Why is it that college does not truly prepare us for the real world? As a senior with one semester left until graduation, I have been wondering about this for quite some time. College in and of itself is an amazing thing, filled with meeting new people, learning new things, and getting involved with campus activities. However, once all of that is said and done, most of us are left with the depressing reality of leaving college as penniless as we entered.
“But isn’t the purpose of going to college to get a good job?” you might ask. Well, not originally. College was a something you devoted your time to so that you became enlightened to the world around you. Sadly, it seems that such an idea is all but lost on today’s generation, who only see higher education as a means to land a job. All the same, we are conditioned by society to expect to gain some kind of decent career after grueling over schoolwork for four years, so I suppose that our thinking would be correct. That being said, colleges should definitely do a better job of making these things happen. Why is it that the majority of college graduates go on to be underemployed or even completely jobless? It doesn’t make sense, and even worse, it does not seem as if colleges or the government themselves actually care about this obviously painful problem. If they did, then we would not have to see the unemployment numbers grow every year. We would have heard that some plan of action has been attempted to help alleviate this matter, but it seems that the head guys are perfectly fine with sitting in their fancy office chairs and ignoring the plight of America happening around them.
Speaking of which, why is it that we are one of the only (or else, one of the very, very few) countries that refuse to support the idea of free college tuition? One of the biggest historical conflicts of this country was the right to education. It used to be allocated based off of racial or social class, but even though this may not be the case anymore, it is still abused through a financial standpoint. Case and point: education should not be this expensive. It simply doesn’t make sense that we should pay by the thousands just to learn more about the world around us. Other countries have realized this, and allow their students to go to class and be enlightened for free. For those countries, it’s not about governmental greed; for us however, it is.
It’s a shame that we would rather leave our students jobless and in debt for the sake of profit instead of helping them to get into the work force and allowing them to be able to benefit society. There has to be a way that college graduates could obtain a job in their field, or at the very least they should be able to go to college for free. What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
