About 7 years ago, I sat in a marketing "class". Oh, don't get me wrong, it contained a lot of good information. A lot of VERY good information, in fact, that I use to this day. But the marketing class was just a sales pitch for the latest Internet marketing company that had set up shop.

At the end of the day, we all received a very nice quality certificate, printed out on quality parchment paper. It was well presented, but all it was, effectively, was a sales pitch.

It was at the moment that I received my certificate that it hit me: degrees, certificates, pieces of paper are all essentially marketing gimmicks.

This is how those correspondence courses, those learn online places, make their money. Often they will offer you the information they are seeking, they just accredit their education to their own standards rather than a national standard, and issue you a "degree" based on their own educational standards. Without any kind of reputation behind it, all it is is another marketing gimmick.

I've spent the last year and a half earning the degree I never received. Now I can actually take credit for earning a college degree, and am working on another. And while there are moments where I think it might have been nice to have earned this degree when I was younger, there's a part of me that is glad I waited this long. Because not only do I value it, but I realize its value.

The degree I am earning is, by itself, worth nothing. Well, maybe the fraction of a cent recycle value that it represents. But the degree itself is utterly worthless unless the education is actually used. It is like a key dangling on a chain. If you find a key while youre walking along the street, do you keep it? Unless you're a packrat, you usually don't. It's just a worthless key, after all, and not worth spending the time stooping to pick up.

Now, then, change the scenario. Assume you find a key, and you know it unlocks a great treasure (for the sake of this analogy, we will assume it's legal to procure the treasure, provided you have the key). What do you do then? You keep it, you guard it, until such time as you can use it to obtain the treasure.

Did the key's value increase? Not one bit. It is still worth exactly what the first key was worth. But the value it REPRESENTS is what increased.

Recently it was suggested that the government should pay for all postsecondary education, up to and including advanced degrees. I disagree with that premise, and this is why. Because it makes no sense to hand out keys indiscriminately to everyone hoping that one or two will unlock the treasure.

In America, we are incredibly fortunate. We have all the tools for learning at our disposal. You cannot go to a city of any size and not find a public library. These libraries have a wealth of information available to anyone who wants to use it. And, in fact, if you're reading this, you are sitting in front of a machine that gives you access to more information than the most well stocked library.

This is what makes the suggestion of "free" postsecondary education useless. Essentially the proposal is that we hand out keys to everyone so that they can unlock their potential. But if they won't walk through open doors to unguarded treasure, why on earth would they use a key to access more closely guarded treasure?