Coming live from Hood College, a post about why college shouldn't be necessary.

While I still think that less bureaucracy would be a great step towards improving our quality of life, I really couldn’t think of any way to make this work at all. So instead, I’m going to home in a little more on not making college mandatory (Yes it’s not actually mandatory, but it may as well be) because I feel like that is something that we could realistically accomplish, though it would be a group effort.

College used to be the place to go for the minority of people who really wanted higher education. Those who wanted to be lawyers, doctors, or simply valued knowledge above other things went to college. For the majority, they had no use for college, and that made absolute sense. Do you really need college to work in a factory or cubicle? Probably not. However, as time went on, more colleges began to appear and eventually it became engrained in society that we have to go to college to get a good job because we will be competing with other people who have college degrees. But still, why do you need a college education if all you are doing is filling out an Excel spreadsheet? As of now, college is attended by basically everyone, despite the fact that most students can’t afford it and are in terrible debt paying for a degree that they couldn’t give two shits about. Right now, college is an extension of high school.

So how can we improve? In order to do this we would have to totally change employer’s minds about the value of a degree. People with college degrees should not be looking for jobs in retail or jobs where it simply isn’t required, and employers should understand when the job they’re hiring for isn’t something that requires a degree. Right now, high schools are all about setting people up for college. Every step of the way you’re encouraged to think about where you want to go and what you want to do. The tests like the SAT and AP exams are mandatory to get you to a good college. As a fix, maybe the SAT and AP exams should only be available to those students with great grades and an intention to go on to higher education.

There are plenty of things that need to be changed in order to fix the mindset that college is mandatory. Most importantly, the amount of schools should be drastically decreased, and those schools that are still left should have a far lower acceptance rate. If less people are getting into college, then hopefully people will realize that going to college just isn’t as important and employers will begin to relax their hiring policies.

This was super disorganized I think, but my main point is that college should not be thought of as mandatory, and if we can get less people feeling like they are forced to go, maybe we can go back to the days when only those who wanted to be there would be in college.