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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
I have had the immense privilege of being through both an undergraduate and a graduate education. It was required for the profession I wanted to go in to, but it was also very expensive. My family was made up of people with degrees, and a good-paying job or two in there as well, and all of the children have gone through at least an undergraduate education. I'll bet dollars to donuts that before all is done, both of my younger siblings will also have done graduate education, as a requirement of their professions and of continuing education requirements.
I also managed to pay back the loans that had to be paid back on time, and got at least some of the loans forgiven because of my choice of profession and the location that I was working in. Because I have done this, I am thoroughly on board with as much forgiveness of student debt as can possibly be wrangled, and I cheer any politician who wishes to relieve this burden from all of the people who have gone through the system of student debt and loans. Especially because a university education, or in rare cases, a community college education, has become the floor of sufficient class signifier to get work in many jobs, and especially in any jobs where a large paycheck and some nice bonuses is part of the expectation of what you get from doing that job.
Public education in the United States is free to the finishing of the 13th year, after which any further education becomes a paying enterprise, with costs per credit hour obtained depending on the course of study and the prestige of the school involved. The end result, after several years or year-equivalents of study, is the conferral of a degree/credential that presumably means a person has studied and mastered the necessary components for the field they will be going in to. The usual standard is the bachelor's degree, a four-year course of study, with some form of concentration on a subject. Vocational, technical, and community colleges often run shorter programs, somewhere around two years, that usually end up with certifications in what are collectively referred to as "the trades," usually skilled manual work that can, in fact, thanks to collective bargaining, pay quite well and provide very good returns on the cost of a credential. Graduate programs are also usually shorter than four years, standardizing on two for a master's degree and possibly three+dissertation for the doctorate. (I haven't done one, so I don't know what the usual schedule for it is. And many doctoral programs include the work of generating a master's degree, so that if someone doesn't finish the doctoral process, they still have a credential.)
[There's a very long digression here about U.S. culture and how it seems to divide prestige of occupation into three categories: people who work in service and food, who are usually assumed to be either teenagers getting experience before heading into other jobs or migrants, legal or otherwise, the "blue-collar" jobs that generally encompass manufacturing, factory work, the trades, and other jobs done by people who use their hands and bodies as an important part of the work, and the "white-collar" jobs that tend to be more in an office setting and are more knowledge-worker and managerial situations. "Blue-collar" workers are positioned by most major media outlets as the mouthpieces of the "real" United States, and politicians who say they're there to help with "blue-collar" workers are usually protectionist, nationalist, and many are more than willing to spread the idea that migrants, usually undocumented migrants, are "stealing" good jobs away from those who were born here. "White-collar" workers are usually struck with the anti-intellectualism bend of those same politicians, as out-of-touch liberal "elites" who ruin everything they touch. There may or may not be something over the Anti-Semitism Conspiracy Line added in here. This context is needed for understanding what gets said next.]
The U.S. attitude toward schooling and degrees is generally perverse, regardless of what level you're looking at. Vocational-technical education and going into the trades is often seen as work for people who aren't smart enough (by which they mean rich enough) to hack it as white-collar knowledge workers, even though the "skilled" part of "skilled trades" is not a misnomer, and the careers that vo-tech turns out are essential to keeping the rest of the plates spinning. People who advocate for more tracking and steering during secondary schooling suggest that many more people should be diverted into vocational-technical education as the place they will be happiest, do what they like, and use their skills to the fullest.
The university system, in comparison, often gets summed up in the idea that "B.S., M.S. and Ph.D" mean, correspondingly, "BullShit," "More Shit," and "Piled higher and Deeper." The further up the degree scale you go, the more you are abstracted away from and separated from what the common people think and do and the more you are in an ivory tower, looking down on everyone else and believing that your solutions to problems are simple and perfect, if only everyone else would agree with you that those solutions are simple and perfect. U.S. society both looks down on those who labor with their hands and bodies as dumb rubes with no brains and sneers down at people who have advanced degrees and do work that most requires thinking, research, teaching, and publication as out-of-touch arrogant elites who have no concept of what "real people" believe and want. (Some politicians manage to express both of these ideas within the same paragraph of their speeches, if not in the same sentence.)
