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comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  4352 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall

I tend to think that college degrees are good if you go into it thinking this is to make me a better informed more knowledgeable person. This is to teach me how to learn, how to approach problems. If it's all about a job, then perhaps you're missing the point. It's about acquiring a career path, then undergrad is really only the first step for most people.





tubadude  ·  4352 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think this is a fair assessment. I would say that any post-high school training could be approached this way, and that is what I wish more people were open to. I think society needs to rid itself of the "Oh, you're a trucker? You must have been too dumb for college." type of stigma. My father-in-law had a master's degree in electrical engineering and held contracts with NASA for his optical systems, but he went out and got a CDL and drove trucks for a while because he had always wanted to. I often wonder what people in gas stations thought of him when he was on a trips, no way did they know that he was an expert in holography, or lidar, or that he had developed the optical disk used in IBM's first barcode scanner. Einstein was a patent clerk, kind of unassuming.

thenewgreen  ·  4352 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Great comment. This is something that I have to remind myself, I don't really know anybody and I shouldn't assume to. Almost everyone that I have taken the time to really know has something that makes them unique, a gift or a passion for something that is theirs alone. It doesn't matter if they're a truck driver, a patent clerk, or a dishwasher… Most of us are striving toward something and that striving is what's remarkable.