Things that happened in 2018 (briefly)

[mathemagicalschema]

• I got my driver's license, and a car! I'm still a terrible driver, but having the option of driving let me search for jobs in a much wider radius, and has been pretty helpful in general.
• I had a job! From April until the end of September. It was a seasonal office job, full time for the most part with a lot of overtime in June and July. My bosses thought I was awesome and I managed to save a bunch of money.
• Through said job, I acquired a posse of tea-drinking nerd friends, which has been pretty great.
• Rather less positively, in August and September I got hit with some pretty catastrophic fatigue (sleeping 12 hours a day, falling asleep at my desk, etc. etc.) I never found any kind of medical explanation. I have since gotten back to a "normal" energy level for me, but I have no idea what triggered the fatigue or how to keep it from coming back. I'm kind of terrified of that happening again. It's extremely difficult to crawl my way back out of fatigue like that, because it leaves me with no energy to manage anything beyond the very most basic self-care (if even that), making it almost impossible to make and keep medical appointments or do other things that are "supposed" to help. Thanks, body?
• After being laid off from that job, I was thinking about looking for something part-time, but eventually decided to go back to community college and finish my AA. And then... wavered on that for months, alternately panicking and despairing and pretending I was super motivated and everything was fine. Everything was not fine.
• Found a therapist. We haven't made enormous amounts of progress on anything specific yet, but I have fuckin' issues with therapists, and the fact that she has not pushed me to make rapid progress on anything in particular is to her credit. Cautious optimism there. Maybe someday I will learn how to handle an ordinary workload without having panic attacks?
• At the last minute, I made the decision to defer going back to college until next quarter, by which time I will hopefully be able to manage it with less resentment and terror. Part of what makes the idea of going back to college so difficult for me is that... well, I don't actually want to. I view getting a bachelor's degree as the only way I am likely to ever attain a middle-class standard of living. There are parts of the process that wouldn't be completely terrible, but I feel that colleges are fundamentally exploitative.

I think these days, the product is not the education, or even the credential or the acculturation, it's the student. It's a scheme in which the school processes raw materials (mostly teenagers) into more employable Graduate Product, by subjecting them to unreasonable professors, opaque bureaucracy, and artificially towering workloads. The "successful" student learns to sacrifice their health and sanity to please their teachers. The resulting Graduate Product has learned to accede to the demands of their superiors, no matter how arbitrary or unreasonable, and can be trusted to set their personal life aside whenever necessary for the nebulous reward of "getting ahead". Employers have found that this Graduate Product is so superior to what gets extruded at the end of compulsory education that they now insist upon degrees for many jobs that would never have previously required them, not because they need any of the specialized skills or knowledge that some students acquire in the course of a particular major, but because the Graduate Product is more biddable, and because they can. To whatever extent a particular school manages to create a more appealing Graduate Product, it can then sell that ideal to prospective students, to their parents, and to the voting public.

Notably, providing actual benefit to the student themself is entirely optional. A school that creates graduates who are more downtrodden, less happy, or more indebted may actually have a more appealing Graduate Product, provided that it doesn't leave too many of them too broken to function. Similarly, a school can create a much more appealing Graduate Product without overinvesting in the "teaching" or "development" or "mental health" of their students by being more selective in the applications process, accepting only those students who are already bright, privileged, and willing to tie themselves in knots to please authority figures. The school does not promise that any individual student will finish their program, nor that any given Graduate Product will find a buyer, or that any graduate will be paid enough to keep a roof over their head and service their loans, but so long as they keep the public convinced that college is a ticket out of poverty, so long as home-buying and child-rearing remain out of reach for most young adults who refuses to play the game, they can depend on a steady flow of tuition dollars, and even enjoy a semi-charitable status.

I'm planning to major in economics, because this economy is so broken. (and for more reasons than that - I have some intrinsic interest in the subject, I think its core assumptions are extremely flawed and the field has failed to incorporate the insights of behavioral economics, and as a nice side benefit it seems to leave a reasonably broad range of career options open that are mostly pretty high-paying.)

Comments

[anthropicprincipal]

Have you seen The Case Against Education?

[mathemagicalschema]

I haven't, but I'm familiar with Caplan's ideas and think he's more or less on the right track.

[alatefeline]

Thank you for sharing this post.

[steorra]

Yay for effective transportation!

"I view getting a bachelor's degree as the only way I am likely to ever attain a middle-class standard of living."
That reminds me of a post from a few years ago by siderea that I read because she linked it recently:
The Value of College

[rusalkii]

<3

[dorchadas]

I'm torn. On the one hand, you're right, credential inflation is a huge thing, now to the point of people going to grad school to stand out from all the people with mere undergraduate degrees. On the other hand, there's a story I've heard multiple times from other Jews I know that education is so valuable because it's the one thing they can't take from you (less of a problem than when they were children, more of a problem than ten years ago).

I do feel like a university setting has a lot of benefits that are orthogonal to education. My university had tons of theatre performances, cultural events, student groups, lectures by visiting scholars, and all of them free or low-cost to students. Every time I think about it I kick myself that I didn't go to more of them.

[blackcoffeeanddarknights]

Not to focus in on this tiny detail, but congrats on getting your license! I'm starting to work towards getting mine; it was my only real new year's resolution tbh.

College is a mess. :/ It's hard not to resent the educational system when you're so encouraged to break yourself just keeping up. And like you said, the rewards are nebulous at best.