The bachelor's degree is often excoriated as a class and wealth marker rather than a sign of any kind of intellectual or rigorous study, usually summed up in the derision of "underwater basket-weaving" as a class that gets taken, or the folks in the Avenue Q musical with the song, "What Can You Do With a B.A. in English?" While it's true that a lot of people end up doing work in a field that is not obviously related to their concentration, the defense of the university experience is that in addition to subject-specific knowledge, the university experience teaches its students critical-thinking skills, has them work through research methods, exposes them to environments where there is not a preordained correct answer, and otherwise gives them generally applicable skills that will help them when they need to solve problems, improve their work environment, or otherwise do better work and support their position-specific skills. [Politicians of a conservative bend generally poo-pooh these arguments in favor of asserting that the university is an indoctrination ground where liberal/progressive/socialist/Marxist opinions are dogmatically correct, regardless of the truth or empirical evidence, and anyone who opposes that will be ruthlessly oppressed and then eventually driven away from the university environment. Those politicians have generally not actually sat in on a full course load since their own university days.]
In my specific case, the bachelor's degree was a waystation rather than an endpoint, and therefore, I was generally free to take whatever coursework looked interesting, and to figure out the rest later, as in deciding to be a Librarian, rather than a library worker, I had committed myself to graduate school and its associated costs. As it turns out, by taking courses that looked interesting, I managed to get myself 95% of the way to an honors history bachelor's degree. Once the chair of the program pointed this out to me, after saying how good it had been to have me in class for The Canterbury Tales, I decided I would be willing to do the undergraduate thesis work and take the final necessary class (an art history class where I could choose from several - I took Buddhist art. Very pretty.) to get that degree.
Much of my university experience, in both undergraduate and graduate studies, was also a lesson on time management, workload juggling, making sure I could get up on time to get to class, making sure I was far enough along in my work before I took any breaks or did social things, making sure I left time open for band and its requirements, and otherwise building the edifice of compensation and external memory that I needed to get through class a the person I was, and in trying to figure out what I could do to keep myself awake from the shocks of going from the very cold outside to the very warm insides. I know now that what would have helped me would have been getting the two important diagnoses earlier on in life, but I was holding it together and doing well in my classes, so nobody really had much of a thought about wondering whether I was succeeding, much less me. The weaknesses would only start showing up when there weren't defined requirements and grades, when unspoken requirements were also expected to be followed, and when I was getting stressed out of my gourd about basically everything in the relationship that I put far too much effort into trying to hold togeher. All the same, the university experience did teach me skills that have turned out to be useful in other parts of my life, so that part is true, even if, yes, the first degree was a little bit of a throw-away in terms of actual professional skills. (Except when that odd question comes through that is actually in my wheelhouse because of that study.)
Graduate schooling was, at least for me, "more of the same, emphasis on more." Paper lengths got longer, lecture times got longer (although less frequently through the week), projects got bigger, and required classes started intruding on band rehearsal hours, so I wasn't able to continue with anything of that nature through graduate school. Instead, I would often end up going to some of the women's sporting events, as those were free with a student identification, and I picked up a bit more of work-study through intramural refereeing and through doing some work in the School of Education's instructor resource center. (Which is where I cannibalized iFruits for the jump to beefier operating systems, and started getting some of the "you need to be awake for this" issues. This had to do both with the apnea, but also with the part where VAST brains sometimes declare they're finished for a little while and they want a nap to recharge. Often after a meal. Grad school is also where I learned some of those "okay, I can stay awake if I stay standing up instead of sitting" techniques that would get me in trouble in my workplace several years later.) I also spent a summer doing internships at local public libraries to get some amount of work experience in an actual library setting, and to make sure that the thing that I thought I wanted to do wasn't something that I wanted to run screaming from, instead. Those were required for credit, and they changed rules to benefit me so that my two summer experiences would count for the required amount of practical experience, rather than having to do one very long internship into the school year, forcing a certain amount of juggling schedule to achieve. The graduate education system really is geared around the idea that most graduate students are working at least part time, and therefore the schedule of classes is supposed to make it easier for someone to fit them in around their working schedule. Even if doctoral students are more appropriately funded, they're also likely doing paid work as assistants to other researchers, or doing work in some other job to help pay for the education, because at the point of graduate school, you're considered an independent student, which means the government expects your family to contribute nothing to your expenses. The loans get murderous at that point. Two years of graduate school was fairly close to the same amount of loans as four years of undergraduate, and without any of the grants, merit awards, and other ways of defraying costs that I had at my disposal that kept the undergraduate costs down somewhat. By the time I was done, my loan totals were anywhere from "more than a year's salary" to "approximately a year's salary," depending on where I wanted to work. If I were already employed somewhere, and my employer had some amount of either or both of paying me or offering me tuition reimbursement money, the total costs probably would have gone down, but I had the privilege to not have to juggle both of those things, so I didn't. (It was probably a good idea. Making sure that I got to the places I needed to be on time is one of the biggest struggles I had. Which makes more sense with the diagnosis of something that has "has trouble estimating how long things take" and "has trouble switching tasks from one thing to another, especially when the thing currently capturing attention is interesting and provides some dopamine.")
