Every now and then, I learn something when I read The Reflector. In Tuesday’s edition, an article on the front page discussed a new Certified Financial Planner program that MSU is going to offer. What stuck out to me in the article was a quote in which the director of the program said the skills learned were going to be obsolete in two years.
So an academic certificate is worthless after two years? What does this say about what a particular program of study can teach a person? To push the inquiry even further, how much is a bachelor’s degree worth these days?
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen wrote in his book Development as Freedom that, of all the major sociological differences-race, religion, wealth-the most important one was whether a person possesses a bachelor’s degree. In other words, all measures of wealth and status are most directly related to whether a person has a bachelor’s degree.
But Sen was surveying the entire world when he performed his studies. Most of us just care about what a bachelor’s degree is going to be worth in the United States.
Of course, when examining the worth of a degree, one must take into account what a student majored in. For example, an engineering degree is just a few technological advances from being obsolete. The same goes for most scientific degrees.
A liberal arts degree is more durable, since the writings of Shakespeare and John Stuart Mill don’t change, but most jobs don’t require an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare’s comedies (much to the chagrin of some people I know who had papers due this week on that topic).
Besides, the world needs engineers and scientists. Somebody has to make computers work so others can write literary criticism, and someone needs to invent drugs so others can paint without a headache.
I remember an article written by William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Mississippi native. The article consisted of excerpts from a commencement address he gave to the University of Maryland. Paraphrasing Raspberry, one goes to college not to get a degree, but to learn how to learn. Most of what we learn in class is ephemeral, so the way we learn it is the most useful thing about getting a college education.
While I don’t yet possess a bachelor’s degree and have spent precious little time in the “real world,” my hunch is that Raspberry is right.
This idea could be viewed several different ways. One, the state of Mississippi is spending an awful lot of money to teach people how to learn. Two, the state of Mississippi needs as many educated people as it can get. Three, some of us could be doing something better with our time than getting a degree in a major simply because it has easy requirements.
Those who have taken any economics classes should remember a concept called opportunity cost. Put simply, it is the cost of not doing whatever else you could be doing. While we spend a few years in Starkville, meandering our way toward a degree, we could be earning money, learning a skill or getting valuable experience.
However, I think that for the majority of us, a degree, while perhaps not offering much in the way of practical personal benefit to our lives, will enrich existence much more than spending an extra four years climbing up the corporate ladder.
So more power to those who want to be financial planners. Sure, skills learned in that program might be obsolete after two years, but those people will learn new skills during those two years. More power to those who pursue technical degrees. More power to those who want to spend their lives deciphering John Donne’s poetry. More power to those who say “To heck with it all,” and go sail around the world.
And if you’re having real doubts about what you want to do, but you don’t want to go back home and start working, just become an economics major. That’s what I’m doing.
Wilson Boyd is a senior economics major.