Loving data means I have to keep loving it even when it tells me stuff I don’t want to know. Jack Hough of SmartMoney has a bundle of charts, graphs, and figures showing the dismal facts that a college education is so effing over-the-top expensive that it’s no longer worth it (financially speaking) to get a four-year degree. His argument looks only at things from a purely monetary perspective, and he also assumes that everyone involved (college-educated Bill and non-college-educated Ernie) was good at saving money before they even graduated from high school. I’m not sure very many of these mythical teens exist, but whatever.

The point Mr. Hough is trying to make is difficult to argue with: Paying for higher education sucks, and if it continues to suck so viciously that it slowly removes the souls of the college educated, then no one’s going to pay the price of matriculation. And then where will we be? Apparently, if we’re all good savers, we’ll be ahead financially but way behind on the higher education front.

I’m not saying you have to go to college to learn how to ponder the big questions and see the big picture, but it helps. Real life, with the jobs and the family and the house and the dog is already pretty full; the majority of the population doesn’t have the time or the energy at the end of the work week to load up on philosophy, engineering, calculus, chemistry, biology and literature texts from the library and spend the weekend absorbing and pondering.

I just want everyone (everyone, even the people I don’t like) to have access to an affordable education. Privilege should play no part in who gets to learn the cool stuff. Earning a college degree should neither set a student back financially nor should it be so horrendous that a large number of young adults feel like they have to just skip it altogether.

Isn’t the whole reason behind mankind amassing a gajillion years’ worth of knowledge, to improve all of mankind’s men and women? If only a privileged percentage of the humans get to learn the full depth of the accumulated smartness, then what’s the point? Until the day comes when the powers that be manage to remove their proverbial heads from their proverbial asses and make education less of a privilege and more of a right, higher education is going to seem like a financial blunder. Please please please try to just say “F**k it!” and go to college anyway, damn the consequences.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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