The actual coursework in my master's program was a lot about teaching us general principles, fundamentals, and the foundations of various skills, on the assumption that whatever place we were going in to, and the systems they were using, would then refine those general skills into skills that would be useful for that specific work location and task. Learning to wrangle phenomenally stupid search appliances, work out game theory applications, program a little bit, see actual issues in the wild and try to fix them, answer actual questions that people pose, and understand that most people aren't looking for something that's exact, but something that's sufficient are all generally applicable things, and in the place I'm in, I use those skills more or less frequently. There was a lot that got left out, as well, but having those general principles under my belt did mean that when confronted with a novel situation, I could generally make it to an acceptable solution, or figure out what I needed to search to get more specific answers from the engines. I learned a lot of things that look like magic, but are generally much more about translating human to computer and back again, and learning the various fiddly procedures to make things work, what the most common ways are they go awry, and how to bring them back into a working state when they do go awry. (Threatening the technology sometimes works, but you have to know the right threat to use.)
I did like university. The learning was good, the topics were interesting, the materials discussed were interesting, the people were fun, and the independence was nice. (So was the Internet connection.) Even when it jumped up to graduate school levels of time and length commitments, I enjoyed it, and I did well at it. I also feel like I had the most amount of autonomy over what I did with my time in the graduate school years, a feeling that I have been chasing ever since I became a working person. Unfortunately, I doubt I'm going to have that much time on my hands again until I retire from my profession. And the way that things are going, retirement is probably a lot farther off than it was when I stepped into this job. University also gave me plenty of options to engage in social activities, make friends with similar interests, and otherwise be around people and interact with them in walking distance of each other. Even if some times those walks were augmented with bus rides, or were actually quite long walks across campus spaces. So, in a lot of ways, university days were learning how to be an adult, without necessarily having to be an adult full-time. (I agree that these kinds of skills really could be taught in secondary school, but to do that, someone would have to fund secondary schools properly and change them from their current roles as warehouses and prisons.) For all of the learning how to be a functional, employed adult, "Thanks, I hate it," or "Adulting: One star, would not recommend" are still very true. The bits that were about learning, researching, and then writing up what you've learned and seeing what other knowledgeable people thought about it, those were the best and most interesting parts of the university experience, and are the things that I do the absolute least in my current position.
So, when it comes to advice about whether to pursue the university pathway, I'd say that it's always worth researching whether or not the career you want to get into requires a university degree. The next thing to research is to see if you can get other people to pay as much or all of the associated costs, if you can. (This goes extra if you're considering graduate school.) From there, it's a question of how much work you put into the degree and how much work you put into the process of becoming an independent adult. And if it feels discouraging, if there's any part of my journey, or the things that I've talked about that resonates, remember that one of the pieces of advice I give to the grownups about their kids and certain behaviors in story time is, "I was that kid, I turned out fine." Which I deliver as a joke and mean seriously.
