Do You Have the Right Education?

Do you have the right education? Most people think of education as earning a university degree. In many cases, a university or college degree is important, but in other situations the degree may be vastly overrated. You need to decide for yourself whether a college degree is necessary, or if some other education would suit you better.

If you ask many people ten years after they graduate from college what they remember from those school years, many of them will only remember the parties, the dates, the fraternities and sororities, and the other good times. Not many will be able to tell you many of the details about what they learned in class. A college degree does, however, tend to show that you can finish what you start. So having a college degree can be beneficial if for no other reason than to reflect well on your tenacity.

There are many times, however, that college degrees seem of little or no value as far as a worthwhile education goes. Suppose you want to work on a pit crew at the Indianapolis 500. It probably won't do you any harm to have a degree in accounting, but it's not likely to do you a whole heck of a lot of good either. An auto mechanic would probably do better to attend a trade school than a typical university. How about professional bull riding? If there is a university anywhere that teaches someone how to ride a bull, we'd like to hear about it.

If your dream job were running rafts full of tourists down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, a college degree may not do you an ounce of good. That is of course, unless you want to own and operate the business to run the river, then, of course, a degree in business administration might help you out quite a bit.

Sometimes a college degree seems superfluous, yet can help you out in unexpected ways. Take police departments for example. Most police departments do not require a college degree for a person to be hired, yet many of those same departments require a degree for promotions within the department. To pick a department at random, you might choose Mesa, Arizona. Mesa is one of those departments which does not require an applicant to have a college degree. However, the officer must have an associate of arts degree, or the equivalent number of college credit hours, to receive a promotion to sergeant.

At the Mesa Police Department, a promotion to lieutenant requires a bachelor's degree. For promotion to any higher rank, a master's degree is necessary. You would think that the degree would need to be job related, but that is not true. One officer there was promoted to lieutenant after receiving a college degree in library science. Several other staff officers also have college degrees in fields totally unrelated to law enforcement. How a library science degree can make a person a better police administrator than someone with no college degree is baffling, but apparently, the Mesa Police Department thinks it does.

For some jobs, a little on the job training is all that is necessary. If your job is to take big rocks and smash them into little rocks, your OJT should be minimal. Food service is another story. It small fast food places, you might be promoted to a management position with little more than a high school diploma. However, if you want to work as a top chef in a five star restaurant, attending a prominent culinary school should be your goal.

Even though university training can seem almost useless in many careers, you would probably never want to visit a physician who had never attended medical school. If you have been injured because of someone's negligence, you wouldn't want a high school drop out to represent you as your lawyer in court. You wouldn't want the high school senior next door designing the next high rise building where your office will be located.

College degrees are a must sometimes, just not all the time. The object of all your education training should be related to the career in which you wish to spend the rest of your professional life. You must decide the best education for your situation.

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