sometimes a banana is just a banana, Anna.
It was a rich and glorious time in my life. But the big central lesson I took away was this: high school teaches you how to learn; university teaches you how to think. It’s not the lessons and lectures that are important. It’s developing the critical thinking abilities that will enable you to work through life’s various challenges. Those skills will be valuable always, no matter what you do or where you are.
I achieved my degree (in Art History and Creative Writing) and went on, to my mother’s endless shame, to a career in advertising and media production. While what I learned at university may not have had a direct bearing on my life’s work, throughout my career, random nuggets of knowledge from my university days have enriched and informed my work in all kinds of interesting and unpredictable ways.
But that’s small beer. The biggest gift of higher education is as stated above: it teaches you how to think. How to problem solve. How to assess differing accounts and arrive at a semblance of truth. How to see the world through one’s own eyes rather than just going with someone else’s version. Higher education is your own, best BS detector.
My three children all went on to post secondary studies, with little or no prodding from we parents. In fact, they all went further than me, gaining masters or equivalents. We never pushed them into it but we supported them, financially where we could (the rising cost of post-sec education is one of the great penny-wise pound-foolish anathemas of our time) and without reservation in all other ways. I like to think that one of the motivators for them was the same as for me: a family culture that prized and valued learning and education.
And as to the enduring economic argument: to me, the real, true value of higher education is simple, if difficult to enumerate.
As a colleague once said, no-one can predict the future, and no-one knows what tomorrow’s jobs will be. Today’s in-demand skills maybe tomorrow’s robotic routine. The job you spent years training for may tomorrow be obsolete. Too bad, so sad.
No, the best way to prepare yourself for an uncertain future is to learn to be innovative, resourceful, creative and open to new challenges. So armed, you can adapt to a changing economic landscape and find footholds in a shifting world. Those are the real skills that university teaches. They are always in demand. And they are priceless.
And to those who persist in trying to hang a price tag on higher education: these are people who (to borrow from Oscar Wilde) know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.