Is College Worth It?

Society expects students to attend a place of higher education, but how does one know if it’s worth it or not? With the rising cost of tuition and the crushing student loan debt, is the education worth being a slave to the government, banks, or whichever other institution from which we borrow money? Is the tassel worth the hassle of looking and applying for scholarships one may not obtain? Some people make a comfortable living without ever obtaining a degree. They’ll never have to pay back school loans or suffer through the grueling and tedious tasks professors put them through. They can go right into their passion without having to learn things they don’t value  

Researchers have studied and written on this topic for years, many of which focus on the cost of attending and loan debt. In fact, most people do think about the monetary setbacks of attending a University. According to the 2016 Nationally Representative Online Survey conducted by Consumer Reports, 45 percent of people with student loan debt said that college wasn’t worth the cost. Among those who said it wasn’t worth the cost, 38percent didn’t graduate, 69 percent have trouble paying back loans and 78 percent earn less than $50,000 a year. With the median amount of debt being $20,893 for a public, in-state school, the impact of this debt has caused almost half of those surveyed to cut back on everyday living expenses. With tuition rising, the crisis will only grow.  

Asking whether college is worth it on Social Media sparked many opinions on the matter. Most who responded gave split answers.

“[I]t depends on the career path one wants to go into,” Cassie Hall, a student at Georgia Perimeter, said. “If someone wants to be an electrician, they should go to a trade school.”  

While one needs a degree if they want to pursue a career in the medical field, one doesn’t necessarily require a degree to be a manager of a company, especially if that company hires from within. Hiring from within means starting at the bottom, gaining experience and knowing everything about the company in which one works. Some debate has circulated whether employers desire experience over education, but there is no clear answer. One woman who responded did agree that on the job training is the best form of education, but many employers want both experience and education in a candidate, because their goal is to eliminate risk.

Many college grads experience the difficulty in job searching and securing a job in their field, and can attest to the speculation that employers seem to crave experience over education. Many college graduates end up working in fields that aren’t related to their major, or worse, are underemployed. In a 2018 study by the New York Fed, 41.4 percent of recent graduates and 34 percent of graduates overall were underemployed, meaning they work jobs that don’t fully utilize the skills they learned while in school. Seeing data like that may cause one to think that spending tens of thousands of dollars just to work a menial job where he or she is likely to be underappreciated isn’t worth it. The data does overshadow the fact that college grads tend to earn more money than high school grads, and that college grads are less likely to be impoverished, due to them working jobs that even a student who has yet to obtain a high school diploma can easily get.

Don’t allow the statistics and money to be the only thing determining whether college is worth it. Of course, money is important and people want to stretch their dollar as much as they can, but aren’t some things more important than money?

Another responder to the post, Megan Fogg, a recent graduate from the University of West Georgia, states that “[c]ollege is about so much more than getting a degree to get a decent paying job. It’s about expanding your limited perspective on the world […] and thinking critically.” She goes on to say that students who attend college expose themselves to other experts in their field, more so than if a student doesn’t attend college. One might argue that even if one doesn’t attend college, he or she can still be exposed to experts in his or her field; however, he or she must work much harder at it.

The analyzing and critical thinking skills, the tools and other social and life skills learned make one a far more well-rounded individual. Alysha Watts, former student at Southern Crescent Technical College, admitted that she didn’t want to go to college after graduating high school, but said “[c]ollege definitely is something that all should consider no matter what.”

Attending a place of higher education isn’t for the faint of heart. It challenges mentally, emotionally and sometimes physically in ways one cannot imagine until he or she experiences it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and whether college is worth it or not solely depends on the individual considering it.