Does it Matter?

Everyone always says you need to be prepared for college and start your post high school education journey early, but should any of that matter? College is introduced to students of all ages as the key to a happy successful life and it’s important to get good grades so you can first of all graduate high school, and second of all make it into a good college. However, I’m wondering how helpful college actually is to a successful life. Students who aren’t certain of what they want to do for the rest of their life are almost completely expected to go to college. Even to the point where they are often subject to being looked down upon by their peers, parents, and strong majority of society if they don’t. I think that college is a waste of time, energy, and money if you don’t have a predisposed reason to attend. The entire process of being accepted is rushed, especially since the idea behind this prompt is trying to get students to start thinking about it even earlier than they already have to. College should of course be an option for students, but trying to implement it in every students brain earlier and earlier will do more harm than good.

Children are very impressionable, especially at younger ages. The more, as well as earlier you begin talking about college to them, the more they will feel it’s their only option in life. Not everyone is built for college (or school in general) so this kind of constant added pressure won’t do anything except stress students out further. It’s ridiculous to assume middle schoolers or even high schoolers all have the perfect idea of where they are going and where they want to be in life. College only helps you if you already know those things. Rushing and pressuring students into applying for college and finding a major to pursue is toxic for a student body, and only gets worse the younger schools begin doing it. It causes students to rush their career choice and jump at the first thing they think of because they’re told if they don’t start early it’ll be worse. At the end of the day middle schoolers and lower grade high schoolers are still children and are rarely knowledgeable about the way the world works and how adult life will look. It’s unfair to assume they will all be interested in college, and just explaining that other options exist doesn’t fix this issue. Teachers always undermine the idea of another route, just because they may tell you it’s viable, doesn’t mean they will ever promote it at the same scale college is promoted. If the plan is to force college onto middle schoolers, every other post high school path needs to be promoted at an equal level. If we truly want students to be successful, every other path needs to be talked about equally as much as college so we can ensure students are finding a path that properly fits their needs in life. Obscuring their knowledge of outside methods means students uninterested in college will still feel forced to go, eventually wasting their money, time, and energy on something useless. Especially when they could have put all that effort and commitment into something more suitable, as opposed to ruining their lives from the start because they aren’t getting those things back. Students need to go into their career paths with an open mind, not under the impression that college is the only way just because it’s viewed as the safe way.

College propaganda is widespread all over the united states, now that sounds ridiculous to say, and that’s why no one understands or considers there might be truth behind it. Going to college means you have decided to take a career path where you will always have a steady job under an employer and recieve a liveable wage in a field you’ve chosen. On paper it sounds great, but the reality is that means you will never make your own schedule again. You work for a person who makes your schedule for you, and even if they don’t, you still owe them a specified amount of hours or completed work amount each week. This leaves very little room for a person to have control of their own life. Implementing the idea of college into students brains early on is a tactic for keeping the working class working, and removing the idea that they can break the cycle by diminishing the thoughts of people being able to produce their own source of income without need of an employer. In this way we are keeping the poor people poor and the rich people rich. I strongly disagree with the forceful implications of college being the only way to achieve a happy successful life in America because the reality is college just puts you in debt so you can make money at the same job the rest of your life to pay it back. If you can be inventive and manuever your own way through life, money comes easier and in a bigger abundance. College is not the key to success, it is in fact what drags us further down as a society. Sure you might say doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professions make lots and lots of money, but none of them make nearly the amount their employer does. You might be okay with that, and thats okay, but me personally, I don’t want to make less money as the person doing the dirty work as opposed to my boss who just makes sure im doing a good job at it. Not to say employers and CEOs don’t work hard (except the ones with wealth handed to them), because those people who have built businesses did the hard work alone for years and were able to increase the size of their business and profits to the point where they could hire and pay people to do it for them. Doing the hard work alone and creating your own success will always be more profitable than clocking in and being paid to do that work for the owner. There is no reason to say anyone can’t create these kinds of things on their own, only excuses against it because people are told thats unstable and unsafe and they should instead be the one clocking in because that is stable and safe. I disagree with early age college promotion and believe it is an injustice on the american people.

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