It seems that everyone and their mother is a critic of the American education system, and it is true that I am part of everyone and their mother. Don’t get me wrong—I love that I have the opportunity to get an education of my choosing, but that does not mean that there are not faults at work in our system.
The way in which we access grants, scholarships, and loans is largely flawed. Just this year, I was flagged for Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority (KHEAA) verification. Essentially, this meant that my FAFSA and all my other forms of financial aid were withheld until I submitted all imaginable tax confirmation documents to KHEAA. This wouldn’t be such a big issue if they flagged students other than the poverty-stricken ones that actually need the aid. Being flagged essentially means that they, the people that decide these things, didn’t believe that your need was accurate, and they wanted to check and make the process as strenuous as possible for all students involved. If I wasn’t so tenacious and actually in need of the aid, I would have quit a long time ago and left with no college education and thousands of dollars in debt.
Grants and scholarships are also difficult to access if you didn’t have a dedicated high school counselor, like myself. They are practically impossible to find, requiring hours upon hours of searching. There is no easy search engine or compilation for this type of aid, yet these are some of the only types that will not let students become indebted to some random company or spend too many hours on the phone after we have our degrees.
Setting college students up with debt going into their actual adult lives—having jobs, babies, and bills—is a huge mistake on the part of our government. We will spend practically the rest of our lives owing someone money, and a lot of us will never know the wonderful feeling of paying off loans.
Aside from financial shortcomings, the way we are taught in college is flawed as well. I don’t mean that our teachers are terrible (even though some of them are below average). In the theater department, we are lucky to have professors that love what they do and inspire me to love what I do and create.
But taking a full 18-hour course load, having a part-time job, and being active in the theater and communication departments as well as supporting Eastern Kentucky University sports as often as I can is time-consuming. The biggest flaw with how we teach higher education, in my opinion, is that we tell students that everything holds the same amount of importance. If you don’t get this assignment done, the consequences are real and your life is over. This is the same with every assignment in every class, no matter how small. We don’t teach students to prioritize, which is going to bite us in the butt after the luxuries of college are over.
