Essential Education - but will there be jobs??
The protests from college students across the country hit a very personal chord with me. Having been through the “academic mill” I sympathize deeply with these student’s who are attempting to do. They see education as their ticket to a middle class - or even upper class life. However, I had to wonder when I saw the protests, will the education that they are protesting for truly result in a higher standard of living for these young people?
My concerns are based on personal experience. As someone who holds a Ph.D. that I hardly use, the question above is far from moot. Ask anyone who has a degree is science, math, computer programming, engineering and the like. Many underwent extensive educations which were taken with the idea this would pay off in the form of increased remuneration for years to come. When I was an undergraduate, I had a job in a graduate school working in the registrar/bursar’s office. The specialized in engineering and computer science. The students flooded in each semester. The classes were held from 6 PM to 10 PM Monday through Thursday. Some students were on campus every night - others were around twice a week. This went on for years. Even in the mid to late 80s, it was expensive and certainly intellectually demanding and very time consuming. It’s been about 21 years since I worked in that institution. But these days I often wonder about the fate of the students who came through those doors. Are they still employed? Have they been outsourced? Did someone with an H1-B replace them with a lower salary? Given what happened to the monetary value of my own Ph.D. , these questions aren’t idle musings.
Many academics and business people a like now say that such education should be a lifetime effort. That fields of work will come and go - but that re-education into new fields every decade or so will be the norm. That this is not necessarily a bad thing. Really? To these notions I say BULL$%#$!
Why? The time and expense makes such an on-going educational imperative is wildly impractical and of dubious financial benefit. Degrees are expensive and time consuming undertakings. Even back in the 80s and 90s the cost was far from trivial. What made the time and expense worthwhile was the belief that once completed, the graduate really “had something” worthwhile - that would pay off for years to come.
Now, entire career paths and the courses of study required for admission are being created and commoditized with alarming speed. The hapless student chasing these degrees often finds their “cheese moved” before they even come out of the education pipeline. Going in - the student sees this as a viable career with high demand - this creates a flood of people chasing the same dollars. The flood creates a glut and industry adds salt to the wound by importing “cheap labor” from abroad. This scenario appears to be repeated over and over again throughout many industries and fields of study.
But how practical is this for the average worker? The answer is that it isn’t. We are getting to the point where a Master’s degree might get about six years of milage out said degree. Then the cycle has to restart when “retraining” becomes necessary. How many degrees are we going to have to take, in order to stay viable? Does it even make any sense to take theses degrees? I don’t know, crunching the numbers, it doesn’t seem to be very practical. For anyone taking a Ph.D. the stakes couldn’t be higher. The pipeline to graduation is so long that a student entering a Ph.D. program is more likely that not to be seeing a very different employment market when they emerge.
My point is this - education is valuable - however, if there are no jobs going with these degrees - people are simply going to truncate their educations. Resulting in a further dumbing down of our society. The brain trust we are counting on is being eaten alive by academia and industry alike. No one has clean hands on this one. Academia certainly aided and abetted the situation with respect to biomedical science. Breaking the American brain trust ? It’s already broken.
