Challenges Of Higher Learning

Improved Essays
In the article, “Higher Learning” different groups of people are deciding or have to decided to go back to school to obtain a college degree or certification to help facilitate achieving a higher position in their current job, or to revamp their current career path to better their lives. Due to cutting down on the work hours or in some worse cases even being laid off, because companies are relocating or shutting down completely, more and more adults are going back to school. There are some challenges with this idea however, two major challenges are time and money. Adult students that chose to return to school have to balance the challenges of attending school and working a part-time or full-time job as well as raising a family. Both work and …show more content…
After numerous family members and friends reassuring me, I took the first step by enrolling myself in the program to obtain my high school diploma. After successfully completing that task, I started to imagine and liked the idea of me actually receiving a college degree. I also wanted to show my boys that you are never too old to go back to school, as well as the importance of continuing on to that higher education. Forntuately, I do not have that much of a busy schedule to take college courses, I work a part-time job and both our kids are in school, which alleviates the stress of finding child care. My best time to study is during the late afternoon or early evenings, I seem to concentrate better during those times. The majority of my classes are online, which helps me with my time management, so I can go to class at any time compared to having to go to a class room. This is a big plus since being a military spouse can at times be very demanding and hectic at times. I realize that at times it can be hard to focus on a subject, but I am very motivated to obtain a college …show more content…
When it comes to questions or concerns, I know I can either call or e-mail my mentors, professors, or classmates. I also know someone in my family might be able to help me when I don 't understand something. It takes a lot of self discipline to stay with the assigned tasks and to juggle daily routines. I feel that I could be classified as an Intentional Learner. An intentional Learner is often described as someone that brings experience from their life experiences into their studies. They are often more focused on the outcome than a High School graduate, that is either forced to go to college by the parents or doesn 't want to enter the working world just yet. Intentional Learners are more willing to put much more effort into their studies, are critical thinkers, have set much more clearer goal towards the degree and self-aware of how the study is going to help them in the end. They have the greater abilities to connect the theory with the practice, know how use their skills efficient to combine the learning part with the already knowing life

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Are Too Many People Going to College? Charles Murray’s article “Are Too Many People Are Going to College?” explains a large point in the life of young Americans. He discuss some needs of our education system, and stated that it needs great improvement.…

    • 698 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Do I really need to go to college? That is the question many students ponder coming out of high school. In the essay, “Is College for Everyone”, Pharinet challenges the idea that perhaps college is only for a selected few. Whether you go to college because you genuinely want to, or because you want to appease your parents, college might not benefit you the way you think it does. Though Pharinet uses logical reasoning to support her claim such as the use of logos, ethos, pathos, and rhetorical questions, her argument is weaken because of her lack of credibility, failure to support her ideas, and bias opinions.…

    • 456 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In our current economic situation almost everyone has to worry about money, whether that is for: groceries, the mortgage, rent, or in our scenario, schooling. With the cost of getting a higher education being so high today will it pay out in the long run? You don’t want to waste four years going to a school that will set you back farther than you want. Possibly even get a degree that will not help you secure yourself a stable financial future. In an article titled, The Rising Cost of Not Going to College by the Pew research center, one of the statistics it shows talks about how most college graduates, who are working full time, earn about $17,500 more per year than other participants who only have a high school diploma.…

    • 2068 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Now, the jobs that do not require higher education are scarce after the closing of the factories and the unemployed citizens are forced to face the reality that the promises teachers made were not true. Many quickly became aware that “the graduation hangs on the wall / but they never really helped us at all / no they never taught us what was real” (19-21). Students who were not fortunate enough to grow up in a wealthy family, did not consider getting a college degree because they could not afford it.…

    • 573 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Even though the four-year brick-and-mortar residential college is out of style, Murray states that “the two-year community college and online courses offer more flexible options for tailoring course work to the real needs of a job” (230). Most students going to college now are going for practical and vocational degrees. Degrees that a four-year course, 32 semester long credits, is not practical for. As students graduate high-school, they are now strongly encouraged to go to a university. In response to this push by parents and high-school faculty, Murray states that even though it is true that someone holding a “B.A. makes more” than someone “without a B.A., getting a B.A. is still” the economically incorrect choice “for many high-school graduates” (234).…

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Some people think if students can not doing well in college, why should we let them go to college? Why not go to vocational school instead of college ? Dale Stephens describe in her article “ College is Waste of Time”, she claims, “College fails to empower to with the skills necessary to become produce members of today’s global entrepreneurial economy” (38). Also, they think college can be replaced and that social experience is more important than college experience. Marty Nemko in the article “ We Spend Too Many Students To College”, she points out “if you graduated in the bottom 40 percent of your high school class and went to college, 76 of 100 won’t earn a diploma, even if given 8 1/2 years.…

