What is the real purpose of education? Is it to help us get jobs? To weed out those who are incompetent and let the overachievers shine? It’s a great feeling when you find out you scored well on the exam you had to cram the last two nights for, since you haven’t been to class once in the past three weeks. Of course, most of this was retained in your short-term memory and if somebody were to ask you about the class next semester you’d have a blank look on your face. It’s because in this country, education is a backwards system. We pay an enormous amount of money to sit in 300-person lecture halls and realize that either the professor can’t teach, or that the tests are tailored specifically to the way the professor presents the material, instead of to the subject matter itself. Essentially, our tuition doesn’t necessarily go towards having good teachers; we pay to come here and take exams, so that we can one day walk out of here with a degree from the Pennsylvania State University.

Society expects us to be absolutely perfect. They want us to have perfect test scores, grade point averages, letters of recommendation, internship experience, etc. They put so much pressure on us to succeed, that students start to take desperate measures. Look at how lucrative of a business the Adderall black market is. I hear people all the time talk about how reliant they are on those 30 mg supplements. It’s said to give you an unfair advantage, but I can’t really blame people for doing it when everybody else already is. As long as your GPA stays up, employers aren’t going to know – let alone care – whether or not you Adderall-binged for virtually every exam you took in college. We comply to the standards set by those in power, and when the bar is set as high as it is, students become much more susceptible to taking such risks.

And don’t even get me started on the reasons why students come to college. Once again, society has determined that the next step after high school graduation is for students to enroll in college. You’re supposed to know what you want to do with your life as soon as you turn 18 – a total load of crap. So for most people, we choose to enroll in the best college we can and take out absurdly expensive student loans just to determine what we might want to do, but more likely find out what we wouldn’t want to do. We’re told that you need to study engineering or business if you want to get a job, and that liberal arts degrees are basically worthless. Yet (and this may not apply to everybody), once students graduate and have that steady nine-to-five job, they realize how empty their lives are as they sit at a desk all day, sifting through mounds of paperwork. 

What happened to people actually learning or pursuing their passions? Life’s short enough as it is and not worth spending every minute conforming to the expectations that society puts on us. Let’s face it: not everybody is supposed to go to college. You could be a carpenter, a bank teller, an entrepreneur or, by God, if you love to sing, start recording your own album. You’ll save yourself from being up to your eyeballs in debt, and not waste your time and energy studying things that you don’t really care about. At the same time, though, I’m incredibly thankful for people who choose to put in the work to be scientists and engineers; the world definitely needs people like them who are competent with math, science and technology. However, we pressure so many students to pursue these fields of study without even asking them if they want to do it. 

I applaud and am inspired by students who choose to study the liberal arts. You made the decision to pursue something that you enjoy and that I would assume brings out the best qualities of your character. People give liberal arts majors a lot of crap because their degrees might not be in as high of demand as a student who studies business or engineering. But this goes back to my point on what we are supposed to be getting out of college. Competition for success is great and brings out the true grit in a person, however, we shouldn’t be changing who we are and what we stand for just to make a six-figure salary. Believe it or not, there are a lot of very successful people who studied English, sociology or political science. If you are deeply passionate about what you’re doing and have the drive, you’re going to make it no matter what it is you’re interested in. 

Education is supposed to be a tool to help us grow intellectually and enable us to learn as much about the world as we can. But in college, that ideology seems to go to the wayside. We’re taught that there’s a direct correlation between monetary success and happiness, and that we’ll only become rich if we have those perfect credentials. This is why students are willing to take whatever competitive advantage is available even if it goes against their values. It’s not our fault that society has placed these notions in our head, but it is on us to change the system. The best way to reform education is by first encouraging students to start pursuing their passions instead putting the focus on making money and end results. As the scholar Howard Thurman once wrote, "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."