About 40 years ago, the American public decided that the only way to be competitive and gain an advantage in this world was through a college education. Higher education has been lamanted as “an economic imperative”(Owen and Sawhill 208) that can no longer be seen as optional or supplemental for people hoping to to attain a job in the workforce. This means that without getting a degree, you are not only shirking your responsibility as a functioning member of society, but you are also cutting yourself out of your own possible economic prospects. This relatively new attitude towards higher learning resulted in noticeable shifts throughout the country. We expanded college preparatory courses throughout the nation’s public schools and started
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College is not for everybody, and the person who tells you otherwise is at best, misguided. College is a place where people of all walks of life congregate and generally try to learn to become functioning adults in society. However, the price for this luxury may not be worth the time or debt incurred. As Stephanie Owens and Isabel Sawhill - authors of Should Everyone Go to College? - mentions, “not all college degrees and graduates are equal.” The new economic doctrine that is shoved down the throats of American fails to acknowledge the disparity between certain majors and financial gains. For example, people who graduate into the field of art, education, or service, are statistically likely to have a lifetime earning that is below someone who only received a highschool diploma. (Owen and Sawhill 216) With the cost of college averaging about $102,000 in and these people being projected to make less than half of that a year, to tell these folks that college should be their path is to lead them to the road of financial burden. People in these programs of study would have a higher lifetime return on investment (also known as ROI) with their education, if they went to highschool, and then enrolled in local community/statewide programs in those same fields to attain their goals. The truth is, college is not for
College is not for everybody, and the person who tells you otherwise is at best, misguided. College is a place where people of all walks of life congregate and generally try to learn to become functioning adults in society. However, the price for this luxury may not be worth the time or debt incurred. As Stephanie Owens and Isabel Sawhill - authors of Should Everyone Go to College? - mentions, “not all college degrees and graduates are equal.” The new economic doctrine that is shoved down the throats of American fails to acknowledge the disparity between certain majors and financial gains. For example, people who graduate into the field of art, education, or service, are statistically likely to have a lifetime earning that is below someone who only received a highschool diploma. (Owen and Sawhill 216) With the cost of college averaging about $102,000 in and these people being projected to make less than half of that a year, to tell these folks that college should be their path is to lead them to the road of financial burden. People in these programs of study would have a higher lifetime return on investment (also known as ROI) with their education, if they went to highschool, and then enrolled in local community/statewide programs in those same fields to attain their goals. The truth is, college is not for