It’s May now. Most high school seniors have made their future plans. Some go to four-year universities, some go to community colleges, others ship off to the Armed Forces, others still bet on a trade education or a gap year. It’s a rite of passage for the graduating student to decide what they want to do with their life.
As one of these students, I had been consumed by the decision. For months, I’ve weighed the options time and time again, with the goal of making it into a four-year program after high school. It’s been my plan since the start of freshman year.
And yet, as we’ve just passed the deadline for commitment, I feel exhausted and stressed.
Part of me is relieved that I still have some plan going forward; that it has, in some way, worked out for me. But I missed out on my top choices, on scholarships, on any opportunity to advance the experience.
The culprit? Higher education is too expensive for how important it is.
As evidenced by my time with the Blockbuster, I am seeking to be a journalist. Many of those jobs require a BA in Communications. That requirement means that a college education is a need for my future. And almost every single option I had would leave me with far more than double the average amount of student loan debt.
It’s a reality that I would need to take out loans to cover the remaining expenses of college. I never have and never will expect my parents to absorb the financial burden of my choice of higher education. Frankly, I think it’s a ridiculous notion for any student to expect that of their parents.
But there’s a point where those loans are too much of a future burden to consider reasonable. Salaries for journalists are not stellar; the average tends to lie around $50k-60k/year. If, for the sake of the argument, we say that I were to earn $60,000 starting, the reasonable amount for student debt to take on would be 20% of that, or $12,000.
Not counting the Cerro Coso to CSU transfer path, any college option incurs more debt than that, though, ranging from a lower end with CSU to the high end with out-of-state options. I could be looking at anywhere from the national average of over $20,000, to the absolute high end of over $100,000 in debt.
My major deciding factor had always been cost. Ultimately, it is the reasonable economic decision that lower costs are better. But it irks me that such a decision still casts a significant financial burden on someone.
And it affects many others, too. I’m appalled at just how out of reach college education is today, when so many employers require a bachelor’s to get hired. And in a town like ours, those burdens hit particularly hard.
Not long ago, I wrote and directed a satirical short film for the Film Production class, which focused on the cost of college and how ridiculous it tended to be. It’s a tad bit unfortunate that it turns out to be so true.
