I, presumably along with the rest of you reading this, spent the majority of my senior year of high school planning out my college career. I visited countless campuses, ultimately settling not on my dream school, or even The University of Alabama, but on the school that offered me the most scholarship money.
I then proceeded to fantasize what the next four years of my life would look like. I dreamed of finding the perfect balance between schoolwork, social life, on-campus activities and my part-time job. I was a scholarship student, so I had earned a college experience that rivaled the every 1990s teen movie wrapped together.
Sounded fabulous, until about half of a semester in when I realized I hated it. And by hated, I mean loathed almost everything from my “luxury” apartment, my total and complete lack of an actual life while trying to juggle 15 credit hours, a 30-hours-a week job, a needy boyfriend and how much money I was spending just trying to live while bettering myself. I spent the first half of my freshman year burping up Jagermeister while narrowly hitting my scholarship’s GPA requirement.
Mike Rowe recently dropped in on “Real Time with Bill Maher” with a few sobering, realistic words about the America we currently live in. To summarize his visit, here are the facts: Our country has $1 trillion dollars in student loan debt. There are three million jobs that no one wants to take, because we have been borderline convinced to believe that those jobs are beneath us. And in Maher’s always eloquent words, not everyone can be a “cave painter.” Every society needs its “hunters and gatherers.”
Rowe and Maher are both completely correct, despite the harshness of it all. We have convinced ourselves that a college degree is our only chance at respect, at being taken seriously in the workforce. But the harsh reality of the vast majority of America’s workforce is that it doesn’t care about your degree, or lack thereof. The majority of America’s workforce needs able bodies, but somewhere along the track of one of our many intellectual awakenings, we’ve forgotten that. “Everyone should be ableto attend college” has suddenly been confused with “everyone should attend college,” regardless of ability. We’ve forgotten that skill sets – such as mechanical knowledge and heavy machinery experience – are valuable, too.
One of the jobs Rowe mentioned was in Las Vegas, Nev., operating said heavy machinery. The starting pay was $40,000 to $50,000 per year, with almost guaranteed advancement to over $100,000 per year after a few years. Why aren’t people lining up for their current 26 openings? Because we feel as though careers that don’t require degrees are beneath us, and few people are aiming to obtain the skills necessary for these types of jobs. Instead, they’re sitting in university hallways spending tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars to gain knowledge that will likely never pertain to their actual future employment.
Six years ago, I would have pitied the unfortunate souls who were forced to take on the roles of America’s hunters and gatherers – the mechanics, the heavy machinery operators, the construction workers. I would never be one of them; I was too smart for that.
My AP teachers and school counselor would have balked at the idea of one of their precious “scholarship earners” doing anything but pursuing at least the obligatory four years of higher education. But a little more than six years after graduation, I find myself beyond disenchanted with the college agenda and all that comes with it. I was constantly lost, shuffling in and out of four different majors and three different schools, and I was never able to enjoy what we have dubbed as the “typical” college experience thanks to, as my former manager Jon Alford once put it, “working at, like, four different bars (at a time).”
What I failed to realize – and what so many young Americans fail to realize before taking the plunge into higher education – is that college is expensive in ways that are unimaginable until you’re actually doing it. If you’re like me and have no financial support from your parents, you have two choices: You can work a lot and make some serious financial sacrifices to take as many classes as you can, or you can take out student loans. My parents are both still making student loan payments to this day, so that route didn’t exactly appeal to me. Working your way through is definitely easier said than done, and while it is completely doable, I began to realize that I had been sacrificing (and struggling) far too much for far too long to keep up the charade. Simply put, I felt like Hannah Horvath long before I ever obtained my useless degree, and I was tired of it.
I believe in higher education wholeheartedly, and one day, I would love to attend a university again to finish up that degree in English lit. This effort would be purely for the satisfaction of my intellect, as I currently do not foresee a viable and lucrative future with a degree in such a subject. Perhaps one day, another opportunity will present itself, and I will see school as a necessity. But as I type this, I have no immediate plans to return, and I must wonder how many more young adults – children, if we’re being honest – have been made to feel inadequate if they don’t obtain a college degree.
I wonder how many more unemployed “cave painters” we will have gushing out of our flawed four-year system before we admit that people who hold a skill set are just as necessary, and are to be just as respected, as those who chose to paint the caves.
Morgan Rice is a former student at The University of Alabama.
