What is success? Is it determined through happiness or wealth or social status? Many believe that this idea of success can be achieved through obtaining a degree through higher education. What success do people who get a degree hope to find? Most believe that a degree leads to a better pay and therefore a better quality of life, and for some a college degree is an opportunity to escape poor upbringings and make lives for themselves. As Zachary Karabell claims, “People believe in college with an optimism that has all but vanished in other areas of life. They believe in the American dream fulfilled by education. They are willing to pay substantial sums of money for these dreams, and in return colleges are saying, yes, we will educate you, and give you time to think, learn, and grow, give you the skills you need, and award you the ticket to your future” (Karabell 220). This is the mantra children are fed growing up and believe in when they go to college, but the ticket comes with a price and doesn’t always lead to the success they were told they would achieve. The higher education system is a crumbling empire which has lost its sense of purpose and meaning and degraded to a revolving door mentality, churning out students with no real skills pertaining to their degree. As the foundation of higher education decays, and degrees become valueless, many students search for success in alternative areas and have become very successful. A college degree doesn’t correlate to success and higher education is failing to educate students properly. Exploration of other avenues of success and an examination of how students, the government, and educational institutions have caused this downfall will reveal success can be found elsewhere. 

To explain this phenomenon requires an examination at the most basic level of the failing higher educational system. The failure starts with the students. Students entering colleges across the country have a few things they wish to accomplish and this can be broken down into categories. As Feldman explains in his book, The Impact of College on Students, there are four categories of students, academic, nonconformist, collegiate, and vocational. Those in the academic group find themselves aligning their concerns with the faculty and achieve high academic marks and focus on their work outside of the classroom. Nonconformists have a detachment from their school and faculty and find off campus cultures and groups to find their independence. The last two categories, vocational and collegiate are not very involved with ideas. The collegiate culture is very attached and loyal to their college but resist or don’t focus on academic demands. The students in the collegiate group are more focused on social life and extracurricular activities. The last culture, vocational students, are neither academically oriented or attached to their college. The students in the vocational group and collegiate cultures are making higher education fail. These students may come to class late, stay out and party during the week, and when they do come to class, show little or no interest in what is being taught and are distracted by their phones or sleeping. 

The issue with the vocational and collegiate students is further explained in Lee’s Success Without College. As Lee explains, many of these students do not put the work into their studies that is required and instead expect a grade to be handed to them and are not happy with the amount of work given in a course. Many students believe that college will be different than high school. Students believe they will excel in college when they barely managed to pass high school. As Lee further explains, “The truth is there are kids who are simply allergic to school. They have to be monitored in high school to do their homework. They skip school, arrive late, leave early” (Lee 9). These habits that students develop early in their high school career do not automatically disappear in college which hampers their academic potential and leads them into becoming a vocational or collegiate student.  The students swindle their parents, who so desperately want their child to go to college, into believing that even though they barely made it through high school that college would be a fresh start. 

Another way higher education is failing to properly educate is the money that should be spent on academic resources is instead being spent on amenities for students. The students of today are mostly uninterested in their studies but as Lee says, “Students are not acolytes who arrive on campus to partake in a sacred ritual of education. They are savvy shoppers who have chosen a college based on skin-deep factors like the splendor of apartment suites (most students, raised with their own rooms, object to sharing a dorm room), the size of the swimming pool, the sophistication of the Internet connections and what’s on the menu in the dining hall” (Lee 12). The students looking at schools focus first on whether they have their degree program and second comes the amenities and for many, the party atmosphere. The danger in this is the schools continue to spend more money on the amenities to catch the eye of students looking for a school and in Willimon and Naylor’s The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education they explain the difficulties faced when money goes toward amenities and sports such as basketball and football and not into the academics where it is needed and should be focused on but instead the school turns to the amenities and sports to attract students which will give them more profits. 

The second force to blame in the failure of higher education is the government. The governmental push for higher education has been a reoccurring theme throughout history and most notably started with Bill Clinton’s presidency. As Karabell explains in his book, “Washington's sponsorship of higher education stems from the belief that economic competitiveness and college education are somehow connected. Yet to be competitive, you have to meet minimum standards, whether the market is domestic or international” (Karabell 215). This quote from Karabell’s book exemplifies why the government placed such a significance on higher education. The next time higher education came up was during the Obama administration, where Joe Biden pushed for free higher education for all. This push for higher education coming from the government has instilled the ideology that it is our American duty to attend college because it will help further our economy and only solidify our position as a super power in the world if we have a more educated society. The most recent push for free higher education came from Bernie Sanders presidential campaign which instilled the same ideas that it was important for the United States economy that we educate everyone possible and make it available to those with the ability to learn and a hunger for knowledge but lacking the funding to go. 

