That’s a lesson one college graduate learned the hard way, but it’s something I wish more college-bound students knew going in.

...[a] degree is a piece of paper. It’s not some magical entity that grants the holder immediate and undeniable success. This claim is not to suggest that a college education is worthless, I’m only suggesting that a college degree is nothing more than a ticket to compete. It puts you in the running for a better future, but it provides no guarantees.

That was not what my friends and I thought we signed up for. We thought college would be the answer to our problems. Once we had our degrees, we would be coasting down easy street with fifty thousand dollar starting salaries at every turn. But when our graduation dates arrived, what we imagined would happen wasn’t anywhere near what actually happened.

I can vouch for being sold on the idea that a college degree was a ticket to a life big-salaries and high-power jobs as a kid.  All though high school, which was just a few years ago for me, we were drilled on going to college.  If we didn’t go to college we couldn’t get ahead.  We were even told that if we didn’t go to college immediately after high school that chances are we’d never go and we’d be stuck as janitors our whole life.

But that isn’t true.  In fact, some of the most successful people I know who are my age didn’t go to college.  Or they didn’t go to college until they had already started their careers, at which point they were just attending to get the specific training they needed.  Some of the least successful of my friends, however, are those who went to college, got some generic degree and are now struggling to pay of student loans while trying to find a job.

Which isn’t to say that college is pointless.  It isn’t.  For a lot of careers (doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) going to college right out of high school is a necessity.  But blindly pushing every single kid in high school to go on to college with some vague assurances about guaranteed career success afterwards is not only foolish, it’s cruel to those being pushed.