The Value of a College Education

     Astute readers may have detected a slightly cynical tone regarding higher education in the previous post. Is this attitude warranted? Is there nothing good about attending college? What keeps a person grimly marching on the academic treadmill semester after semester?
     It certainly isn’t ease of access. College is expensive and time consuming. Tuition is constantly being raised while the number of available classes shrinks. All of which acts to stretch out the time required to earn a degree. It isn’t ease of use either. Enrolling in classes is a complex and often counter-intuitive process. University employees approach their jobs with a paradoxical combination of love for bureaucracy, and an air of being too important to deal with the red tape themselves. Even physically getting to school is a hassle. Until I began attending CSUS, I had never seen a traffic jam inside a parking structure.
     So why do I keep showing up on campus? The main reason, I guess, is the same thing that inspired me to go to college in the first place: it beats manual labor. After a decade or so of working at jobs that basically boil down to moving heavy objects from one place to another, I decided that there had to be a better way to make a buck. Not that college is making me any money right now of course. Quite to the contrary, it’s costing me money. Driving me into debt and penury in fact. Which is, in itself, a reason to continue going to class. As soon as I stop, my student loans come due. That’s going to be a tough nut to make even with a degree. I figure that with Section 8 housing vouchers and the generosity of the local soup kitchens, I should be able to get by on the kind of salary a journalism degree commands, but paying down my student loans will be another matter. Student loans are the one kind of debt you can’t discharge by filing for bankruptcy, so those usurers have me on the hook for life. I’ve been planning an Ocean’s Eleven style casino heist (the one with Sinatra and Sammy Davis, not the Clooney and Pitt version.) To get out from under the student loan sharks.
     In all fairness, I have had positive experiences at school. I explored different creative outlets. I took a photography class and my final exam from the class decorates my apartment to this day. I’m proud of some of the work I did in a creative writing class. I even took a class onresidential electric wiring at junior college that enabled me to fix an outlet at my Dad’s house. Well, I didn’t so much fix it as cause it to not work in different way than it was not working originally. The house didn’t burn down after I tampered with the outlet, that’s the main thing.
     I must also concede that the level of the discourse on campus is superior to that one finds on the loading docks. When working blue collar jobs, there are only three acceptable topics of conversation: Sports, Jesus and Pussy. Discussing anything else on the jobsite will cause your coworkers to question your sexuality. At least when college students talk about distasteful subjects they employ sophisticated vocabulary and proper grammar.
     Let us never forget the best aspect of attending college however. It bestows a piece of paper upon people that entitles them to work in air-conditioned comfort seated in front of a computer. A bachelor’s degree is a talisman against menial labor. After all, if we wanted to work hard, we would be out earning a living rather than sitting in a classroom.