Is College Worth all the Fuss
When it comes to higher education, your opinion about the relative merits of college may well be informed by a host of different factors. Your parents’ experience, your expectations around role and salary, as well as the economic and political climate can all have a marked impact on how useful a college education becomes in your career. The reality is that you can get a good job without college, but the question probably isn’t as simple as it sounds.
Defining what makes a good job is a complicated enough matter, to star with. Is a good job defined by the starting salary, the development prospects or the happiness it’s likely to bring you in life? You can debate which of those is most important, but realistically, all three should be considered, and it’s probably unwise to make a decision based solely on one of those factors. Social and political opinion, however, probably leans towards the first two criteria.
An article onMSNBChighlights a number of career options where a college education isn’t necessary, where the starting salary is deemed to be good, and where there is healthy income and employment growth (as at May 2012). Take your pick from being a dental hygienist, an online advertising manager, a hair stylist or an electrical technician, and there seem to be plenty of opportunities available to young people who can’t afford, or don’t want to pursue a college education.
Are any of those roles likely to fall into the definition of somebody’s dream job? Possibly not - and here’s the rub. Disingenuous questions such as this one serve very little purpose. As one politician suggests that a college education should be made available to everyone, another rebuts by alleging that such an attitude is snobbery and that you can manage perfectly well without one.
What all those articles, commentaries and debates must remember is that there are two crucial dependencies. Young people must be given the opportunities to pursue whichever career option suits them as individuals, whether that is college or not. Society needs to stop analyzing the career market and trying to force new career builders that they must their decisions on financial criteria and or statistical analysis. Many people who went to college have become millionaires. Many people who didn’t became millionaires too. How is that supposed to be useful?
Career planning advice needs to be based on a discussion around skills and aspirations, matching individuals to the right roles, in the right place, at the right time. If somebody is set on a vocation that requires a college degree, then the decision is pretty clear-cut, but to be everybody else, it’s rather more difficult. As the colleges try and justify their fees, and the political parties try to justify supporting or condemning them, young career builders are caught in the cross fire.
You can get a good job if you go to college. You can get a good job if you don’t go to college. Those facts are irrelevant. You can only ever get a good job if you think about what you’re great at, what you like doing, and working out how to find the most realistic combination of the two.
