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.)<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}