Nothing Better To Do Than Go To College

In essay “College is a Waste of Time and Money,” Caroline Bird makes some interesting points on why people choose to go to college and what college truly means to a high school graduate planning the next phase of their life. Bird goes on to give several reasons and examples demonstrating why college is not needed. For example, writing about the financial side of the colleges, saying “It became a mammoth industry, with taxpayers footing more than half the bill.”

In one paragraph Bird says “[college] students are sad because they are not needed.” I don’t think college students are sad but knowing that they are not needed as a part of the society they live in could deteriorate a college student’s self-esteem. It’s like saying that college age students don’t really have a place in the world and are useless.

What Bird wrote could be considered true. What more can a newly high school graduate do besides getting a minimum wage job, go into the military, go through some kind of job training if they are devoted enough, and hope to avoid paying taxes and insurance bills for a few years.

Bird makes her argument sound as if the purpose of college to put all useless people of this age in one place, so no one would have to worry about them for a few years. Bird makes it sound like college age students are actually a burden that needs to be put off to the side and handled at a later time.

Bird makes college experience to be more of a way to pass the time than a place to get an education. To attract more students to a school, colleges no longer advertise a strict curriculum, but “an environment conducive to meaningful personal relationships, and a curriculum so free that it doesn’t sound like college at all.

All of Bird’s arguments would make any college student question their true intentions of going to an institution for higher learning. Are you in college because everyone else your age was going after high school and you can meet new people? Or are you in college because you didn’t know what to do with your life after you graduated? Or are you in college because before your role in society consisted of going to school, and to get another role in society you have to put yourself back in school?