Education Vs. Certification
We plunge ourselves into tens of thousands of dollars in debt to receive an education we hope gains us prospective employment.
This is a terribly misconstrued idea that has evolved into crumpling a systematic process by bridging step A: education (which should really be more like step E), directly to step Z: employment in a relevant field (not always the case).
When Did This Change? Did It Ever Change?
Forbes claims that A College Degree Is The New High School Diploma, yet our already inadequate diploma generating high school education doesn’t prepare us for the next step (assumed next step). The way we are raised in the American education system has made it a norm to expect college as the most correct, and most profitable, way-ahead in our young lives.
At least now it is.
Where did the fork in the road appear when college became a certification producer? Shouldn’t it instead be a focus on the means of becoming educated to enhance our knowledge, in turn making us naturally more equipped for success in the real world?
Sadly I have no quantifiable figure to produce as a solution for the ambiguous question of when the apparent shift happened of importance from the focus on the ends rather than the means. This shift has been a gradual one resulting in a now minimum expectation of a bachelors degree for gainful employment in a setting that has a prospective growth.
Education Rather Than Certification Will Reassert Its Importance Naturally
Work after the industrial revolution saw much manual labor and factory style work, coupled with the undeniably necessary agricultural field. As technology improved, less human labor was required to conduct the same tasks. In short, it required a higher education to manage the increasingly complex systems that replaced human labor, keeping people in the work force instead of academia.
More complicated machines, computers, higher regulated business practices, and many other more technical and learned skills saw a higher enrollment in education. As technology increased, so did the number of Americans with a higher education.
From 1950 to 2015, the number of adult high school graduates in the U.S. recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau spiked from 34% to 88%. The holders of bachelors degrees went from 6% to 33%. We can see now that Forbes might have been quite literal when they say that a bachelors degree is the new high school diploma if it were relative to the shift over time.
Now, our technology is surpassing the necessity of the certificates we hold, and instead requires critical thinking and an application of the education we learn in college to operate and improve it.
Specializations in science and technology and the producing of experts is necessary for the way ahead. Although a general understanding of a field can gear us towards specialization, it doesn’t always require a degree to do so.
We have all heard many a story of the successful engineers and developers at Microsoft and Google, or those that go straight from high school to a successful startup. I’m not saying that we don’t need college, but instead we need to use it in its correct form; an institution to educate us, not certify us. What those high schoolers, or dropouts, did that evaded the status quo routine of high school to college necessity was they built on their passion, what they were good at, or sometimes were just hit with a stroke of luck.
If you’re a believer in making your luck, sometimes it is getting that education that gives you the ability to set yourself in the right place at the right time intentionally or not.
What’s the Solution?
I am in no way able to confidently tell anyone a set path to educate themselves properly for success.
However, the education in a field enjoyable to you will naturally equip you with a more prospective ability to succeed in the field you study.
It sound simple, too simple, but maybe we hold standardized education in too high of regards and hold those regards in the wrong aspect. There needs to be a higher importance on the actual education and critical thinking and possible application of a subject instead of its accreditation value. When we really learn a field, and understand its underlying concept and direct association to other applications associated to it, that is where we can become gainfully employed because of the education. But instead of going straight from gaining a degree to expecting employment, we need to start a few steps back and understand the purpose of the education in the first place.
This involves pursuing what we are passionate about, because we can end up more successful leading a business in what we want see to fruition instead of following a model that we saw was profitable for picking as a degree.
Associating Passion to our Education
We tend to learn best what we are passionate about. And as Ulrich Boser claims in his book Learn Better, we learn the best when we associate a value to what we are learning. This may not be a stretched out monetary association to a bachelors degree, but instead to a field or industry that we are passionate about and one in which we see a possibility for a positive change.
We have to think about the ends that we want to see for positive change in the world, and how we, with our individual ambitions, can be that positive change in our own ways. The best way to do that is to educate ourselves on the current standing of the world and its conditions in the factors that interest us, and in what way we can affect it beneficially.
Producing a positive change and helping people in unprecedented ways will make us naturally successful. If we stop looking at the monetary value, and instead on the humanistic benefit, we will gain much more through education beyond a profitable return in money.
