Why Do People Drop-out from College?
Today, we shall discuss about why do people especially youths drop out of college, using my personal experience as an illustration. A year and a half ago, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life. I started to drop out of college as a business finance major to pursue my dream of working in the film industry. The past year and a half, I’ve worked on three feature films, countless commercials, student films, start a YouTube page. I’ve gone to travel with work and most recently, I’ve gone into the International cinematographer’s guild and I feel that I’m finally at a point where I’m far enough away from my decision to drop out of college, that I can talk about why I did it whether or not is the right choice for me.
I started to apply to colleges when I was 17, I didn’t know what I wanted to do I wasn’t one of those kids who had figured out what they wanted to do when they were 13 and perfectly executed their plan throughout high school. You know when I was 13, I was still excited when my mom put a juice box in my lunch, you know I was still having fun back then but then you turn 17 and it feels like it’s 17, it’s your responsibility to figure out what you want to do with your life.
Even though you’re only 17 years old, so I went to college you know they really know what to expect. I knew it wasn’t going to be like a movie, I wasn’t going to USC, I wasn’t going to a party school, I was going to a local California State to get an education for the first years of college, the general modeling speed just get through. Your GES just show up, sit down, take these classes and I remember the first couple of GES I took, I would always sit in the back of the class and I would look down on the lecture, I was amazed that for a lot of the time nobody was paying attention.
It seems like a quarter of the kids are on Facebook, the other kids are shopping online, you know a quarter of us are asleep than the other quarter like doesn’t even show up to class. I was kind of amazed, I thought I was going to be the only one didn’t want to be here. Thought I was going to be the only one who was bored by these subjects I was being taught. I’ve been told at many times, the point of GES is to make you a well-rounded student but I didn’t really understand that especially when I live for the past four years of my life, I’ve been seeing in high school taking pretty much these same classes just with a different workload.
I always felt that if we were to restructure GES, you know instead of having these students take these classes that they’ve already taken several times before and teach them real life skills, it might be useful. For instance, seems in the past couple years, every college class that graduates has fewer jobs and higher death. So why don’t we start teaching college students about debt, while we start teasing them about credit and how bad credit score can haunt you forever or teach them a mortgage or teaching them about retirement plans.
I feel like oftentimes, to focus, I’m trying to take students and push them through the system and hand them a degree and not focus enough on giving them the skills to be successful in life. I quickly realized and by quickly, I mean it took me two and a half years of going to college to figure out that College was preparing me for a life that I didn’t want to live. A life of a nine-to-five job, with a water cool in the corner and a cubicle with my name on it. A place where I count down the days until casual Friday. To me, that’s not living at all so I decided to drop out and just because I dropped out doesn’t mean my education stopped.
These days, I spend more time on college campuses than I ever did when I was going for a degree and there’s so many amazing resources online like TED, Linda and creative mornings, you can learn from if you want to. Sit down, and put in the time, one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that if I actually care, if I actually have passion about something I’m breeding or something I’m studying, it’s so much easier to learn it. It’s not teaching us barging just for tests or just to get through this class, like if I actually care about the information it’s so much easier to retain.
One of the major questions I asked when I told people I was dropping out of college was why don’t you just finish your degree and all. MIT is a pretty good school. The question is more than halfway through college, finishing up my degree would have not been that big of a challenge, but I know myself and I know that on the route that I’m taking with my life there’s going to be days when it’s hard, it was going to be days when I wish I had a consistent paycheck. I kind of wish I had that 9 to 5 job and I know that if I have a degree sitting in my back pocket it’s going to be so hard to not execute on it.
It’s going to be so hard when I’m trying something new and I’m failing, it’s not just to go to the comfortable ground to keep on trying, to keep on failing and to keep pushing forward and that’s what I’m trying to do. If you’re watching this, trying to figure out if you should drop out of college, that’s something I can’t tell you that some of your friends can’t tell you. Some of your teachers can tell you and there’s something your parents can tell you because the decision, like that, has the potential to carry major consequences.
That can be so bad a consequence that can be so good. What I can tell you is that, I believe I made the right decision, I believe that I made the right decision to drop out of school to stop postponing my happiness and start pursuing my dream. I can tell you that I’m so much happier than I ever was when I was going to college and I figured out that I don’t have to be textbook successful. I don’t have to have that fat salary, a beautiful house and the nice car, my happiness is all that really matters. Feel free to air your view and opinions about dropping out from college. While you do that, check this article on why do people need education.
