The real purpose of education

Enrollment at McCook Community College and Mid-Plains Community College is down this year, following a national trend that shows college enrollment down across the country. There are a variety of reasons for that, one being the publicity we've seen lately of students graduating from college with a degree, only to move back in with their parents because they can't find a job.

A generation ago, the opposite was true. There were more jobs than qualified applicants to fill them so companies and corporations would go to college campuses to actively recruit future college graduates. They would rent rooms in the student union, hold interviews with students graduating in May and offer positions. It wasn't unusual for a graduating senior to have three or four job offers in hand by the time they made the walk and received their degree. It was a buyer's market.

That obviously wasn't a very well kept secret so parents starting sending their children to college in droves and the dynamic quickly did a flip-flop. Instead of there being more jobs than qualified applicants, there quickly were more qualified applicants than available jobs and that trend has continued to increase over the past two or three decades.

I tell every new incoming group of students how tough the job market is today and how every single day of their college career is important. Most of our students have been in school since they were five years old and they've forgotten WHY they're in school. In their minds, they've been in school forever and still can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. But the day is going to come when they're finally finished with college, they have degrees in hand and they'll be sending out applications and resumes far and wide, trying to get a job. And that's when their performance in college will come back to either save them or haunt them, depending on their performance.

It's so easy when you've been in school forever to skip an assignment, skip a test, even skip a day because you convince yourself that you can make it up later, even though many don't. And you eventually pay for your mistakes because others took their college education seriously and made better grades than you. And now you're competing against them for scarce goods and resources; mainly jobs, and for the most part, they're going to win and you're going to lose.

But there's something more important than using a college education to get a job; it's using a college education to get an education. It's learning how to think critically and analytically, how to look at all the facts on all sides of an issue and then, using your OWN intellect, instead of the words of someone else, deciding what's right and what's wrong. That has always been true but it's truer today than ever before because of the Internet and mass media that's on 24-hours a day, seven days a week. And because some people don't want to do the work themselves, they let others do it for them. Unfortunately, they have no way of knowing whether the ones they let do the work for them did it correctly or not.

So we have literally millions of people whose opinions are forged by individuals with a particular mindset, people who look at only one side instead of all sides, and that's not good for the Republic. If I listen ONLY to one set of political commentators or another, my mind and my intellect are boxed in with nowhere to go. I've voluntarily given up the very thing I worked so hard to get when I was in college and that was the ability to think for myself.

We see that at our highest levels of government today; all sides staking out a claim to absolute truth and certainty without even knowing what the other sides stands for or proposes. A closed mind is no mind. Giving up your right to think for yourself and devise an educated opinion based on fact and truth rather than gossip, rumor or innuendo should be an untenable position to take in our modern, information-based society but it isn't.

In fact, more people are doing it each day and truth, fact and science suffer and take a back seat to patronage, bellicosity, and unwarranted certainty.

We have all heard that a mind is a terrible thing to waste; yet more people do it every single day and the nation suffers irreparably because of it.