2023-09-24 When Getting a Degree Makes You The Enemy

This is something I've noticed recently that is extremely pervalent in my personal life and among the internet. There is this desire among parents of your child getting educated, graduating from College, and doing something great with their life. They are supported before, and maybe even during the process sometimes. And then everything changes - suddenly over time you become the self-important arrogant rich elite that had enough money to get an expensive degree and had the time to spend 4 years of their life on it. There comes a point where getting a degree, a very big acheivement for a lot of people, and something many only dream of, makes you the enemy, and I'm not the only student who has expressed these experiences.

The assumption, of course, is that only rich people get degrees, that every person with a degree is a self-important know-it-all that doesn't actually know anything at all, but had thousands of dollars to get through College just so they have a piece of paper they can hold over other people. Of course people who never went to College are most set on projecting this narrative. It's not just them either, it also comes from the far-right that thinks College is a brainwashing machine that turns people into Communists. Neither of these narratives are true.

I grew up in a poorer family. We didn't have the money to pay for College, let alone pay for a great College. The University I went to was a Catholic University that I had no interest in going to, but I had to because it was the only one that had financial aid. Over half of my tuition was loans, loans that have interest that I have to now pay off for the rest of my life. Make no mistake, I and many other students were not rich or priviledged with money. We put it just enough work to get through High School with a halfway decent GPA, even with all of the challenges, and there were *many* challenges.

College education is valuable and extremely important, and everyone should have an opportunity at it. It is meant to expose you to different cultures, different art, different expressions, different people. It makes you think, it allows you to develop your own thoughts, to learn history, to learn the difference between opinions and facts, how to do historiography correctly. It develops your writing and reading comprehension skills, which is all too important in this day and age.

When are we as a society going to stop being spiteful of the next generation's accomplishments and start being encouraging of their dedicating four years of their life to studying what they love and gaining knowledge and experience from it?