I have had the immense privilege of being through both an undergraduate and a graduate education. It was required for the profession I wanted to go in to, but it was also very expensive. My family was made up of people with degrees, and a good-paying job or two in there as well, and all of the children have gone through at least an undergraduate education. I'll bet dollars to donuts that before all is done, both of my younger siblings will also have done graduate education, as a requirement of their professions and of continuing education requirements.
I also managed to pay back the loans that had to be paid back on time, and got at least some of the loans forgiven because of my choice of profession and the location that I was working in. Because I have done this, I am thoroughly on board with as much forgiveness of student debt as can possibly be wrangled, and I cheer any politician who wishes to relieve this burden from all of the people who have gone through the system of student debt and loans. Especially because a university education, or in rare cases, a community college education, has become the floor of sufficient class signifier to get work in many jobs, and especially in any jobs where a large paycheck and some nice bonuses is part of the expectation of what you get from doing that job.
Public education in the United States is free to the finishing of the 13th year, after which any further education becomes a paying enterprise, with costs per credit hour obtained depending on the course of study and the prestige of the school involved. The end result, after several years or year-equivalents of study, is the conferral of a degree/credential that presumably means a person has studied and mastered the necessary components for the field they will be going in to. The usual standard is the bachelor's degree, a four-year course of study, with some form of concentration on a subject. Vocational, technical, and community colleges often run shorter programs, somewhere around two years, that usually end up with certifications in what are collectively referred to as "the trades," usually skilled manual work that can, in fact, thanks to collective bargaining, pay quite well and provide very good returns on the cost of a credential. Graduate programs are also usually shorter than four years, standardizing on two for a master's degree and possibly three+dissertation for the doctorate. (I haven't done one, so I don't know what the usual schedule for it is. And many doctoral programs include the work of generating a master's degree, so that if someone doesn't finish the doctoral process, they still have a credential.)
[There's a very long digression here about U.S. culture and how it seems to divide prestige of occupation into three categories: people who work in service and food, who are usually assumed to be either teenagers getting experience before heading into other jobs or migrants, legal or otherwise, the "blue-collar" jobs that generally encompass manufacturing, factory work, the trades, and other jobs done by people who use their hands and bodies as an important part of the work, and the "white-collar" jobs that tend to be more in an office setting and are more knowledge-worker and managerial situations. "Blue-collar" workers are positioned by most major media outlets as the mouthpieces of the "real" United States, and politicians who say they're there to help with "blue-collar" workers are usually protectionist, nationalist, and many are more than willing to spread the idea that migrants, usually undocumented migrants, are "stealing" good jobs away from those who were born here. "White-collar" workers are usually struck with the anti-intellectualism bend of those same politicians, as out-of-touch liberal "elites" who ruin everything they touch. There may or may not be something over the Anti-Semitism Conspiracy Line added in here. This context is needed for understanding what gets said next.]
The U.S. attitude toward schooling and degrees is generally perverse, regardless of what level you're looking at. Vocational-technical education and going into the trades is often seen as work for people who aren't smart enough (by which they mean rich enough) to hack it as white-collar knowledge workers, even though the "skilled" part of "skilled trades" is not a misnomer, and the careers that vo-tech turns out are essential to keeping the rest of the plates spinning. People who advocate for more tracking and steering during secondary schooling suggest that many more people should be diverted into vocational-technical education as the place they will be happiest, do what they like, and use their skills to the fullest.
The university system, in comparison, often gets summed up in the idea that "B.S., M.S. and Ph.D" mean, correspondingly, "BullShit," "More Shit," and "Piled higher and Deeper." The further up the degree scale you go, the more you are abstracted away from and separated from what the common people think and do and the more you are in an ivory tower, looking down on everyone else and believing that your solutions to problems are simple and perfect, if only everyone else would agree with you that those solutions are simple and perfect. U.S. society both looks down on those who labor with their hands and bodies as dumb rubes with no brains and sneers down at people who have advanced degrees and do work that most requires thinking, research, teaching, and publication as out-of-touch arrogant elites who have no concept of what "real people" believe and want. (Some politicians manage to express both of these ideas within the same paragraph of their speeches, if not in the same sentence.)
