What is College good for?

Different people have different views on this topic. Some say that it isn’t needed and others say that it is, or perhaps some people don’t have a view on the topic.

According to Nate Kornell’s article “What is College Good for Anyway?” most college students are in college to earn a good paycheck later in life. Personally that doesn’t sound like a very good reason to spend at least 4 years of your life in a classroom and library. There has to be something more in depth and more important to some people who don’t share the same feeling as those who just want “a good paycheck.”

A good paycheck is a nice perk of going to college and getting a degree, or even multiple, but is definitely not a good enough reason for me to spend 4 or 5 years of my life studying and going through stressful situations day in and day out. I would want to have a career which I enjoy, and something I can look forward to everyday. I would rather be poor doing something I love than be somewhat wealthy or maybe even rich doing something that I don’t particularly enjoy doing.

In Russell Hvolbek’s article “The End of Education” he states “I argue that as we absorb the socio-economic values of our age, an age ruled by business, we have drifted away from what we in the educational community should be doing: teaching students to think, to see, to read, and to write.” This leads toward the possibility that only two things are taught in college anymore and those two things happen to be business and science. As if those two topics were all that society now a days is built around. If that was the case then we would have no lawyers, economists, or people do to accounting. If that was the case then the world would be a planet filled with idiots and close minded hypocrites.

There is more involved in society than just science and business. If that was the case I wouldn’t have decided to go to college and pursue a career that hasn’t quite defined itself yet. I also probably wouldn’t live in the United States either. I am not the biggest fan of America as it is. Personally I would love to live in Europe somewhere.

College having a lasting affect depends a little on the school that is being attended. According to Louis Menand, in his article “Why we have college”, “the students at the Ivy League university that he taught at were happy to be taught, and we as their teachers were happy to be teaching them.”

If students everywhere were as happy to be taught by teachers who were actually happy to be teaching the students, I think that the learning experience would be much greater. Right now it seems like most teachers aren’t happy to be back in a classroom but on the other side of the desk this time around and it hurts the students learning ability when there is a monotone teacher talking about how much they hate life or wish they would have taken a different path for their life long career.

Researcher Holly Higgins asked students questions and recorded their answers in an article titles “Why some graduates believe university was a waste of time.”, “Graduates who believed that participating in HE had contributed to their personal development explained how studying for a degree helped them to develop confidence in their own ability, giving them the courage to volunteer and defend their own ideas, and challenge the opinions of others. They also felt that attending university had given them the opportunity to engage with, and learn from, people they might not otherwise have met, prompting them to reassess their priorities and think more critically about their own ideas and ambitions. Describing the social and intellectual rewards of HE, these graduates explained how the experience gave them confidence in their ability to make sense of new ideas and unfamiliar concepts, and understand, manage, and summarize complex information. They explained how studying for a degree taught them how to appraise other peoples' work and apply their own knowledge, and their description of the way studying for a degree taught them to evaluate their skills and knowledge suggests that participating in HE also prompted them to adopt some of the behaviors associated with career self-management.” Some people clearly thought that college wasn't necessarily a waste of time and some said that they wouldn't be where they are today or have the knowledge that they have if it weren't for their college experiences.

I think that college is useful in to many ways to describe and it can help you later in life if you make decisions that allow it to help you. If someone looks at college as a waste of their time for the rest of their lives then they won’t get any of its benefits and will be down about going and burning multiple years of their live that could have possibly been put to better use then racking up a decent amount of debt and reaping nothing from it.