Casey Brown
A&E Editor
@CaseyBrown_CU
It is easy to dream of a new life, working the perfect job with a college degree in hand. It is easy to assume that a college degree will lead to success and stability. It is easy for people to say, “you should be in school; you’re so smart.”
I heard for many years that I needed to get back to school. It was a given that I belonged in a school setting.
However, I ultimately came back to school because it is important to me to hold a college degree. Part of my identity as a “smart person” was tied to the idea that smart people go to college; therefore, as a smart person who wasn’t in school, I was not fulfilling my potential. I don’t quite understand the connection between going to school and living the American Dream. It might have been true at one point in history, but at this point, we are all just chasing the lie that is a White-Picket-Fence life.
I didn’t realize that ideal was partly behind my desire to enroll in school.
I question the benefits of a college education. I was told by society that going to college would benefit me socially, and more importantly, it would lead to financial security, a good job, and at the very least a middle-class life. Let’s be honest, by middle-class life I mean it was essentially a given that I would eventually be a millionaire.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have a concrete job in mind. I came to Cameron armed with an abstract vision of a “better life for myself.” For me, that vision was even more abstract because I’m the first person in my family to go to college, so I had no idea what the degree-career relationship looked like in real life.
I enrolled to get an education, not a specific degree. I guess I thought the free-spirited desire to study the liberal arts would be enough. I guess I assumed that if I worked hard enough, then everything would all work out. Of course, it will all work out because it always does, but while it is working out, I will be making sizable student loan payments. However, I would think that at some point we as a society could get it together and tell our children what to realistically expect out of college and with a degree.
I have realized a little too late that flying by the seat of my pants with the forethought of a hippie, motivated by the lies that were promised to me and my generation, is not exactly going to work out the way I had planned. Good thing I have experience at flying by the seat of my pants.