“You can be anything you want to be when you grow up,” we declare to children as they enter kindergarten.
What we forget to mention is you can be anything you want to be as long as you spend at least four years at an institution of higher learning competing with those around you in terms of who is the most stressed, who can consume the most caffeine in a 24-hour period and who attends the most prestigious of universities.
If you don’t go to college, many teachers would say, you will end up without money and depressed.
To the wide-eyed youngster we convey the message that they can be an astronaut, but that’ll be four years in physics classrooms to start. Or they could be a princess, but they can’t be a successful one without (at least) a bachelor’s degree in How To Wear a Crown.
There’s only one route to success: elementary school, middle school, high school, college — wait, and don’t forget graduate school. Don’t think you’re done being rejected from universities after high school. You get to go through the pain all over again.
If you’re not on the way to putting a Dr. in front of your name and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a piece of paper — what’s the point?
It isn’t until after nearly two decades in school that you are fully capable of being a living, breathing, productive, decent human being. Now you have to make those big bucks, and as we all know, money makes you happier than anything else in life.
Hold up, you’re still not done. Cheers to the next 30 years of paying off student loans.
