It being graduation season, the air is abuzz with newly released studies evaluating the ROI\u2019s and CBA\u2019s of PhD\u2019s and MSc\u2019s.\u00a0 Each new finding stirs up a fresh flurry of discourse about the \u2018worth\u2019 and \u2018value\u2019 of a university education.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a new discussion.<\/p>\n
The debate over whether a university education is \u2018worth it\u2019 has been around for decades, certainly since before I enrolled in my alma mater over forty years ago.\u00a0 Even then, people questioned my purposes: \u201cWhy bother?\u00a0 There are hundreds of PhD\u2019s driving taxis.\u00a0 An education is worth nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
I disagree.\u00a0 Education \u2013 any and all education \u2013 is priceless. But back to our story.<\/p>\n
So why did I go?\u00a0 First, there was a family culture that valued \u2018higher learning\u2019.\u00a0 One of my paternal grandmother\u2019s proudest boasts (she was English) was that \u2018All my boys went to Oxford\u2019.\u00a0 (Her lone daughter did not, but married a doctor, which given the times and circumstances, was the next best thing.)\u00a0 Whether or not the actual degrees they earned played a significant role in their eventual lives is debatable, but that was not the point.\u00a0 The learning, the education, (and, this being England, the social prestige) was value unto itself.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 So off I went.<\/p>\n
Forty-plus years later, I retain not only fond memories of my university years but also some timeless lessons.\u00a0 One of my favourite and most memorable came from an early history course.\u00a0 We\u2019d always been taught that history was a series of dates and events to be memorized.\u00a0\u00a0 No, said the professor. History is a theoretical construct based on interpretation of a series of known facts.\u00a0 All history is, basically, fiction. That\u2019s 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\u2019d been told or taught. What a revelation.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 A friend told me of a moment in which, describing the dawn of agriculture, he framed this phase of human civilisation as having to \u2018scratch in the dirt, or die\u2019.\u00a0 Hundreds of undergrads feverishly scribed his words in their Hilroys: scratch in dirt or die.<\/p>\n
Sometimes a banana is<\/strong> just a banana, Anna.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s not the lessons and lectures that are important.\u00a0 It\u2019s developing the critical thinking abilities that will enable you to work through life\u2019s various challenges. Those skills will be valuable always, no matter what you do or where you are.<\/p>\n I achieved my degree (in Art History and Creative Writing) and went on, to my mother\u2019s endless shame, to a career in advertising and media production.\u00a0 While what I learned at university may not have had a direct bearing on my life’s work,\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s small beer.\u00a0 The biggest gift of higher education is as stated above: it teaches you how to think.\u00a0 How to problem solve.\u00a0 How to assess differing accounts and arrive at a semblance of truth.\u00a0 How to see the world through one\u2019s own eyes rather than just going with someone else\u2019s version.\u00a0 Higher education is your own, best BS detector.<\/p>\n My three children all went on to post secondary studies, with little or no prodding from we parents.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n And as to the enduring economic argument: to me, the real, true value of higher education is simple, if difficult to enumerate.<\/p>\n As a colleague once said, no-one can predict the future, and no-one knows what tomorrow\u2019s jobs will be. Today\u2019s in-demand skills maybe tomorrow\u2019s robotic routine.\u00a0 The job you spent years training for may tomorrow be obsolete.\u00a0 Too bad, so sad.<\/p>\n No, the best way to prepare yourself for an uncertain future is to learn to be innovative, resourceful, creative and open to new challenges.\u00a0 So armed, you can adapt to a changing economic landscape and find footholds in a shifting world.\u00a0 Those are the real skills that university teaches. They are always in demand. And they are priceless.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It being graduation season, the air is abuzz with newly released studies evaluating the ROI\u2019s and CBA\u2019s of PhD\u2019s and MSc\u2019s.\u00a0 Each new finding stirs up a fresh flurry of discourse about the \u2018worth\u2019 and \u2018value\u2019 of a university education. It\u2019s not a new discussion. The debate over whether a university education is \u2018worth it\u2019…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts","category-filosofy-c","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joesays.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}