PLN 16: Lets Stop Preparing Kids for College

In the blog article “Let’s Stop Preparing Kids for College”, by Karl Fisch, what matters is the debate over spending our hard-earned money on college, or making high school more relevant and useful to apply in our everyday lives. I often think to myself as I am doing different assignments every night, “When am I every going to need how to find the area of a triangle in my life, especially when I am not going to be a mathematician when I grow up.” Some people have seen this and go as far as to say that instead of spending the thousands of dollars every year to pay for college tuition and food/boarding that high school should relate to worldly matters and real-life situations so that students are not required to go to college to get a decent job with average pay. Others argue that college is vital for developing adult skills to be able to survive in the world because it provides independence in which students make their own choices and don’t rely on parents to get them through.
With the prices of practically everything but gas going up these days, it has become harder and harder to afford things like paying tuition for college, so some people would much rather just have high school serve as preparation to be able to survive in the real world. They think that if high school was more relevant, that they wouldn’t have to go to college, but they could be suited for any job as soon as they got out of high school. From there they think that they could take a training course on the job and call it good. The problem comes up when someone wants to be a lawyer or a vet. These types of jobs require more than a simple training course to inform people on how to do the job. To be a lawyer you have to study the law and know about what each one means, and how it can be interpreted. To be a vet, you have to know how to take care of any different animal in any type of scenario. To be able to do either of these, you have to study for many years until you are fully knowledgeable and useful in today’s society. Know that wouldn’t hire someone if they’ve only been trained on the job because they are inexperienced and will not satisfy customers.
By going to college, you gain more than just an extreme amount of knowledge in the area that you want to pursue as a potential career, but you also gain life skills such as responsibility and independence. When in college, you stay at a different place than home, most the time, and so you have to rely more and more on yourself to go to bed at night, to feed yourself, and to make sure that all your stuff is done before you go out. Before, we had our parents to rely on for that. They told us when to go to bed, they provided transportation for whenever we needed to be somewhere, and they made absolutely sure that our homework was done every night. Once we get into college, all that decreases greatly because our parents aren’t there anymore to us. We have to learn in a survival of the fittest world. High school can’t prepare us for everything, but it gives us the minimum to survive in the real world, that’s why college is optional.
There is great debate about the matter of preparing kids for college. If we stop, will the percentage of kids that go to college decrease? Yes. Will there be less educated kids working in real-life jobs? Yes. Would stopping preparing our kids for college make an impact on the world? Yes. Will some people still do it anyway, even though they know how it will affect the way our economy and government is run, and potentially not for the better? Yes. Something to think about.