Oh cool; higher education. My hobby horse. Here's the thing.. all of these statements are true: - Higher education can give you a great professional career pa

Oh cool; higher education. My hobby horse. Here's the thing.. all of these statements are true: - Higher education can give you a great professional career path - Higher education can give you social skills The problem is this; there is a third option, which is not to go into higher education and to do something vocational. Unfortunately we live in a world where this is a worse option. That is fucking unbelievable. I just got someone in to do a bit of extension work on my house. It looks great, it is precise craftsmanship from someone who has worked at it his whole life. He learned it vocationally and worked his way up to a pretty successful living. OK, so he is not making millions, but neither do most graudates. Here in the UK, at least, it is assumed you are aiming to go to university and get a degree. In my time it was pretty bad, I think now it is even worse. That's such a worrying idea; I mean, if everyone is a high flying management executive, who the hell are they managing? Kids are sold this idea that you have to go and get a degree and then your life will pan out for you. What a joke; you can hardly blame students for being dissillusioned when they realise that they now have a stonking debt, and there are still no guarantees. I'm not criticising the risk of doing higher education on debt, just that we lie to our younger generations and pretend that it is a done deal if they just get through a couple years are uni. Fucking stupid. We need to refocus. Going from school at 16 to college to learn, say, graphic design is awesome. Except as a society we are supposed to roll our eyes and go "oh, college.. right." I myself fall into the second of my bullet points; my career now is entirely through finding a job for my hobby skills, learning a new "trade" (digital forensics) on the job, and working my way up. Sure, I learned a lot about critical thinking in my degree, but the real takeaway was earning some friends, developing some social skills, making connections, letting myself go for a bit (uptight as a kid, sigh..). My career is entirely self-made at this point (learning programming myself, before uni., Learning forensics. Learning business acumen. etc.) - there are many many similar people out there but because I went to university I must be somehow awesome at this! here's the joke - my grade was about average because I barely turned up for lectures, having more interesting things to do :) The aggravating thing is that I look at really smart, capable people being passed over because they never went to university. Because it is ingrained, now, that for any vocation there is a degree for it. The education revolution, when it comes, doesn't have much to do with cost. But with perception.