The Case Against College

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My freshman year of college could have very easily ruined my academic career and pushed my life in a wrong direction. I did not have the right mind set to learn yet. It wasn’t until I started to grow up a little more and started paying for my own living and college education that I started to understand the importance of taking my schooling seriously. In “The Case Against College,” Caroline Bird points out that college should be a place where people want to learn more than anything. I relate to Bird because I needed the experiences in my life to fit my worldview. In some ways, I agree with Stephen Colbert’s article “Higher Education” in which he says that fraternities do help largely in where a person ends up in life; yet contrary to Colbert, …show more content…
I came from an upper-middle class family, and received all the benefits from it as well; these benefits, I am slowly realizing, have also been hindrances for me. I had felt like I had been babied most of my life; looking back now I can say that for a fact that I was, and wanted to start to grow in my own adulthood. Completely by my own choice I had moved out of both my mom and dad’s house (they are divorced) in order to start to grow up a little bit. I wanted to get rid of these other hindrances as well so I started to pay for my own gas, food, rent, clothes, and schooling. Making that big of a jump closer towards being an adult had drastically changed my life and perspective of it as well. I was now in a way self-sufficient, which felt good. It was at this point that I feel like I became truly ready for college. Bird was almost describing me when she stated, “that an eighteen-year-old high school graduate is still too young and confused to know what he wants to do, let alone what is good for him (357).” Once I realized what I was doing to my education, by not trying in school, I wanted to go somewhere that would cater to my academic recovery, and Butler was my …show more content…
Now that I have started college I feel lost, and unprepared. All these classes teaching me different things in different ways just threw me off. Sometimes I feel I am not as smart as my other classmates, because I didn’t score as high in my ACT scores, or the placement tests. Twelve years waiting for this to come, the time when I got to study a profession with which I would become someone successful; I feel so disillusioned of my own feelings for college. I’m not sure if I want to be a teacher any longer ; I’ve now changed my major to liberal arts which I was told means you do the basic courses, in other words, undecided. Even though when people ask me what I’m majoring in I just say liberal arts, because I’m not a big fan of the word “undecided”. Maybe if I actually knew what I wanted, I wouldn’t feel so out of place. All the determination and effort I needed in order for me to get here, is slowly dissolving. In Mark Twain’s “Reading the River”, there is a similar feeling as mine – “I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!” (364). It sounds awful to me because I have always been the kind of person to encourage others to do better, and proceed their education to be someone in life, and now I am having mixed feelings about college? Unlike Mark Twain who lost
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