Fox, I understand your disdain, but you have to admit that without college, most people wouldn't bother to educate themselves.
I don't need to admit that. In my opinion, and from my observation, humans have a natural intellectual curiosity and a passion for learning and exploration. Forcing education on many of those people is exactly what beats that passion and curiosity out of them. But we've decided that in our capitalist socioeconomic structure we value the workforce above the individual, and therefore we beat the creativity out of people so that they can interface with other people in a fairly predictable fashion.
Our system of education exists to turn humans into cogs.
The best part is that we make them believe that they're truly free, truly think for themselves, and are truly enlightened. And they may be correct, in a sense--reality is a funny, mutable, incredibly relative thing--but that's not the reality that I choose for myself.
I agree it's too expensive. College SHOULD be free in a modern society.
At a minimum, it should be free. It should also be hard. Not "We'll reduce your life to a number and decide whether that number is good enough for admission" hard, but "We're going to challenge you to learn. We're going to challenge you to excel. We're going to help you determine your aptitudes, interest, and path... but when you find your calling, you will live, eat, sleep and breathe it and we will grow you as a person by having you live within that existence."
If college were free, my objections would be greatly muted.
It is not.
The question becomes is the fight worth the negative impact on your career? You aren't going to change any hiring practices, but you'll definitely limit your own options.
The pragmatic angle emerges. I alluded to it earlier, but I'll address it more directly now that you've raised it.
First, here's my pragmatic answer: I am 35 and working as a pilot. Going to school full time is something I haven't the time (left) or money for. Going to school online is something I haven't the money for or, given my experiences in that direction, interest in.
Now for the subjective: If I'm going to even expend the time it takes to pursue a degree, I want to learn things. I don't want to hash over flat, stale information that I already know or doesn't interest me, taught by instructors who long ago lost any joy they may have ever had in the subject. I have better things to do with my time, like writing books, making music, playing / reffing hockey, doing Judo, racing sailboats, programming, studying things that interest me, learning new languages, building airplanes and so on.
I am enrolled in Embry Riddle Worldwide Online, with credit for my certs and ratings. However, the classes I've taken so far, at $300 per credit hour, have left me violently opposed to continuing that route. It's not a matter of work, it's a matter of value. Even if I could put up with the humiliatingly-bad education content management system (Blackboard), I cannot stomach paying $1100 for an English class that presents information that I learned in the sixth grade, and presents it in a outdated, prescriptivist (and fundamentally wrong!) methodology. The entire thing is a bare shell of an education--worse in its goals than even ATP is at conveying a knowledge of flying on its students. It's all about going through the motions, and I'll be damned if I'm going to just go through the motions, wasting my time and a helluva lot of money just to literally check a box on an application.
Say what you will about me, but I'm unwilling to play that game. It even feels dishonest.
I enrolled in online- and in-person courses at a community college in the Bay Area, strictly for love of learning, studying music theory, audio engineering, recording studio setup and design, and various other art and music classes. That was much better, but I could still see that most of the enrolled students were going through the motions.
Let me try and sum that all up quickly, since I let it get a little bit long:
I understand the pragmatic argument. Flying for a major airline isn't my raison d'etre. (Would add the circumflex but I'm inexplicably typing this on a Windows computer.. which is also why my em-dashes are '--') If it happens, it happens, and I certainly think it'd be fun... but that's really it. I want to have fun. I want to have enough money to eat, enough time to myself to write and do all the things I do, and ideally a job that I'm excited to go to. Ideally I'd work for a company I could be loyal to, and be based somewhere I either have friends or could commute from somewhere I have friends. (That would be SEA, PDX, SFO, really, in that order)
If I cared about money as a long-term goal, I would be making $200k+ in the tech industry right now.
I don't. Quality of life, love of the job, and enough pay so that I can eat good, healthy food and live an active, healthy lifestyle is all I demand.
What are your career goals?
To have fun. To go do something else if what I'm doing stops being fun.
-Fox
