To borrow Elizabeth Warren’s phrasing, our generation is being “chipped at, hacked at, squeezed and hammered.” Youth unemployment is at a record high, as is college tuition. We’re paying money we don’t have for an education that guarantees less and less in terms of future success because it feels like the only option on the table.
I don’t believe that college educations should be valued only in terms of salary increase nor do I think the solution is to tell smart, talented kids not to go to college. The rates of unemployment and underemployment, even when factoring in student loan debt, are worse for those only with high school diplomas.
What I find fascinating is that many students are giving so much — mortgaging their future — for the education they’re getting at NYU when they clearly don’t want to be here.
This isn’t an issue of judgment, or how-dare-kids-these-days-be-on-Facebook-during-lecture-Andy-Rooneyism. It just fascinates me: People look at each class they’re taking as a slog to get through and are ecstatic every time they can close their books and pursue whatever else they do.
I’m not naïve. There are long days and classes I wish I didn’t have to take. But for the most part, I’m overjoyed. I’m in New York. I’m taking interesting classes (mostly) with tough, demanding, brilliant professors (mostly). I know what I want to study.
But too many NYU students are here because it was the next logical step. They were smart kids, did well in high school, are here at college because it’s the “thing you do” and then, who knows?
What raises this from a my-that’s-interesting observation to an issue worth writing about are the economic issues I raised above — it’s simply too easy to be convinced in this culture that it’s worth it to while away $200,000, lots of it in loans, on an education that you don’t even want with any passion or zest. It’s too easy to walk out of NYU with a diploma worth little in an economy like ours, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and very little to show for it.
If you don’t want to be here, don’t be. No judgment. Go work for a while. Figure out what you want to do. It might not require any more extraordinarily expensive semesters. It might very well require many more pricey semesters. But at the end, there will be something for all that. We need to make that an option for people who feel like the crushing debt of student loans is the only choice they have for their future.