Like many other juniors right now, I am preparing for life outside of high school. Whether that be going straight into the workforce, or for most, continuing to higher education at a 4-year college. 

College originally was only for the elites of society where instead of learning things such as business or communications you were learning things like humanities and how to speak Latin and Greek. Meaning college wasn’t always necessary to acquire a job. But we now live in a world where almost everybody will be attending college after high school so a degree of some kind is almost mandatory for just about any job. 

You would think something that has become almost essential for getting a job in the future would come at a cheaper rate than it does but this is not the case. Currently in the United States 43.5 million Americans are currently suffering from student loan debt leaving the total US student loan debt, as of September 2022, at 1.76 trillion dollars. How can we expect people to succeed if they are being crushed by student loan debt? 

The issue of college also brings questions to how it is affecting people before they even get there. Colleges are becoming more competitive than ever before as students try to look perfect on paper to make themselves the best candidate to these colleges but as these students continue to spread themselves thin trying to do as much as they can, they don’t have the time to do the things they are passionate about. In order to become more appealing to colleges, high school students begin to join an array clubs and extracurriculars they have little to no interest in, and in turn they have so many that they can’t focus on the ones that actually interest them. I’m even guilty of doing this to myself but if everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t I? So I can fall behind? 

College of course does also have its plus sides. According to CNBC people who attend college make 75% more compared to the employed people whose education maxes out at a high school diploma. However starting wages for the majority of jobs will not be very high so at the beginning years out of college this debt is collecting interest and becoming an even larger sum of money. College debt can be like a dark cloud that hangs over your head. It’s hard to be optimistic about the thought of being in debt for such a long time and is often a source of anxiety for many people. 

There are several routes you can take when high school is over, and I can’t say to never go to college, but what I can say is that college has a lot of negatives that people seem to brush over when talking about how glorious college is when in reality it is a stresser, before, while, and after you’re there.