Is a college degree worth it?

My father-in-law Bob Wilvers relocated from Milwaukee to New York, getting a job at the legendary agency?Jack Tinker & Partners, then following trailblazer?Mary Wells?to?Wells Rich Green, creating the still-famous “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz”?commercial?spot for?Alka Seltzer, and being?inducted?into the?Art Directors Hall of Fame?before his way-too-early ascendance to the advertising agency in the sky.

The other thing that distinguished Bob:?he never graduated college, prompting me to ask, is college worth it??

It’s four years of your life.?It’s expensive.?It doesn’t come with a warranty or guarantee.?There is no promise of a fulfilling career, including one in advertising.?To paraphrase Mark Twain, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”

The New York Times?seems to agree, publishing a?story?recently, “A?4-Year Degree Isn’t Quite the Job Requirement It Used to Be,” suggesting workers, “should be selected and promoted because of their skills and experience rather than degrees or educational pedigree.”

Add to this the reality that higher education itself doesn’t seem to value its own people, evidenced by a second?New York Times?story, “Help Wanted: Adjunct Professor, Must Have Doctorate. Salary: $0.”?Who pays their doctoral students zero??Lots of top-tier universities, it turns out, the ones that “often expect Ph.D.s to work for free.”

I rarely take exception to what I read in?The Times; this time I do.?

I am all-too-aware my four years of university education as a full-ride student at a private institution cost less than what a?single?semester runs today.?I also know that, when I went to school, there was no such thing as a curriculum in advertising and marketing.?

Yes, there was a journalism department, where you could learn to be a reporter, and yes, there was an art department, where you could learn to paint, or at least make a noble attempt.?But learn how to be a copywriter or art director, let alone a Planner or a production or a media person??As Donnie Brasco would put it, “Fuhgeddaboudit.”

To repeat: school is damn expensive.?There are other, less costly ways to master a trade.?And yet I cling to the belief that school?is?worth it.?When someone challenges me on this, I respond by comparing?Applied?Science with?Pure?Science.?

The terms have any number of definitions, but simply put, applied science has an outcome; pure science rarely does.

When I was in school there were no applied subjects in the craft of advertising, and even if there were, I wouldn’t have been inclined to take them, given I had, at the time, no interest in the field.?In fact, I had only the vaguest notions of what I wanted to be, which in part explains why I became an?American Studies?major, which allowed me to forestall a decision about a career, letting me range far and wide when it came to course offerings.

I learned stuff I never would use professionally, and yet I received an amazing education.?“How did that happen?” you skeptically ask.

Had I’d been a student of what you might call?Applied Learning, I might have taken accounting classes, or been an engineering student, or studied science, each of which led to a post-college career.?I don’t know exactly why – a lack of interest maybe – but I pursued none of these subjects.?

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was engaged in?pure learning.?

Subjects didn’t matter.?What mattered was learning how to think, how to ask questions, how to listen, how to research, how to communicate, and how to collaborate. None of these skills are subject-dependent.?And becoming more proficient in these is what my four years of school was all about.

Could I gain equal competence through some other means??Possible sure, but not likely.

My father-in-law didn’t have the educational opportunity I had, but even so, he was hell-bent to see his two daughters graduate college, and willingly staked both of them to their respective universities. As someone who never went to school, he knew, better than most, something many others didn’t.

A college degree is worth it.