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Education has a significant impact on one's future. College education provides more than just knowledge, it also teaches skills like time management, communication, and multitasking. Networking opportunities in college can lead to job connections. Keeping up with technology is essential in college and the workplace. College helps individuals pursue their passions and explore different career paths. People with higher education tend to live longer and have healthier lifestyles. Higher levels of education also lead to higher wages. Employers view college graduates as more job-ready and possessing more skills. However, college education does not guarantee immediate job offers. Trade schools and associate's degrees also offer valuable education and can lead to successful careers. Hi, my name is Ava Hurley and I am a sophomore at the University of Connecticut. Today in my podcast I'll be talking about the broad topic of education. Our main topic as a group is all about the effects of education. My inquiry question is how does education impact your future? I chose this inquiry to dive in and understand if education is the only way to have a successful future. I also chose to narrow my question in on getting a college degree versus having just a high school diploma. As a student in college, I wanted to understand and research if getting a college education would help me down the road. I wanted to also further understand if getting a college education was the only way that I could be successful in the future. Now I'll talk about the research I found regarding education and its impact on your future. So one of the main points that I found in my research was how education promotes more than just knowledge. You are gaining skills that companies are looking for. When you're in college, you have to learn time management, how to communicate with all different types of people, do multiple tasks at once. When you begin college, there is no one to tell you what to do like it was in high school. You're on your own, which comes with a lot of freedom and independence. In order to have a successful time in college, you need to learn how to work on your own time management. College really pushes you to plan in order to have a social life while still completing your schoolwork. Relating to this topic is being able to complete multiple tasks all together. In college, you are given a lot of different things including homeworks, quizzes, lectures, and you're trying to handle a bunch of different classes. It may be hard at first to juggle all these tasks, but it is up to you to come up with a method that works for you. Also, when you come to college, you are exposed to a whole new group of people and culture. This teaches you to communicate and interact with people you might not typically do so. You will learn how to even work with people that you may not like, but you have to do it to benefit yourself. And another thing that I found that promotes more than just knowledge is networking. And as I mentioned before, when you come to college, you meet lots of other people. These people can essentially help you in the long run. These people you meet might have connections that can help you land yourself a nice and well-paying job or connect you with other people. You also have the ability to join organizations within your college where you can meet people. There are so many opportunities to meet new people within your college. For example, there's clubs, sports teams, Greek life, and so much more. You could also meet alumni who could help you with letters of recommendation and more. Most people that like go to like the same college as you are always there to help you and want to benefit you in the future. And another thing that I found was how technology is always changing. And that's like everyone knows technology is changing, but as the world is constantly changing and constantly evolving, the technology is also doing that. And every year there's some sort of improvement in technology. You can look back even five years and see a major change within our technology. And when you're in college, you have to keep up with the changes in technology. You are somewhat forced to evolve with the technology because most of the classes are online. A lot of presentations are online exams. There's ebooks now and some classes are fully online as well. So with the evolvement in technology is the same for the workplace as well. Companies are trying to like keep up with technology and kind of do like what's relevant to what's going on in today's world. Therefore when you're in college and you're learning how to use like Excel, PowerPoint, and all these different like tools, it could help you land a job because companies will see that you have like already background in this technology. And another thing that I found was that going to college can really help you pursue a passion of yours. And when you're in college, you're taking all these different classes, which can eventually help to get where you want to be. For instance, if you wanted to be like a doctor or a nurse, you could take those classes and that will clearly set you up to hopefully go into that field. And also when you come out of high school, a lot of people aren't exactly sure what they want to do. So in college, you're given the opportunity to take so many different classes and you get to learn all about different classes that you want to take. Like for me when I came out of high school, I wasn't really sure exactly what I wanted to do. But so far being at UConn, I got to take a couple econ classes and a couple business classes. And that kind of made me realize that that's something that I might want to go into, but I honestly would have never thought that just coming straight out of high school. So thankfully I had