¶ … College -- Importance, Values, and Goals The global labor market has changed dramatically over the last half century. Increasingly, access to jobs in technology and Internet communications don't require college degrees so much as the ability to successfully contribute to a technology start-up. A recent trend shows technology entrepreneurs hiring savvy undergraduates who have become disenchanted with college (William, 2012). These young whiz-kids -- often programmers who spend their days inventing new software applications and writing code -- reject the idea of spending years in classes that seem irrelevant to their interests and result in enormous student load debt (William, 2012). The problem with this mass migration away from higher education is that there are only so many jobs in the labor market that fit this mold. Like a "one and done" college-age hoopster who shows up on campus just to get noticed, with the hope that they will be drafted by the National Basketball Association, a high level of innate talent is necessary to make it to the top echelon in Silicon Valley or its corollaries (William, 2012). One can easily reverse the argument that college prepares people to be managers, executives, or enter professions like medicine and law -- and the number of those positions is limited -- to assert that the elite ranks of high-tech tend to fill up quickly (William, 2012). Indeed, the turnover in high-tech comes less from hierarchical advancement than it does from deliberate departures to begin yet another technology start-up...

What these pro-college and con-college arguments suggest is that the driver of the college / un-college choice must ultimately be students' employment targets upon graduation. For students who don't fit neatly in either of the long-tail job categories of this modern-day normal curve, the decision to attend college or not attend college must, then, be based on other values and goals. In fact, it is precisely these factors that are at the core of my decision to attend college and provide the rationale for why I believe college is the best choice for me now, and for my futures success. I will consider my choice to attend college from a framework that explores the importance of college, and the relationship of the choice to my values and to my goals.
College graduation is important because it is very likely that my employability will hinge on my possession of a college degree since, for the majority of professional positions, college degrees are still required. Moreover, for those jobs that do not require college degrees, the quality of applicants is likely to be high and a college degree can provide a competitive edge. This is true from an absolute value because unemployment rates continue to be high, even for jobs in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). Indeed, the unemployment rate for engineers in the United States, for example, is 7.5%, and for computer scientists, the unemployment rate is 8.2 (Hacker, 2012).

My values tack to the mainstream where college is still valued as…