We Sell Our Life to Money, and We Do It in College
The Effects of College on
Students
Our whole society seems
to revolve around the concept that success means having more money – nothing
else. Nowadays, people are going to college just because of the statistical
promise that by doing so, they will be happier, because they will be earning more
money than if they do not go to college. We are ruled by this false concept
that money equals success, and that one cannot really be considered successful
without it. The reason we are being ruled by this concept is because we have
made it our purpose to work in order to get more money. The definition of
success according to the Google search engine is “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Therefore, all
of us who think that success means getting rich are making the grave mistake of
making our main purpose in life the sad task of collecting money. This is a
result of excessive Capitalism – American Capitalism. We live in a society
structured as a social hierarchy, in which the rich are at the top, and the
poor at the very bottom; this gives the thought to people that to be
successful, or better, they need to climb up as much as possible – and if this
thought does not come to all Americans naturally, we are repeatedly reminded of
this aim by the ever-growing media. By presenting a faulty perception of success,
American Capitalism has also been able to over-esteem college in such a way that
may hinder people who are not meant to go to college.
How
does it present a faulty perception of success?
Success
may mean a lot of things depending on the person, but the definition that
people keep giving it is: getting rich. In many ways, this is the definition
that keeps getting shoved and drilled into our heads. We hear this through
music, television shows, movies, and other media. We also hear some form of
this idea in school by our teachers and counselors, in our homes by our
parents, and everywhere else by our friends that already have this idea
established in their minds. This idea comes in so many forms and through so
many mediums that it is impossible to avoid and extremely difficult to dismiss
it as untrue.
For
example, in all of popular hip hop we hear artists brag about how wealthy they
are and how much worse it is to not be rich. A perfect example of this would be
It’s all about the Benjamins where Diddy (Puff Daddy) says, "Five
carats on my hands with the cuts / And swim in European figures / F**k being a
broke n***a". This song ranked 32 in VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of
Hip Hop in 2008 (VH1). Another example of a popular hip-hop artist that helps
define success as getting rich is Drake in Successful
where his chorus by Trey Songz is “I want the
money/Money and the cars/Cars and the clothes/I just wanna be/Successful.”
These two very popular artists are heard by many people, especially young
adults, all over America. However these are only two examples of songs that
define success for us as getting rich. Hip hop songs in general are very
popular and played regularly on local and internet radios, regularly
downloaded, and played on YouTube over a million times – saying the same thing:
Success is getting rich.
Television
and movies are not as bad when it comes to delivering this kind of message, but
they do show it often. I have watched countless shows and dramas, and the
characters that are always on the spotlight are the ones with the huge houses,
nice cars, and expensive suits. It’s not a problem that they are rich, but that
they are always viewed as the only successful characters by the rest of the
characters in the show, even if their money is completely inherited. This sends
a message that it does not matter whether the money was earned through work or
not, as long as the individual has money – then he or she is automatically
considered successful.
Seldom does
television or radio, or any other type of media encourage any other definition
to success that becoming wealthy, and since people are heavily exposed to the
media, they cannot help but become influenced by it in many different ways,
including their goal. However it is not only the media affecting our goals – it
is also the hierarchy inside Capitalism in itself that defines success this
way.
We live in
a society that is openly divided into three general social classes: The working
class, the middle class, and the upper class. Each class is trying to reach the
top for better living conditions, more power, etc… However, just by having
social classes, the idea that one is “better” than the other comes naturally.
One may begin to question: If one is better, why is it better? How are the
social classes different? The main obvious difference between the three classes
is money. The upper has the most money than the middle class, the middle class
has better living conditions than the lower class, and the working class has
the least resources to spend. And if we attribute “better” to “more successful”
then another natural thought that may “pop up” into people’s heads is, “they
are better because they have more money”, which can then be transformed into “I
can be more successful if I earn more money”. Now my argument is not that
people should not strive to get more money; my argument is that this thought of
successful has an excessive relation to money to a point where the only thing
people think of as success is money. Once this is established as success, then
the generations after that also think it is the case, until we completely
measure one’s success by the amount of money that one earns. This is the case
now, and this is impacting young adults to prepare for life by thinking “how am
I going to get rich when I grow up?” This allows young adults to depart into a
life without intrinsic pleasure as Crawford describes it.
“...an external reward can affect one's interpretation of
one's own motivation, and interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling. A
similar effect may account for the familiar fact that when someone turns his
hobby into a business, he often loses pleasure in it. Likewise, an intellectual
who pursues an academic career gets professionalized, and this may lead him to
stop thinking. This line of reasoning suggests that the kind of appreciative
attention where one remains focused on what one is doing can arise only in
leisure activities. Such a conclusion would put pleasurable absorption beyond
the ken of any activity that is undertaken for the sake of making money,
because although money is undoubtedly good, it is not intrinsically so.” (Crawford)
In this case, by making our main goal into
making as much money as possible, we are actually taking away pleasure from our
own lives. If we do that, then we may be as rich as Bill Gates, but would we
really be successful?
How does this over-esteem college?
Going to
college has become a national fad, a rite of passage, millions hope, into the
world of hefty salaries and McMansions (Reeves).
I come from
a high school whose mission is “to prepare all of our graduating students to
succeed in college and beyond”. Every Friday our whole school would gather and
sit together in the Multi-Purpose Room to talk get motivated to do better the
following week. Although most of the time money and riches was not used as
motivation, it did come up a few times. “You can’t get rich if you do not work
hard” I remember hearing a couple of times. Of course I considered this to be
true, but since when was it our main focus to become rich? “If you succeed in
school, you have the opportunity to succeed in life”. Does this mean that if we
do not succeed in school, we do not have the opportunity to succeed in life?