The bachelor's degree is often excoriated as a class and wealth marker rather than a sign of any kind of intellectual or rigorous study, usually summed up in the derision of "underwater basket-weaving" as a class that gets taken, or the folks in the Avenue Q musical with the song, "What Can You Do With a B.A. in English?" While it's true that a lot of people end up doing work in a field that is not obviously related to their concentration, the defense of the university experience is that in addition to subject-specific knowledge, the university experience teaches its students critical-thinking skills, has them work through research methods, exposes them to environments where there is not a preordained correct answer, and otherwise gives them generally applicable skills that will help them when they need to solve problems, improve their work environment, or otherwise do better work and support their position-specific skills. [Politicians of a conservative bend generally poo-pooh these arguments in favor of asserting that the university is an indoctrination ground where liberal/progressive/socialist/Marxist opinions are dogmatically correct, regardless of the truth or empirical evidence, and anyone who opposes that will be ruthlessly oppressed and then eventually driven away from the university environment. Those politicians have generally not actually sat in on a full course load since their own university days.]
In my specific case, the bachelor's degree was a waystation rather than an endpoint, and therefore, I was generally free to take whatever coursework looked interesting, and to figure out the rest later, as in deciding to be a Librarian, rather than a library worker, I had committed myself to graduate school and its associated costs. As it turns out, by taking courses that looked interesting, I managed to get myself 95% of the way to an honors history bachelor's degree. Once the chair of the program pointed this out to me, after saying how good it had been to have me in class for The Canterbury Tales, I decided I would be willing to do the undergraduate thesis work and take the final necessary class (an art history class where I could choose from several - I took Buddhist art. Very pretty.) to get that degree.
Much of my university experience, in both undergraduate and graduate studies, was also a lesson on time management, workload juggling, making sure I could get up on time to get to class, making sure I was far enough along in my work before I took any breaks or did social things, making sure I left time open for band and its requirements, and otherwise building the edifice of compensation and external memory that I needed to get through class a the person I was, and in trying to figure out what I could do to keep myself awake from the shocks of going from the very cold outside to the very warm insides. I know now that what would have helped me would have been getting the two important diagnoses earlier on in life, but I was holding it together and doing well in my classes, so nobody really had much of a thought about wondering whether I was succeeding, much less me. The weaknesses would only start showing up when there weren't defined requirements and grades, when unspoken requirements were also expected to be followed, and when I was getting stressed out of my gourd about basically everything in the relationship that I put far too much effort into trying to hold togeher. All the same, the university experience did teach me skills that have turned out to be useful in other parts of my life, so that part is true, even if, yes, the first degree was a little bit of a throw-away in terms of actual professional skills. (Except when that odd question comes through that is actually in my wheelhouse because of that study.)
Graduate schooling was, at least for me, "more of the same, emphasis on more." Paper lengths got longer, lecture times got longer (although less frequently through the week), projects got bigger, and required classes started intruding on band rehearsal hours, so I wasn't able to continue with anything of that nature through graduate school. Instead, I would often end up going to some of the women's sporting events, as those were free with a student identification, and I picked up a bit more of work-study through intramural refereeing and through doing some work in the School of Education's instructor resource center. (Which is where I cannibalized iFruits for the jump to beefier operating systems, and started getting some of the "you need to be awake for this" issues. This had to do both with the apnea, but also with the part where VAST brains sometimes declare they're finished for a little while and they want a nap to recharge. Often after a meal. Grad school is also where I learned some of those "okay, I can stay awake if I stay standing up instead of sitting" techniques that would get me in trouble in my workplace several years later.) I also spent a summer doing internships at local public libraries to get some amount of work experience in an actual library setting, and to make sure that the thing that I thought I wanted to do wasn't something that I wanted to run screaming from, instead. Those were required for credit, and they changed rules to benefit me so that my two summer experiences would count for the required amount of practical experience, rather than having to do one very long internship into the school year, forcing a certain amount of juggling schedule to achieve. The graduate education system really is geared around the idea that most graduate students are working at least part time, and therefore the schedule of classes is supposed to make it easier for someone to fit them in around their working schedule. Even if doctoral students are more appropriately funded, they're also likely doing paid work as assistants to other researchers, or doing work in some other job to help pay for the education, because at the point of graduate school, you're considered an independent student, which means the government expects your family to contribute nothing to your expenses. The loans get murderous at that point. Two years of graduate school was fairly close to the same amount of loans as four years of undergraduate, and without any of the grants, merit awards, and other ways of defraying costs that I had at my disposal that kept the undergraduate costs down somewhat. By the time I was done, my loan totals were anywhere from "more than a year's salary" to "approximately a year's salary," depending on where I wanted to work. If I were already employed somewhere, and my employer had some amount of either or both of paying me or offering me tuition reimbursement money, the total costs probably would have gone down, but I had the privilege to not have to juggle both of those things, so I didn't. (It was probably a good idea. Making sure that I got to the places I needed to be on time is one of the biggest struggles I had. Which makes more sense with the diagnosis of something that has "has trouble estimating how long things take" and "has trouble switching tasks from one thing to another, especially when the thing currently capturing attention is interesting and provides some dopamine.")
