I have great news. You’ve heard the discouraging numbers. You’re future does not look promising.
While you’re unlikely to go unemployed, you will likely face the purgatory of underemployment.
So why has it become an unquestioned assumption that attending college is essential to achieving success?
And what kind of success are we talking about? Material wealth, as the bling-bling generation unblinkingly asserts?
Four-years of building massive debt for an overpriced education is unlikely to get you there.
At well over $20,000 a year, this education is going to cost around $100,000.
In a non-scientific analysis, paying only the principle on that at $350 a month will take 24 years.
Better pick a field you love.
Students are committing to a narrowly-defined lifestyle for, well, a lifetime. How many high school juniors are really aware of this when they sign on?
Short of defaulting and declaring bankruptcy, suicide in the Equifax Age, graduates have no choice but assuming an eight-to-six salaried reality.
So just how far will a degree go in turning you from a chump into a Trump?
Let’s look at the academic achievements of some high-profile nouveau riche.
William Gates III: he dropped out of school. Paul Allen: didn’t finish either. Michael Dell: same. Larry Ellison: yet another fabulously wealthy dropout.
They were too busy making money to bother with college. They found success outside the system.
The system is for producing skilled, if unimaginative, workers a factory manufacturing capable consumers. Middling-class bourgeoisie. Still a wage-slave, but one with a dental plan.
Even if your sights aren’t set on making the Forbes list, graduates are facing the fiercest competition for jobs ever, which translates into lower pay.
How marketable or remarkable can you be with the same bullet-points on your resumé as the other two million graduates hitting the streets each year?
So if educated college graduates are as common as beards in Afghanistan, what can you do to make yourself special?
Well, that’s the great news.
The headlong rush from cradle to school to desk to grave should be punctuated with some moments of living. How interesting can you be if nothing interesting has happened to you?
So do something different. Live imaginatively for awhile there will be plenty of time for making money.
Do something you normally wouldn’t. Talk to strangers. Get into trouble. Help someone in trouble. Buy a motorcycle and ride it to Belize. Hitch-hike to see the World’s Biggest Ball of Yarn.
Make something very special and then burn it.
Buy a guidebook and take yourself to Bhutan. Avoid organized tours. Start a fire. Start a business. Have it fail. Make mistakes. Get out and get lost.
Sound frivolous? Counter-productive to your big time goals of becoming a heavy mover and shaker? No. These are the things that will turn you into a human being, not another sleepy paramecium.
Doing some living will make you a sought-after commodity. More importantly, It will burn away the choking fear that limits everything.
Then, you will be unstoppable.
Kenneth Todd Ruiz, a senior journalism major, is managing editor of the Campus Times. He can be reached by e-mail at kruiz@ulv.edu.
