I was talking with my youngest sister the other day about the value of an education. She just started her sophomore year of high school and is tremendously bored with her studies, but her teachers will not put her into more difficult courses because although she is smart enough for honors classes she will not do the work required. I have told her countless times that doing well in school and acquiring scholarships is one of the best ways to get out of her current situation. She generally suggests easier options that would work reasonably well for a very short period of time, but ultimately would very likely land her in a heap of trouble or stuck with a life that she didn't want in the first place.
While I am giving her all this advise about how furthering her education is the best way to improve both yourself as a human being and your life, I can't help but wonder if that is true anymore. Currently we are living in an environment where getting a job in your chosen field immediately out of college is extremely difficult, where students leave college with an average of $30,000 of debt or more for just their bachelor's degree, and tuition rates are rising faster than the federal and state subsidies which help students less and less every year. By the time I graduate medical school I will very likely have somewhere between $200,000-$300,000 of student loan debt, and I am told that this not something that I should worry about at this point because once I am a doctor I'll be able to pay it back. Which is very similar rhetoric to what I was told when I started my undergrad degree, and yet two years after graduation I am working at a job that just barely covers my living expenses and my outrageous student loan payments.
While I still think that education is the best way to better oneself, most of the things I learned while getting my bachelor's degree I could learn for free on the internet. In fact that is how I learned calculus or at least how I got an A in calculus. It's also how I learned and studied chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, physics, and so many other subjects. I'm not saying that my time in college was a waste, because I certainly did learn a great deal, but I'm not sure it was worth the $30,000 I paid for it.
Which brings me to my most important point, the educational system in this country is extremely flawed in that it puts so much financial strain on those that so desperately need this system to work, the students themselves. Trying to find a job with a living wage in this economy without a college degree is nearly impossible and so many people choose not to persue higher education because of the cost associated. We have created a system in which the young and the poor are buried in debt, how can we ever expect our economy and our society to recover from this system if we continue in this manner?
*** Image credit: This fantastic article about Cards Against Humanity on BuzzFeed.
