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On Education as Investment
When I was leaving high school, I knew why I was going to college: I wanted to get a good job. In spite of Kanye West’s The College Dropout, it was an assumption consistent with the one my parents had. Their generation either worked with a college degree, or without. I hadn’t yet realized that in my generation, software had eaten the world and was quickly digesting it. The API had, quickly and quietly, replaced the college degree and already started splitting my generation into two classes — those who told the APIs what to do, or those who were told by the APIs what to do. But with an outdated set of facts and general risk aversion, I wouldn’t know that for years.
Naturally, the transactional nature of my education — and many others — put an expectation of return on it: money was the motivation. At the end of my first year, I switched out of the media program I was accepted into, transitioning into one of the school’s two business programs (first in the finance stream, then in the newly-introduced consumer behavior stream).
Education came with an expectation of a return on investment. (Apparently I was ahead of my time.) At the time, I figured I’d need this degree to get me a good job, so that I could live independently from my family at least. Maybe to start my own one day. I didn’t know. I made a simple, calculated, decision to go into marketing because the field was…
