What Is the Value of an Education?
To be educated is more than just a status symbol
The way we view education in North America is backward and unsustainable.
A very vocal portion of the population, American and otherwise, believes that the value of an education is lessened if you don’t have to pay for it.
Expensive private schools are held in higher esteem than their comparatively cheaper public post-secondary options, and the students of those institutions are granted special consideration.
The prevailing societal expectation is that education should be run like a for-profit business. Post-secondary education exists to churn out good workers with an impressive pedigree.
What does this mean?
Learning is a business, and students are the product.
When you say that free education carries no value, you’re telling me that you view a degree as a matter of status. You’re not viewing it from the perspective of learning for its own sake; you’re viewing it as a measure of a person’s value to the workforce.
This fundamentally misunderstands the entire point of receiving an education.
The point of an education is not to have a degree on your wall. At least, it really shouldn’t be. The point of education is to be educated, to learn and grow.
The point is to be taught new concepts, master a subject, and study and broaden one's understanding of the world. It isn’t a means to becoming a better worker—at least, that’s not all it is.
To become educated should be an end goal in and of itself.
When we treat having a degree as a matter of social status and allow private institutions to increase the price endlessly, we make it so that only a select few people can achieve it.
You make it so that people struggling to get by have no chance at upward social mobility. They’re stuck where they are, working low-wage jobs with little choice in how to improve their lives.
Most people are not lazy, despite what certain segments of the political sphere like to rant about online.
People want to build a better life for themselves and their families. They want to experience everything that life offers — after all, we only get a finite number of years on this Earth, and it’s appalling how little of the world we get to see!
Most people, if given the chance, want to learn. They’d love an opportunity to go to college or university, have new experiences, and see the wider world outside their tiny bubble.
The perception of laziness or a lack of will to better one’s life is a yoke we place upon ourselves. It doesn’t help to shame people for something largely out of their control.
This is why there’s that perception of small-town rednecks (no, I’m not being insulting, I’m describing myself here) hating them educated city slickers.
‘Edumacated’ as my stepfather jokingly says. He’s a college instructor in digital art and animation.
Wealthy people don’t need to take out loans; they can go to whatever school they want and learn whatever they want.
By contrast, we poors are stuck where we’re at. Education is held out of our reach by astronomical increases in price, and we don’t have a prayer of paying off the necessary loans.
We may dream about it, fight for it, and be desperate to get there, but we can’t afford it. So we are barred from that social status upgrade of having a degree, not to mention the careers we might excel at if we were given the chance.
Unless we take out a loan and get some assistance.
And then, if we struggle with paying it back, we get spit on. Well, you ought to have known better than to let yourself go into debt! It’s your own fault; you shouldn’t have taken on more than you could pay back.
Well, if you’re like me, attending school wasn’t optional. It was a given that I would attend college, even if my parents didn’t care what it was for.
How many of us took on life-altering debt because it’s what we were ‘supposed’ to do?
I was told my whole life that I needed a college education to get anywhere, that I shouldn’t worry about the loans, and that I could cross that bridge later.
I was a kid. I believed them.
I was told that student loans were just a way to get a high-paying career, and you could pay them off while working.
Thank goodness mine were low. I attended an art and trade college funded mainly by the government so I wouldn’t be trapped in debt. I’m fortunate to have made all my payments so far with minimal difficulty, and my country no longer charges me interest for my loans.
I will be paying it off for a while, but I won’t be financially ruined. Other people haven’t been so lucky.
What happens when a good education is something that most people can’t achieve? What happens when most people can’t afford it?
Only the people who can afford it will go to college, which is proportionally a small subset of a country's population. If only a handful get an education, then only a handful will qualify for those high-paying jobs.
So, how many people from that small proportion will choose the careers we need to keep our countries running? For example — what percentage of those potential students will decide to attend medical school?
Family doctors, nurses, surgeons, paramedics, ophthalmologists, oncology specialists, endocrine specialists? What about mental healthcare, like therapy or psychiatry?
There are hundreds of specialties, each requiring extensive, expensive schooling.
