It is hard to imagine an education system that tells students that they don’t need to go to college after graduating. It is emphasized from the start the importance of attending college after high school to receive higher education. Even so, both high school students and their parents are wondering if college is even worth the time, money, and effort of attending. Students are finding themselves in immense debt after finishing their years of education and ending up with almost nothing to show for it. Though today it may seem like a college degree is a requirement in order to be successful, more and more people are finding that the cost of college cannot compare to the possibilities that could be found by considering different paths for their future.

In 2011, Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal, offered to pay each of the 24 winners for a new fellowship of $100,000 to not go to college in favor of developing business ideas instead (Wieder). Thiel believes that the traditional college environment does not involve ideas in students that could be thought of elsewhere, tackling the world. These ideas are the ones that could be used successfully to lead new excursions that would impact society and develop new companies and jobs for the future. The traditional college environment just does not provide opportunities to develop these ideas quickly. To add to this, college costs are rising, and “students today are taking on more debt and recently tightened bankruptcy laws make it more difficult to shake that debt” (Wieder) Factors like this complicate the decision to pursue a college degree even further. According to a 2011 report on the national survey of 2,142 adults ages 18 and older, 57% of Americans agree that colleges fail to give students good value for the money they have spent to attend and 75% of Americans say college is too expensive to afford (Pew).

When more than half of the adult population thinks attending college or a university is too expensive and not worth the investment, then there is a problem. There should be other options presented to students in high school that will encourage them to discover a future that does not require going to college. Supporting this claim is data from a think tank that addressed the issue of new entry-level wages for men and women leaving college. Surprisingly, though there is an emphasis on going to college in our society, college graduates now are earning less than they did ten years ago (Shierholz). Even now, “with unemployment expected to remain above 8% well into 2015, it will likely be many years before young college graduates- or any workers - see substantial wage growth” (Shierholz).

People don’t necessarily need to attend an institution of higher learning to learn how to accurately judge situations and act accordingly. Anyone can become an agent of change, change that is capable of producing meaningful advances in the world. A perfect example of this is the great minds of Silicon Valley who have made such major advances in the world of technology beyond a college education, this proves that a piece of paper with an official stamp can be seen as useless. People should not feel as if they need a degree to justify and demonstrate that they know how to think and act critically, this is an invaluable skill that can be learned outside of higher academia.