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by steve-howard
5641 days ago
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UChicago gives a speech every year entitled "The Aims of Education" to its freshman class. One quote from a while ago: "There are no aims of education. The aim is education. If -- and only if -- you seek it... education will find you." From what I know of my UChicago friends, they really downplay majors and emphasize their liberal-arts core. In other words, it seems that education is generally a pursuit for personal enrichment, unless you happen to love whatever field will make you money (I thank my lucky stars that I'm in computer science and my internships are quite well paid; my friends in other disciplines like journalism are not so lucky). I have generally judged people who major in economics here but hate it (it's a big thing at Northwestern, since we don't have undergrad business). It always seemed like those people are saying "I want to get into a good business school and then stuff myself into a suit for the next 40 years"; it's a depressing analysis of one's own strengths. But then again, maybe those people are just smart and I'm just lucky. I also wish we'd work with kids on finances before they pick a college. Here at Northwestern, student loans are capped at $20k. It's one of the most expensive schools in the US, but the financial aid office does try to keep its students from drowning in debt. Other schools, though, don't really care how much debt students rack up, and they're the ones with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to work on. |
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Personal enrichment is fine as long as you don't go into debt. Going to college to learn a valuable skill and taking on debt to do it is also okay, since you'll be able to retire your debt with your valuable skill.
But people have been screwing themselves by taking on heavy debt loads and then going the personal enrichment route. It's hard to believe they realize what they're giving up - many of these folks will still be paying off debts into their 40s.