Amy Lindgren
Today I’d like to make the case for earning a bachelor’s degree. Four-year degrees, as they’re called, are usually a bachelor of arts or science, depending on one’s discipline.
And they’ve come under fire in recent years, for everything from sky-high tuition to lack of relevance for modern life.
Much of the criticism is deserved and I don’t plan to defend the missteps of higher education. Nor do I have a reflexive admonition about how these degrees lead to higher lifetime earnings or better career prospects. Higher than what? Better than what? These studies have never sat well with me, but even less today.
By contrast, vocational training is finally having a moment, as are apprenticeships and other pathways into careers in the trades. This is good news, but I hate to see the pendulum swing too far the other way. Even those working as trades people could find they need more “book learning.” And of course, not everyone is cut out for the trades.
Hence, my reasons for encouraging someone to consider a bachelor’s degree:
1. Key to promotion. While it’s becoming easier to start a career with less, different, or even no training, candidates with higher degrees are almost always favored for higher-level jobs, even in the trades.
2. Chance to explore. Pursuing a bachelor’s degree presents a rare opportunity to delve fully into a liberal arts course, or to switch career paths on the strength of a newly-discovered interest.
3. Exposure to different views. Theoretically, exposure to ideas can happen anywhere but realistically, it doesn’t. Workplaces aren’t set up for the exchange of ideas, for example, while trades training is focused on specific practices, not philosophy.
4. Training in thinking and communication. One of the superpowers students learn in trades school, in any discipline, is problem-solving. For bachelors’ grads, the superpowers are analysis and communication. Their classes frequently require writing and presenting, while their coursework leans to gathering, evaluating and synthesizing information.
5. Pathway to specific careers. If you want to work as a lawyer, librarian, doctor, or in dozens of other occupations, your path will include a bachelor’s degree.
6. Networking. It’s wrong to assume one type of education would provide better lifelong contacts than another. But in general, institutions offering bachelors’ degrees facilitate the networking, making it easier to build or maintain connections through one’s lifetime.
In presenting these reasons I’m not trying to promote one type of training over another, but to demonstrate that there’s more to the decision than a cost-to-earnings formula.
That said, I’ve never been a fan of the four-year model of bachelor’s training, for reasons ranging from the sudden boulder of debt to the forced delay in a student’s process of “adulting.”
Luckily, we have abundant options today that weren’t as available in years past. In addition to a surprising range of grants and scholarships, there are also lower-cost community colleges and free college courses that help high school students shave years off their bachelor’s degree.
Perversely, I most often recommend going slower rather than faster. Instead of pushing hard for a bachelor’s in four years (or fewer), I often advise intentionally setting your sights on longer.
This advice stems from my own college years, when a series of life events unexpectedly stretched my four-year degree into seven. Essentially, it took about five years for me to complete my junior and senior years of college.
Disaster? Actually, no. In that time I took a number of internships, guided a campus organization I had founded, worked way too many jobs, and started my business. Although they were somewhat haphazard, I wouldn’t call those wasted years.
Now I tout (planfully) pursuing a slower path by noting the potential benefits of a lighter courseload: Extra time to work, which provides both experience and potential tuition assistance; the possibility of more internships; an opportunity to join or lead more campus clubs; the chance to use that student ID for more discounts than usual.
That last point is light-hearted, but the others are spot on. When I meet recent early-graduates I’m often wondering if that date on the résumé will prove more valuable than the work and leadership experiences they could have built on the slower path.
The answer could be decades away, but one thing we know now is that internships — however the student squeezes them in — create strong inroads to work post-graduation. Come back next week for a look at how students can access and leverage these valuable components of their education.
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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.
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