College is an amazing experience. It gives you your first taste of adulthood, offers opportunities to study abroad and travel to exciting places, and marks the transition from taking classes every day to working a full-time job. As awesome as college is, however, it is not for everyone. Neither of my parents had the college experience I have today: My mother went to secretarial school for a few years and my dad went to technical school for a year before taking on a full-time job as a electrician. They are both very successful in their fields today, but their decisions not to attend a four-year, full-time university or college might not be as successful or well-received today. We live in a society that enforces the college mandate, where every student is expected to go to college after high school. While this model works well for many kids, it puts an unnecessary burden on kids who aren’t sure what they want to do with their lives or want careers that don’t require skills learned at college. College used to be a choice, not a necessity. It was there for people who wanted to further their education, and plenty of people like my parents were very well-off without it. Now it’s not much of a choice for today’s students and can cause problems for students who aren’t sure what they want to do.
For example, going to college when you’re not sure what you want to do with your life can cause a lot of unneeded stress. Many students feel that they must have their entire lives figured out by the age of 18, just as they’re becoming adults. Most college kids switch their majors at least two or three times, sometimes as they’re about to graduate. Once they have graduated, some don’t even use their degree, or they end up working in a field completely different from what they studied in school. One of my friends graduated after four years with a degree in engineering and went on to nursing. Another dropped all of her pre-med classes a month before graduating and spent another four years getting a degree in political science. It’s okay not to have your life figured out when you enter college, but unfortunately many students feel like they should.
You also don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a degree you won’t end up using. Many adults think students today complain too much about the price of college. I’ve heard from many family friends that “all it takes is a little hard work and taking on a summer job or two” to pay for a college education, like they did. In 1999, tuition and fees at Northeastern University cost about $18,000. Over the next ten years, the price doubled to $36,000, and within five years had increased to $43,000. An NU student would need to take on about ten summer jobs to pay off their loans by that logic. Not to mention that a Bachelor’s degree is not worth nearly as much today as it was 25 years ago, as most young adults these days have four years of college education. Students have to spend more money on a Master’s degree or Ph.D. to set themselves apart. Ironic that a college degree that costs over twice as much as it did 25 years ago is less esteemed today than it was then.
Many students decide to take “nontraditional” routes, such as working after high school or taking a year off and postponing college plans. It makes sense if you want to wait until you know what you want to do before digging yourself into a money pit, or if you want to go into technical or trade fields that focus on hands-on work. However, many people look down on these decisions, saying people who take a year off are lazy or people who go straight into the workforce aren’t smart enough to go to school. It seems a lot smarter to me to save up for school so you’re not drowning in debt or to take time off so you don’t spend half of your next ten thousand paychecks paying off a degree you never used or didn’t even want.
So how can we stop the college mandate? My chemistry teacher told me about how the founder of PayPal gave two dozen students $100,000 not to go to college. Instead, they were to work on scientific innovations or their own start-up companies. If kids who don’t want or need to go to college weren’t pressured into doing so, the cost of college could be driven down for those who do wish to attend, helping everyone. Until the government stops treating 18-year-old students as profit centers and goes back to making college an affordable experience, we need to respect people’s decisions about their education and stop enforcing the mandate.