Vigenst
This is really a question worth a deep discussion that why people attend college. And this is also a question confusing me for many years. Once I wrote it down in my diary about why people want to attend college as “people want to improve themselves, want get a well-paid and decent job”. But when I looked the page again, I think my answer is too simple and naïve, also behind the times.
At first, I would like to introduce the situations in Chinese college, because I’m a Chinese and once studied in a Chinese college. As for my class, there are in all about 40 students coming from different provinces. According to my rough estimation, 60% percent of students in my class played computer games for at least 6 hours per day. Some students even played online games all day and night. They skipped most classes and stayed in dorm playing online games. They continued this kind of life for 4 years. But when they have to confront the graduation, hunt a job or take the post-graduate entrance exam, most of them felt great panic because they almost learned nothing in college and therefore have less competitiveness.
But some students still hold optimistic opinions for the future, of course a few of them has a strong family background to hunt a decent job or succeed family business. However, there are some people feel little panic although they neither have a strong background nor a family business to succeed.
However, just contrary to these students, some top students worked very hard from the first beginning of college. They learn foreign language every day, they give their best shot to everything, they are rewarded many scholarship and reputations, they passed all the exam with high scores and graduate magma cum laude. And after graduation, they entered into famous firms or post-graduate schools.
The above case shows quite different state. Which one do you prefer? I’m not distracting the topic to tell you my story, just the reverse I remind these students especially freshmen of being cautious about the college life. Now we back to the topic that why people attend college.
I want to simply classify college students into four groups. And I will give my explanation one by one.
Group 1: follow type. These students don’t have a clear understanding about college. They go to college because many people go. They just follow the majority. I know it’s very difficult for a student who just graduated from junior high school to have a comprehensive understanding about job market, society and life. Especially in China, many students don’t have conscious of career path. They often can’t think independently and make their decisions. They make decisions largely relying on their parents and teachers. But their parents and teachers can’t give them proper advise but common advise that how to follow the step of precedent.
Group 2: vanity type. These students don’t really want to go to college, but college is something cool for them, with pretty girl and colorful events. This situation is more serious in developing countries especially some regions where very few people owe a college certificate. People with a college degree are usually considered as more decent and high qualified.
Group 3: certificate-aiming type. Those students just want to obtain a college degree other than the corresponding knowledge and skills. They often skip the class holding excuse that the teachers are too stupid and the curriculums are totally useless and boring. But when those students are facing graduation or hunting a job, they find they’re totally wrong. And after they have worked in a company for several months, they start regretting for wasting time in college and learn nothing but online games. They frequently change their job but most of them will never be promoted because they don’t have the capability to deal with the real problems.
Group 4: learning type. This is the last type I want to show and this is what a college student should look like. Their goals are to learn and experience more, to develop yourself, and to forge real ability to solve problems and create value for company and society and even create something unprecedented for this world. And their goals are also to change themselves, to break the shackles of fate, they devote several times efforts than others. Those people demonstrate the spirit of college.
The above four types of college students shows us four different intention to go to college. I think most people tend to support the last type and that’s what we want the current college students to be. Everyone in the college should have the awareness of what you are doing in college and should not kill time over and over in college.