College, initially instituted as the system for higher education, has transformed from gaining knowledge and intellectualism to an alleged pathway to getting a job. Students in high school, already heavily occupied with their stressful adolescent lives, have the added-on stress of not only finding a college but also finding a major that will let them thrive during and after college. High school does not introduce the vastness of subject available to students so that they would authentically be able to choose a major to set up the rest of their lives.

College, a huge investment and a gamble in itself, should lessen the number of required credits and classes for a particular major to allow for young students to explore the academic world. With the extremely high cost of college, it is imperative that most students graduate within four years, but with the excessive number of required classes for majors starting the first semester of freshman year, it makes it hard for students to think about drastically changing majors without the fear of taking more than four years to graduate.

It can be argued that with more required classes and coming out of an undergraduate institution with in-depth knowledge on your major will give you an edge when you get the job, but most of what a job entails comes from training and experience in the profession and not from the multitude of textbooks one reads for four years.

With hundreds and hundreds of colleges in just the U.S. alone, it is an extremely stressful process in finding the right and academically suitable college for a high school student and participating in the hopeless gamble of the college admission process. This alone is hard enough on an adolescent mind and now with the highly-competitiveness mindset of Americans and trying to get an extra edge on their peers, and high school students are being forced to decide on a career path before they step foot on their yet-to-be-determined college campus.

Through the application process, colleges of varied sizes and calibers are requiring students to apply to a certain school within the university. Most non-liberal arts schools have specialized schools or programs within them including but not limited to, business, engineering, arts and sciences, pre-health, and education. Colleges should not require the high school senior who more than likely has no idea what they want for breakfast this morning let alone what they want to do for the rest of their lives, to check off one of these schools within the university. This is very stressful, especially for those who do not know exactly what they are interested in studying. Even for a student who thinks they know exactly what they want to do, this is unfair to their education, since they are being limited in their academic endeavors from the beginning.

The majority of young students do not know the extent of academia and the available courses to them based on the subjects they were introduced to in high school, making it virtually impossible for them to know exactly what they want to spend the next four years studying.

It is unfair that a 17-18 years old has to decide what the life of their 50-year-old life entails.