If you don’t already know, I’m a college kid. I go to class, I study course materials, and I take tests, quizzes, assessments, and free pens when I can find them. Why do I do it? To get a bachelor’s degree, of course. I mean, why wouldn’t I want a bachelor’s degree? My parents told me to get one, high paying employers require one, and most of my friends went off to get one, too.

It makes sense that I should go to college. Everybody is doing it. All I need to do is to sit through four years of classes, and after typing up papers and getting As on my transcript I get that shiny piece of paper, proving that I sat through one hundred and twenty weeks of lectures and labs. Then I can go to Bob & Joe’s High Payer Inc. and get a cozy nine-to-five job with a decent pay. I might even get into some cool college parties and make some sweet moves on pretty ladies.

It’s clear that there’s a message to be had from all this college talk, but here is where things switch gears (in case you think that preachy message was about to rear its ugly head).

It’s been nearly four years, now, and I can honestly say that my time as a college student has been eye opening. I’ve learned to be sociable, I’ve experienced living on my own, and I’ve dealt with the interweaving complexities of making money for both myself and for my college funds.

Life as a young adult is an experience unlike any other, and it is now that we start to make real choices that determine how we want to live the rest of our lives. The observation that I want to stress is that I don’t think these life learning experiences came directly as a result of going to college. They came simply from being a young adult, out on his own, ready to take on the world.

So why, as my title suggests, do I think we’ve gone to college for the wrong reasons?

It all goes back to why I went to college in the first place. I didn’t go to college for a thirst for knowledge. Why would I? I don’t want to go to college to learn; that’s for nerds. I want to go to college to be employable. We need smarter people with degrees in the job world. That way the economy will fix itself. We need to make sure kids get degrees in order to improve the country’s financial situation. We need more money to pay for our debts, for crying out loud!

This mentality is why I believe the desire for learning has been horrifically morphed. The educational system has become this monstrous octopus, a sort of beast that is being fed by hopes of fixing the economy. It seems as though in today’s job world, you have to obtain a bachelor’s degree in order to survive financially. With this mentality being put into practice, the purpose of learning has changed. Learning is no longer made for the sake of improving one’s knowledge of the world. Learning is now made for the sake of suiting the economy’s needs.

But college has always been an institution of learning, not economic solutions. For hundreds of years, colleges have taught people about the wide world we live in. Subjects like Greek, Latin, mathematics, and geography were offered in the olden days. If you change colleges today to only allow the same courses that had been offered one hundred years ago, the only branch of study that would exist would essentially be liberal arts.

But we don’t want liberal arts anymore. My peers (and sometimes myself) complain about the need to take certain liberal art classes. We don’t want to learn about Socrates; we want to learn about writing a resume. We don’t need to look at a political map of the world; we need to look at charts telling us what job markets are growing.

It is sad to realize learning has been turned into a business. Since everyone wants to go to college for that super special degree, many institutions have raised tuition to extreme levels. College debt is now a serious problem plaguing the younger generation, and now politicians have to use the topic as an appealing factor to us younger folk.

Just to clarify, I’m not criticizing the university I’m attending. I’m criticizing the educational system that modern America has created, which is to say that college is simply a means to an end. Young men and women won’t go to college to broaden the horizons or to see things in a new way. We will go for extra bullet points on our resume.

I mean, I guess I can broaden my horizons and learn another language or something, but I just want to be sure I’ll get that degree first.

Now, with all that bashing about the economy, I’ll say this. Of course, no one wants the economy in shambles. I like my eggs being sold at a cheap $1.66 per dozen (which actually isn’t cheap if you take the time to look it up). But using college as a way to improve it is completely asinine.

College has nothing to do with the economy, as its purpose was always for the sake of knowledge. And to a further extent, by making college a necessity for financial security, colleges are looked at by students as another roadblock to becoming an adult. I know plenty of peers who joke about not wanting to be an adult once they graduate.

Learning can be free of the economy’s demands, but it will be a very long time from now. Probably a generation or two. Young men and women will have to stop signing their peak years away before there’s any hope of college returning to its intended purpose. It’s just a shame that I didn’t realize it until after I had signed away mine.

But I don’t regret it. As I’ve said before, I learned a lot from going to college. My real worry is for the people who didn’t.