¶ … College?)
It's become a widely recognized fact. College is expensive, and saddles students with lifelong debts. Moreover, observation shows that people learn very little in college and that knowledge and talent in a field may be unrelated to the degrees that one has. There's a simple solution to this problem: the youth of this nation should refuse to go to colleges where they will be saddled with debt and useless information. Of course, many people would complain that without going to college, one is not qualified for jobs in the real world. It is true that many jobs will not hire people who go to school, but this does not make the unschooled less qualified. If everyone refused to go to school, then corporations would simply have to accept new standards for hiring, such as talent. It is my argument that college is not worth the price and people should not pursue a college education unless they have plenty of money to spare, don't care about overthrowing the unjust system, and don't actually have the talent to compete in an open (not degree-based) market.
The problem here is that college is exceedingly expensive, so that a good private university can cost more per year than the average American family earns annually. Even public universities may be prohibitively costly. Because the system costs so much, many people cannot afford to go to school. "A new report on the nation's universities warns that the pressures of growing enrollment, rising tuition, and declining funding have put campuses on a dangerous financial course and threaten to exclude many students from higher education." ("Colleges' failure...") This means that having a college degree is not a sign of academic ability, but merely evidence of economic ability to afford the school. Additionally, those who do go will usually be saddled with inordinate debt. Student loan repayment alone can cost as much as many lower-income individuals make monthly. "Monthly payments amounted to nearly...
Even the government and scholarship organizations can't help the fact that college is so expensive that it either excludes worthy individuals or places lifetime burdens on the very young. "the more we pump out there, they'll raise the price to whatever they think the market will bear," said Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee." ("Rising tuition...")
It is my opinion that the only answer to this problem is for the youth of the nation to all draw together and refuse to attend college on the basis that it is socially oppressive to the poor and useless to all. Last week I sat down with all of my friends in school, and asked them why they attended school. None of them were there because they liked the classes or learning. All of them were there so they could get a degree that would let them do what they wanted in life. For example, Matt cannot be a lawyer without first getting a prelaw degree, even though he says he is learning nothing. Courtney, who is a computer science major, says she knows everything she needs to know about computers (or can learn it online), but she wants to get her degree so she can get a good job. Jojo, in computer engineering, agrees. Even Roxie, who is a psychology major, says she doesn't really feel like school prepares her at all for her future work, and wishes she could skip ahead to studying the actual work of child therapy. If we were not going to school, we could have apprenticeship programs that taught us what we really want to know about our professions instead of learning pointless "liberal education" material. No computer science major needs to understand British Literature, just like an art major doesn't really need to understand calculus or advanced biology. While I am sure there are some students here who need everything they are learning, or enjoy learning it, most of us got our general education out of the way years…
