Well, it’s still that time of the year: college decision time. In my last piece on this topic, I discussed students’ tendency to get suckered in by the prestige of top-ranked schools, and why this is a problem: they tend to increase students’ stress and are not always a good fit for their personalities. This detracts from their happiness, which is the reason we’re here at all. Unfortunately, that problem goes even deeper than your time in college for one major reason: student loan debt.
Let’s face it: Elite colleges are expensive. My family is upper middle class, yet without my scholarship, they wouldn’t have been able to send me to Emory. $60,000 a year for four years is an expense that all but the wealthiest of families just can’t eat on their own. So students have to take out loans to finance their education.
“But, but, but,” you may protest. “What about financial aid? All the experts tell me that very few families pay the sticker price!” And you’re right: financial aid is common, especially at elite colleges. But it rarely covers all of tuition, instead reducing it to what a state university would charge. And this isn’t enough to offset the need to borrow a whole lot: almost 7 in 10 students who graduated from college in 2015 had student loan debt, and the average graduate of the class of 2016 owed $37,172 in student loan debt.
That may be a manageable amount, but about half of borrowers have more debt than that--some in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it impacts their quality of life. We have already seen that many doctors choose lucrative specialties because they need the money to pay off their student loans, even if primary care is their passion. Why would it not be true for undergraduates, especially as college costs--and student debt--balloon? Fields like business, engineering and computer science are very lucrative, but they aren’t right for everyone. For many people, they can be downright boring, sucking meaning and purpose out of a third of every weekday.
Even if you don’t think about meaning and purpose when you think about happiness, you should at least think about being able to live well. The more you owe in student loan repayments, the less money you have to enjoy life’s pleasures, like eating in restaurants, going on vacation, or even just buying new clothes. I don’t believe in a life of luxury because it takes resources away from others and--even worse--tends to corrupt the soul, but the complete absence of wants in your life is generally a recipe for unhappiness.
Don’t we all want to be happy? Isn’t that why we’re here? Indeed, it is such an important goal that we must orient the whole of our lives towards human happiness--which means giving up fleeting pleasures, like the honor of being an “elite” student, when necessary. Being “elite” may be good, but being happy is better. When you make your college decision, think of that.
