Four months from now, Westside seniors will walk out of this building for the very last time. Many will spend their summers either on one last hoorah, or saving up for the start of the rest of their lives. For most, this new journey is college.
Myself included, there’s a growing population of people who are really scratching their heads at the idea of college. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel puts education on the same level as the housing market and the dot-com era by calling it a “bubble.” In a 2011 TechCrunch article Thiel defines a bubble “…when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States.”
Thiel gained further notoriety after paying people to drop out of college to start their own business.
Educator, Sir Ken Robinson, calls college out on a similar argument. “In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide, will be graduating from education than since the beginning of history. Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything.” In his, now infamous, TED Talk, Robinson also argues jobs which once required a bachelors degree are now requiring a masters, and it will continue to inflate in such a way.
I speak more towards people in computers and the arts. Some fancy art school won’t put your pieces in The Louvre. You don’t need a Stanford diploma to get work in Silicon Valley. We’ve gotten to the point where a college degree guarantees you close to nothing, other than a piece of paper. The debt which comes with a degree isn’t something to scoff at either. 

This idea of skipping college is a hard concept for most Westside students. Since I came into the district in 2nd grade, college has been everywhere. Kids talked about big universities, teachers asked where you wanted to go when you grew up. Is it a bad thing? Absolutely not. However, kids should take a bit of time to really think about what their future is going to look like. College is merely an option, as is skipping it.