Many times our counselors would come into our classrooms during Advisory period
to try to motivate us to work hard in school. The incentive that has stuck to
me the most, probably because of its repetition was “according to statistics,
people who graduate from college earn a higher wage than people who inly
graduate from high school”. This is also the incentive that I remember having
the most reactions and positive discussions from my peers. Money is not a bad
thing – it opens doors to many things that may be otherwise be closed; however,
when money is the main incentive for getting high school students excited about
college, we might need to think a little about what is going on.
Ever since
I came to University of California Riverside, I have noticed my friends have
used their self-proclaimed fact that they’ll be rich after college as an excuse
to do their work. Especially these last few days - the end of week ten and the
beginning of finals week – when they do not want to work any longer, they keep
saying out loud that it’s worth it because they will get a job that will make
them rich. I am always glad to see them work but their incentive somewhat
disturbs me; it is mostly because I do not think that anyone’s reason for
coming to a university should be because they were promised a higher paying job
– instead of studying for four years to earn qualifications for a job that they
may enjoy. It just sounds absurd to think of college as a financial solution
for the future.
Overall,
college is being sold to young teenage high school students, and even grown
adults, as a pathway to an easy wealthy life – when in fact it is not. Although
statistics do show that college graduates earn twice as much in their working
years (Goldman), going to college is not an easy route to “success” as people
tend to make it sound. Due to the “success” that is promised by college, many
parents expect nothing less than graduating college from their children –
making all high schools change their role from purely educating students to
mentally preparing them for a future they are almost forced to take.
How does over-esteeming college hinder individuals who are
not meant to go to college?
Firstly, we
already know that only about half of the people that go to college do not
actually complete it within six years (Waldron). So that means that about half
of the people that went to college - whether they were pressured to, wanted
to, or forced to – did not graduate and ended up paying without getting their
degree. This is a way in which going to college may hinder an individual
economically. Also, since there is a huge emphasis on succeeding by graduating
from college, the people that end up dropping out leave with a mentality that
they cannot be successful in anything else.
Secondly,
we are able to say that college is not a promise to a “successful” future.
Although many argue that college is a prerequisite to being part of the middle
class, a job is sometimes not available to fir the degree; some college
graduates end up taking jobs that are often given to high school graduates,
making little more money but having college debts and some lost earnings
accrued while unsuccessfully pursing a degree (Vedder). This is because the
number of new college graduates far exceeds the growth in the number of
technical, managerial, and professional jobs where graduates traditionally have
gravitated. As a consequence, we have a new phenomenon: underemployed college
graduates doing jobs historically performed by those with much less education.
We have, for example, more than 100,000 janitors with college degrees, and
16,000 degree-holding parking lot attendants (Vedder).
Thirdly,
some people may be happier doing manual labor, which often does not require a
degree yet holds the title of a cognitively rich job. An example of someone
like this would be Matthew Crawford. He got his PhD and ended up getting a high
paying “thinking job”, but ended up trading it and its perks in order to a motorcycle
mechanic (Crawford).
Conclusion
All in all,
if one’s goal in life is to get rich, then having more money would be one’s
definition of success. However my belief is that money is not the basis of
success, and should not be held that way by our capitalist society. Although it
seems inevitable to see success as anything other than becoming a doctor or a
lawyer because they make a great living, we should reconsider our life’s true
aim and live outside of the excessive greed that happens in America. If we can
understand that money is not our goal, then we will also be able to view
college as what it is – an opportunity to new doors and an academic adventure –
something much more profound than a path to the money bags. Also, if people
start seeing college this way, then many people can save their time from
sitting in classrooms for four years without liking it – and prepare in some
other way for what they are really passionate for. I would like to repeat that
my argument is not that making money a goal is bad, nor am I arguing that
attending college is a waste of people’s time; I am arguing that making money
should not be anyone’s ultimate goal, and that people should not go to college
just because of the false promise that they will earn more because they went to
college.
"What
is success? To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and
endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate the beauty; To find the
best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a
garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived; This is to have succeeded."
Works Cited
Canne,
Kayla. "Employers Value Experience over Grades, Data Suggests." The Daily Free Press [Boston
University] 07 Mar. 2013: n. pag. Print.
Crawford,
Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An
Inquiry into the Value of Work. N.p.: Penguin, 2010. Print.
Goldman,
Jordan. "Go To College, Make More Money." CBSNews. CBS Interactive, 18 July 2002.
Web. 08 Dec. 2013.
<
"How
People Choose 'career Paths'" How
People Choose 'career Paths' Stanford University News Service,
28 May 1991. Web. 07 Dec. 2013.
Reeves,
Thomas. "College Isn't for Everybody and It's a Scandal That We Think It
Is." History News Network.
N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2013. <
Vedder,
Richard. "Why College Isn't for Everyone." BusinessWeek. N.p., 9 Apr. 2012. Web. 8
Dec. 2013.
<
"VH1′s
100 Greatest Hip Hop Songs Ever." Reality
TV VH1 Blog. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2013. <
Waldron,
Travis. "Study: Nearly Half Of America’s College Students Drop Out Before
Receiving A Degree." ThinkProgress
RSS. N.p., 28 Mar. 2012. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.
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