College fits K-12 like the unnecessary spinoff sequel to everyone’s favorite afterschool special. The few that like it can’t quite say why, and those that don’t have all the right reasons to withhold praise. But at every turn, students are being bombarded by demands that they go to college, that through attending university they shall achieve “success” (the details of which are never quite specified), and that despite the horror stories of debt that follow up anyone’s degrees, their only option after their senior year is the office building for their local institute of higher education.
	What this is, is a demand; not only that, it’s a threat. Questions are met with exaggerated bewilderment: “Your future is at stake – how could you think to spend your life the way you want? Don’t you know that high school graduates can’t get jobs? Or that even with a college degree you’ll still struggle to find a job?” And in that same breath: “Don’t you know that college graduates make millions more?” By no fault of their own, soft-minded students are pushed into more institutional cages, and – worse still – are made to pay for it with the most precious years of their lives.
	Let’s take a look at the price of college. Forget the stress it puts on the mind from all the unnecessary bits and pieces of studies (though that is a serious issues; I vividly remember complaints from my undergraduate friends who explained that they had to take classes they didn’t care a bit for), take a look at it from the perspective of a high school graduate afflicted with tunnel vision. Having been told all his life that he needs to go to college to succeed, he realizes the only way he can go to the college (that his government-appointed advisors told him to go to) is to take a loan. The idea repulses him, but worse still is the looks he gets when he says he can’t afford it. But, his advisor says, Big Daddy Gov’t is here to help you out – and with a student loan, so seemingly inoffensive and safe, does he make his way, waist deep, into the river of debt. And that’s only the first year.