¶ … college? I want to go to college for a couple of reasons. The first is that I will gain the type of knowledge and critical thinking skills that will help me for the rest of my life. The second is that college provides me with the degree and credibility that will improve my earnings potential, again something that will set me up well for the rest of my life. A third reason is the social factor -- many of the people you meet in college will be part of your life forever.

To make my decision to go to college, I looked at a lot of different factors. College represents a significant investment, and because of that I wanted to make sure it was the right choice for me. I came across a piece of advice that just really made a lot of sense. It was that college was a place where you learned how to think, and how to put those thoughts together. This was an interesting idea, because I always figured that you learned about a specific subject and that was that. But so many people have said that you often get into an entirely different field when you graduate, making a living not even where you studied. But these same people would impress upon me that the value of college lies with how it trains you to think critically about issues. No matter what you study, in order to gain a certain level of scholarship, you have to learn how to research, how to not just gather information but to verify it. Then you have to put that together in a coherent way to gain knowledge. That is a skill, and actually a very valuable one.

This may sound, trite, but the reality is that college grads earn more, and I would like to earn more. What I basically mean is that I do not want to have a ceiling put on myself. I see college as a means of unlocking opportunity in the working world. There are just so many jobs where you have to have a degree that I feel I would be hurting myself if I did not go to college. Maybe I would not hurt myself right away, but eventually I would be forced to go to college in order to get a promotion or something, and at that point I will wish that I had done it. So that was part of my thinking as well, that a college degree is a way to really remove a lot of barriers that get put on people -- I want to have as much freedom as I want to learn and to pursue the career path that is right for me. I know that college grads earn more on average, and that is probably because they have more opportunities, especially on the upward side of getting into more managerial roles. I want the option of doing that myself, so it was a clear and easy choice that I need to go to college.
A third factor is actually that you can meet a lot of really good people. Everybody knows that there is a social aspect, and that this can be really important in life. You bond…