As a society, we have established requirements necessary to work at a specific job, in the past these requirements were simpler. For example, it was not a requirement for teachers to have a college degree. Today, in order to become a certified teacher you must pass state licensing exams, obtain a bachelors degree, and obtain a masters within five years of being hired in order to keep your teaching position. Therefore, as professions raise standards, education becomes the underlying requirement needed to enter a professional field. This is especially true since specific educational training corresponds to different fields. This shift and need for higher education is due to the inflation of high school graduates.
In the past, a high school diploma was enough to land you a good position because not many people attended high school. Yet, with the raise in high school graduates another standard had to be set - that of a college degree. Most jobs and businesses want the best of the best to work for them. Therefore, they raise their expectations and requirements. This makes it difficult for those who do not have the expected educational requirements to qualify for a position.
Today, even a bachelor's degree is not enough to obtain certain positions because even they are becoming common enough to be obsolete. Thus, this never ending surmounting of educational requirements makes education in the modern society necessary in order to achieve a placement in any given field.
As society becomes more and more complex, the general masses must become capable of understanding its complexity in order to maintain it. Managing a business two hundred years ago meant that you had to understand the economy of your town or small city. Managing a business today often means understanding the economy of a comparably larger town, city, country or world. This makes the job of a common businessman much more complicated and therefore demands that the businessman be educated in different aspects of business. For example, he would have to learn the skills to create a working profit for his company. If he is selling items that are in high demand, he will have to know what the legal price of sell is. If he is producing goods overseas, he would even have to come to an agreement with other retailers and manufacturing companies. Therefore, in order to compete, he must definitely be educated.
The full mastery of a skill is not enough to guarantee success in attaining a position within a field. This is because hiring managers always look to your educational background as a definition of your capabilities. This is why a college education is important. For college not only provides you with Liberal Arts courses that allow you to get a feel for the world, but because it provides you with the option of multiple majors that will assist in deciding what fields you will qualify for as a professional. A school-based education is important because it aims to produce a well-rounded person capable of dealing with the wide array of skills needed to be successful in the modern day.In the end, as time goes on the requirements to qualify for any given field will continue to rise.Thus, we must ensure that in order to keep up we too gain an education that will allow us to compete with the rest of the world.
