Attaining College: Is It Worth It

Why we need to attain college? What’s the point? In article “Degree by Default”, April Yee mentions that “For this generation of young people, attending college is a default option rather than a conscious choice motivated by intellectual interests.” Peer pressure, social and family expectation, prerequisite for a job, stereotype… All of those external forces make us think that: we have to be in college, instead of “want to finish 4-year college degree”. Entering college is like the only choice left after we graduated from high school. Since most of the people surrounding me admitted into college, I should also doing like that. Otherwise, some people probably would think or laugh at me that my ability is not affordable for me to attain college. Honestly, I prefer to find a job directly after I finished my high school.

In my family, my mother is a housewife and my father is a manager. Sometimes, my mom will earn money by helping others reorganized magazine. But that’s just a small amount of money, which means most of the economic expenses of our family are mainly borne by my father. As a Chinese student, the tuition fee become a huge pressure on my family, since the currency exchange for Chinese Yuan to US Dollar is 7.15 to 1. If we do some simple calculation, the estimated average costs for a school year is 64,368 dollar, when we convert to Yuan is approximately 460,000. I am not sure about the monthly salary for my father. But when I check on the internet, the average salary in Shanghai is 9,000 to 10,000 Yuan per month. Just take an example, if someone work in Shanghai, he never eat outside, doesn’t buy new cloth, and not hang out with his friends, he could save about 95,000 per year. That was only about 21% of my tuition. Although my parents told me that I don’t need to worry about the money because they have saved money since a long time ago, I still feel guilty. I saw my mom buying clothes only when there was a discount for the seasonal change. I know my dad always go home at 9:00 to 10:00 P.M. because of the overtime work. Do I really need to go to college? That idea appears in my mind.

I was trying to find a part-time job during the summer vacation. (Because high school graduation was in May, and the college started at September. I got entirely 3 monthly.) No matter how much money I could earn, at least I don’t need to ask mom and dad for pocket money. It was a sunny day, I carried my high school transcript, diploma, and resume to those institutions, which need the teaching assistance for their summer classes. When I asked for a part-time job and handed my resume, basically the interviewers looked at me strangely and asked: You have not yet gone to college? I explained to them that I got the similar jobs and volunteers before and showed them all my experience during high school. When they gave back their results, I could feel that they didn't care how much experience I had. What they really care was just my university diploma. Even the prerequisites for the waiters at the restaurant is studying at least one year in college. At that time, I realized that 4-year college degree is everything. Without that piece of paper, all my experience is worthless. When I was desperate, a private small company decided to carefully review all of my information and let me wait patiently for their results.