Who needs a college degree?

College, unlike highschool is more tedious to require some seriousness. It is a time for one student to make a crucial choice about the career he wants to take. Critical to this stage is one's adaptation to new realities and a conviction to stand on one's feet. When I entered college, I was not properly guided as to what course would really fit my competencies and interest. There were so many options in my mind: I wanted to be an agricultural engineer, an architect, a doctor of medicine, a political science, a journalist.

Through some elimination, I opted to take mass communication. I could draw well, but I was not so good in math. I excelled in my highschool biology, chemistry and physics, but we didn't have money to buy the books for a pre-med and the med-proper courses. I was well versed in history and the social sciences, but the University that was so convenient for me was not offering political science in fear of rearing activists. Sadly, it didn't have a program in journalism, which was my elective from first year high school.

After college, I tried a six-month stint in the print media as a showbiz magazine editor. But then I found myself teaching college students eventhough I didn't have any education background. Having a college education was to me a training ground for employment. It is really, because in the Philippines there is no way you could get a better paying job without a college degree. It also depends where you graduated from. Job hunting is so mean to prefer graduates from reputable colleges and universities. I was fortunate that I graduated from one prestigious university. College gives an experience of the world, a glimpse to one's future and formation to maturity.

In the university, I learned my rights and stood to fight for them. My eyes were opened to realities in our society and so I advocated social justice in the streets. It honed my writing skills so I became the student publication's editor in chief. It taught me democracy and civil liberties, then the school administration tried us in their own justice system and sued in the city's trial court for unjust vexation. College is where I got try so many things I couldn't dare do in highschool; smoking, drinking, watching girls dance all the way, cutting classes, arguing with teachers, rallying and picketing to name a few. But all those I guess are part of my passage to maturity. With friends I tried these.

College is the begining of a student's adult life. Exploration will be so necessary for anyone in college to have a pre-taste of what life is. The degree one obtains in college is a ticket to employment, even though it may not be so relevant to the job demands or the life one chooses to fulfill afterwards. The picture I clipped here was taken when we were in the second year. The boys there are my barkadas, we were eight in all. In those years, our mindset of our future was short term, we all wanted to get into the media industry as mass commmunication graduates.

On the contrary not all of us got to practice what we studied. Chris is the only successful media practitioner in us, now a voice in the Philippines top AM radio station. Another one who had a career in government communications was Tygs, the bad guy in us who influenced us to smoke and drink. Roy is in applied communications as call center agent. Ikel who started as billing collector is now handling corporate communications for a water distributor.

Others did not really work in the communication field. Betong and Omar are now lawyers, while I teach in college. Our advantage in our chosen careers is that of having the communicative competence. College was an opportunity for me, because eventhough it did not give me background in education, my communication skills are more than adequate to teach communication arts to students. In legal practice, lawyers need to the same competence both orally and in writing.

College is fun and it enables one to build relationships and foster friendship. In my time college served one purpose, to obtain a degree that would qualify us for a job. On the contrary, the college students I deal with do not have that purpose. They go to college not to have a degree for an employment, but so that they can do something to keep them busy. College for them is a social opportunity to meet new people, and learn at the same time.

Well, the students I deal with are well off than any of us back in college. They can survive life without a college education, because they are economically stable and that they can expect a great inheritance of wealth from their parents. This is one fact I have to deal with in order to make the college experience of my students more meaningful to them. As to me, college gave me the knowledge foundation and core skills that I needed to reach where I am now.