*steps onto soapbox*

The Devaluing of Education in America or Why I Blame Guidance Counselors for the State of Our Economy

Let's take a trip about 11 years in the past.  I was a fresh-faced high school senior, ready to take on the world, every opportunity at my fingertips, I'm going to make the world a better place and get lots of money in the process!!  Woohoo!!  So during that extremely impressionable time of my life, every adult said the same things, "What college are you going to?  Where are you going to college?  Well you have to college!"  And being an impressionable, fresh-faced youth, I listened to my elders and spent four years in an institution of higher learning.  Now I can definitely say that those four years were some of the best of my life, but other than being a respite from responsibility, what exactly did it get me?

I can tell you what it got me:  debt.  And a shit ton of it.  By the time I was out of college, society had changed.  When the adults told me to go to college, they saw it as an amazing opportunity to grow my education and have a better chance at getting a good job.  But after those 4 years, it turned out that the adults in everyone's lives told everyone else the same thing and now there's this flood of "educated" 24-year-olds descending upon the job market, expecting to get positions that will outweigh their ridiculous amount of debt.  And when you have 80 bagillion 24-year-olds who have all the same slips of paper, then that little "Education" portion of their resume doesn't mean shit.

And this, my friends, is where we are right now.  Everyone has a bachelors degree and it's become the new high school diploma.  It's assumed that everyone has the education, but the big issue here is that entry-level jobs don't compensate based on the fact that most of the applicants have had to pay out of pocket for their education.   This.  This is why the middle class is going down the tubes.  Because high class?  They don't have SallieMae to deal with, and the lower class?  They probably didn't go to college and don't have the debt.  So it's the middle class schlubs like me that get stuck in retail for entirely too long and are faced with the fact that for the rest of their lives, they will never be able to call their money their own.

I am grateful for my education and I wouldn't trade that time for the world.  But will I ever encourage another starry-eyed high school senior to blindly go to college?  Hell-fucking-no.