The truth about going to college

In our society, going to college is usually an essential necessity to those who want a decent high-paying job. This narrative is pushed endlessly by teachers and the other faculty in school as early as elementary school.

If you don’t happen to have the paper saying that you are “capable” of doing a job, you can kiss your chances of having a bright future goodbye. Without those papers or titles stating what degree you earned, your options for work are quite limited. However, there is one significant flaw in this system: the assumption that only the people who happen to have the right “titles” are capable of doing a specific job.

Sure, you can try and argue that if somebody is indeed truly capable of doing that job, then they are more than capable of working toward getting the needed degree. However, this assumes that everybody has the resources needed to attend college and work for said degree.

College has become increasingly expensive in recent years, so it’s not surprising that it has begun to scare off countless potential students from even considering going to college. Many people can’t even begin to fathom being tens of thousands of dollars in debt, much less when the debt keeps on growing exponentially over time.

Many bright individuals are forced to settle for the lowest available levels of education and are forced to instead make do with whatever job they can get their hands on. Going to college is not always merely a choice. Some people simply don’t have the same opportunities as others to attend college.

Going to college is simply too costly and time consuming in the modern day. When students aren’t able to pay for college, they can take out college loans. The problem with this is that the debt from these loans increases gradually over time, sometimes too quickly for people to be able to pay them off steadily. It takes people up to several decades to finally pay off their loans, that is, if they are ever able to actually pay them off. Couple this with the fact that you also have to pay living expenses and taxes, paying off that money becomes even more increasingly difficult to do as the years go by.

The fact that employers are primarily focusing only on those who have special college degrees is also an issue that has to be addressed. Simply having a degree does not mean that someone is instantly capable of doing their job, and similarly enough, not everyone who doesn’t have a degree is incapable of doing their job. The only way to truly know if one is able to do the job is from experience.

Somebody who may not have the degree could be more than capable of doing the designated job, while someone who has the degree may be unable to put what they learned into practice. It is a fallacy that our society seems to follow, but the answer seems to be nowhere near in sight. For now, we can only cross our fingers our hope that we can resolve this issue for the next generation of youth.