Seriously, stop. Parents, educators, peers, and anybody else who has influence on young lives, it’s time to stop telling people that college is necessary to achieve a successful life. Remember when a college degree, in anything really, was a surefire way to a career and comfortable lifestyle? Yeah, me neither. I’m only 20 years old. In recent years, college has become a gamble. You may end up with the comfortable lifestyle we had been promised, or we may end up unemployed and thousands of dollars in debt. Sure, you can major in something more employable like a STEM field to better your odds, but there are still no guarantees. The ones who constantly encourage us to attend college seem to always leave that part out. There’s a really simple way to help better students’ odds. Hypothetically, if we stop putting so much emphasis on college, less people would go. If less people went to college, degrees would once again become more valuable. A more valuable degree would lead to less un/underemployment and would put graduates on a fast track towards that lifestyle we were all promised.

“Well that’s great for those who would still get to go to college, but what about those who your hypothetical leaves out?” Those left out would go help solve another problem we are surely creating. Every year, more and more young people are leaving high school classrooms and heading straight for college lecture halls. Every year we’re also further contributing to a shortage of “skilled labor”. Skilled labor refers to electricians, mechanics, welders, and so on. That’s right, the jobs so many of our parents and grandparents worked to help provide for us will soon need to be filled by a new generation. With an ever growing economy and more people choosing college over these trades, a dangerous labor shortage is approaching. With this shortage looming, and trade school being a fraction of the cost of a 4 year college degree, becoming a skilled laborer may be the better investment.

Another problem with constantly telling people to go to college is that not everybody is meant for it. Higher education wasn’t initially designed for the percentage of people it now caters to. Some people go to college just because they’re expected to. How many people do you know that are in college and have no idea what they want to do with their life? I know multiple people right now who are just working on a general liberal arts degree because they grew up thinking that this was simply the next thing they were supposed to do. Students need to know that they don’t need to go to college to be successful. College shouldn’t feel like something that is “forced”.

Please stop nagging the next generation of students about going to college. We don’t need to continue to spread the lies that if you don’t go to college you won’t be successful, and that if you do, you will be. With so many options, like trade school, people need to know they have other options. So once again, please stop telling people to go to college. Instead, tell them to work hard and be the best they can be at whatever they set their mind to.