Weekly Deals 5/3/26: Give the gift of education
Grad season is a time of joy, new horizons, and new responsibilities.
Education is in great shape these days. Anyone who tells you there’s a crisis with our youth, with our college kids are wrong. Not only do 1 in 5 people struggling financially definitively experience no difficulty whatsoever in paying their student loans, but every spring, students flock to social media to post their college decisions. I did it once, but I’m too embarrassed to unearth it.
But most of all, spring holds the joy of graduation. After a grueling, or maybe not so grueling, several years of education, you are officially passed along to greater society. In this economy, jobs may not be too hot, and grad school might be your sudden passion. But a degree is worth something, so long as you say it is.
This season, give the gift of education by giving respect to its definition. Education is not the degree that is formally printed, or even the experience you gained without the opportunity to attend school. It’s simply your readiness for the workday regimen you will execute at full maturity.
Go where your heart desires. Not where the price tag lures you.
Here’s my own student loan balance. I take sympathy in cash, and I take empathy via debit.
Actually, it could be a lot worse, especially for an English degree. I went to a school that meets “100% of demonstrated financial need” and I couldn’t be more grateful. But my education has also given me something no dollar amount can ever approximate: the ability to sniff out bulls**t like a dog.
Try it this way. Go to LinkedIn and count how many posts celebrating the newest AI coding tool you can find. Even better, count the number of “ironic” posts making fun of the LinkedIn format while also collecting hundreds of likes and proudly displaying their corporate achievements in their work experience.
I’m guilty of it, too! You play a game; you play it to win. Invest in a bachelor’s from a private university because it can give you a leg up in the game. That is, if you care to do so. I’m not bitter, actually, I’m quite grateful for the immense opportunity I’ve had to study my passions, change majors several times, and meet dozens and dozens of ambitious peers.
One thing you might learn in a humanities degree is that the most persuasive criticism is often self-implicating. And frankly, in a world that is desperate to automize labor wherever possible, your “soft-skills” degree might indeed prove quite lucrative. Recent technology hasn’t introduced the perceived lack of critical thinking in society. It simply exploited a deteriorating framework around schooling to concentrate wealth within a select few, a framework that arose from the demand for stringent labor schedules during an era of industrialization.
Read voraciously this summer.
Still, schooling has its innocence. Education is meaningful. You might consider it a luxury purchase, but rich reading experiences can transform ones educational, professional, and personal trajectory towards security.
I don’t know if they still publish these animal profiles anymore. I couldn’t bring myself to Google it and find out. My parents withstood this sacrifice for me, for the hundreds of pages I was sent in the mail. When the binder grew full, I overheard the whispers in my parent’s bedroom. The credit cards had been getting too hard to pay recently.
More is not always better. Indeed, while the shipments no longer continued the next month, I had something physical to hold. Knowledge held in my hands, quite heavy, causing misalignment of the binder rings. But damn, if that subscription wasn’t the investment of a lifetime. For a long time, it gave me something to look forward to, jumping to sort through the mail before my father could. In slick, flimsy plastic packaging. Like trading cards, I could inhale their paper scent, trace the creases with my fingertips, insert and reinsert the latest entry into my binder until it felt just right.
No, I won’t look up the price now. Nor will I confirm its continued publication. I have it, it’s mine, I possess it. And maybe, I’ll pass it down someday to someone else who seeks to possess it too. No one will take it from me, what I have inside my skull. It belongs to me, much like my work belongs to you.
