Do you believe that attending college is important? by Peter

Do you believe that attending college is important? by Peter - April 2020 Scholarship Essay

Sure it’s important. Attending college is the key to a way of life because if you don’t have a degree, many employers won’t hire you, and that changes your occupation -- the thing that occupies you, and fills your life and keeps you going. That’s the easy answer. However, there are questions implied by the question, “is it important,” that are worth addressing individually.

Is it right that attending college is “the key to a way of life”? In the case of neurosurgeons, I certainly think so. If someone else were going to cut up my brain, I should hope s/he would have received a formal education. In contrast, there are other cases in which a degree is required, but for reasons that are not so clear-cut. Does a person need a physics degree in order to work in finance? Well, no, and yet a physics degree would certainly be preferable to a high school diploma on Wall Street. The fact that so many people use college degrees to qualify for jobs that have nothing to do with their respective fields of study is evidence that a broad range of backgrounds, including many without college, would suffice for the same purpose. So, whether or not college should be the key to a way of life does depend on what the “way of life” is.

Is that “way of life” important? I am determinedly agnostic about that. Yes, it could be subjectively important, as long as you, the subject, believe that it is. Like it does for marriage and birthdays and national holidays, the human imagination imparts beauty and value to the opportunities associated with education -- not the other way around. For example, part of the reason why I want to be a genomics researcher and not professional dog-walker is that I have been conditioned by the group of adults around me to believe that the former option holds more “value,” as reflected in their opinions and in the amount of money that people would be willing to pay me. To be a scientist is good because people say so. Having said that, I must not be excessively irreverent toward the notion of inherent value. The (college-educated) neurosurgeon saves people’s lives and preserves the minds which make them uniquely human, and no explanation is necessary for why such work has inherent value. Let’s simply not question that.

Nonetheless, some will make an even bolder argument, that college itself has inherent importance for any individual because it expands a person’s mind, and I must emphasize that I reject that argument. I do not reject this notion of inherent importance just because I question whether it is important to have one’s mind expanded. No, I question it because every complex individual who walks this earth is already a philosopher, regardless of how s/he was educated or how s/he writes. For instance, Bigger Thomas, who is Richard Wright’s fictional portrayal of the perfectly uncultivated mind, is a philosopher, and that is why Wright was able to write an entire book about him. I acknowledge that strange crops do grow in that uncultivated mind of his, and they grow and bear strange fruit (that is, he is executed for rape). However, they bear fruit nonetheless, and the complex products of his thoughts and behaviors certainly make him a philosopher. Yes, Bigger is a philosopher, Diogenes is a philosopher, my cat is a philosopher, and anyone who is unemployed is doubly a philosopher, for want of any other occupation. Although college education is necessarily important if we are committed to a society that particularly values the work of college-educated people (such as neurosurgeons), it is not necessarily of unique importance when it comes to enriching people’s minds.