Education – 101

College education has been getting some bad raps recently. It’s expensive, elitist, and does not guarantee a high-paying job. Trade school, these critics insist, is better.

Having spent a fair number of years in trade as a marine woodcarver, I won’t knock the value of a craft or trade. But I’ve also accumulated a few degrees and certifications along the way. Frankly, I am most proud of my bachelor’s degree from Boston University ( Go Terriers!). BU took a chance with me, a high school dropout. They let me meander my way through the Metropolitan College and later the College of Liberal Arts. I was a part-time and then a full-time student for about five years. I made a few premature declarations of majors ( political science, history, and, at last, anthropology).

If, at times, I appeared to be in a bit of an intellectual quagmire, I had a sympathetic counselor in Francisco Aquilera, who occasionally chided, guided, and suggested courses of action. I eventually wandered towards graduation and graduate school in anthropology.

But at BU, I also received that very old-fashioned thing called a Liberal Education. For you conservatives out there, I hurry to add that it has nothing to do with political orientation and everything to do with exposing the student to a wide variety of current and past human thought, philosophy, and practice.

I reveled in the Epic of Gilgamesh and explored political science with a former top aide to Josip Broz Tito. Professor Elizabeth Barker led me through the world of literature, from Juvenal to Steinbeck. Several courses in the geography department altered how I viewed the physical and cultural topography of the world. In anthropology, I found an intellectual center for my thinking about society. There were also courses in math, language, and other areas.

What do I gather from all this? It’s not so much the degree as it is your path to the degree.

I’d say that you wasted four years if you insisted upon it or had it pushed on you only to study one narrow thing. The world around you will never cease to change. Education should aim to teach you how to grow and respond to change, not limit you to one data set forever.

Will my philosophy guarantee you fame and fortune? Nope. But you might have a wider world to live in and not find yourself boxed into a corner career-wise.

My dad, Nick Carreras, was proud of how I went from being a “warehoused” student in New York City to college-educated. 

But he always advised me to have a trade to fall back on. He maintained, and I agree, that the two were interdependent – part and parcel of a complete strategy against the fickle nature of the world.