Value of Education
Many people go to university for economic reasons and hopes of earning higher incomes, and they are afraid that if they do not they will only be able to find some low-paying job in the service sector, like a convenience store or a fast food restaurant. They think they will be able to move into a higher social class and find some type of management or professional work, so upward mobility is the main reason that most people go on to higher education, unless they are already independently wealthy or have inherited a lot of money from their families. Parents also believe that, which is why they also put pressure on their children to succeed in school and move on to higher education. Even in the present recession, unemployment is lower among college graduates and their lifetime incomes are generally greater than those who only completed high school. Not all university graduates are equally successful, since the best jobs and highest incomes go to those in specialized and technical fields like computer science, engineering or business administration, not the arts, humanities or social sciences. Four-year college degrees also tend to get devalued because so many people have them, while there are also skilled workers who never went to college who can still...
Nevertheless, over the past 30-40 years, those unionized working class jobs have been disappearing, making university education the main path into the middle class. This does not rule out other reasons for going to university such as
curiosity and desire for knowledge and self-improvement, but the realistic explanation is that
economics is still the most important factor.
2) Should everyone go to university?
In the past, only a very small minority of people ever had any opportunity for higher education since it was available mostly to the wealthy. As late as 1940, perhaps only 5% of the
population went on to universities and just 20% graduated from high school, while
women and
minorities had even less of a chance than this. Only with the
expansion of
public universities and
government programs like education benefits for
veterans,
grants and student loans was it possible for larger numbers of people to attend universities, including women,
minority groups and those from the lower classes. So for most of
history, the answer was that higher education was for the privileged few, not for everyone. Society has become more democratic in the last 50-60 years, and this meant that in
theory at least everyone should be able to go on to higher…
