“Did you hear?”
“About?” I yawn.
“The news god damn it.”
“No, no, no, no.” I yawn again, this time it lasts several seconds. “I’m just getting up.”
“Well this lady at MIT, she lied.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Turns out she maybe can’t even read.”
“Illiterate type huh,” I plop down in front of the computer, “What is she the chancellor, president?”
“No, no Director of Admissions.”
“Yeah well that figures.” For a brief moment, I reflect on all of the rejection letters for various graduate schools that I received. I think of initial acceptances and rejections for my undergraduate. Perched somewhere inside tiny turn-of-the-century built buildings on distant land-grant campuses, even now, an army of temps with high school diplomas and A.A. degrees riffle through the hopes and dreams of tens of thousands of middle class children… all the while their boss, cracking the whip, has less education than any of them.
Frightening? Empowering? Pointless?
However you call it, I have to accept that I spent 100,000 and change and a decade of my life to come to know that “Everything Is Bullsh$t” to quote a late friend of mine.
“What’s that bi%*h’s name?”
“Marilee Jones” He laughs into the phone, “oh she’s the Dean I guess. You know this kind of sh*t is really gonna f#ck up your current job search. Everyone’s gonna be crazy about checking degrees and all that crap. You know how reactionary everyone is.”
“Yeah.”
What I can’t believe is how listing multiple degrees helped Marilee Jones. I applied now for over twenty admissions officer positions at various institutions trying to land a health-care ready job and not one of them even gave me an interview. So unsuccessful have I been, that I now lie to tell people I have LESS education than I do. This has actually lead to recent interviews.
“So I mean what’s a Ph.D. worth?” Felix is laughing so hard on the phone he can barely choke the words out.
“Well we already knew the answer. Nothing.”
