Education vs. Training: A Thinker’s Guide to the Form and Function of College

Something that I have heard, over and over, while working at colleges around the country is this notion that we are “getting students ready for the workforce.” I have heard it in many different contexts, such as why a school wouldn’t close for a snow day during a big storm (“Your business won’t be closed for snow days!”) or why you a student might fail an assignment if it’s not in by the due-date (“Late work is unacceptable in the work place!”). I take issue with the notion that colleges are training grounds for the workplace. I can understand why certain companies in certain industries prefer to hire people with certain expertise as proven by their degrees, but I see a big distinction between training and educating. Perhaps some of this difference is more of an ideal than distinction, but if we don’t hold on to these ideals, the operating philosophy of education becomes devoid of integrity.

Let me explain.

The first major distinction is this: if college is training you for the workforce, you shouldn’t be paying them to do so. Your job should be paying the college for that training and you should be pulling down a paycheck for every hour spent in class. It’s easy to see some logic in the notion that your degree gets you a job and the job can pay for that degree retroactively, through loans or through paying you back on your initial investment. But this logic fails in light of the rising cost of college and the stagnation of income. While overall wealth has risen in the last 40 years, 90% of Americans have not seen a dime of that rise, so it hardly justifies the astronomical increase in the cost of college over the same period. In fact, the cost of college has risen almost eight times faster than wages have. With that kind of disparity, you cannot argue that the rationale behind a college education today is about your future income in the same way that your grandparents could argue it.

If you go to college with the notion that you are going to be trained for a certain profession, there is more bad news for you than your wages. The job market, the available jobs, and the overall economy will be vastly different when you come out of college than when you went in. The job you pictured yourself walking into with your degree may not exist anymore. Your professors and administrators can’t keep up with this market any better than you can. If their conceit is that they are preparing you for a certain job within the framework of the existing marketplace, you are being sold snake oil.

Your future job would have to present some sort of fixed-point in space, around which your curriculum, courses, and work revolved and eventually joined for any of the above to be at all true. Since you, presumably, get a formal education before launching on your career, this cannot be the case.

So. What is the fixed-point that your education is anchored to? Ideally, that fixed-point is you.

A college education is far from perfect, we all know, but in an idealized sense, it should present itself as a forum for your own self-improvement. The degree is a formalized process of recognizing the self-improvement you’ve performed, not a ticket to your next life. This turns all of the grim news up above into at least tolerable news.

Wages haven’t gone up, but the cost of improving your mind, methods of thinking, and skillset has gone up with the cost of living. This doesn’t make that rise in cost any less, but at least it lines it up with the world and presents a system of logic that can be tolerated on its own.

And the job market shifts and changes? Well, if your degree were just job training, it would be useless the moment that job migrates overseas or into the seas of artificial intelligence. As a token of your self-improvement, it is still a negotiable; it should represent your ability to adapt to the changed and changing world, not a relic of a bygone one.

Now, do you have to improve yourself in order to accomplish a degree? I doubt it very much. I’ve met plenty of fools with advanced degrees of one kind or another. While that is the subject of another essay, it’s worth recognizing. For now, it should content both the educator and the one undergoing education that the philosophy behind the process may not align with expectations of economic payoff or with the rigor of an imagined corporate tyrant. Your education should represent something other than a step in a Capitalist contest; it should be a step in your development, and like everything else, it’s up to you how you leverage its use.