Later promotions as a military officer can be very competitive. Right now every promotion up to captain is all but guaranteed, and I believe even major has a 100% selection rate for the time being. One of the things the selection board considers for promotion is the level of personal development an officer does, and for some reason they think that a master’s degree is a good metric of that. Most likely it started when someone on the board thought it was important and then everyone on the board had a master’s degree. And once promotions start favoring it, everyone has to get one or they aren’t going to get promoted.
I don’t know if I want to stay in the military long enough for that to matter. Right now the prospect of dealing with politics and nonsense for more than my required term of service sounds daunting. But I do not like the idea of closing doors, especially when I feel that God directed me to the Air Force.
I’ve been looking into master’s programs for a while now, and I haven’t been able to figure out what to study. There are so many programs I could study, but none of them sound interesting. Well, a couple sound interesting, but I feel I would would be better off learning that outside of a university environment. I was flipping through school after school of degrees offered the other night and they all looked terrible. That was not helped by the fact that they all came down to either credentialing for credential’s sake or preparation for further graduate work. It felt like the degrees were all pointless, where was the learning?
Then my brother happened to send this comic. Oh man. This sums up ~all~ many of my problems with higher education. I don’t want to pay ridiculous sums of money for a professional credential for a field I don’t work in (and even the one for aviation sounds terrible). I want to learn valuable things that improve me as a person. Cybersecurity and software development are great, until I fall behind of the state of the art and everything I learned about in school is useless.
Well it just so happens that I may have found the right degree for me: The Masters in Classical Education from Hillsdale College. It’s a study of classical education from the trivium and quadrivium to the modern interpretations and implementations of it. That’s something I’ve been wanting to learn for a long time. And not only does it seem to fit a university setting, but it’s what universities were originally all about. If you’re looking for a check-the-box master’s degree, or are an educator, this might be a cool option for you!