What's Good Enough For You May Not Be Good Enough For M.

All our lives we have been told go to college go to college. It’s been drilled into our heads that after high school you go to college and do something with your life. Sure. College is awesome. It’s full of freedom responsibility and it’s also a lot of fun. And if you know what you want to do with your lives you learn a bunch of stuff about whatever, and hope that, after 4 plus years of constant studying your butts off, you can somehow get a job in you preferred field of study.

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If you are able to get a job right after college doing what you went to college to do that’s fantastic for you! Unfortunately, not everybody who gets a degree is this lucky.  In order to get a job you need experience, but how are you supposed to get that experience without that job? Financially Poor says, “In today’s job market, experience trumps a degree every time.  So much so, that there is a push to keep seniors and boomers in positions past traditional retirement age in many industries.  This is due to the fear of losing knowledge and experience that recent graduates and young professionals do not have.” I think this is ridiculous. If companies would just give the college graduates jobs they could get the experience they need, and in return people could retire at the normal age and less college students would be without jobs.

I keep reading about how the dropout rate for college is so large. Ramesh Ponnuru says that, “40% of kids who enroll in college don't get a degree within six years — may be a sign that we're trying to push too many people who aren't suited for college to enroll.” I agree with him. I mean, college is not for everyone. Everybody thinks that college is for them because that’s what everyone has been telling them their entire lives. Unfortunately it takes them wasting a bunch of money to figure that out. My first couple weeks of college were very stressful personally. At that point I was not sure at all if I made the right choice of going to college. I called those first couple of weeks the weeding out period, because every teacher is literally weeding out the people who are not supposed to be there. Did you ever notice how at first you classes had a lot of people in them or more than you originally started out with, and then gradually you would lose more and more people?  

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Career Chase says, “The old adage of “it doesn’t matter what kind of degree you have as long as you have one,” doesn’t hold much water anymore. Truth of the matter is, it seems like everyone is sporting a college degree nowadays. This is why a college degree isn’t enough anymore.” One of my close friends wants to be a missionary instead of going to college because she does not think it’s for her. After she spent the summer as a missionary in Porto Rico she was sure that she did not want to go to college. But her parents really wanted her to still go to college so she would have something to fall back on. The problem with this is what if her fall back can’t back her up? I mean a degree does not guarantee a job. It’s just a piece of paper that says I went to school for four plus years and I am qualified to work in this particular field. Does that sound good enough to you?

Think about this. I you do get a job right after college doing what you want to do. First of all you’re very lucky. Second of all, is this job going to pay off all of your student loans? Nones Notes says, “total student debt, which surpassed the country’s credit card debt for the first time in August 2010, now tops $1 trillion. Compare that to student debt being only around $200 billion as late as 2000. So we’re talking an increase of ~400% in a little over a decade, which is miles more than the inflation rate over this period. Average debt now stands at almost $23,000 per student, which is a spike of ~8% over the past year alone.” That’s insane. I don't know about you but if I am going to be in debt for the rest of my life then college is definitely not good enough.

One of my favorite quotes is “Some people are so poor all the have is money” some people don't need fancy things to be happy and to survive. I read a poll that asked if college was good enough. One person said, “What is success? Its not money. But for some people it may be something else. Bookish education will only equip your mind with some facts(sometimes the facts may not be proven true). For human beings what is required is moral education. If a person with high qualification doesn't know what human compassion is and how to work, then what's the use of degree. Its just a certificate that tells the world that, you have studied some facts from a textbook.” So before you spend more then you can afford, ask yourself if college is really good enough for you.