The Five Year Party

"College is an expensive waste of time for over half of those that go."

Another column debating the increasing expense and general worthiness of a college education in these days of economic woe and difficulty. While I think higher education is in desperate need of an injection of new thinking now, as a posed to ten years down the road, when shrinking state budgets force them to be creative, I still think a college education is worthwhile- but maybe not right away after high school. Gap years are a fairly common practice in Europe, with students taking a year to usually travel abroad or just work and more importantly, it gives them time to think about what they want to do with themselves.

One of my cousins is about to make that choice- between Uni or a gap year or just finding a job and getting to it and she's going through what I went through and what thousands of young people go through each and every year. Sometimes, at 17 or 18, you genuinely don't know what you want to do with your life. And that's perfectly fine- but paying thousands of dollars just to go to college to 'find yourself' seems like a pretty dumb thing to do- especially if at the end of it all, you still don't know what you want to do with yourself.

Consider this statistic from the column: 70 percent of high school grads start college, but only half complete a degree within four years. So about half of the people actually are blessed with some focus, drive and ambition about where they want to go- but the other half? Not so much. And maybe that's OK- maybe people have a right to do what they want to do when they're young, but the fact is, we should be having this debate. We should be asking questions and we should be thinking of different ways to get people the education they need in as cost-efficient a way as possible.

Plus, learning is a lifelong process. Shouldn't knowledge be fundamentally free? I mean, what we're paying for is a piece of paper which tells employers that we can show up and focus on a task for any given period of time more than anything else. Does education have to be about job training? Or is it about intellectual and social growth? If it's the latter, why is it so damn expensive?

All questions worth asking…