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Re: You're still failing to grapple with the serious point...
By niralshah
Feb 27th 2007
at 5:10 pm EST
(Updated
Feb 27th 2007 at 5:25 pm EST)
Nowhere did I say a degree is a guarantee of success. Its an issue of opportunity and likelihood. Obviously, a sufficiently lazy PhD could end up homeless, but its not likely. Your drive can only take you as far as education allows. Training can help, but its becoming more and more of a job-specific phenomenon, where education is the basis of the hiring decision.
Anyone theoretically can make something of themselves, but education vastly increases the avenues that one can pursue, greatly increasing the likelihood that a lucrative or fulfilling career develops.
And yes, increasingly necessary. Its not really a contested idea. The income gap between those that do and do not have college educations is enormous - in my article I cite a census statistic indicating a $1 million lifetime income increase per post-secondary degree. People change jobs a lot. A general signal of ability to learn improves flexibility and the attractiveness of an employee, not to mention the dynamicism of the economy (which can have shifts in growth of sectors more rapidly than ever before).
A few weeks ago, I took on a three-part series by conservative “scholar” and author of the infamously racist The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, who argued that most Americans are too dumb for college, and that most college educations impart no meaningful skills. Clearly following my lead (I am, of course, on the cutting edge of today’s journalism), the New York Times Sunday Magazine mentions some of the same critiques of Murray’s argument.
Citing the income gap between those with and those without higher education, the piece underscores the value of a college education, and goes beyond Murray’s simplistic conception of learning. Most importantly, the article focuses on the value of education as a general signal, pointing out how the modern economy’s greatest rewards “have gone to those whose intelligence is deployable in new directions on short notice, not to those who are locked into a single marketable skill...”
A college education isn’t the end-all, be-all of a meaningful existence. As undergraduate education becomes more accessible, perhaps some of its prestige will fade and transfer to graduate education. But, the point still stands. A college education is still a worthwhile and vital component of upward mobility and the American dream, and Charles Murray is still a moron.
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Anyone theoretically can make something of themselves, but education vastly increases the avenues that one can pursue, greatly increasing the likelihood that a lucrative or fulfilling career develops.
And yes, increasingly necessary. Its not really a contested idea. The income gap between those that do and do not have college educations is enormous - in my article I cite a census statistic indicating a $1 million lifetime income increase per post-secondary degree. People change jobs a lot. A general signal of ability to learn improves flexibility and the attractiveness of an employee, not to mention the dynamicism of the economy (which can have shifts in growth of sectors more rapidly than ever before).