Continues from Part 1
Kallen: Now let’s go to the moment, where you graduated from high school. A lot of them that graduate from high school, sometimes, don’t even have an option.
Sometimes, their mom or dad would say, “I don’t want to hear it. You’re going to college whether you like it or not.”
Sometimes, they don’t have a choice to pick whether they want to do a gap year. Maybe, they just want to skip college and be an entrepreneur.
Sometimes, their parents are conscious and force college upon them even if they’re not ready for it. How was it like for you? Was it a personal choice of yours?
Derek: That’s a really good question. You know they framed it as as an option. But I think it’s just become a social fact that to be able to advance and achieve what we think of as the American dream; college has become a basic requirement in a way.
For our parents’ generation, it wasn’t. You could have a high school diploma and still very relatively easily find a middle class lifestyle.
You know let’s say, working an assembly line or something along those lines, we know that’s changed right. And so I think for my parents, they’re definitely more of the supportive types – not the “you’re gonna do this or that.”
But I think in the back of their heads they knew that I was heading toward college anyway. If I told them that I didn’t want to go, they might have stepped in and said you have to think about what this means for your future.
So, I think it’s tough for parents now because that is the reality we live in today. I feel like it’s for somebody who’s interested in higher education. I think that might be coming to a head.
If you look at the combination that a bachelors degree is becoming a requirement for social mobility but at the same time the crushing debt so many students find themselves in and it just seems like that equation doesn’t add up.
This is a snippet transcription of Reaching The Finish Line episode 94.
Photo: Pixabay
