Students beginning their last year of college at Syracuse University are waiting in anticipation of their hard-earned college degree. With that degree, they hope to enter the outside world ready to earn a living and make a difference.

But what else that college degree will yield them besides a higher salary and bragging rights is being reinvented.

ERIC Digest, an education publishing company, has released new public opinion results on the value of the college degree. The result concludes that not only does a degree provide monetary benefits, but there are also communal benefits which make higher education more of a public good than ever considered before.

This idea of higher education as socially beneficial implies that through extended learning, one can gain a better knowledge of what is important in life, according to the results.

When asked his opinion on the value of a college degree, Bob Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Television at SU, said he supported the idea of civic benefits.

‘I think that the real spirit of liberal arts education is not only about getting a job and being employable, but also about fulfilling what one is capable of doing as a human being,’ Thompson said.

The study referred to in ERIC Digest said higher education is a means to ‘more open-minded, more cultured, more rational, more consistent and less authoritarian; these benefits are also passed along to succeeding generations.’

These personal benefits only add to the already obvious advantage over non-degree holders of a higher salary or wages, the study stated.

Sophomore Matthew Halliday disagreed with the idea of the communal value of a degree.

‘I seriously think that a college degree is important financially by helping you climb the ladder of life, but at the same time, there are cases where people have not had a college degree and are just as successful as those who have,’ Halliday said. ‘I think the way you are raised is more important than a college degree. You could still be open-minded and well-rounded even if you have never gotten a degree.’

People can still have the traits of an educated person without having received a university degree, he said.

Yet Scott Wheaton, a senior marketing and finance major, said having gone through college and approaching graduation, he will take with him the ability to adapt to his new surroundings and interact with others – skills he gained only because of his SU experience.

Thompson agrees.

‘The better educated one is, the more one understands all aspects of knowledge which, therefore, leads to a richer and better life.’

Published on September 16, 2007 at 12:00 pm