During the first two essays they had to consider what a college education is or should be and what it is worth. They all said that if more people had diplomas, a college education wouldn’t be worth as much. And now I think, why shouldn’t we just make a Masters degree worth more. (Bachelors as well but us first, please.)
This isn’t just doing more in the field while in a program. I mean the aims, the goals, and the difficulty of achieving them. I should present at conferences and submit for publications as much as I want. Sure. That kind of stuff, superficially, is a pursuit of experience and renown. Super. Is that a part of the graduate school experience that most people know exists?
What I mean, people, what I’m talking about, is understanding. I can’t say completing some form of higher education deserves more respect, but it should be worth respecting. I just don’t know we can make that happen.
It’s possible we could use our time as teachers to talk about the worth of our degrees. Personal anecdote seems just as good a route as praising the Masters and Doctors we respect greatly, or as conveying an air of respect that translates and outside academe. Maybe it’s a bit much to say that we are all seen as having done a good deed by getting our Bachelors degrees, but it was more than monetarily valuable. If there’s social pressure to “get a degree” in order to “start a career” then it’s a plus to at least have a degree. We are a different sort of contribution to society’s intellect: we try to bring reason and variety, merriment between chaos and order in the storm. We’re sensible.
I remember the contempt with which my stepmother, my very successful stepmother, spoke of her MA in English. Or whatever degree it was. It hurt to hear it days before I (effectively) got my BA in English, which I had begun to feel proud about. But she was expressing a real concern and I tried my best in the moment to appreciate it. The prestige and opportunities granted by a college degree weren’t there like they were.
“Aren’t as many trees in the stupid forest now that they started making paper. Damn it all.” That’s really what I make of that argument about degree inflation. I’ll throw it at my students tomorrow while talking about the way context can make the same exact sentence very different.