2008 Woodie Awards
Is college worth all the debt?
Chloe Sagstetter
Issue date: 3/4/05 Section: Opinion
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College stereotypically is a struggle. It's several years of telling your parents you need more books then you actually do, then returning them and getting cash.
It's scrambling for McDonald's money, finding free food on campus, not driving due to the absence of gas and wondering where next month's rent will come from.
Most college students I know don't struggle with money on a regular basis but have at least once.
And many struggle with it every day, which leads me to ask: Why? To get a degree, of course.
Then I wonder: Is college the route best traveled? Of course, statistically you make more money with a college degree. That's what they tell you in high school.
What they don't tell you are the statistics about how few people actually graduate - how long it really can take you - and how much debt you can dive into.
When I worked as a cashier in high school, I worked with a 45-year-old-man who was doing the same job I was at 16.
He had worked at HEB for almost 10 years and had no higher aspirations. He put it to me like this:
"I come to work from 8 to 5, five times a week. I don't make a lot of money; I don't have a lot of nice things. But I have time with my family. I don't have any debt.
"I buy what I can afford, which isn't much, but I never have to stress about money. I don't have credit cards, a mortgage or a financed car.
"The credit collectors never call me. And yet some people pity me because my house has leaks and my car could break down any minute.
"But when I leave work, I'm done. I sit on my front porch, have a beer, eat dinner with my wife and kids. That's what's most important to me."
I was shocked. In a world where you can finance a personalized license plate, here is a man who has said, "No."
If you make $20,000 a year and live like you make $20,000 a year, are you better off than the person who makes $75,000 a year and lives like they make $150,000?
Does college promise a life of more money and higher success?
Or does college promise years of grueling debt from student loans, followed by the thought that because you can finance it, you can afford it?
So what is it all for? To be 10 years out of college with a five-bedroom house in the suburbs, two brand new cars, 2.5 kids and 10 credit cards?
I saw a commercial that shows a man with the perfect house, car, vacations and so on. He says, "How do I do it? I'm in debt up to my eyeballs."
I think we are sent to college for the wrong reason: Make money.
Why not go to college to be educated? We're told to go to college to make more money - while digging ourselves into a pit of debt, spending money to make money.
You shouldn't be a student living like a doctor, because then you'll be a doctor living like a student.