We live in a society that fancies itself fairly educated. Typical advice is as follows: graduate high school, go to college, get a degree, work in whatever field you have a degree, retire, die. I am here to challenge that.
Gone (LONG gone) are the days when a college education was something only the best and brightest could hope to obtain. Gone are the days when a genuine interest in learning is what drove a person to attend a University. We live in an era where going to college is practically considered the status quo. Indeed, 40% of all working age adults currently have a college degree. Why is that a problem? Education is good, right? Of course education is good. The problem lies not in the fact that more people are "educated" but that people who don't value education are being shoved through the education machine.
There is a difference between enabling people with a genuine interest in learning to attend a University and promoting universal post-secondary education because "JOBS!" The idea that everyone needs that level of education is ridiculous and the enactment thereof serves primarily to wedge barriers between educators and people who actually want education while postponing the period of self-discovery that is absolutely necessary in such a diverse, individualistic society.
So here comes the part specifically targeted at you, High School Seniors. If you are 18, there's a good chance that going to college is not a wise decision; at least, not immediately. I have a couple of good reasons:
You could probably do with a break. You've been battered by homogeneity since you were 5, at the very least, all the while being told you're a special snowflake. What a steaming pile of festering hypocrisy! The public school system is absolutely and entirely fixated on creating and maintaining standards. I'm not talking about grading standards necessarily but teaching standards. The goal, so it seems, is to provide every single person in The US with the exact same education. Aren't you tired of that? I can tell you that probably your first two years of College will be no different. In fact, if you thought as I did, that dual credit was a waste of effort, you will inevitably be sitting through your first two years of college getting credit essentially for things you've already learned. Take some time off. A semester or two will do you some good. The primary argument against this is that people who take a semester off are far more likely to never attend college. I'm sorry, but is there a problem with adults gaining enough internal and external awareness that they can see through your you-won't-be-as-successful fear-mongering well enough to figure out that where they ought to be isn't necessarily a University? No, there isn't.
You will have time to figure out who you are. Gaining self-awareness in high school can be tough. You've realized that you are not necessarily what other people say you are but that's usually about as far as you've come by graduation. You pick a major that sounds lucrative or at least not painfully soul crushing and you're off to college. I've gotta tell you, I don't think I know a single person who started college immediately after High School and didn't change their major at least once. You owe it to yourself to know yourself. Spend some time figuring out who you are. Before you attempt any education beyond high school, you should be fairly sure about what you like, what motivates you, what you dislike, and where you'd like to be going. This internal awareness will make any sort of education that you undertake that much easier to grasp. When you aren't wrestling with questions like "how do I fit in to all this?" or "what do I want to do for the rest of my life?" you can learn with relative ease. Self-awareness is like WD-40 for learning and just about anything in the universe that requires thought and practice.
There are definitely people who are driven by learning and acquiring new knowledge. They are the ones want to study the universe, solve problems, and understand everything they can for the betterment of mankind. Universities used to be giant collections of these very people. It was a distillation of the very best minds that humanity had been able to produce. Professors pushed boundaries, unabashedly flooding their students' minds with fringe ideas and concepts that required study and scrutiny; things that might later be taught at lower levels of learning.
Look at how far we've come. Professors are often forced to teach homogeneously due to the fact that like 98% of their students are there for the sole purpose of acquiring a degree which they can then hopefully trade for a job. It is begrudgingly and with the utmost contempt for the process that students sit through lectures. "What's on the test?" is the only thing they want to know. They trade time for credits and credits for degrees and degrees for jobs. Nobody is there to test the boundaries. Nobody is there to compare ideas. Nobody is there to learn. That is not what college is about now. It's just how you get the currency with which you purchase a credential.
-Ben
