Last weekend, I attended my college reunion, where students of my MBA batch were meeting each other after one long year. Now, as professionals and corporate executives.
Naturally, everyone was asking each other about their companies, their work and the people they were working with. After interacting with my batchmates one year later, and thinking about my own experiences post graduation and at the workplace, I started reflecting back on my years of higher education.
The simple question I asked myself was: “What do I think about my return of investment? Was doing my higher education from a particular college and in a particular field worth it? What was my unique takeaway from these two years?”
In this article, I want to share my thought process in answering these questions.
I understand that any exercise in coming up with a logical valuation of an experience that consists of more intangibles than tangibles is a difficult task and can be very unfair in its approach and the subsequent outcome.
However, the idea is to offer a different perspective to the students currently in college or thinking of applying to a particular college for higher education. This is the perspective of a degree holder reflecting back on his times as a college student.
The hope for this discussion is to offer students an approach to think about making college decisions and help them in understanding the real value of a college education.
Education is a commodity
Although it was not, a few centuries back.
It’s necessary to understand the history before we start making decisions of the future. So, bear with me for a while. You will see why this throwback was important.
Back then, knowledge was exclusive, accessible to only a certain group of people. It was the royalty and nobility in Europe, it was the Brahmin community in India, it was the religious leaders in Islamic countries and so on.
This exclusive access to knowledge ended up creating an aura about “the educated man” and as exclusive things usually do, it built up a unique kind of reverence and following amongst the people.
Throughout the ages and centuries hence, education was kept exclusive and the educated man was respected, obeyed and even feared.
Eventually, this changed. Education became somewhat accessible.
Hence, people who could afford it, started paying money for their kids to go to reputed schools and colleges because they thought that their child was getting exclusive information which would effectively differentiate him from the mass and make him better equipped to succeed in life.
IITs and IIMs were revered, international education even more. Rightly so, because indeed the education imparted in these renowned schools and colleges was exclusive and one of a kind.
But then, information revolution happened.
Internet exploded and so did internet plus education based products and services. Courseras and Khan Academies of the world started popping up, which offered you courses from those very reputed schools and colleges.
Knowledge was suddenly not so exclusive anymore. Anyone with primary schooling, a laptop and internet access could learn anything and everything right from the comfort of their home and the convenience of their time.
Now the question is: If quality academic education is not so exclusive anymore, why are we still willing to pay lakhs of rupees to get into reputed colleges and spend anywhere from two to five years there?
Better Exclusive Jobs…Not so much
When I was thinking about the above question, the answer looked simple enough.
Better and exclusive jobs.
However, allow me to give you a different perspective on that.
In the place where I work, I have colleagues who come from colleges better than mine as well as colleagues who come from colleges considered less better than mine. Irrespective of our college background, we landed in the same job, doing the same kind of work on a daily basis.
Even in my discussions with my batchmates regarding their colleagues at work, I discovered that there was no workplace which had people exclusively from one particular college.
On the contrary, there were instances where their colleagues came from a completely different sort of background and work experience.
A simple LinkedIn search of a veteran corporate executive’s profile will show you that people can get whatever job they want, irrespective of their college and background.
You can start in a particular field and eventually move out to a completely different field. It’s possible these days and seems even more probable in the future.
The point that I am trying to make is that getting into a particular college does not necessarily mean exclusive access to a particular kind of a job. The key word here is exclusive.
There will always be many people who will reach the same place as you have without following the same journey that you took.
You might argue here that at least a particular college will make my journey to access the job I want easier than the journey of other people. I completely agree with you and that’s what I want to talk about next.
So, if we take access to quality education and access to better excusive jobs out of the equation, how do we justify our desire to invest lakhs into a reputed college?
Even before that and more importantly, how do we make the decision to pick a particular college?
It all comes down to Exclusive Opportunities
What does an exclusive opportunity mean?
Anything and everything that is unique to a particular college, which no other college or very few colleges can give you, qualifies as an exclusive opportunity.
A pre-requisite to figuring out exclusive opportunities is your clarity in terms of what you want to achieve from a college.
This is an exercise most of us fail to perform, primarily because it’s a hard question and answers don’t easily come to us. Nevertheless, a basic inquiry into your goals and objectives in pursuing a college degree is something that needs to be addressed.
That being said, here are a few examples of exclusive opportunities:
- Access to faculty and professors with unique experience and preferred subject matter expertise
- Exposure to your target companies and industries in terms of live projects, industry sessions, corporate competitions and placement opportunities
- Networking opportunity with potential peers who come with a relevant experience and useful background
- Access to the college library, which provides you with books that would be difficult to procure elsewhere or on your own
- Access to a unique college campus experience
- Access and exposure to opportunities in your areas of interest
This list can be extended and modified to include individual preferences and priorities. However, the bottom line is in this era of institutional education, what you are paying for is nothing but exclusive opportunities.
You can teach yourself everything there is to know about marketing through online courses and internet and that too from the best universities in the world.
However, what you cannot do, if you are not an IIM Ahmedabad marketing student is get easy and early access to the best FMCG company of the world and apply those marketing concepts that you have taught yourself. Only an IIM Calcutta graduate will get an opportunity to interact with Mr. Raghuram Rajan and argue about his policy when he was the head of RBI.
How are you planning to leverage that exclusive opportunity?
This is my suggestion to all those are thinking of getting into higher education from different universities of the world. Know and understand what you are paying for. It is not access to quality education. It’s not just about the classroom learning.
It is the opportunity that your college exposes you to and only that. Understand this fact clearly and jump on each and every opportunity that you get from your college.
Maybe it’s that new industry project that is being rolled out or maybe it’s that competition that is now open to students of your college. Grab that with both hands and then work your hardest to make the most of it.
When you are making decisions about which college to get into, look at what the college offers you in terms of opportunities and not just in academics, but even in other areas such as sports, theatre, music and so on.
Your choice should be the college that can expose you to the most number of opportunities in the profession that you pursue.
Education is not exclusive anymore, it is a commodity and the only thing that will differentiate you is the opportunity that you leveraged and others did not.
