This isn't a partisan look at the issue. I just had a person who I've known since kindergarten and who went to the same K-12 schools as me in the same grade cut me off because I asked her what specifically she found to be wrong with Arizona entertaining the possibility of hiring K-12 teachers without college degrees and she is very Right of me.
Yeah, the Left has been a bit more rampant with the "Trust the science." rhetoric which translates into, "Trust the guy with piece of paper that cost him a couple hundred thousand dollars to earn and the institution fifty cents to print." since the pandemic hit. Still, the obsession over college can't be blamed on one political ideology.
What I have to say is that this peripheral friend that I had for thirty years was probably insulted by my question. She's a teacher who went to college to become a teacher. By asking her the question, I was implying (what I do believe) that you don't need to go to college to do her job.
The thing is, that shouldn't be an insult. When you think about it, there really aren't many, if any jobs that require a college degree.
Having gone to college and received a BA, I can tell you that I take no offense when it's pointed out that you don't need to go to college to do what I do. Steven Spielberg didn't go to college. Paul Thomas Anderson dropped out of college. A lot of filmmakers who did go to college didn't study film. None of that detracts from people like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, or Francis Ford Coppola who did go to college. People just found different paths.
That's a easy example; but, can you really name a profession that absolutely, positively requires college for a person to claim proficiency?
Abraham Lincoln had a successful law practice and he never went to college. Steve Jobs never went to college. Bill Gates is a college dropout.
Is there anything about a brain surgeon going to college that makes you more comfortable about him or her performing surgery rather than the surgeon having spent eight years as an apprentice under the world's top brain surgeon that hasn't simply been programmed into you since you were in diapers?
It's pretty clear that you shouldn't need a college degree to be a public school teacher. Most of my teachers wouldn't know an indefinite antecedent if it bit them in the ass. Maybe opening the doors for autodidacts who are looking for work because their industries have fallen on hard times could make competent teachers without going to college.
Still, while having gone to college shouldn't be a badge of honor and it's inevitably going to become less of a badge of honor, it shouldn't be something that people are broadly discouraged from attending. I know plenty of people who went to college who are working jobs entirely irrelevant to their college training who don't regret the time and money that they spent on college. People take different things away from college and some is positive and some is negative.
What I am saying is that it's dangerous to overvalue college and we've gone way off the deep end when it comes to overvaluing college.
College should be a path or an option. It shouldn't be the only path to respect and dignity as an adult. A lot of people view college as the only path. I have never broadcasted or listed my ala maters anywhere. I've had conversations with people who don't know whether I've gone to college or not who ask me if I have before continuing the conversation, as if, it is a prerequisite for having a valid opinion.
It's this perverse and myopic mentality that has millions of people crying for the government to pour billions of dollars into treating college like we do all of our other bullshit schools. With due respect, if you think that four years of pre-paid college will turn a flat-earther into somebody who reads Stephen Hawking, you're actually an example of why we shouldn't be dumping more tax money into public schooling.
We need to stop valuing the dude with a degree from a liberal arts college who works at Starbucks more than the person who skipped college but can repair your air conditioner. We also need to stop pretending that one person's opinion is more valid than the other's simply because of a piece of paper. Judge opinions on merit rather than who is expressing theme. Judge people on skill, character, and merit.
Those things can be obtained with or without college.