Assignment 17- Thomas

College awaits us in a few years, and even now it is easy to get caught up in picturing ourselves at a dream school; however, not as many people pay attention to the financial aspect of college. For out of state private schools, the average cost per year is $43,289 (Mirabella, 1). How do we pay for this, especially since this number is certain to increase before we enroll? Sure, scholarships help tremendously but they rarely cover all the expenses. The answer is student loans- we ask for money from the government or a private lender, who we pay back later once we graduate college and get a job. This seems like a great plan because the lender lets us go to school for free and in return, we give them a yearly portion of our salary after we have a steady source of income. The problem arises with the magnitude of our student debt: on average, a graduating student is 35,000 dollars in the red according to the documentary College Conspiracy. And this doesn’t even cover the expenses for an additional 4 to 8 years of postgraduate education, something that is necessary for the more lucrative positions. Student loan debt in America currently exceeds credit card debt. To put this crisis into perspective, an ABC news study expects future veterinarians to still be paying for college 27 years after school, and reporters to still be paying 30 years afterwards (Kim, 17). Nobody wants to settle college debts well into their 40s, and yet you, and all of us, may be forced to do so in the near future.

But at least the people mentioned in the previous statistics have jobs. The unemployment rate coming out of college has nearly doubled in the past 5 years, and while the job search becomes tougher and tougher for these graduates, their hope of balancing their checkbook in a reasonable time frame vanishes. Who is at fault for the absurd accumulation of student debt? The economy? It plays a part, because when people don’t have jobs, they cannot generate income to pay unresolved debts. But how about a more unexpected culprit: the colleges themselves? They might not be preparing us for the future as adequately as we assume. These institutions are exceptional at teaching us how to think, but not so much on how to do, on how to get an actual job in the real world. The conventional viewpoint is that high school preps us to go to a respectable college, which in turn gives us the necessary training over four years to take the job that is just waiting for us. This opinion couldn’t be further from the truth, and today’s graduates are taking the monetary blow because of their misguided assumptions. Take the account of Katelyn Bonar, who expresses her frustrations regarding the worth of her degree in an interview with NPR: She says, "You take the time and you put in extra years and you get an extra degree and are told, 'This degree or this time or this hard work is going to open doors for you.' And you're in the same position as someone who just finished undergrad. It's humbling, to say the least." We go to great lengths and pay all of this money to get ourselves the best education, but does it really give us the best preparation for our future? I’m sure Ms. Bonar and thousands of other college graduates agree that it doesn’t, and that the college educational system needs to be improved if we want to have hope of settling our school debts across America.

While there is no clear-cut solution, the best remedy may be internships. These help students to acquire job experience and connect them to future employers. Stuart Lander, a member of the chief market office at Internships.com, says, “You have a 7 in 10 chance of being hired by the company you interned with.” Teaching someone how to think is important, but in the end jobs pay our debts and keep food on the table. Nancy Hoffman, in her book Schooling in the Workplace, details the vocational emphasis on education in Switzerland; students spend their final two years of high school in workplace apprenticeships. Certainly, this experience contributes to the country’s consistently low unemployment rates over the past 10 years. In the United States, we could modify our system so that 3 years of college are in a structured classroom, and then the other year requires an internship paired with a lighter class load. It would help to connect more people to job opportunities, and put our students on the right track to paying off their debt and starting their future.

In 5 or so years when we are graduating college, I hope that none of us will have to deal with debt issues or trouble finding a job, but in reality, most of us will. If we are careful about our choices for higher education, we could lessen the magnitude of these problems and potentially start our adult lives without being bound by debt and despair.