How many will want to become engineers? How many will go into one of the thousand branches of science?
How many architects, mathematicians, chemists, astronauts, biologists?
Anthropologists, historians, archaeologists?
Botanists? Pharmaceutical researchers?
I could go on forever, listing various academic professions people could choose from. This isn’t even counting people seeking education just to better themselves—I’m talking about hard economic growth here.
We’re looking at a small handful of educated professionals and a massive population of people trapped in entry-level 9-to-5 jobs, struggling to get by with the rising costs of living.
Most don’t make enough money to live off, at least not well and comfortably. Not if they have families to care for. And they don’t have disposable income to add to the local economy, either!
What happens to a society when only the wealthy can afford an education?
Stagnation. People struggle to make ends meet and obtain the necessities of life, such as food, shelter, and healthcare.
Just look at Canada: there’s a massive shortage of doctors and nurses, and in some provinces, the wait to get a family doctor is three years and counting. You can still get healthcare, but it’s not as smooth as it could be, and people with chronic illnesses are struggling.
This is partly due to COVID-19 causing severe burnout among our healthcare workers and partly to the cost of replacing the doctors who choose to retire. The price of the necessary degrees outweighs the salary of healthcare workers.
You know what sucks? I know so many young people who want to ease that shortage. There are so many kids who desperately want to grow up to be doctors, nurses, and paramedics, but they can’t afford to.
Not to mention the ones who want to be teachers, a globally understaffed field.
These kids come from families where their parents work low-income jobs. They’ll start working early, probably to help pay the family bills. They might even drop out of public school early if things get desperate.
How are they supposed to gather enough money to go to college or become doctors if they work at a coffee shop? They can’t even afford to pay rent on a small apartment alone, much less pursue a degree.
When an education costs too much, the career paths we need to keep society functional fall apart. If the price of becoming a family doctor is too high, we’ll always have a shortage of people qualified to fill that role.
So many of the small-town residents here are priced out of education, and per my experience in college, most of my fellow students were temporary residents for the school year!
They came from outside, even from other countries, to learn the arts or pick up a trade. We were all there for the same reasons: to get our hands dirty and learn the skills needed to prosper.
Again, I’m lucky that my school was relatively inexpensive, and my loan was small. I can handle it.
But my diploma wasn’t a status symbol. I went there to learn a skill, pick up a trade, master a craft, meet people, and build a network of connections with people outside of my bubble.
I learned so much more there than I paid for.
When having a degree, diploma, or certificate is just a way to achieve social status, the value of education is degraded. The actual benefits to society are ignored and discarded.
There is more to it than just being able to say, ‘See? I’m one of the educated class.’
Education does not exist to feed somebody’s ego. It exists to help society progress and grow, to help people get out of poverty, to help people elevate one another, and to gain new perspectives on the world.
At least, that’s what it should be about. And it makes me sad that for so many people, it isn’t anymore.
We should never have let it become a pipe dream for so many in the first place.
Solidarity wins.
There is now the premise that the wealthy elitists don't want us to be educated beyond high school anymore. it gives them toto much competition. They need less educated people to do the work they don't want to do. More and more, as these things become unobtainable, people are going to become angrier and angrier. Especially in the U.S. The pot is simmering more and more nowadays and it won't take much to set it to boil over.
I was one of the luckier ones, able to pay a domestic student's fee for Canadian public universities. (McGill and U of Toronto). So that's way cheaper than an American university, let alone an international student's fee. But still it was a lot, so I'm fortunate my parents were able to support me then. (They're still supporting me now, since I don't make enough money from my part time job as a psychotherapist to make ends meet. Especially as our business expenses are a lot.)
Yeah it sucks to think of how understaffed hospitals and doctors' clinics are, for instance. And also some government positions. It's next to impossible to get a call with the CRA, even if you have an urgent question. Can't email or live chat. And if you call, you get a slim chance of making it through to an agent. You can't even leave a message, ugh. If only there were fewer barriers to entry for these and other jobs, then people would be less overworked and folks would get the help they need. The educational gatekeeping is ridiculous indeed. :(