If you are applying for a career-job, a bachelor’s degree is a minimum requirement. Your resume isn't even considered without it. There is this huge time and financial buy in just to apply for a job that offers both a livable wage and job growth. People want to discuss the trades like being an electrician or a plumber as an escape or alternative from this expensive time consuming necessity.
Plumber or electrician are great trades, especially due to the recent building boom. However, they can also be very migratory, unstable, and physically debilitating. But even the trades and skilled labor market can’t escape the reach of the Liberal Arts dogma. A friend works as a Lab Technician (perfect example of skilled labor) has done so for the last decade. Recently transferred into a new lab at the medical research facility for which she has worked at for the last 10 years. The PhD who hired her at $15 per hour. Human Resources cut her salary down to $12 because she didn't have a degree. No one regardless of skillset, ability or seniority can earn the $15 per hour without a degree. She asked them if they would take any degree? They said yes, any degree. So now, luckily due to her husband’s employment at a university as an electrician (funny enough) she can go to school part time for free. She is now pursuing a liberal arts degree. You know the very degree we are now discouraged from pursuing. The degree we are supposed to be shunning for something practical like a skilled labor trade, like lab technician.
I asked her how the humanities degree would improve her ability to do her current job; she laughed and said it doesn't. She is now three quarters complete of her degree. I asked her if it had been useful for her personally or if it's made a contribution to her life. Again the answer was, no. With a degree, this mother of three will earn an additional $400 per month before taxes working a 35-hour workweek.
Or we could look at it another way; a bogus policy capping access of salary growth of non-degree holders creates degree inflation and continues income inequality.
Degree inflation altars the statistics of what the true market value of a degree holds. Higher wage earners with a degree under this policy can be assured to earn more than their non-degree counterparts. Not from experience and hard work but simply by attending university and colleting a degree. We have all seen the charts that the universities publish which clearly demonstrate the power of degree inflation and not necessarily the real value of the degree. This also undercuts real work place and market place competition, ensuring that ability and ingenuity is rewarded and not whether your parents could afford or willing to send you off to university.
Yes, lets keep a working mother from earning an additional 5k a year, an increase her hiring boss felt her experience awarded her, by requiring a degree which isn’t useful professionally or personally.
Please keep in mind. She is not 18 years old lost in a sea of sorority sisters exploring the magical bubble of the academy. Many of the classes she is required to take are taught by 22-year-old PhD candidates with no life experience trying to teach her the importance of choice, consequence, and how-to-think. I think requiring a 23 year old kid to teach a thirty something mother of three about choice, consequence, and how-to-think, is complete hubris on the part of a university system. It’s almost as big of failure as the premise that after someone has lived on their own raising dependents has the same educational needs and requirements of someone that is 18 and dependent on their parents. Just exactly how are the universities supposed to shape the young minds of a thirty-something with three kids, after they have had to deal with real life choice and consequences, and not the pretend theoretical examples in books?
By choice, direct action or compliance, some how, at some point, education became this big self-driven industrial complex where there is no escape from its tentacles, even in the skilled labor market. One no longer has the option of opting out of college and working their way to the top without the far reach of the university smacking them down into their respective class status they were born into. No if you want to escape your upbringing it isn’t through self-learning and hard work, you have to purchase a hall pass from a university. Just purchase a degree, any degree.
We need to get back to the primary purpose of education, to enlighten. We also have to value all education regardless where it takes place. I’ve learned an enormous amount from my time in college, however my biggest lessons have not taken place in the classroom nor did I receive a credit.
If you, like me, believe in education, in learning, in expanding yourself, then join me in reclaiming education through advocacy and policy reform. Please contact me at http://AccessCoalitionForEducation.org
Matthew Name is a social equity advocate and currently runs a small non-profit Access Coalition for Education. You can find out more at http://accesscoalitionforeducation.org