"Is Higher Education Worth the Price?"

 Parties, welcome back bashments, leading the Greek sororities and fraternities, ice cream socials, basketball games, and more are just some of the typical highlights that highlight the social aspect of one's college experience. When we look beyond the hype and into the hidden gray areas of what college is truly about, we see depth, declining enrollment rates, a lack of funding, high tuition costs, and more. We tend to emphasize the benefits of what makes college enjoyable, but we fail to recognize the things that we will carry with us in our back pockets that are more fundamentally establishing a future career than social activities. The costs that are heavily emphasized in order to create this social life of colleges are not the same intentions that are for education. Andrew Hacker and Claudia's Dreifus, the authors, certainly highlight key points within colleges that are more about money than education. Tuition charges have more than doubled in recent generations, and we continue to see this every semester as school tuition skyrockets. The article suggests that we engage all students, make them use their minds, make presidents public servants, allow fewer sabbaticals, distribute donations more evenly, and do other things to help improve the educational costs that our students face. I'll ask the question again because it was raised in the article. "How does higher education benefit individuals and society as a whole?"

Author Sanford J. Ungar helps us put common misconceptions we encounter across colleges into perspective, down to the very new form of liberal arts and sciences. "No one could be against equipping oneself for a career," he says, "but the "career education" bandwagon seems to imply that shortcuts are available to students that lead directly to high paying jobs- leaving out frills like learning how to write, speak, and so on." Many people graduate with bachelor's degrees and are told they must return for master's degrees in order to work in their field. This appears to demonstrate that 4-5 years of college education was insufficient. Even if you have the ability to read and write well.  While many students are scraping the bottom of the barrel for jobs that will accept us, other students who are more affluent are accepted faster because they have money to prove it. The same is true for colleges. That is why college will always be an unelected plain field in which we thrive because it isn't about brains but about books, and not just any books but checkbooks and who has the most 000's after their names. Without a doubt, higher education has become uncontrollably expensive, and liberal arts are becoming obsolete, but the problem goes far beyond what we perceive it to be.

The disappointing aspect of this controversy, as depicted in David Foster Wallace's "Kenyon Commencement Speech," is the commonality of commencement speeches given to graduating seniors who are told to go out and be great world changers, or to never limit yourself, or how about the fact that we worked too hard these past years for you to settle for less? However, Wallace used this speech to decode stigmas, reveal hidden truths, and use parables to emphasize key points throughout the article, such as the one about the fish at the beginning of this article. Overall, these articles are linked based on common college conversations and controversies that have for far too long remained a problem with no solution. My truest hope and desire are to see significant multidimensional and multidisciplinary actions surrounding college education and what kind of efforts are being placed in this so that students who graduate with the world's largest debts on their shoulders do not have to worry about whether they will even find a suitable job for them, or whether they will even be accepted by society! These wrongs must be righted. It doesn't begin when we're ready because we'll never be ready. It does, however, begins now. It is now time to act and make a difference.