Sc300 Unit 2 Personal Statement

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The year was 2014. I was a senior in high school, already I had committed to go to Colorado Mesa University, I had a track scholarship and I was going to major in Geology, ultimately wanting to go into petroleum engineering. The only thing was, I didn’t want to. I did not want to go be a geologist, I wanted to travel, to see the world! As cliché as it may have been, I dropped out, I worked for a period of time and sent myself on a trip to Europe to “find myself”. Arriving back home after a few months in various countries, I thought that I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Art, I was going to become an art teacher and I enrolled at CU Boulder, ready to take the world. Then it hit me, a month before I was due to start classes I realized, artists …show more content…
This want, a human drive for security and sustainability has been around for a long as the human race has lived on this planet, although the type of security/ sustainability has changed over time, the same concept remains. In the past, there have been many different ways to obtain this financially secure future, some of these being: working in the trades, working your way up a company ladder, and obtaining a college degree to start a career. So is obtaining a higher education still one of the best ways to secure a future, or has the rising costs outpriced its worth? Would it be more preferable to just join the workforce immediately and risk the chance of not being able to break the barrier of “higher education” in businesses? In this essay I will discuss the public views on these topics, as well the financial benefits and disadvantages of both of these options, thus giving the reader the information to conclude if obtaining a degree is a necessity in today’s …show more content…
In our current economic situation almost everyone has to worry about money, whether that is for: groceries, the mortgage, rent, or in our scenario, schooling. With the cost of getting a higher education being so high today will it pay out in the long run? You don’t want to waste four years going to a school that will set you back farther than you want. Possibly even get a degree that will not help you secure yourself a stable financial future. In an article titled, The Rising Cost of Not Going to College by the Pew research center, one of the statistics it shows talks about how most college graduates, who are working full time, earn about $17,500 more per year than other participants who only have a high school diploma. This increase in salary would be largely beneficial to anyone, but does this increase come around to all college graduates? Many schools that you can attend may place you in far more debt than you can handle. Even possibly bringing your actual income after you make your payments on your student loans for that month, less than what a high school graduate would make. J. Selingo has a great example of this in his book, College Unbound. He compares debts accrued by graduates from Princeton University versus graduates from Ohio Northern University. On average, student loan debts were, $5,225 for

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