My Cynical Views on My Degree

Not an image of my actual degree, obviously.

[This entry was intended for another blog that I keep with a friend. The basic requirement was that we write about how we feel about our degrees and how we view a college education.]

When I was a kid, it was always said by adults that one should never discuss politics, religion, or money with strangers or at the dinner table. As to why, I never received a definitive, consistent answer, but all the responses feel very much related: it's too revealing; it's rude; it leads to arguments or animosity; it's far too much to discuss to everyone’s content. Seemed fair to me as a kid. Now, as a young adult, these are all the things I talk about, and I talk about them with all kinds of people all the time. These are topics that I think most people think about and discuss often as well. The one topic that makes me tense anymore is college. With today’s job market and economy looking the way they do, it’s making others nervous too. People are of several minds when it comes to the necessity or use of higher education and of American universities, and each of the different sets of views is gaining greater and greater representation within the population, versus before when the general consensus was that college was a good unto itself no matter what. How people feel about a college education is often separated into what they imagine is appropriate for themselves, how they feel about it on a theoretical level, and how they regard those who have had a college education. There is frequently overlap but just as often there is not.

I'll note here that I possess a college degree, and I'll note here that it in itself hasn't given me much of anything quite yet.

Dialogues about college before it actually happened for me were always tentative but full of hope, and people engaged in these conversations with me readily just to reiterate how delightful and wondrous the experience was going to be. They would say how life after college was sure to extend the glories of my college days, with classmates becoming co-alumni and allies or possible spouses in that place called the "real world." Course objectives would become mission statements, class curriculums would become the gist of my work, and overall GPA would translate to my position within whatever company I was to be part of. Whatever was paid for tuition would be earned back doubly in a year’s pay.

During college, conversations remained largely the same if just a tad more interrogative and detail-oriented. That undifferentiated word ‘success’ was replaced with jokes of me winning Oscars or Golden Globes, or writing best-selling books on the Tiwi, or becoming employed by The New Yorker. Questions about my major abounded, and talk of what would happen to me after college turned into what I wanted to do after college. Life with a degree still had promise, but now control was in my own two hands.

Control, in this job market, is a delusion. How my life is now as compared to how I thought it would be back when I was still attending university are different, but this is mainly based on changed timelines. A hiatus from academia was always intended, but a two-year break was not in the books. I expect to work almost full-time during graduate school to make a living and to make ends meet, compared to three years ago when it was purely supplemental. I’m considering extending my hiatus so that I can pay back some of my loans from undergraduate study before I take on more loans and debt to pay for graduate school. I’m no longer feeling that a Ph.D is a wise option even though I intend to teach at the college level; and I’m nervous about how my lack of experience in both film and in front of a classroom will impact my ability to gain employment. My feelings about the future are multi-faceted, but don’t reflect my one-dimensional view about the value of my college education: it hasn’t done enough for me to find worthwhile work, and I underestimated the need to utilize my alma mater’s resources towards that end.

Talking about college, now, post-graduation, has been an extraordinarily fascinating and thoroughly involving affair, and surprisingly therapeutic. The tone of these conversations has everything to do with the setting I find myself in, not to mention whatever mood I'm in. When I’m at work, talk of my college experience is flecked with grunts and grumbles. I suppose it’s a defense mechanism, to deflect judgment from others that I’m still working a low-income job despite having graduated from a top university, or to deflect guilt from within over the same thing. Outside of work, my attitude is far less cynical. Talking with friends, most of whom have graduated from some university or another, I find myself speaking in future-oriented language, and I refer to goals that I’ve set up for myself, deadlines and all. These goals have little to do with desired salaries or markers of success, unlike some of my peers, and resemble lifestyle expectations that I’m trying to uphold or learn to uphold by a particular age. I want to teach world cinema and I would love to be a programmer for a movie theater or film festival or museum of modern art, and I haven’t paid much thought to whether or not these sorts of jobs will keep the bills paid.

There is a multitude of outcomes that begin with graduation and they don’t always end in success. Attending college can be as much a crutch to one’s chosen lifestyle and livelihood as the key to opening the doors of wealth and happiness, and it’s certainly not an experience I’ll ever forget, or can afford to forget considering my loan repayment, which will continue for years to come.