School is a lot of money.
It’s kind of dumb.
It’s even dumber when you consider how little you’re getting out of it.
Yes, college, dumb.
It sucks it took me until my senior year to realize schools are totally business-oriented and only want your money (figured I should take this time to appease all the people whose immediate thought after reading the first few sentences of this was “If school’s so pointless, why don’t you just drop out?” Yeah, if I hadn’t already blown three years of my life and a silver sack of cash that would be a more reasonable plan, but, alas.), and it’s kind of bullshit, you know?
I know I’m not the only person who thinks this way. Someone needed to vocalize this silent perspective above the petty conversations stemming out of drunken dorm room jubilees, which are undoubtedly forgotten by the next morning.
Maybe it’s absurd to think a university should put students first. And I’m sure many will say students do, in fact, come first at The University of Wisconsin.
But I disagree.
Since I enrolled at this apparently world-renowned institution (which, don’t let that moniker fool you—it’s almost entirely referring to graduate and research programs, not those eh-hem “useless” L&S degrees so many of us are currently pursuing. And don’t try to tell me anyone sitting in offices on Bascom actually cares about majors headquartered in the Cold War-era monstrosities sometimes referred to as Humanities and Vilas), I have, without doubt, learned more on my own.
And I’m not just talking about your so-called “street smarts” either. I mean other than the occasional extraneous detail I never would have thought to look up on my own, I have taught myself more academic material than UW-Madison has—mostly because of this little thing called the Internet, you know, that place where you can Tweet and Tumble and just so happens to harbor all of the world’s information.
Maybe this is the harsh reality of choosing a career path/major other than business, pre-med or engineering? I guess so. Make fun of me for it, go ahead. I made a mistake and I’m owning up to it.
But here’s what I propose: How about our generation stops letting our lives be defined by our ability to cough up six figures and study for classes led by professors who literally only give a shit about their own work and teach us absolutely nothing?
As I said above, there are some professions that most definitely require a higher education. Don’t send me a high school dropout surgeon, please. There are, however, so many jobs that don’t require a college education whatsoever, but we have for some reason convinced ourselves to believe it’s totally necessary.
Fewer people should go to college. There, I said it. It’s not because I want people to be dumb. In fact, I so, so dearly want people to be more intelligent about the way they live life. Let’s stop playing dumb though, because that’s all we’re doing. The tools for learning are all right in front of you, at your disposal, essentially for free. And I haven’t taken any Economics classes, but if only those people who have a legitimate reason for tertiary education go to college, won’t that make it less expensive?
Maybe I’m just tired of being unable to justify this piece of paper I’m due to receive in a few months.
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