Why even mention this, I mean a lot of people have college degrees?
I made my first website around 1996, over twenty years ago. At that time I hadn’t had a lot of experience and I thought adding my education to my site might help. At one point later on, I did leave it off, but eventually added my education back in as part of my site.
Here are a few reasons why.
The idea of getting college education has gotten a bit of a black eye lately. People like Mike Rowe would say that getting an education in the trades would be a better option, and I agree. But not in all cases. I don’t think a degree in philosophy from your local community college is a really good idea, but a degree in philosophy from Havard, Princeton or Oxford is something else entirely. That doesn’t mean kids in community college shouldn’t have some exposure to philosophy either. The same goes for paleontology; your state college just isn’t going to have the same paleontology program as say, Yale or the University of Chicago. And even though we don’t like to admit it, a Paleontology degree from Yale is going to have more cachet than one from the Institute for Air Conditioning, Auto Repair and Paleontology.
If you look at a given population, there really isn’t a great need for a paleontologist per every 100,000 people. General physicians, dentists would be higher, brain surgeons a bit less. For plumbers and electricians, there is a much higher number per every 100,000 of the population.
I grew up in a blue-collar town, where I college degree was “that piece of paper”. To my parents, who never went to college, “that piece of paper” could open doors closed to them. In the 1950’s world they grew up in, a college degree was much rarer than today. From what I gather their view was the predominant one.
Getting a college degree as part of getting ahead has been an integral piece of the American Dream. However, in the pursuit of the goal, we have forgotten the journey. I can remember a future math teacher in a linear algebra class I took, asking the professor, “when is anyone going to use any of this”. The usefulness of education has become very important to many. If some utilitarian use of the knowledge transmitted cannot be proved, the knowledge must be worthless.
If in Sir Isaac Newton’s day you were to ask one of more educated persons of that era what the utilitarian uses of the theory of gravity would be, they would have been hard pressed for an answer. Now that class I took in Byzantine art would not have the world changing repercussions that the theory of gravity did, but on an individual level it has had to left some impression, if even a faint one.
I can remember a girl I went to high school with (who didn’t go one to college) visiting me and I showed her the art history book from one of my classes. I never saw anyone laugh so hard. She had tears coming down her face! Now in the lectures I had, no one laughed. It would be crude to say I was more “cultured” now that I had that one semester of western art. But I would say that the mere fact of going to college in itself made me more open to worlds and ideas alien to the my high school world of shopping malls and pizza places.
That fact is important: If I had not gone to college, would I too have found the pictures in the art history book so funny? I hate to admit it, but most likely the answer is yes. If that is the case, then my experience in college has made me different than I otherwise would be. This difference is not as world-changing as the theory of gravity, but it changed the world in me. As such, it is important and worthy to note.
That being said, I still get a smile when I look at the picture of The Goddess in Childbirth, the one she found the funniest.