In that case, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t know much about politics. I’ve never been interested. It isn’t… scientific.
The terrestrial government—that is, the major human shareholders in the Planetary Tourism Agency, under the guise of the World Parliament—has the good sense to guarantee a good, free education to ninety-nine percent of the children on the planet. And I do mean ninety-nine percent, not one hundred, because as you can see there are always exceptions. My village of Baracuyá del Jiquí, which has no continuous access to holonet or any other connectivity, must still lie completely outside the World Education System.
According to neurologists and psychologists, my mind’s almost complete “virginity” is one of the essential factors that turned me into the freak I am today.
Fine, then; when teenagers finish middle school, they have two choices awaiting them: either they are successful at their aptitude and IQ tests and get into college prep schools, or they fail and end up in tech school. Or they start working, which is what most people have no choice but to do.
For the fortunate few who get into college prep, the state doesn’t charge them anything… for the time being. But they’re racking up a debt that they’ll be forced to pay, to the last credit of accumulated interest, in the future.
There are two ways of enrolling in the university: for free… if you negotiate a second and even more exhaustive series of exams brilliantly enough. Or by paying and skipping the exams. If the student or the student’s family is willing to pay the cost of every class, book, and so on. The privileged few who are able to afford doing this are another matter. Paying automatically gives you certain rights, including the right to choose which career you want to study.
The fact is, the majority of future terrestrial scientists start out among the ranks of those who pass their entrance exams and gain free admission to the university. And when I say the majority, I mean only one out of every hundred college prep graduates.
In practice, only the few who have shown a potential for becoming absolute geniuses have any real possibility of choosing the field of science they will study. The academic fate of the rest depends on a sort of roulette, in which their qualifications play a role… but what mainly counts is the medium-term plans of the Planetary Tourism Agency, or of the government, which is the same thing.
It doesn’t matter if a young person has been dreaming since childhood of becoming an astrophysicist. If the “needs of Earth” demand x number of sociologists over the next seven years… he’ll have to study sociology, or drop out of the university.
Naturally, two out of three young people go unsatisfied into specialties that never interested them. If they are interested in learning, better something that nothing, don’t you think?
To be sure, it is always possible to change fields.
Though the mechanism was intended for students who discovered halfway through their studies that they have no vocation for the subject they selected, some thirty percent of students on Earth graduate in something completely different from what they started out studying. And according to conservative statistics, of the other seventy percent, nearly half wish they could do so… but their grades aren’t high enough to qualify them for a transfer request.
The only students who have a right to make such a petition, and only after completing the second year, are those who attain a grade point average of 9.5 or more out of ten. Even so, the deans of each school can turn down a petition for changing specialties at their own discretion, if they feel that the student will be of more use in the specialty he originally started out in.
The deplorable state of the lab equipment in universities on Earth is known throughout the galaxy. We’re a third-rate planet… Our College of High Energy Physics doesn’t even have a small particle accelerator, and future astronomers can only gaze at the stars through vintage two-meter, or at most three-meter, reflecting telescopes. They can’t even dream of modular orbiting field reflectors. Much less of off-world field trips.
Our next generation of biologists know such basic techniques as autocloning or body exchange only through crude simulations or well-worn holovideos. Nor do they have access to fauna from other worlds—live specimens are prohibitively expensive. Our geophysicists have fewer opportunities to send probes to the interior of our planet, and they know less about it, than any interested tourist.
Now, medical students do have the luxury of working with real patients from the start. Of course, those patients are humans on Social Assistance, which provides them with free medical care. New medications are also tested on them. Since a human life has so little value, while there’s always a need for doctors and new medicines, nobody complains… Maybe that’s why Earth’s doctors and medical system are so famous throughout the galaxy. They don’t lack for experience, that’s for sure.
Even sociologists are unable to implement real surveys to learn how to use the complicated skewed statistics programs that are fundamental to their science these days. Like everyone else, they work with simulators.
As might be expected, the lack of resources is slightly less grave at private graduate schools and at institutions directly connected with the Scientific Reserve, the places where those who can pay and the especially talented study… For the rest, hardly any university on Earth has access to resources other than simulations. And even those are necessarily four or five years behind the models sold everywhere else in the galaxy.
So there is no way for a future scientist to interact with the real world. Indeed, the terrestrial doctrine of higher education could be phrased more or less as follows: “Take these rudiments of theory, then go do your real learning on the fly—and good luck.”
It is upon graduation that the fledgling scientist begins his true odyssey. That is moment when Earth’s clever bureaucracy hands him the bill for his “free” education. To settle his debt, he’ll have to work for at least five years, not where he wants, but where the government deigns to assign him. And the salary he works for over those five years is almost laughable.
If he wants to change postings earlier, at the cost of having his title revoked, he’ll have to make a $trong ca$e for it, and even then only after piles of red tape that usually take years to sort out.
For better or for worse, the chaotic state of Earth’s economy cannot guarantee placements to more than sixty-five percent of its graduates. More and more young people enter the university every year. And fewer and fewer new graduates find work in their specialties.
There are biologists working as lab technicians in provincial hospitals. Physiochemists as quality inspectors in synthetic food factories. Sociologists underutilized as reporters on some third-rate holonet.
And that’s not the worst of it.
Many tour operators, guides, and aerobus drivers decorate their living room walls with the beautiful and useless holograms of their university degrees. Others, even more pragmatic or more cynical, forget about their titles forever, or they set up small enterprises to survive. The “Second-level Scientific Reserve,” they’re called, and presumably they’ll be in demand at some point… over the next millennium.
Meanwhile, since you have to make a living somehow and the Planetary Tourism Agency is always hungry for intelligent young people, especially the good-looking ones…