the opportunity to take these classes which ultimately gave me kind of a passion for the career that I want to go into. And lastly, I found this quote that I found very interesting and it had to do with like having a healthier lifestyle. And it said, people with better educations tend to live longer and have healthier lifestyles. According to research, people with higher educations have a one-third lower risk of heart disease. Degree holders are also less likely to smoke and more likely to get regular exercise. And I thought that was really interesting because I think that that kind of has to do with creating a method and creating a system that works for you. So like when it said at the bottom like degree holders are less likely to smoke and more likely to get a regular exercise. You're kind of like have a system built up which could eventually help you in what you want to do and how to be healthier for yourself. And so another point that I found in my research was the kind of narrowing down is high school education enough or do you need a college degree? And I found these statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and it's median weekly wages from 2021. And high school diploma was $809. A bachelor's degree was $1,334. A master's degree was $1,574. And a doctoral degree was $1,909. So clearly there is a big difference there, especially between the high school diploma and the doctoral degree. That was almost a $1,100 difference. So clearly getting like higher up in degrees that will clearly help you later making more money which could eventually help you become more successful. And so a lot of things that I found, I found a lot of quotes regarding this and it said the study found that employers believe that applicants with a college degree are more job ready than those without a degree. Specifically employers feel that candidates with degrees possess more hard and soft skills than non-degree candidates. While the range of hard skills varied by field, the desired soft skills were generally the same across the board including verbal communication skills and the ability to mentor other staff, which just kind of goes to what I said initially in the beginning is that like companies are going to see that you have a lot more skills because you went to college and you learned all that time management, you learned how to use technology, you learn how to communicate with others. So employees are going to see this and see someone that might just have a high school diploma and that they might not have all the same qualities as someone that did get a degree. So there clearly are a lot more benefits to going to college and getting learning all like those different skills that eventually will help you down the road. And another statistic that or kind of like just a guy that said something that kind of goes a little bit against this was that an author of one of the articles that I read Eugene Gold said that he was pushed to go to school by his family because that was the right thing to do. Everyone in his family had always gone to college. So it was kind of what he felt that he needed to do in order to make his family happy. And he enjoyed college and he finished his college education getting a degree. However, he was not offered a job right out of college. He said that he found difficulties actually getting a job. So Gold eventually became an entrepreneur and said that in order to become that is that you need to have visions and you need to be a leader in order to succeed. You can't really become an entrepreneur without having a goal or a plan and that you kind of need to have like a sort of drive. So this goes against like that you might go to college, but you're not always guaranteed a job after college. But he did say that getting the degree and getting an education from college even though he didn't get a job exactly out of college is it still did help him later on down the road. And another thing that I wanted to talk about was like trade school and associate's degrees because those can are considered not college degrees, but they're still further education like higher than a high school diploma because within a trade school you're there for 18 to 24 months and you're learning a certain skill that can include like electrician, welding, plumbing, there's so many different types. And then associate's degree is still also just a two-year program and usually at like a community college and you can honestly start working like right after your degree. So I thought this is kind of interesting too because a lot of people said this. I did my research it showed that people also benefited a lot from this and that still it technically isn't like your typical bachelor like four-year college degree, but it still is a further education than the high school diploma and that really like helped them later on to be more successful. And there are definitely opportunities to be successful with a high school diploma but it does not compare to the amount of opportunities someone could have with a college degree or a higher level of education. There are so many statistics and studies to support the statement that there is a higher success rate for those who get more than just a high school diploma. There are also benefits to not just being successful with money, but also having life skills. There's so much to learn within education that holds so many benefits and I think that there are definitely different options for getting a higher education than high school, but they are kind of necessary. And the amount of benefits that can help someone in the long run is inevitable. And so that kind of wraps up the our episode for the importance of education. I hope you all enjoyed listening to all these different aspects of education that myself and my other group members talked about. So thank you for tuning in.