Tuesday, October 29, 2024
To summarize for ya’all, despite my ongoing efforts to prevent my dog from escaping the fenced “dog area,” he’s still managing to bully out; however, as of today, Chase is still with me.
In a long conversation yesterday, a friend told me about her two twenty-something-year-old daughters and why they are conflicted about attending college. The youngest is a dental assistant who loves her work. Her dentist encourages her to become a dentist, and she wants to very much but fears incurring the enormous debt of attending dental school. She might instead settle on becoming a dental hygienist.
Her older daughter completed some college but couldn’t find local employment and sustainable wages, so she moved to Kentucky a few years ago and found work there with decent pay. She won’t return to higher education as its cost/benefit ratio isn’t in her favor.
To me, a college education is more than learning practice in areas of potential employment, although it does that. A college experience encourages self-awareness and confidence through real-time activities such as thought-exchanging, interactive listening, and identifying and debating specifics. These help individuals evaluate and understand their own positions more clearly.
Those “extras” of education help individuals “round out” and become more adept at finding appropriate work and negotiating for personal needs.
Hindsight tells me that the extras are essential for finding desirable work and navigating associated essentials. But today, perhaps thoughtful individuals in their twenties view the concept of debt as so real and burdensome that they disvalue more possibilities, like becoming more rounded out and capable of negotiating effectively for personal advantages.
If I’m out of step with the times, my life’s experience and observations have recognized the almost unmeasurable value of pursuing and achieving higher education.
Dear Friends: That’s my position; I’ll stick with it and not disregard pushback. Diana
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