The pressure for high school students to attend prestigious colleges and universities has been ingrained in society for a long time because many people believe that once you earn your degree that you are guaranteed a successful life after college which isn’t always true. There has been a constant push to put kids in college when most of them are not financially, academically or mentally prepared for situations that come across.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics decreased from 8.3% to 5.1% in 2019, it only decreased about 3.2%. This still happens because they feel like it’s something that just had to do and it didn’t matter if they felt like they belonged there or not. This narrow minded thinking had caused the college dropout crisis.
People who don’t go to colleges and would rather join the workforce to make their way up or join other vocational training schools are stigmatized because the notion that only students who go to college are the ones that are smart and the people who don’t will never amount to anything they do in their lives. There have been many occasions of people going to four years yet not knowing what to do with their degree and they find themselves in unemployment. People who have joined the workforce or have been certified reap the benefits of the field they feel comfortable doing such as working or way up to becoming a manager at a store, military, or any other path that doesn’t require a degree. However this isn’t always the case because people’s lives are different. People get their degree and find high paying jobs because they were determined to do what they wanted to do, which is a great thing but not that many people wouldn’t want to take that route because of many reasons such as not being able to afford to go to college, they thought of something else they could do or just because they felt like it didn’t suit them. It is a good thing for people to recognize that there could be a potential failure and they can get themselves into financial trouble such as racking up debt. You cannot live a successful life when you have massive debt, and wasted money for a field that you didn’t want to continue.
Recognizing the cons instead of it being just the pros can save you from lifelong debt and unemployment. When you don’t feel like colleges are the best option for you there are other options you can choose from because colleges are not the only blueprint or foundation to achieve your goal. There are many technical schools and jobs you can do to have a livable wage and other schools you can attend for training and certification to make a lot of money.
College is a great option for students who are ready and prepared but it’s not the only way to be successful because people think success is the amount of money you make and what status you hold but people have different beliefs about what it means to be successful.