The government has been pushing higher education since the 50s and the parents of this time have then, pushed their children to do the same, as Karabell explains, “Middle-class parents take great pride in seeing their children in college, and immigrants send their children to college as a symbol of integration into American society. While there are controversies at specific schools or over particular events, higher education is held in greater esteem than most major institutions or most sectors of society. (Karabell 220). The government widely publicized higher education taking it from an elite and unique opportunity to a widely-accepted part of an Americans life. This push has only ensured the downfall of higher education by making it a highly available which is causing the deterioration of the higher educational systems quality and applicability to the real world and the focus has shifted from educating to generating revenue for the colleges. 

Truly, the government isn’t interested in what people can gain from this education, it is about what the country and government believe they will gain with a more educated society. The evidence of the governments involvement in funding for students to attend college is revealed in through the Pew. As the Pew Charitable Trusts data collection reveals, federal sponsored lending grew from roughly 21 billion to 105 billion from 1990 to the year 2013. Also from 2000-2012 federal spending to higher education increased from roughly 3,800 a student to surpassing state funding in 2011 and in 2012 was sitting at 5,100 dollars per full time student while state funding was at 4,300 dollars. This numerical data proves that the governmental push for higher education has been increasing and even though states funding has decreased the federal funding has increased to make up for the deficit in order to keep students going to college. If the government cared about making sure students could go to college they would check their ability to pay back the substantial loans that they take out instead of handing them out like candy. The reckless rate at which the government is granting students loans reveals that the true intentions behind their help is to try to fortify the American economy with educated citizens. If the government cared about ensuring students could attend college for the students benefits and not the governments then the development of a new strategy of funding is required because the current programs leaves many students swimming in debt.

The last cause of the failing higher education system is higher education itself. Higher education has lost its luster and inventiveness that it used to have. The institutions across the United States have lost their ways at some point and turned higher education into a playground for students offering amenities that would capture the attention of potential applicants rather than focusing on the curriculum and the applicability of the curriculum. The entire college experience has become one expensive 4-year party for many students who take up useless degrees so that they do not need to focus on the academic portion of their education as much as other students in more rigorous majors. The higher education system is crumbling and its focus has shifted from providing a quality and comprehensive education to wringing every cent from people so their child can have the college experience. As Willimon and Naylor point out, 

Members of the Pew Roundtable noted that, when the media turn their attention to the American higher education, “Their dominant perspective is one of lumbering obsolescence; to them college and universities are dinosaurs trapped in the tar pits of political correctness and inefficient as well as self-serving attitudes and practices. The media’s characterization of higher education is increasingly one of an industry that is exhausting itself in the attempt to escape from a morass of its own making. It is a view of colleges and universities as places that consume rather than produce energy” (Willimon and Naylor 59)

As the Willimon and Naylor explained, the media sees the higher education system failing and it is because of its inability to adapt. 

The higher education system has been destroying itself through its policies, spending, and the way that it teaches students. Higher education has remained stagnant in a dynamic world and continues to trudge forward with an outline that is failing its stakeholders in the situation. As Sinnott and Johnson point out in Reinventing the University: A Radical Proposal for a Problem Focused University, higher education is failing on many platforms such as students, faculty, public relations, tuition costs, checks and balances and many others. The three main focuses here for the purpose of this paper is the faculty, students, and tuition. The three chosen are all connected, first the faculty is treated poorly by the institutions and don’t have much say in decisions made regarding the college. For example, graduate students are exploited and used as part time professors in order to cut the costs of hiring actual professors. This brings into question the cost of tuition. Should students be paying as much as they are to be taught by anyone less than the best the university can find? This deceitful act is a sad reality and is one of the ways they are failing to properly educate students. Another way the universities are failing to properly educate is through the use of an outdated and ineffective educational model. This outdated model has not changed with the times which is an issue because the world is always changing and higher education has not been changing to keep pace with the demands of these changes to help properly educate students to be successful in the world they will be living in.

