Education Inflation
As college attendance rises, the idea of a bachelor’s degree is starting to take the conceptual place of high school – getting a bachelor’s degree, for the middle class, is becoming the norm, such that students are going to college even if they have absolutely no idea of what they’re going to do with their education.1 Since more people are getting an undergraduate degree, the degree is becoming less impressive; more people pursue terminal degrees and that in turn becomes less of a distinction. This results in a whole bunch of people attending school longer for degrees that carry less weight.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the situation above – the increasing education of the population is, by itself, an appealing idea. The problem is that as the education of the middle class stretches to include a requisite 2-4 years of undergrad and 3 to 5 years of graduate school on top of that, the students aren’t getting any younger. So we graduate at 27, an age when our parents were married, having children, and buying houses. To put it succinctly, ou
r bodies are saying “babies!”, our advisers are saying “thesis!”, and the largest purchase we’ve made so far is a minifridge. This doesn’t seem to be bothering us too much, though; we are good at school, we figure, so we might as well remain in the bubble so our loans continue to be subsidized. We stay in school, we stay in debt, and we stay in our parents’ houses.
The idealism eventually escapes our peer-reviewed brains when we graduate and realize that we don’t know how to buy car insurance. But that’s really okay because we can ask our parents to do it for us. They’re right downstairs, after all.
Overstocked and Ungrateful
One major problem is that our generation doesn’t know what to do with what we got – more so than generations before us, we are often oversupplied and oversupported. We were told we could be anything we wanted to be and were then gingerly placed into the world, too old and too inexperienced. We are the kids kept inside nice houses so we don’t get our clothes dirty – the kids sent on a field trip to the library with 2 days’ supply of food, a spare rain slicker and an atlas. We are the safest generation yet. And we are floundering because of that. Everything was set up for us to be effortlessly happy, but the essence of life is potency, not happiness. And a 26 year old who has been in school for 21 years does not feel potent.
And then we feel unable to talk about this – what kind of idiot complains about not having enough work? What kind of ungrateful kid says he or she doesn’t want to be pampered? But that’s what we have to do. Because pampering, while incredibly comfortable, is stifling.
And I don’t know what to do with this – like I said before, an increase in the college-educated population is good, and college degrees (once we actually get them) have been shown to increase salaries even in fields unrelated to one’s major. But the inflation of the college degree has kept a whole generation of students from recognized adulthood, and the results are debilitating.
1They take Psych 101 and whatever else sounds interesting to them, and graduate with a humanities major that their adviser says will look great to graduate schools.
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