Are Higher Education Degrees Useful?

As I look at my bachelor's degree diploma from UC Berkeley, I can't help but feel that it is useless for practical matters. Where is my job I was supposed to get as a result of my borrowing thousands of dollars to earn this degree? In college, I worked in three different scientific laboratories as a student assistant, and I did a good job according to the principal investigators of the labs.

Yet here I am in my late thirties, having worked only about a year in any professional manner. Given that I spent a lot of the time on disability, the work world is cruel to anyone that doesn't have a blemish free work history. I worked for eight years on a Ph.D. in physics, only to have the university deny me any advanced degree. The irony is that most employers do not count graduate study that did not result in conferral of an advanced degree. I have to compete with people who have never studied for a graduate degree.

California Magazine, the magazine for alumni of the University of California at Berkeley, often spotlights "success stories" of alumni who have "made it", such as CEO's of large corporations who studied at Berkeley. They make it look as if because one studied at Berkeley, one is successful in career. The magazine would never publish my story, one of a man who is still struggling to make his way in the world, nearly two decades after graduation. My story would hurt recruiting for new students, faculty, and staff for the university. In short, California Magazine, would never publish stories of failures such as myself.

Yet we are real. I only know of one failure in my circle of friends from UC Berkeley, myself, but I am certain that there are many failures who do not choose to share their failure stories with university publications such as California Magazine. People only share good news with university alumni publications, thus skewing the appearance of the relative success of alumni.

What purpose does a bachelor's degree really serve? It seems a bachelor's degree only really allows you to attempt to earn a higher degree like an M.A., M.S., Ph.D., M.D., J.D., etc. Even those degrees don't guarantee success in career and life. On the news, I saw women who had multiple master's degrees, but the economy prevented them from finding any kind of employment. Obviously, their multiple advanced degrees didn't help them find work. That is the story of my work life.

The bachelor's degree has become the new high school diploma. Just about everyone has a bachelor's degree nowadays. One can essentially buy a bachelor's degree from any so-called university. This forces everyone who wants to stay competitive to work toward more advanced degrees. The truth is that amount of knowledge required to do most types of work doesn't require study at the graduate or professional level, yet employers raise the educational requirements in order to screen the hordes of applicants for the few openings in their organizations.