Education as a Stock of Options

Society is used to treating a diploma as a report card on human quality: higher education promises intelligence and flexibility, its absence a narrow horizon. In fact education is valuable for specific knowledge, access and the ability to learn, not for the status of its holder.

It does not work that way.

A university education can give you fundamental knowledge, the skill of working through complex material, access to a regulated profession, a network of contacts, confirmation of qualifications and a wider choice of first job.

It can also give you debt, an outdated syllabus and several years of study with no clear result.

A person without higher education can learn, change profession, start a business and master complex skills. But some fields genuinely require formal training and a licence: medicine, law, some engineering specialities.

So the question is not “is education needed at all” but:

For which line of work?

Of what type?

Of what quality?

At what price?

What alternatives exist?

A vocational college, an apprenticeship, a university, self-teaching and a short specialised course solve different problems.

A good grounding increases the ability to change direction, because the person understands the basics and knows how to learn. But flexibility also depends on language, money, health, age, family and the labour market.

A diploma is no insurance against unskilled work. Sometimes it is precisely education that lets a person do whatever work is available for a while without feeling that his biography has ended. Sometimes what stands in the way is not a lack of skill but a status-driven distaste for an occupation below expectations.

Education is not a report card on human worth. It is an investment in particular options.

Before investing, it helps to know which ones.

In hiring, a diploma more often works as a filter at the entrance: it shrinks the pile of CVs and says almost nothing about what the person can do in month three. Yet the same diploma turns out to be insurmountable where a licence stands: no amount of experience lets you sign off a design in place of a certified engineer or write a prescription in place of a doctor. The difference between these two roles is substantial — the first can be got around with results, the second cannot be got around at all.

So the question before applying sounds dull: what exactly is being bought — knowledge, the right to sign, or a line that removes a formal objection. Each is paid for separately, and the prices are not the same.