EH 102 Composition II: College Education is Worth Pursuing (Research Paper Sample)

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College Education is Worth Pursuing
The success stories that are most often canonized are those of people who, like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, dropped out of college and met unrivalled success in their ventures. These stories have been inculcated into so many people’s minds that they have borne a fallacy that the chances of tremendous success increase only when someone skips college. As this fallacy gains more audience and wins more hearts, an ever increasing number of people cast a dark shadow of doubt on the worth of college degrees. Many have, in fact, touted it as a terrible waste of time, a bad investment and even an obstacle to radical innovation. However, amid all the desperation and anxiety that such claims stir up, there are people who firmly believe in the value of college education. They do have the right to believe so, because there is enough data to support the claim that college education is worth pursuing.
It is so easy to come up with success stories of people who dropped out of college, but it is not very easy to actually achieve success after taking that road. The number of drop-out success stories is no match for the number of graduates who have succeeded. If, by extension, wealth were to be used as the yardstick for measuring success, still people with college degrees would emerge tops – by far. In fact, most of the top 400 richest people in America do have a college degree (Kaplan and Joshua 158). In the technological sector, which has some of the most famous drop-out success stories, almost all of the top 30 under 30 did, in fact, stick to college to the end. Similar figures are noted in other fields such as the arts, where graduates make up about 87% of the top 30 under 30.
Education has long been viewed as an investment; an investment in knowledge that is expected to pay back in terms quantifiable in a monetary sense. Well, there is evidence that college education is an investment far better than most other investments. Over the course of a lifetime, college graduates earn, on average, almost double that which is earned by those who only attend high school. It is estimated that only 5% of those who attend college remain unemployed, while up to 13% of high school graduates who did not proceed to college go without employment. Some research has also shown that investment in college gives better returns than most other investments.
If for no other reason, people need to go to college because college polishes people in an all-rounded manner, making them thoroughly ready for employment. Putting aside the inherent importance of learning, college equips many people with the collaborative, communication and critical analytical skills that are indispensable in employment (Fink 23). In several scientific jobs, mastery is brought about by problem solving and experimentation. These are experiences that are often first met at college while taking scientific courses. Beyond this, college offers the perfect opportunity for self-discovery. In college, people learn how to learn, besides learning about the respective subject matter of their majors. The exposure to new ideas in college is tremendous.
College gives one a buffered opportunity to explore the world. In other words, college affords an adventurous young person the freedom to try out new things without having to worry too much about the repercussions. In college, enthusiastic and forward-thinking people are given the opportunity to think about new ideas, present new projects to their tutors and get guidance on how to improve their thought processes and their projects. This is an invaluable service that people outside campus may have to pay through their noses to access. In college, people not only get to know the feasibility of their ideas but also get to get coached on how to better their ideas and generate new ideas. In fact, it is not farfetched to think that most of the big technological inventions are college products, including Facebook and Microsoft, for their owners first thought of the ideas while in college. Moreover, one would as why neither Zuckerberg nor Gates has entrusted the running and growth of their companies to fellow college dropouts. The answer is pretty straightforward: they both know that the sustainability of their great ideas depends on the refined technical knowhow only gained through college training.
College education is one of the surest tickets to the middle class. Until the 1970s most of the middle-class jobs required the equivalent of a high-school education. From the late 1970s onwards, most middle-class jobs required the equivalent of a college degree or higher. In a wider sense, what distinguishes the bourgeois from the proletariat is the amount of access to college education that each of these segments of the population has. Most people with some college education are either in the middle class already or moving steadily upwards.
Preparing people for great careers is just a small part of what colleges do. Above and beyond this, colleges play an extremely important role in the intellectual development of individuals. Many people who go through college also believe that their years in college enabled them mature as individuals. College helps students expand their horizons because it provides them a platform to get exposures they would never otherwise have. College brings together several different students from different backgrounds in their element. However, it equalizes them in the sense that they are all in the quest for knowledge. Thus, students from humble backgrounds get a chance to interact at the same level with students from well-off backgrounds, and this gives each one of them better world views. It enables individuals foster relationships with peers form diverse backgrounds with diverse personalities. Few, if any, other experiences can prepare one for life the same way as college does.
Going through college is not just important when examined from the lens of the individual, but also from the lens of a country as a whole. College education has been a driving factor for the growth of many economies in the world. Countries such as South Korea were able to move from the status of the poorest nations in the world to among the richest in a short span of time. The unquestionable driver of this transformation was their emphasis on higher education (Shin 61). America too has had a dramatic expansion of its middle class which has been in tandem with a dramatic increase in levels of higher education. This shows how instrumental college education is in the growth of countries. Jobs and businesses look for places where the most skilled and best educated members of the workforce are, and these are invariably in places where much emphasis is placed on higher education.
College students may also gain a priceless understanding of the significance of civil engagement through the internship programs that they have to go through while in college. The beauty of it is that they can go through the entire experience without being liable for mistakes because they are under tutelage. This is always a priceless experience for anyone who aspires to be part of the workforce.
There have been scathing criticisms about the need to attend college. One of the most common arguments flaunted for this cause is that the debt accumulated during college years closes all the doors that might have been opened by the degree. In other words, college is a bad investment. They say it could send parents into the poorhouse and fail to do the student any good in their lives because they will be chasing debt all their life. This argument claims that everybody claims that college is wonderful and yet many worry at investing so much in this good.
This argument is flawed on many angles. First, as has already been pointed out, college is but one of the best, if not the best, investment that could be made. Secondly, the state of worry that shrouds the thinking of many people is but a form of mental prison which these people erect for themselves, lock themselves in and subject themselves to torture no better than that in actual prisons. Zimbardo declares that "The physical institution of prison is but a concrete and steel metaphor of the existence of more pervasive, albeit less obvious, prisons of the mind that all of us daily create" (743). He then goes ahead to throw the challenge, "To what extent do we allow ourselves to...choose to remain prisoners because being passive and dependent frees us from the need to act and be responsible for our actions?" (743).
Zimbardo could not have captured it any better. The reason why people are apprehensiv...