A College Students Idea of the American Dream As the slumbered student walks through the creaking halls, the weight of despair fell to his shoulders quickly when his eyes ran across the amount of debt towards his student loans. In school, children are told to work hard to have good grades to prepare for the big push off to their college career, but most kids don’t like the idea of school so why would they want to continue drinking the gagging medicine that makes their lives so miserable?
The gagging medicine that makes student’s lives miserable is one of the keys to the American dream, but some don’t see the American dream worth their time in the time being before achieving the dream. Because of how some students have set their minds of their American dream, it has set their lives to falling. When a child is young he/she will follow the footsteps of their elders whether it be their family or a stranger it doesn’t matter because all that child wants to do is to be like them.
This doesn’t apply to just children, but also applies to teenagers and adults. Everybody learns from their peers around them and without realizing it, he/she will start to act like the people they hang around. This most reflects off of what happens in the child’s home. Steve Jobs is an excellent example. “My mother had never graduated from college and my father had never graduated from high school” (Jobs). His parents have already set him an example of what to do when he gets older.
Some kids may look at it as ok and that’s what they want to do when they reach that point or others see it as a poor decision because they see how it has affected their parents lives so they want to try to achieve the goal their parents never reached. However, Steve Job’s parents did try helping him because they wanted to see him succeed to what they never did, but it’s hard to achieve something that the teacher doesn’t even know him/ herself. “Seventeen years later I did go to college… I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life” (Jobs). Although Job’s parents tried helping him succeed to go to college they couldn’t teach him how to solve problems. In order for him to learn how to solve problems he has to choose if he wants to. Because so many college students don’t know what they want to do with their lives, they end up running into the same cycle, going back and forth, up and down. College students go into debt and have to pay off student loans and they have to work to their highest potential to work it off.
Some students don’t even try going to college because of the amount of debt they know they’ll go into. A New York’s Time article written by Eduardo Porter explains the experience of college students dropping out before graduation and the price they pay for letting go of their future. A student comments in his article about what was his push off to decide whether he was going to college or not, “I probably wouldn’t have gone to college full time if I hadn’t received a Pell grant and financial aid from New York state to defray cost” (Porter).
So many people don’t achieve the American dream because they feel like they can’t and their way of solving it is to not deal with it, so then they let go of their anxiety, but in the wrong way. Those who drop out of college and get a job at a fast foods restaurant are not going to be pay much, but their income is just enough to get by. Because college students have dropped out of college they now have to lift the heavy bars, named debt, on their shoulders that are slowly getting more and more heavier.
Even though these students may have a job supporting their lives in some way, doesn’t mean they are the happiest. Debt isn’t the only reason why students drop out of college because a lot of students come out of high school not properly taught how to study. Daniel Willingham wrote an article about students dropping out of college not only because of debt, but because of poor studying and poor time management for their homework. This is causing those college students to struggling and in the end results start dropping out of college.
Willingham gave a good example of how students have learned how to study and how it doesn’t help them remember the concepts, “When preparing for an exam, students reread their highlighted text books and their lecture notes, but rereading doesn’t make information stick because it’s so easy to repeat something mindlessly. ” Maybe for some students this might work, but some teachers have come into the habit of teaching their students in the same way instead of a variety of ways. Not all students learn the same way as other; scientist have discovered.
Since students haven’t learned to study in the way that works for them they either struggle to learn and continue to fight with it or they give up all in all. With the results of students dropping out, people have been putting their heads together to find a solution to the problem stopping other to achieve the American Dream. There about 42 million college students who are in debt from college according to New York Fred. In the article named, Mario Gabelli Gives Solution to Student Debt and was written by Holly LaFon.
In her article she shows some people can’t afford very much and that is how they grew up. She talks about how some people grew up in a very low financial family so to go to college and have the money for it is very hard. ” … Profit schools and community colleges fared poorly in the job market, tended to borrow less, tended to come from lower-income families and were less likely to complete their program” (LaFon). Without going into college you are usually a below average class person.
They make less money and in today’s world, it’s a little bit harder to not go to college and get a decent job. For those who are poor it is very hard for them to achieve the American dream to support a family, own your own house, and being able to work and earn all of for sweet reward that you feel after a long time of working and then accomplishment. So now they have come up with a program to help students with money to go to college for those who cannot afford it. Gabelli gave the idea of letting borrowers tax deduction.
They would only be allowed to use a certain amount of money to pay for your college loans. Then there would be a due date of the amount of money that was borrowed. The program gives those that struggle financially a head start to start their adulating lives. This program would be the program that helps that person who is 30 and works at a fast food restaurant because they don’t have any college education to get a better job. “The repayment withholdings will be in place until the loan is paid off (but will be put on hold if borrower’s pay falls below the threshold)” (LaFon).
With the help of this program, it would kick start those who are trying to achieve the hard working American dream that can be tricky some times. Debt is one of the number one keys of why so many college students drop out, but there are some other key elements that can play a big part in why some kids don’t want to go to college or even to continue on with school that they dread when taking in all the gagging medicine. Like Steven Jobs story he didn’t want to go to college at first because he didn’t see any point of going because he felt it was a waist of his time wasn’t what he wanted to do.
Because of his parents non successful achievements to graduate college and high school, Jobs felt there was no need for him to go to college. A child wants to be like everybody else, but if they only learn one way growing up they will not see another way because their brain has been trained to be closed minded. Another key element was studying and time consuming. Students haven’t been properly taught how to study for a hard exam so when they come into college they have more homework and don’t know how to have good time management when they have three essays to write and two test to study for.
Students have learned to give up when something hard comes up that they think they can’t achieve so they go to the next best thing and find a job that they think will pay the best. More and more people aren’t challenging themselves to reach that goalie. They don’t want to keep dogging the finances in their ways or other hard obstacles so they give up half way through. Because of how some students have set their minds of their American dream, it has set their lives to falling.
