College: To Go or Not To Go?

Have you ever wondered whether or not to attend college? Attending college is pushed on a students from a young age. Social media, television, and movies influence wanting to attend college as well. When you see a movie that you really like that is filmed at a college setting (Pitch Perfect for example) it gets you more interested in college. After watching that movie you might start researching colleges and programs they provide. The same is true with social media.  If several famous people post about attending the same college their young fans may look into the colleges that they are attending. This theory can also work the other way around, many extremely successful people either did not attend college or dropped out of college. For example Steve Jobs (the founder of Apple) and Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) were college dropouts.

I decided to make an anonymous poll for students of LCPS to see whether or not they wanted to attend college, the responses were interesting with many similarities. The majority of students wanted to attend college.  One of the most common reasons was “to get a good job.” That is a pretty understandable response since a lot of jobs require a college degree. Another popular response was to “further my education.” Going to college is not only a pathway to a career, but can help expand your thinking process and knowledge.

Students that said they did not want to attend college for a variety of reasons including wanting to join the military. Another response was “there are other forms of education I want to pursue.” You can participate in internships and be an apprentice after high schools to build job experience. A popular response was also “It never interested me,” which is fine since there are jobs that don’t require a college degree and are stable enough to support yourself

Over all, the final numbers indicated thatt 88% of LCPS students who responded to the poll want to attend college and 12% of students were not interested in/did not want to attend college.