Imagine being a community college student about to graduate with your associate degree. As you sit alone in a room, you stare at a wall plastered with small flags representing Ivy League schools, and all you think about is how you didn’t achieve any of that.
Were the past couple of years an endless pursuit to reach the top?
You took six classes per semester, filled your schedule with twenty extracurriculars for the sake of your resume, battled deadlines, sleep deprivation, and pressure from your parents and professors. You constantly worried about maintaining a 4.0 GPA and studied subjects for hours that you don’t even recall now.
Despite all of that, you are unsure where you will transfer or how you will do in the career you are pursuing. Is higher education worth it?
Most college students face this self-doubt at some point.
Is It Us or the System?
For centuries in the U.S. there has been a traditional educational pathway and massive pressure for students to choose a career at a young age, have near perfect grades and get accepted into prestigious universities.
Those are unrealistic standards. Not only because we all want different things but because this should never be the goal.
Education, at its core, is meant to teach people to think and fend for themselves.
But in many aspects, the system has moved away from that purpose and been reduced to a checklist of achievements, rewarding performance rather than actual development.
Students are encouraged to build a facade by creating impressive resumes, LinkedIn profiles, essays and the so-called “personal brand.” These metrics make them appear as qualified, but that isn’t necessarily true.
The way students learn further reinforces these unreasonable standards.
In many cases, universities and colleges use the old classroom model where education is passively delivered. Students sit through long lectures and read and take notes. They absorb content rather than interact with it.
There is a little to no emphasis on discussion and with the excessive reliance on technology for lessons and assignments, it’s even worse.
Many students struggle to manage their time and retain the information they learn because they are taking tons of classes while simultaneously being “involved” in a long list of extracurriculars.
That process is counterintuitive and a waste of time.
The Career I Want or The One You Want For Me
Students often feel pressured to choose careers based on family and societal expectations. They are encouraged to pursue studies on the basis of profit.
That robs the potential future workforce of crucial professions and sways people away from what they are passionate about.
Institutional changes also reflect these priorities.
In Florida, the removal of introductory sociology from the state core social sciences, while there’s a stronger focus on STEM programs, shows a narrowing of what is valued in education.
A college education is no longer an indicator or sole pathway to success. A lot of famous billionaires such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey dropped out of college.
College isn’t the path for everyone. But if it is, that path should be blazed on your terms and structured in a way that allows you to learn from the experience, not just pass through it for the sake of getting a degree.
