As a millennial, full-time college student, I can tell you that school is a LOT of work. Between taking 16+ credits, being an athlete, having a job, trying to stay involved on campus, and still trying to maintain an active social life, you can say I'm pretty much always tired. But when did school become such a competition? When did it become less about education and learning, and more about high grades?
The workload that college gives us is too overbearing. Staying up until 3 a.m. writing papers and studying for tests that are due at 8 a.m. just isn't physically or mentally healthy. Students are skipping class just so that they can make up work for other classes. Why? Just to get a decent grade on the work? But why is it like that? How can anyone possibly focus and really intake and learn what the professors are teaching when our minds are too wrapped up on deadlines and timeframe?
We are paying thousands of dollars to sit in a classroom where we can not give our undivided attention because we are just focused on the letter/number grades rather than what is really important.
Nowadays, it's nearly impossible to live a comfortable life with a good paying job without a college degree. But at the same time, college is so expensive that many people don't even get to enjoy the money they're making after school because it is all going towards student debt. Young people are taking out loans of thousands and thousands how dollars that will take years to pay off just so that they can get a semi-decent job.
People go to school in order to get a job to pay off the debt that they now have because of the school that they went to. That just doesn't sound right to me.
Older generations call us millennials lazy. But what they don't see or understand is the amount of pressure we have to do good in these classes with work that is almost impossible to get through while having a bunch of other activities and obligations on our plate. We don't view college as a place to learn and better ourselves. We view it as a competition of who can get the better score.
I hope that one day school can go back to how it used to be. More about knowledge and less about rivalry against ourselves and the students around us.
