Is College Education Essential

Growing up college was necessary, often times parents and close ones described it as a privilege you were born into right from the start as a little boy or girl. For a long time and for many of us millennials. There is a limited number of pathways. These pathways consist of either go to trade school which could be interrupted as college with hands on experience, join the military or attend some type of collegiate school. The main focus was on college. We just had to go. We just had to graduate. And if we did, we could count on a career, depending on a decent income and more or less expect security, according to parents and high school counselors and everything we heard and everything we read. By are time a diploma was just a regularly old piece of paper in a folder, it never met anything. A motivated person could supposedly get to a four year degree with smarts, intelligence, and a little dash of help here and there. College is often seen as the focal point of the American dream, a reliable social mobility engine.

We are brought up on the believe that higher education is needed to achieve success. since technology and the vast world we live in is rapidly advancing through the is decades, you may ask yourself “do I seriously need college to have a legitamind advantage over my competitor”. The answer you find may be shocking, in retrospect while there are individuals who’d never even had the idea of going to college and somehow at the end of their career they do better than someone with a degree in business, anthropology, or chemical engineering ect. A once living example of this was Steve Jobs. Steve attended Reed College known for coeducational, independent liberal arts and sciences and later dropped out after two years and joined Steve Wozniak to make the first apple computer in 1976. But hey the majority of us never had the option to drop out or had the great intellectual mind and connectedness as Steve once had.

Most high school seniors are under pressure by their peers and parents to take the common path known as college because it is the easiest way to make money. The main reason students attend college in the fall is not because they want to, it’s because they are so pressured into doing it and never fully get the chance to sit down and seriously reflex on what they want to do from a means of living in the next decade. If the student ever finds the time to reflect on what they want to do, may of them end up developing different opinions towards the end high school, but due to their parents, they become blinded by what makes them happy and tend to lean towards the feelings of “making mom and dad proud”. At the end of the day parents want to have a say in their child’s decision making, even if there self consensually aware about it or not.

It is a social luxury to go to college. Yet most individuals often go to college to get the name of a university student. It’s a straightforward way for some young and inexperienced high school graduate to leave their home and be self enrolled without losing their parents financial assistance. They do not want to be looked down upon by their peers so they do what’s best in the interest of others, instead doing what’s best for themselves, so they can escape being ridiculed by society. Little did we know that since we were little kids we had the idea that college was the right pathway for success.

Going to college and getting a degree does not necessarily guarantee that an individual is going to get a job right after graduation. It is hard for recent graduates to find a good job since there is so much competition due to the increasing accessibility of a college education. Even if they do get a job, it is not usually what they got their degree for. They end up having to find a low paying job to pay off all the debt that their college education has given to them. Which leads to most college students wishing they could’ve spent more of their time learning more within their field of study and less time on irrelevant materials. Many people offer the solution of going to trade school and getting work related experience that way. The problem with trade school is that you can only go so far with the area of work you’re able to do. My solution to this is to have high schools stay more focused on getting students into CCP. By finishing prerequisites through junior and senior year of high school, not only are CCP students getting head of your classmates they’ll be getting most if not all of the useless courses finished before they enter college.

College has its benefits and drawbacks definitely. But what you make of it I think, is college. It can be your best time, but only if you want it. You can take a pessimistic view and believe that college is a waste of money, or that it can be regarded as a new and challenging frontier that essentially sets a precedent in your life.

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