Thursday, August 20, 2009
It’s insidious, really, the way formal education slyly asserts itself in my mind as something to be desired, despite all the protests I’ve lodged against it. Even my old man’s PhD, replete with all his dire warnings to never pursue one myself, boasts a certain mystique. I’ve been thinking about additional schooling recently, brainpan brimming with different scenarios, and when I stilled myself, let the pieces settle, it was clear I was addressing two simple questions: why I would want another degree and what precisely it would bear.
I don’t like school. Nostalgia’s supposed to equip me with rose-tinted shades, I guess, but when I think back to undergrad, specifically the framework of undergrad, I’m left instead with a rose-tinted magnifying glass. I remember asking a professor, one scholarly afternoon, why we couldn’t simply summarize the key ideas of the class curriculum and then, you know, move onward to parts unknown. She scoffed, chuckling as she told me that wasn’t how things worked. Previously I had viewed the ivory tower as a collective endeavor, an engine to further the body of knowledge.
Too idealistic, apparently. Now it strikes me as something entirely different, with the sundry pieces–from tenure to donation solicitations to eye-gouging book buyback prices–clicking eerily into place to reveal a fiendish enterprise built upon never-ending attempts at answering and re-answering unanswerable questions.
Perhaps I’m overextending myself here. Obviously that breakthrough cure or that revolutionary new invention will likely come from the tower, but beyond the more tangible output, what exactly is there? For an MBA, I learned today, connections and business skills, though I’m convinced I can procure those through alternate channels. All that’s truly left, then, is the pedigree, and with it the potential for a fatter paycheck. And when it comes down to this, ponying up $100k for the promise of future returns treads a fine wire between wise investment and the beginnings of a Ponzi scheme.