Academia has always been a rather elite field. The cerebral converse with colleagues, not laymen, and the road to becoming a scholar is extremely difficult. They are experts in the esoteric and arcane. Chances are a good number of the people reading this article are planning to go to graduate school in hopes of entering this field. Perhaps you, like me, have been finding the development of your specialty in the field to be positively daunting.

The hardest part of the graduate school application process has been deciding what my field will be, since that affects nearly everything else: where I will go, who I will study with and, most important, where I will end up. I might add that academia is not a special case; the current job market is so concerned with specialization that the truth is it’s a wonder college graduates can do anything useful.

Knowing that I want to study medieval history is not enough. I need to pick a subcategory, such as class politics or religion. More than that, I need to pick a time period and a geographic location for my particular research. In the end, I may be a professor with specialization in the Catholic Church of medieval England between 400 and 1,000 C.E.

The end result of graduate studies seems to be the elimination of the ability to study anything outside your own extremely narrow field. Projects outside your established forte will be disregarded by some because you are not a ‘specialist.’ If Earth is destroyed in a third World War and you happen to be one of the only survivors, you will, in effect, be completely useless.

Why the emphasis on specialization in academia and elsewhere? The more subcategories of respectable fields we invent, the more positions become available, which is a concern with a steadily increasing global population. The national college graduation rate is only 27 percent, but one must consider that that is still out of millions of eligible people. The rate is also steadily rising, meaning eventually those with specialized degrees will be evenly matched with the ‘working class.’

Focus on practical skills, especially in urban schools, is almost totally obsolete. Everyone is encouraged to go into a highly specialized field (academia being only one highly personalized example) where they will allegedly make more money and command more job satisfaction. The only mission of the specialists seems to be to create more specialists, effectively increasing the gap between the respectable and the practical.

The problem I have with specialization is the societal gaps it creates and the way it limits the acquirement of both practical knowledge and knowledge outside one’s field. I am truly excited about the career path I plan to pursue, but I think everyone would benefit from the attainment of more practical skills. And I cannot help but wonder if being a sanitation worker or administrative assistant is more socially useful than the erudite academic I plan to become.