Ready or Not

When growing up it seems like high school will never come, and graduation feels like a dream. When I was younger I assumed I was going to go to college but it felt like it was something that you only hear about but never actually experience and childhood would last forever, but life doesn’t work that way. When people ask me as a kid “Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?” and my answer was often that I would be a nurse, a teacher, a chef, a librarian, or anything I could think of to answer, but I didn’t really know.

Going to college is something that everyone has to think about whether they want to go or not, but how old should someone be when making these decisions? The prefrontal cortex in the human brain doesn’t fully develop until it’s 25 years old. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for regulating emotions, thoughts, and making decisions. So why are students expected to make these financial and life-altering decisions at 18 years old or younger? When the stress of it all gets mentioned to adults, hearing things like “It’s just starting to get stressful, that doesn’t change, it will only get worse now” can make the stress worse. With the pressures of everything combined with school, college preparations, sports, extracurriculars, jobs, etc, preparing for college can be very overwhelming with students trying to decide what they want to do for their whole life. Sure students have the option to change their mind in the future, but how much time and money gets spent on pursuing a career path before it is realized that it might not be the best choice for them. Yes, college decisions are something that need to happen at some point, to go or not, what major, what degree etc, and I am not saying that the age for college should get pushed back, but if being 18 years old is a little young to be making these decisions then what would happen if these decisions were made by 10-12 year olds.

I know that when I was in elementary school vs. middle school vs. high school and what I wanted to do then and now are all completely different careers with very different requirements. At those points in my life I was a different person with a different understanding of the world, so if I had started planning a career I would have stuck to it and not let myself change what I wanted to do even if I hated it because my confidence and willingness to speak for myself had not developed yet. I also know a lot of family members and friends who went or are going to college with no idea of what they wanted to do and they ended up spending a lot of money for an education that they didn’t really need. Some other people that I know have mentioned that they went or are planning to go to college because that is what they thought/think is expected of them even though they aren’t sure what they want to do and they spend a lot of money for classes they don’t need or use. I will say there are probably some students who go to college not knowing what to do but figure it out halfway through and change their classes to reach that goal, but that is not always the case and still potentially causes money having been spent on classes that ultimately were not needed.

I think that students being told some things about college to emotionally prepare them and get them thinking about careers or even just letting them know the option exists is a great way to ease into getting ready for college, but not every student will go, so I feel that students should know that college isn’t the only option for them to get ahead in life. Stressing students out at a young age, talking and getting ready for college will make the feeling of being expected to go to college worse for them after they graduate. It is already a difficult decision and preparation for 14-18-year-old students to get ready for college and adulthood, when the prefrontal cortex isn’t even fully developed, so why push that stress and anxiety onto students whose parts of their brains are even less developed?

“NYC Library reading room” by MichaelKuhn_pics is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

“The Joys Of Homework” by Cayusa is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.