All Posts Tagged With: "value of a degree"
The first 30
Our on-the-ground undergrad reports on his debut month
I consider myself something of an idealist. I’m reasonably conscious of the many problems in the world and of the effects my actions have on the planet and its inhabitants, and I try to act accordingly. Of course, I hope others will do the same, and perhaps I too easily apply my values when judging the actions and beliefs of other people, governments, corporations, etc. My idealism has also earned me regular reminders from friends and family to “take yourself less seriously.”
I’ve just begun my first year at the University of Toronto, and I’m aware that this is a time when values and personalities can be challenged, shifted and eventually—potentially—solidified. People tend to progress, maybe unconsciously, from idealism to pragmatism as they mature. Idealism becomes a sort of nostalgia: you remember “the good old days,” but are resigned to the fact that those days are decidedly in the past.
Even at the tender age of 18, I have noticed this shift in myself. The more I learn, the more complex things become. The more I realize the barriers that lie in the way of the more equitable, sustainable, logical world I idealize, the less likely it seems that my idealism stands a chance.
Most universities in Canada have become veritable degree-churning machines. A bachelor’s degree today is yesterday’s high school diploma. Six million Chinese graduate each year into an already saturated global job market. A desire to do good is often dismissed as naive or met with suspicion. All in all, there doesn’t seem to be much room left for idealism.
We’ll see what kind of shape mine is in after a month of university.
Touchdown
Aug. 30: If you’re moving to a new city for university, it’s a good idea to arrive a few days before school starts so you can have a chance to explore the area around your new home. Once the craziness of Frosh Week begins, followed immediately by your first classes, you’re not likely to venture far off campus, so familiarizing yourself with the neighbourhood can give you a head start on breaking the bubble that often develops in first year.
For me, coming from Vancouver, it gave me a chance to spend time with friends and family who already lived in Toronto and knew the city well. One of them took me to a drum circle, the likes of which I had never seen: hundreds of people gathered in a park in the middle of downtown Toronto, dancing to a beat you could hear from blocks away. It gave me an idea of the immense variety of things to do and see in this city, and I wouldn’t have had the chance to do such things had I come straight to school.
Through the rabbit hole
Sept. 3: Today was move-in day. After the initial “awkward lunch”—standing around for two hours meeting your fellow first-years and hearing the same questions over and over (“What’s your major? Where are you from?”), it was time to learn the requisite school cheers, glorifying ourselves and putting down everyone else. It’s curious how people always feel this need to distinguish themselves within a group, even as they dismiss it as just a fun tradition.
Stay in school, it pays: study
Millennium Foundation says a degree is a great investment, but other studies raise a few caveats
If you have a university degree, you can expect to earn $746,000 more over your working life than someone with only a high school diploma. The information is contained in a study released today by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, authored by Joseph Berger and Andrew Parkin. The authors also found that Canadians with only a high school diploma are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than a university graduate. College graduates enjoy higher earnings than those with only a high school education, but the earning gap is not as wide and their lifetime payoff is only about half that of university graduates.
Bergin and Parker say they wrote this report in in order to counter “a series of recent suggestions that somehow we have too many [post-secondary] students in Canada, not too few.” They write that “the evidence about the positive returns to post-secondary education is so well-known that it seems unnecessary to review it again.” There’s pretty much no refuting that, if you take the income levels of all those with a university education and compare it to the incomes of all those with only high school, university looks is one heck of a good investment. College similarly looks like a good investment, but university appears to be a much better one. A few years ago, I opened our annual Rankings issue with an article entitled “The Best Investment Money Can Buy.” I estimated, based on a less thorough analysis of Statscan data than Berger and Parkin offer, that the return on a university degree was about $1 million dollars in extra lifetime earnings.
I still hold to the view that university offer serious economic benefits to students and society — but I have some caveats. Education is the fount of progress: social, scientific and economic. A more skilled society will be a more prosperous and successful society. But the more I look at our higher education system, the more frequently I see disconnects between the true statement “our society needs more educated people” and the not necessarily equivalent statement that “our society needs more people with university degrees.” The latter should equal the former, but unfortunately that’s not always the case. There’s lots of evidence that an increasing number of kids are simply being pushed through the system: they may get a university degree (and before that, a high school diploma) without having learned anywhere near as much as the credential suggests they should have. A few weeks ago, a chemistry professor told me about how some students in his third-year and fourth-year classes — students who are majoring in chemistry — never learned the most basic elements of the first-year material. He’s not sure how they made it in to upper-year courses; they’re not educated enough to be called scientists. But they’re going to get a B.Sc. What exactly is their degree worth? Somewhat less than the ideal.
A number of commentators, such as professors James Cote and Anton Allahar, authors of this book (and a related blog) have said that we are lowering standards in order to raise enrolment, devaluing higher education in the process. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for Cote and Allahar’s argument that we are putting too much emphasis on getting more people into higher education, and too little emphasis on what they do once they get there — what they actually learn. Cote and Allahar similarly point to a focus on credentials over learning in some high school systems — which deal with weak students by shoving them through the system regardless of actual performance or learning, raising everyone’s grades, raising graduation rates and giving the illusion of educational progress. More knowledge/skill/education are good things, for the individual and for our society and economy. However, we can’t just assume that more schooling, of whatever type, in whatever field and of whatever quality, equals education/learning/skills. Our system should aim to make those linkages — and this is where Parkin/Berger and Cote/Allahar surely agree. We can’t automatically assume that more people with credentials (whether that is a high school diploma or a B.A.) equals more people with knowledge and skills that lead to higher returns to themselves and to society.
