The Purpose of Education by Jeremy

The Purpose of Education by Jeremy - April 2015 Scholarship Essay

Throughout life, you are told that it is important to get an education so that you can be successful in life. But what value does an education truly hold. Many will argue that an education is important because it will separate you from others when looking for careers in the future. But nowadays, the majority of people get educations from institutions of higher learning. Therefore, the question is asked: What is the purpose of your education that you strived for? I believe that the purpose of an education is not the value of the education itself, but rather the lessons of hard work and motivation you gather along the way.

In the United States, 90.83% of people attain their high school diploma before the age of 25, while 64.31% of people ages 25-29 have a college degree. Many years ago, the theory was that a college education guaranteed that you would have a job because you were different from the rest of the applicants. Not as many people received college degrees back in the day, and therefore you were separated from your peers with this degree. But now, a degree alone isn’t enough to separate yourself from the masses of people with degrees. Now, the value of an education is what you are able to gain from the experience you go through.

Nowadays, the value of education lies within the lessons it teaches you such as hard work and goal setting, as well as motivation to achieve what you desire. The years of work you do, working on homework for classes that you claim have no value does, in fact, have value. The value is, you are now able to enhance your creativity, problem solving, and even work ethic that is valuable in life. These life skills that you obtain are as valuable, and if not, more valuable, as the skills you gain in that subject area. Even if you use your mathematics that you learned in school, the history that you learned does not serve a huge purpose. Therefore, the importance of that history class boils down to the work you put into it and the skills you picked up along the way.

Therefore, I believe that the skills that you pick up through your years of education are more important than the actual face value of the education. With more and more people going to college and becoming more and more educated, the value of education is going downhill and quickly. Therefore, it is more important to go to college for longer to separate yourself. If you aren’t planning to go to more school to separate yourself, then it is the skills that you pick up through your years of education that are essential to your future in terms of obtaining good jobs. As opposed to years past when education was valuable for providing degrees that lead to jobs, education now is valuable for the lessons of work ethic, creativity, and problem solving that you can apply to jobs.