Alternatively, success does not need to come from a degree and seeing the current condition of higher education has made many people turn to other opportunities for success. Entrepreneurialism has become a viable option for many students who do not wish to work for a college degree that will become obsolete and devoid of value by the time they graduate. The entrepreneurial pathway has many benefits over attending college and Michael Price, a renowned author of the book What Next? The Millennial’s Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the Real World, outlines how to succeed in this generation. Price has proven that he has had great success without a degree compared to his college attending counterparts. Michael Price, in an article from the huffington post explains how his experiences have given him the edge over his college graduate counterparts. Price says he has real world and applicable experience in his field and colleges fail to give this type of experience to their graduates. Many employers are frustrated with training college graduates on things they expect them to know and wish were taught. Price also has made a significant amount of money and avoided the debt that many students face once they graduate. Price offers that students find what they enjoy in life and find a way to make it into a living and seek out real world experience which will make them more appealing to employers because experience will always be valued more than anything in any job. 

Nevertheless, Price is not the only one who has found success without college but some of the wealthiest and most notorious millionaires never went to college a few examples include, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs. These men all left college behind and blazed their own paths and became pioneers in their respective fields and gave others inspiration that college is not entirely necessary. Another alternative to the standard 4-year degree would be to attend a trade school. The funding for trade schools has been in hot debate in recent years and the careers after have the ability to make one very successful monetarily and avoid the high cost of attending a university for a degree. Lastly an option to everyone leaving high school is to enter the work force directly and work up the corporate ladder. All of these have their advantages and disadvantages but in the long run will save money, and might be a better choice.

Being a college student puts me in a hypocritical situation in this argument. I find myself on a side that my current situation doesn’t necessarily align with whole-heartedly. My experience in college so far has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I once looked at education with optimism and hope to find success after school, but as I find myself taking out my first loan this semester I feel rather grim about my circumstances. Being out of state means I pay over 22,000 dollars a semester all subsidized from student’s loans. By the end of my degree I will owe well over 100,000 dollars in student loans. I find myself after writing this paper, is it all worth it? Is this experience worth the money? In some ways, I find myself still hopeful, clinging onto the idea that this will help me in the long run, but somewhere inside I find higher education slowly losing its luster with me and I start to question my stake in this journey and question what would be different had I chosen a different path. As I finish this paper I find it hard to follow the yellow brick road I’ve been told my entire life was my ticket to success and actually have found myself resentful of the educational system and all that it stands for. Experiencing all of this firsthand has allowed me to really explore this topic in and out and it has truly become something of importance to me. 

Knowledge is the most powerful tools one could ever possess so the push to attend college is without a doubt, with good reason. Education is important and certain fields require higher education to perform the tasks that students will be faced with in their careers such as engineers, doctors, and lawyers. A survey taken in 2000 by The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education of over 1,400 Americans, “Parents are convinced that college is a vital experience for their children.  Data shows, 62% of parents of high school students say that a college education is absolutely necessary for their own children, and another 35% describe a college education as helpful but not absolutely necessary. Only a minuscule 3% say that a college education is not that important” (Immerwahr 3). This data reveals that higher education still holds value to a large group of the population, but considering the data is over 17 years old I find that there has been a shift in public opinion on this subject now. 

The shift in opinions comes from the availability of knowledge and the ease of access to this knowledge. This day and age, information is at our very fingertips and we should all make use of this abundant and readily available knowledge in order to further expand our understandings of the world and new things. This knowledge, in turn may help us become more beneficial members of society without spending the ridiculous amount of money to get a degree in a field where work experience would be valued higher than a piece of paper. consequently, the advocacy for entrepreneurialism has become very appealing to millennials who have seen the success others have achieved. A college degree does not mean a person is smart, it means they know how to apply themselves and work hard and set goals and achieve them, nothing more. However, this does not mean a person without one does not also possess these traits and one with a degree should not be favored over one without one. 

Is college education completely useless and should be abandoned as a whole? That is not at all what I am proposing. Higher education still has its place in educating those in engineering, medical, and legal fields. This is where higher education is a necessity. These fields are where you can’t strictly just enter them like many others. Other than previously listed fields, college is not a requirement to be successful in other fields. The higher educational system is going to continually degrade to where a change is going to have to be made but for the time being the alternatives to the traditional 4-year college degree are plenty and available to all students graduating high school. As David Ramsey states on his talk show, “Teach your kids that success is not tied to education. Get an education, because being dumb is not a good idea but no matter how many degrees you have nobody promised you a rose garden darling. You got to go into the garden clip the buds you know do the stuff you do whatever the crap you do to grow roses you got to do that stuff.” (Ramsey) As Ramsey explains, get an education, but it is not necessary for your success because if you can’t put in the work then your degree is useless. 
