College Education: Positives and Negatives

Aysin Oruz

Professor Ojeda Espinoza

English 122:0646

16 September 2013

College Education: Positives and Negatives

With so many people facing today's bad economy and financial stress many people are asking themselves the same question: "Are all colleges worth the price of admission?". This is a question all potential students should ask themselves. This particular question has more depth than we think, perhaps our future, wasted time and money. Its important that all people who have college degrees, parents who intend to send their children to college, and people who are working hard at college take the time to ask themselves if all this effort is worth to spend time on studying in college (if all of the effort put into college is worth what you receive...debts, the possibility of a good job)? Is college actually worth all the credit bureau letters arriving at your address? Does ones job of the college cover all the debt some people put themselves in? Is the standard of education that phenomenal that institutes have to be as expensive as they are, that used so many times gets repetitive? Many students are willing to risk their future, but just as many can't afford to.While advocates with a college education argue that tertiary education is fundamental for our future, opponents point out that high price of tuition fee's make potential A grade students turn their backs on education.

There are educational opportunities all around us, some of them come at a greater cost than others. But are we willing to get these educational opportunities, or in another word 'buy' the education for high admission? As an international college student I can answer this question without a doubt, No! To be honest, the high price of admission is not worth the knowledge that I'm getting from college. As Hacker and Dreifus states; "Tuition charges at both public and private colleges have more than doubled-in real dollars-compared with a generation ago." (Hacker and Dreifus 179). . Maybe when faced with such high prices students who do attempt to go will drop out before finishing their degree, while others don't attempt to go at all. There is also prejudice in our society against an uneducated population.To remove this stigma many students feel the need to pursue tertiary education because of the environmental pressure. Are you willing to pay +/-50.000 US$ per annul for something you are not sure will benefit you in the future? Even the former US Secretary of Education, William Bennett, once said, "Teach their dissertation or next article" (qtd. in Hacker and Dreifus 180). I don't see the point in paying large amounts of money for education when our government doesn't even care about the outcome of our future or the standard of teaching.

On the other hand, there are so many people who still believe that by pursuing higher education they have a chance of achieving a better income in the future. Parents who can afford the high cost of prestigious universities, are willing to send their children to these established schools and expect that their children will have a brighter future than many others. Many parents believe, that over the course of their children lives, they are more likely to pay far less for their education than they would pay for not having a college education. As Zhang argues "students and their families often make great financial commitment to attend prestigious institutions.Such a commitment is based on the conventional wisdom that investing in a better college education will eventually lead to greater economic benefits"(Zhang 199, 200). There are many jobs in USA that require higher education. People who have a BA or higher degrees are more likely to get a higher wage than people who hold high school diploma's or less. There are many different levels of colleges. Some colleges have higher prestigious compared to the other low-class colleges.For example since it's common knowledge that a person who attended an ivy league college, such as Yale or Harvard is going to impress more than us kids at schools like DVC.Zhang states that, "The impact of college education on earnings and hours of work separately yields new insight not the mechanism though which college education influence graduates' life"(Zhang 202).If we, current and future students, want to earn a higher income per hour, then we need to start considering whether or not we want to go to regular college and pay less admission or high-quality institutions and pay more for admission.On one hand, I believe higher admission isn't worth the knowledge, however, at the same time I feel that if I were to graduate from a higher-quality institution I would have a better chance at a career.As Zhang states, "One of the main findings of the current study is that