Is Higher Education Worth the Price?

I think the question “Is Higher Education Worth the Price?” can be a tricky one. Plain and simple, I lean more toward the side that college is a scam. Not college itself and what you learn, but the part I think is a scam is how it is seen as something you need to do to succeed in ;life and get whatever job you want. I went to college for one year full time, then stopped and joined the military. I now have a full time job in the military while doing school online. You can go to trade school, you can work multiple part time jobs, you can do a lot of things in this world without college. However, it is also something that is a privilege and if you are bought into the whole idea that college will take you places, then you need to be fully committed to your schooling and take all your courses and work very seriously. 

There are also a lot of things that come from college outside of the classroom that are important. For example, going to school like Michigan or Alabama or Penn State, you get to experience football like no other. Schools like Duke or University of North Carolina get to experience basketball at a high level. Joining a fraternity or sorority gives you friends you will have for life as well as connections outside of school once it comes time to look for jobs and what not. There are many experiences like these that go under the radar but I think contribute vastly to the college experience. 

The articles we read gave us different insight on their opinions of what they think about college and the price of it. The first article we read about Wallace had to say about college not being able to teach you how to think. He says this because it technically just means “hear how to think.” He says college does not teach you how to operate day in and day out in your daily life. Wallace says that your education is a job of a lifetime, not just 4 years and a piece of paper. Hacker and Dreuifus talked about college and how it tries to fulfill too many roles instead of zeroing in on certain aspects that are more important. There were many proposals that were offered to try to fix this. The last article was Ungar defending college and offering his insight on why he thinks college is worth it. He listed 7 misconceptions that someone like me has in college. They were fair and just and I understand where he came from on each misconception. 

All in all, I think college is worth it if you have a plan before college on what you truly want to do. Going in with no plan just to get a basic psychology degree or communications degree without a big picture plan can hurt you big time in the future. When it comes to debt and loans and what not you could be paying off college for an eternity without getting what you wanted from it. College can totally be worth it, it is up to the student to make sure that gets fulfilled.