    • 1253 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Surveys have shown that “by the time [young adults] get to their late 20s, only 30 percent of young people have actually gotten a four-year degree” (“A 21st-century Vocational School”). It is true, college is not for everyone,…

    • 1505 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As wages decrease, people are starting to side morewith the opinion that college is just not worth the high expense. The wages for new collegegraduates, comparing female and male, increased dramatically from 1979 to 2000 by at leastthree dollars, but then from the year 2000 to 2010 it decreased by at least a dollar. Having a four-year college degree, known as a bachelor’s, is not as helpful for a successful future as it wasbefore. Now many people can still achieve a good-quality of living without ever having to attenda four-year college and waste money they never had in the first place. Along with the decrease ofwages, there is a pay gap between female and males.…

    • 1241 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    From a senior research assistant and senior in economic studies, Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill’s article, “Should Everyone Go To College?” , there is a huge gap with annual earnings between a high school graduate and a bachelor’s degree holder which ranges up to $15,000. Owen and Sawhill had used the Hamilton Project, research that shows that people ranging from 23 to 25 years old with bachelor’s degree acquire more money than high school graduates which increases even more by age 50, to show their readers the huge gap between high school and college graduates. With huge gaps in salaries, a degree in higher education convinces a huge amount of high school graduates to continue their studies in college then acquire a degree. The influence of money towards one’s future, promotes the movement of college towards the idea that college is all about…

    • 1266 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    College: To Go or Not to Go? Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill unveiled the constructive and adverse features of obtaining a college degree in the article, “Should Everyone Go to College?” “A bachelor’s degree is not a smart investment for every student in every circumstance” (Owen and Sawhill 222). The author’s stress to their audience that college is not for everyone and…

    • 1115 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    We view “college as a job” that gives substantial earnings returns to a college degree, irrespective of occupation, whether an individual is an insurance agent or a rocket scientist. This is not true because there are people with high degrees, like a PhD or a computer programmer, who have lost their jobs to layoffs. So having a college degree does not guarantee “substantial returns,” as Richard Vedder summarizes in his article, “For Many, College Isn’t Worth It." Vedder thinks the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) are fairly accurate and that college is not worth it for everyone because we are all created differently. An impartial understanding of the information is that school is justified, despite all the trouble, for some huge number of youngsters, but is a significantly more financially dangerous…

    • 1046 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Should Everyone Go to College Analysis In the essay “Should Everyone Go to College,” Stephanie Owen and Elizabeth Sawhill, claim that by telling people they have to go college no matter what and implying that people need a college degree to enter into a middle class lifestyle, is actually doing them a disservice. Owen and Sawhill use descriptive examples and data driven visuals to show that not all degrees are created equal and that there are many factors to consider to estimate the rate of return to education. The author’s use of supportive details and logic help the reader to understand how the return to education can be estimated and shows the difference in income earnings between a high school graduate and a person with an associate’s…

    • 640 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the article, “College is a waste of time” by Dale Stephens, Dale gives his persuasive opinions on why college is a waste of time by giving out evidences of how college isn’t fully beneficial and describing people who are successful today without a college degree. Dale describes college as “rewarding conformity, regurgitation, and theory”, instead of, “rewarding independence, learning, and application”. Providing that college is also hungry for people’s wallet, The College Board Policy Center showed that tuitions have increased 3.6 times since 30 years ago. Not everyone needs college to be successful such as Mark Zukerberg who made it big without a diploma. Summing up the article, Dale states that in the end it’s people’s choice to look for…

    • 1046 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Everyone has heard about how you need to go to college to obtain a successful career. In today’s society, this is a true statement because of how we are advancing. Since our knowledge and understanding of things around us is constantly changing, we are continuously adjusting how we go about our daily lives and our jobs so we need to change the way we prepare to tackle these changes. Three writings that give different perspectives on the issue of the necessity of college are Should Everyone Go to College? by Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill, Measuring ‘Greatness’ of Grads: The Gallup-Purdue Index, funded in part by a $2 million grant, will be the largest national study of college graduates, measuring their material and work successes and well-being by Ronald Roach, and The Magical Elements of College Linked to Long-Term Success in Work and Life by Brandon Busteed. A college education is necessary to be successful today because jobs are becoming harder and are constantly changing with what knowledge is…

    • 1025 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    People will sometimes determine that the cost of college is too much and not worth it. Students who do look at college are left to discover on their own with their parents how they are going to afford college if they decide to go. It can seem like universities are holding a person’s freedom to learn hostage unless they pay the fee to attend. College today shouldn’t be considered an alternative to working, but a necessity to further one’s own personal knowledge and also have a better chance at getting a career in a field that’s enjoyable to the student. In the article “College Free for All?” it says, The average male high school dropout might earn $24,000 a year.…

    • 1364 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays