What is the point of an education?

Is it for intellectual enlightenment? Is it to help us make better decisions in life? Is it to learn the basics skills necessary to not only survive but succeed?

Or, is it, as Forrest Gump remarked of the Army, “to do exactly what you tell us to do”?

I’ve heard people speak of education in a religious, reverent tone, as if a college graduation ceremony was the equivalent of achieving nirvana. To them, obtaining a four-year degree from a university is absolutely vital and a reflection of one’s self-worth and capabilities.

Fortunately, the Tahoma School District no longer suffers from this belief. A committee consisting of 50 members has proposed a new approach called “future ready,” which would help not only students who do not plan on attending college, but those who do to eventually graduate.

As Tahoma superintendent Mike Maryanksi told the Reporter, the previous approach of emphasizing college was not serving the needs of most students. The harsh, but revealing statistics might tell you why:

• Sixty percent of Tahoma graduates go to a two-year or four-year college.
• Less than half of that 60 percent finish college in six years.

That means only 24 percent of Tahoma graduates will also graduate from college in six years. And according to a recent story by the Seattle Times, only one in four public school students in Washington state from the class of 2009 will finish college by 2015.

At the same time, many companies have job openings they are unable to fill due to a lack of qualified applicants. The Career and College Readiness Committee, which will be giving a presentation at the Maple Valley City council Town Hall meeting Oct. 3, believes a different approach to educating students might help them learn these skills. And maybe it won’t require a degree.

Teaching students relevant skills should be the true purpose of an education. It is comforting to see a school district capable of admitting mistakes and willing to change to achieve that goal.

For too long, education has been seen as the end to a means, rather than a means to an end. And high school has been treated as an institution designed to prepare or transition students to a university or college regardless of their own aspirations. The main concern, however, is making sure mandated state test scores remain high and AP tests are taken in droves. A student contributes to this by getting good grades and jumping through all the necessary hoops.

The “everyone should go to college” and “college is the end-all, be-all” myth is beginning to lose followers, especially in this current economy Having graduated from college almost three years ago myself, I observed a few things about higher education.

One, the costs have skyrocketed. When I started my freshman year at Eastern Washington University six years ago this same week, tuition per quarter was $1,426 or $4,200 for a full year. Now, it is $3,581.50 per quarter, $10,743 per year — and EWU is one of the least expensive public universities in Washington.

It’s easy for many students to see the emperor has no clothes, i.e. a college degree and $55,000 in debt while being underpaid at a job they’re overqualified for makes them no better off than a high school diploma with roughly the same wages and no debt. If they’re going to have poorly paid jobs, at least they won’t have to worry about student debt which, unlike other loans, aren’t included in a bankruptcy unless you can show it’s an “undue hardship” on you, your family and your dependents. I’ll bet the definition for that is narrow.

Second, higher education is called “higher” education for the same reason Advanced Placement Calculus has the words “Advanced Placement” in front of it. It isn’t designed for everyone. It’s for a small group of people who fit the criteria for the institution or course.

Saying everyone should go to college is like saying everyone should take AP English — the whole point of the course is for exceptional students to have a more rigorous curriculum than regular students. When you try to incorporate everyone, the standards are automatically lowered to accommodate.

I benefited from this mentality when I took a biology course in college; I did terrible, but still earned a 4.0 because the grading was curved, which meant I was an excellent student only when compared to a narrow sampling of my peers.

Additionally, college isn’t for everyone because not everyone learns well from the university-style education system. Some people are highly proficient in one area, but not as much in others, thus they perform well at a technical college or institute. I myself did mediocre academically in high school, where my classes were an hour and a half long, but did much better in college, where my classes only ran 50 minutes and were better structured for me.

Having no social life to speak of also helped.

This doesn’t mean only smart people should go to college or not going means you’re dumb. It means college isn’t necessarily the best path for students and adopting a “one-size-fits-all” approach hurts not only high school education but students who don’t fare well in that educational environment. It also inadvertently sends the wrong message to the majority of students who don’t go to college — that they can’t be successful as the students who do go to college.

As Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have shown, you don’t need a college degree to make it in life.

You still need to be educated, but that education shouldn’t have to include college, especially with the Internet, where online classes are available for a fraction of the cost, as well as troves of websites that provide free information ranging from economics and history  to mathematics and philosophy.

In a world with cheap and easy access to knowledge, the question has to be asked: What do students go to a school for, to get an education where they actually learn job-related skills, or a certificate they can put on their resume to qualify for a job?

What’s the point of an education if you can’t get a job with it?

It’s a question Tahoma has asked itself and is trying to provide the right answer for. If other school districts want to help out their students, they will do the same.