Essay Sample on How to Start College Right: Set the Course for Your Future

It is always important that incoming students in colleges understand the primary goal to be being enrolled in a higher education’s institution. Colleges present an eye-opener to the student's future, and therefore their focus needs to be aligned to that account from the first day that they set foot in the college compound. Colleges act as the stepping stone to which students get to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills that will empower their life after school and societal development. Colleges present the idea of a great understanding of the societal variations in relation to the methods, concepts, and data. Student’s nature of understanding their environment and how they relate with one another in the workplace and within the general society is all bestowed in the colleges, and therefore the basic understanding of the importance of the college setting is very vital in this aspect. The general discussion on how colleges present students with this environment in cultivating their relationships, and the general impact it has on the society will carry on as the core concept of this essay report.

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College education presents the opportunity for students to approach their future life halfheartedly. Although colleges should prepare students for making a living, they ought to address far more than just that. College education presents the student with an opportunity for learning, but also it greatly influences the development of meaningful relationships. Colleges provide a more meaningful source of interaction and character building because it is through college that students get to interact with their peers of a different race, ethnicity, religion, and also of different socio-economic. For college students, every learning process and experience set as pieces to their identity puzzle (Corredor, Álvarez-Rivadulla, and Maldonado-Carreño, 1668). It takes the contribution of every stakeholder in relation to college education from the government giving out loans to the administrators set up a profound environment where students can have an opportunity to learn and also develop their professional careers.

Although students are at the forefront of securing a chance at their chosen higher education institution, parents and guardians take up the biggest responsibility by setting up finances for college fees. Colleges in America are very expensive, and the finances that go to it are an asset that parents ought to address for their children to realize their full potentials in their future life (Guevara-Cruz, 67). A chance to diversity assures great success in life, and this is a chance that colleges often offer for students, and therefore securing college education is very important for students because of the exchange of cultural diversity breeds excellence in every aspect and therefore ensuring great success for students. Socializing, as a symbol of college life, is a perception that provides students with the chance to interact and explore their individual’s life and experiences with their peers. Colleges are the only place that most students realize themselves, and it also provides them with the chance to explore various experiences that nurtures their personalities.

Everyone ideally knows how much college education is expensive and how it has a gross impact on the middle-class economy in the United States. Dr. Zaloom, an anthropologist aggress to that assertion as she points out much college education has an economic effect on the middle class and how the cultural perception of this fact is important to explore. On average, the tuition for colleges is around $50,000, and for most students, they ought to settle this through loans and even financial aids; schools, however, expect parents to dig into their bank accounts and make a contribution to it all the same. Zaloom presents the financial and cultural impact of college education on the middle-class economy in the United States (Zaloom, 7). Paying for College education has, however, taken a toll in most families, and this has been in ways less appreciated and more profound than in relation to financial conveys of cost. Paying for college education in middle-class America has basically changed the various experiences of the middle class in America.

Throughout history, the middle class has always had to labor in accessing education for their children, and it is only in recent times that the struggle to pay for the same education, which poses a threat to the family solvency and casting the children in taking part in various risky investments. It is a risk that has since changed the nature of a family as it has altered cultural relationships that exists between children and their parents and thus forcing an adjustment in their relationships with one another. College fees are not only the hardship that most families are facing but rather, and it is taking an even much bigger take on the cultural presentation of families and their relationships. Zaloom asserts that most families, therefore, avoids agreeing to discuss such personal finances, and most parents often decline to take on a discussion that targets family budgets with their kids until they seem to have no alternative to the matter.

To better analyze and take on the finding from Dr. Zaloom, I embarked on undertaking interviews with various middle-class families whom I had an understanding of the matter. It was a research practice that would help in the gathering of relevant information at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the financial crisis it has presented. I managed two formal interviews involving the parents and college students (Zaloom, Caitlin, 240). The major findings to this research were all pegged at the central concern for parents in the middle class, where the need to help settle college fees was not merely a financial challenge but rather an obligation of a moral degree. The budgetary sacrifices are all expected and compelled.

The results of the interviews indeed expressed how much paying for college education was a perpetual conflict between financial reality and moral duty. Most families expressed how much it was hard to follow through the steps that the government had set up, like saving up when the children are young. The realization to this account was that, when experts instruct families to economize through college education, they only force these families into a set of moral traps. The first trap is the parents are faced with a difficult state of either spending on their basic needs or saving up for college tuition. Most parents take up the choice of saving up for college at the expense of their childhood development, which greatly impacts their relationship and understanding of society as a young child is expected. The general conclusion to this study was that the expensive nature of college education forces most parents in the middle class to take on social speculation where parents ought to wager finances today for their children's education will win them a place in the middle-class economy tomorrow.

It is this situation that as parents engage in savings, common crises that are there in the society like health emergencies, family breakups, loss of jobs, therefore, catches ups and this disrupts the cultural norm that should be embraced in these societies. At a time like now, when the society is facing economic hardships due to COVID-19, most of the middle-class families are up to a struggle financially because most of their funds are vested in college education, and job guarantees are not much of a reflection to their hopes.

Works Cited

Zaloom, Caitlin. "How will we pay? Projective fictions and regimes of foresight in US college finance." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8.1-2 (2018): 239-251.

Zaloom, Caitlin. Indebted: How families make college work at any cost. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Corredor, J., M. J. Álvarez-Rivadulla, and C. Maldonado-Carreño. "Goodwill hunting: social integration of students receiving forgivable loans for college education in contexts of high inequality." Studies in Higher Education 45.8 (2020): 1664-1678.

Guevara-Cruz, Griselda. "The Importance of College-Going Culture for Latinos prior to High School." Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy 30 (2018): 63-72.