I got into a discussion with someone recently about whether spending tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) for a college education was really worth it. He felt that it was not, and that it was a “moral hazard” to encourage people with easy loans to get themselves well into debt.
This discussion led me to think over exactly how a college education is beneficial. I think there are many ways that it can be worth the time and money. The benefit that most people cite when talking about college is learning “critical thinking,” but I think this is really overblown. Many students take that to mean being able to criticize, and they often come out of college able to critique things, but that skill often doesn’t go over well in the job world (“I can tell you ten reasons why your idea won’t work”).
I realized that the biggest benefit of a college education is learning how to abstract things—how to model the complexities of the real world in a simplified system that can be analyzed, tweaked and applied. How to recognize when a difficult problem is really the same as a simple problem that has been solved in another field. How to cut through the clutter of seemingly unique qualities and identify the essential, universal elements. Learning to create and apply abstraction is the most powerful think students can take from college.