Colleges Prepare People For Life By Freeman Hrabowaski Analysis

In the essay “Colleges Prepare People for Life”, Freeman Hrabowaski argues the importance of college education by responding to the claims in an article written by the New York Times, titled “College is for Suckers”. According to Hrabowaski, the New York Times makes the point that students are taking on large amounts of of debt and are graduating unprepared for work in the real world. Hrabowaski disagrees with these claims when he writes “When we focus so heavily on the momentary inputs and outputs, we ignore the question of what it truly means to be educated”. The essence of Hrabowaski’s argument is that people are too fixated on the negative financial aspect of college rather than what students could actually benefit from when gaining higher education. While I agree that money shouldn’t be the single most important decision when thinking about going to college, I also …show more content…
I agree that the students should be focusing on the complicated, yet important details of gaining a college education, rather than the broad reasons that the colleges pitch to families. But I wonder if Hrabowski is focusing too hard on the “how” students should go to college and not enough on the “why”, or “who” part of the discussion. There are hundreds of reasons as to why furthering one’s education is a good thing , but justifications like “ Hey, the University of Oregon is one of the top rated schools in the state” or “They have a 73 percent acceptance rate, it must be easy easy to get in” are not the right reasons to decide on a college. While one student may have gotten a lot out of their college experience in a certain school, that doesn’t mean you will have the same outcome. Therefore, I propose that talking about the advantages and disadvantages of going to college all together with each individual is the missing part of the discussion Hrabowski suggests all students