“A true bublle is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
"The numbers that people have come up with over and over are that every extra year of education that you get will translate into an 8 percent increase in earnings over your lifetime. So someone who graduated from college will earn about 30 percent more on average than someone who only graduated from high school."
The truth of the matter is, most of the skills we learn in college aren’t actual skills we can employ in the job force. From late night cramming to bullshitting a paper, college teaches us to look for easy ways out of situations and devalues the importance of hard work. Granted, there are certain degrees such as accounting, engineering, and the likes that provide you with essential skills you will need in the work place, but most degrees, especially those in the humanities, teach you absolutely nothing. With full knowledge of the expertise, or lack thereof, of recent graduates, employers are now less willing to hire recent graduates which in return has led to many recent graduates unemployed and in debt.
America holds $1 Trillion in student loan debt, making it higher than home mortgages, car loans, and credit cards. With the cost of colleges having increased by 1000% in the past 40 consecutive years, students are taking out loans on a faster rate than ever before. While some have the option of taking out loans that don’t accumulate interest until you’ve graduated, the majority of us don’t have the same luxury. With the cost of college education costing between $80,000- $160,000, student loans will cost somewhere between $920- $1,840 per month for ten years. To make matters worse, student loans are the only debt that can’t be expunged by filing for bankruptcy. In other words, you either have to figure out how to pay it off, most of us will finish around the same time as Obama, or essentially pass away.
Ultimately college has good qualities as well; it’s not an institution that is only filled with cons, but it’s important to inform our kids about the implications and consequences of attending college. It shouldn’t be somewhere they go to hide away from fear of what the world has to offer and it certainly shouldn’t be somewhere that provides them with less real world experience and knowledge than other options.