Motivation for college: education or salary?

[Angrboda]

Well, I was steered towards math and computers because of my abilities, and I'm not sure I would know how to make a better choice if I were back in those shoes again. Part is that I had no overwhelming interest in doing anything on the one hand, and being the type of person who enjoys and thrives at most anything on the other. At the time, I suffered from chronic depression, and as my grades slid off the continental shelf, I found myself spending a lot of time on philosophy, women's studies, and poetry, and only modest efforts toward my dual major of math and computer science. I do think college is an important atmosphere for learning, something that can't be duplicated by self-study. Learning a language through self-study is slow, laborious, and considerably less effective. But the same goes for other subjects, as you are forced into acquiring, pondering, and learning topics and viewpoints that you would never study on your own, or as successfully.

I became cynical at one point and decided that the primary purpose of college was to weed out those who couldn't stomach all the bullshit and obediently jump through all the hoops. Particularly in the technical fields, you will learn the bulk of your job skills after college and in your first few years on the job. Still, I believe in the value of a well-rounded liberal arts education, even though I don't have any arguments or data to support the notion. It is said, however, that a college graduate earns an average of $3,000 a year more than a high school graduate, not to mention what happens with higher degrees. Over the course of a 50 year stretch of employment, that's an extra $150,000 for retirement. I don't know that you can sneeze at that.

One thought does occur to me, however, regarding the relative merits of technical versus non-technical degrees. At the university I attended, there was a bit of graffiti I encountered, and it said, in the language of mathematics, that, "the limit of IT (Institute of Technology) as GPA (grade point average) goes to zero is CLA (the College of Liberal Arts)". And it was quite accurate; only the best and brightest survived the rigors of coursework at IT, the rest settling for the liberal arts college. For better or worse, the ability to quantify performance in the technical disciplines is greater than that outside them, in the soft sciences and the liberal arts. This likely has two effects, both related to the lack of equally rigorous metrics of performance. First, it will allow the mediocre and underqualified a better chance of passing through the system without being weeded out. Second, it is likely to attract a disproportionate number of those for whom the lack of tangible metrics is attractive (whether they are free spirits, non-conformist, or scoundrel). Thus, I suspect, but don't know, that it's possible the rate of incompetence is higher in the arts and the soft sciences, than it is in the hard sciences.

Speaking of my own field in particular, philosophers as a whole have a lowly reputation. A friend who I roomed with once confided in me that she had started taking classes in philosophy, and one day she looked around her, and she was tempted to ask the rhetorical question of her peers, "Were you born this way, or did you have to work to become this stupid?" My own thoughts are that there are plenty of stupid people in philosophy departments, on both sides of the lectern. Whether that's just a bias or overly harsh judgement, I don't know. (I've even come to view one of my favorite philosophers, Dan Dennett, with something of a jaded eye.)

Still, I look back on my life, and I wonder. Despite depression, flunking out of college, nearly flunking out of high school, and spending the bulk of my adult life disabled and not working, it is only in the last year that I've made my most significant breakthroughs. And a lot of that has been spurred by a late life kick of learning spurred on by my association with atheists, skeptics, humanists, and other secular people. I don't know if I'd have made the same discoveries if I'd been successful in computers or mathematics, and in hindsight, my druthers today would be to do basic research in higher mathematics; even if I'd chosen to pursue philosophy early on, who knows what would have occurred — I might have slumbered in the dogmas of this or that well educated niche.

(Noting my aspirations in mathematics, it's also true that I had horrible skills as a mathematician, developed largely as a consequence of neglect over the course of about 5 years. I've often wanted to go back and fix the problems, but am not even sure it could be done.)