There are a million reasons and even more why most of us don’t want to go to college. The most annoying, or perhaps most interesting, is that you spend four to six years to receive a thick paper bearing your name and school stamp. Funny, isn’t it? All those years are summed up on a piece of paper and that is all.
The one that baffles me most is that most of what is learnt is not even used in the real world. It is just as simple as when you are done with college, you will still have to start learning the basics of living in the real world afresh.
The question is what then is going to college for when you don’t need it to be successful?
To make it more interesting, a lot of successful people in the world today claim to not have a college education or even just a little college experience at most. This makes one strongly contemplate if going to college is worth the call.
In this side of the world and maybe many other parts of the World, your entry to college is the passport to complete or near complete autonomy in life.
It is a very beautiful thing for us here to go University because you will have at least a final say on most issues affecting your life. If not for any other reason, this is a reason strong enough for us to run to college. Not only this, but we are also made to believe that going to university makes you successful automatically. So seeing people who go to college and yet are not successful as we expect makes us ask the question, why go to college when success is not guaranteed again? It becomes worse when you see people with no university experience, yet successful. This is the first place we got it all mixed up.
Education does not equal success. College won’t teach you to be successful.
This may have been the trend in centuries before now. Maybe in the 19th and early 20th century but not now in the 21st century, what works is Personal Development. This is actually what worked in those centuries but it wasn’t recognized because it was unconscious.
Going to college back then made them work on themselves and task themselves to be better so that when they left college they were almost successful. Unlike now, education then was tailored to adapt to changes in society and foster personal development. Now, changes in the society are so steep that restructuring the educational system can’t effectively meet up with the pace of societal development.
What we do in college now is running the rat race of attaining First-Class by all means, crooked and straight. The race to get the best-stamped paper has drained the whole essence of college. We aren’t in any way fulfilling the reason college was established. The society itself has contributed to this brouhaha and it only recognizes the successful ones no matter what way they achieved it.
The basic role of college can be surmised in the fact that college is a necessary preparatory ground for independent and successful living. The whole point of going to college is to prepare you for the life ahead. It helps you build a foundation on which you can build your life on.
College achieves this by giving you a course (or the other way round) to focus on and also by pushing you to try to be the best in that field. Unconsciously, you are stretching yourselves and mental muscles to be able to withstand anything. But you won’t know if all you do is to mindlessly attend college. You would still have to build the foundation that you are trying to build in college in real life, but by trial and error if you don’t attend college.
If you attend college, your foundation is built well because you are supervised and helped. In the real world, to be successful in doing something, you need tutelage. In that same way, college is to help give you that for a living.
I found out that going to college helps a student do six basic things regardless of whatever course he or she is studying. These things include:
1. How to identify problems
2. How to analyse it
3. How to collect data to proffer solution
4. How to synthesize date to proffer solution
5. How to apply the solution
6. Monitoring, feedback and control
Life in College is a simulation of the real-life experience. It is like you are test running how you are going to live your life. Your chances of better living could be increased if you are able to achieve the true aim of going to college.
Success in life is a personal thing. You have to decide to be successful and also work towards it. So, going to college is not just to read books but to develop all aspects of your life. You have the opportunity to minimize mistakes on your way to success if you attend college and make good use of that time of life.
Those who were successful and yet never attended college are in the best position to tell what advantage going to college gives you over them. Tyler Perry, in his 2011 Commencement Speech at Tuskegee University, said that going to college gives you an edge to succeed over others who don’t, by increasing the pace at which you will achieve success.
I intentionally wrote this piece not to answer the question but to make you rephrase the question of “why should I go to college” to “if I am going to college what will I do with those years?”
In a subsequent piece, I will be talking about how you can make effective use of your years in college.
I hope you now have an idea what the true essence of college is- that college is to prepare you, refine you and give you a better chance of achieving success in your chosen field. It is up to you to go to college and make the best decision of life by going with a mission of not only academic excellence but personal development! Let college prepare you for successful living!
See you at the top!
Teens Meet Outreach 
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