The ouroboros of higher ed: you get a degree so you can… teach other people to get the same degree?
Pyramid Scheme or Ouroboros?“To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.” - Stephen Covey
I saw a post recently that basically alluded to (most) college degrees being just part of a big pyramid scheme.
Meaning that many of the degrees, the only thing you can really do with them is go back into the system and teach others the thing. Or maybe it’s more of an ouroboros? I don’t know, but I know that many degrees are unnecessary in the world we currently live in.
In many cases, the colleges/universities do you dirty by not really preparing you for the industry your degree is in. They follow the outlined curriculum, check all the boxes, dot all the t’s, but not much in real-world skills are provided.
“Your results are determined by the people you surround yourself with.” - Dan Sullivan
Don’t do yourself dirty, but rather, learn about a job/industry/career BEFORE going after it.
We now live in a time when it has never been easier to do this.
YouTube and TikTok are full of videos from people showing “a day in the life of….”
No problem. Go find the person in your community who does the thing.
While I grew up in a time where YouTube and TikTok weren’t things (hell, the internet didn’t really become a thing until high school), I was still fortunate enough to still be able to connect with so many people to learn about what they do.
Each one of these encounters led me either towards or away from a career that I would have otherwise wasted much time pursuing.
There are certainly careers that will still require specialized schooling (for now). Nursing is one of them that I foresee will require a degree for a long time.
Yet, so much of what I learned during my years of schooling didn’t really prepare me for my actual job. What was taught in the classrooms, in the labs, in the clinicals didn’t give me the skills I needed when I was working in the ER.
The best advice I got during nursing school was from my first clinical instructor, who told us to just take the first nursing job offered to us. She said it would help us gain experience and really learn how to be a nurse. She wasn’t wrong. But I feel like many professors don’t do this for the students, so it is really up to you to figure out what you are in for.