Going to College or Not.

For Filipinos education has always been the greatest vehicle for social and financial mobility. Without it, one is stuck with jobs paying the minimum wage (if it is a legitimate employer). A degree is so important to attain here that there are those who also sacrificed their own education in favor of their younger siblings. Like a pay it forward system, the oldest see to it that the younger ones finish first before they attend to their own needs. Then they become so proud of what their younger siblings have achieved.  While there are others who would like to say that they were successful without it, even those who had been successful without it, they themselves have essentially sent their own children to school so that they would not suffer the risk of not being successful in life.

However other countries, primarily the first world which has been beset by the financial crisis are seemingly adopting the view that education may not be that important after all, counting the fact that it does not guarantee a job nor does it guarantee financial gain. To them its a vehicle of incurring a very heavy financial burden that can span to a decade and bottom line is if they are going to earn as much as an uneducated individual they'd rather not study at all. A very different mindset from where I am living in because here, having a degree is basically the minimum requirement if you wish to get any good job outside of a minimum wage, with some self-employed individuals being the exception. There's one serious flaw in the argument of nay-sayers to education though, and that is the equating education with material gain only; it is, in simplest terms, trying to equate a part of your life to the amount of money that the market will dictate. Everyone knows how fickle the law of supply and demand is;  'need' is not the motivational factor of demand, rather it can be as stupid as 'unsubstantiated fears (speculation)' and 'popularity' (think apple fanboys) to drive demand; Ten years from now when the market has again stabilized, what will happen to all those who chose not to study but end up stuck in a world where specialization has become the norm? There is no value created in unskilled labor, something that economists like Samuelson have forgotten, one clear example is China being able to churn out so much cheap and useless products because people would supply common labor in exchange for food. Compare that to goods made in Japan, and Germany where products have been associated with quality.

While there are arguments the higher education is not for everyone, like in MBA where it is discussed that once you have reached your level of incompetence, or in plain terms this student is just plain stupid to comprehend higher concepts; I do not agree that one should cease to pursue education. Its effects cannot be quantified by mere material gain or what an individual earns. An educated society is far better than a country full of idiots or have we all forgotten why there was  a point to civilization? The benefits to the person's psyche, his intellect and his experiences, and the effect to the society he is living in cannot be quantified.  Access to information and education should be made a human right, but until then, with the prohibitive costs of whether or not to get it, I hope that people make the right choice.