The actual coursework in my master's program was a lot about teaching us general principles, fundamentals, and the foundations of various skills, on the assumption that whatever place we were going in to, and the systems they were using, would then refine those general skills into skills that would be useful for that specific work location and task. Learning to wrangle phenomenally stupid search appliances, work out game theory applications, program a little bit, see actual issues in the wild and try to fix them, answer actual questions that people pose, and understand that most people aren't looking for something that's exact, but something that's sufficient are all generally applicable things, and in the place I'm in, I use those skills more or less frequently. There was a lot that got left out, as well, but having those general principles under my belt did mean that when confronted with a novel situation, I could generally make it to an acceptable solution, or figure out what I needed to search to get more specific answers from the engines. I learned a lot of things that look like magic, but are generally much more about translating human to computer and back again, and learning the various fiddly procedures to make things work, what the most common ways are they go awry, and how to bring them back into a working state when they do go awry. (Threatening the technology sometimes works, but you have to know the right threat to use.)
I did like university. The learning was good, the topics were interesting, the materials discussed were interesting, the people were fun, and the independence was nice. (So was the Internet connection.) Even when it jumped up to graduate school levels of time and length commitments, I enjoyed it, and I did well at it. I also feel like I had the most amount of autonomy over what I did with my time in the graduate school years, a feeling that I have been chasing ever since I became a working person. Unfortunately, I doubt I'm going to have that much time on my hands again until I retire from my profession. And the way that things are going, retirement is probably a lot farther off than it was when I stepped into this job. University also gave me plenty of options to engage in social activities, make friends with similar interests, and otherwise be around people and interact with them in walking distance of each other. Even if some times those walks were augmented with bus rides, or were actually quite long walks across campus spaces. So, in a lot of ways, university days were learning how to be an adult, without necessarily having to be an adult full-time. (I agree that these kinds of skills really could be taught in secondary school, but to do that, someone would have to fund secondary schools properly and change them from their current roles as warehouses and prisons.) For all of the learning how to be a functional, employed adult, "Thanks, I hate it," or "Adulting: One star, would not recommend" are still very true. The bits that were about learning, researching, and then writing up what you've learned and seeing what other knowledgeable people thought about it, those were the best and most interesting parts of the university experience, and are the things that I do the absolute least in my current position.
So, when it comes to advice about whether to pursue the university pathway, I'd say that it's always worth researching whether or not the career you want to get into requires a university degree. The next thing to research is to see if you can get other people to pay as much or all of the associated costs, if you can. (This goes extra if you're considering graduate school.) From there, it's a question of how much work you put into the degree and how much work you put into the process of becoming an independent adult. And if it feels discouraging, if there's any part of my journey, or the things that I've talked about that resonates, remember that one of the pieces of advice I give to the grownups about their kids and certain behaviors in story time is, "I was that kid, I turned out fine." Which I deliver as a joke and mean seriously.
