By: AVA WOFFORD
Staff Writer
High School. You’re probably hanging out with your friends on a daily basis, enjoying extracurriculars, and for the most part, are still relying on your parents. You don’t have a care in the world, and the things you are worried about are trivial and you’ll forget about in a month. Life’s great as a teenager! In your Junior year, however, you get ready to start applying for your dream colleges when all of a sudden you take a look at your grades and have to come to the conclusion that you probably won’t be getting into that school you’ve been dreaming of for years. The enjoyment you had as a teen has now led to you giving up hope whether it be in a college, profession, or just education in general, but why? Why is it that in High School there are times when you must sacrifice having a good experience or being able to do what you want with your future?
We all know that what you do in High School is what prepares you for college, but what’s the point if you can’t even get into college? When colleges are going through applications they look at a multitude of factors such as grades, extracurriculars, essays, and community service. Schools have an expectation when it comes to grades. Due to this most colleges are pretty competitive and not having a high GPA can mess you up in the long run. However, this is where there tends to be an issue. Getting good grades is hard. The fact of the matter is, students have good and bad subjects. While some might be good at English, others might be bad at English. It all depends. Grades also depend on time. Most of your grade stems from homework, however, most teens just don’t have the time for homework. Many teenagers have jobs and sports after school and when they finally get back home they have other responsibilities like family. Getting good grades can also be hard to get because you must sacrifice fun. When making sure you do well in school you’ll have to turn down friends and family, even if you really want to hang out with them. This tends to take away the fun experience of High School and leave teenagers feeling alone and might make them turn away from college altogether. That brings us back to the original question at hand: should High School really count towards college? Teenagers are still kids. Kids want to have fun and experience everything. If you asked a kid right now what they wanted to do they probably wouldn’t start talking about college and their whole life plan to get there, so why do we make teenagers do this. High School doesn’t prepare teens for college. High School tells kids they need to think of a plan without telling kids how to do that or how to reach their goals. Today an estimated 65% of working American adults don’t have a college degree and the number is only growing. If this continues we won’t have the workforce we need to continue as a country. So what can we do? We can first start by helping students understand what they need to do and how they can plan. We can also understand students more and see why they might have a bad grade in a class and what they can do to fix it. We can’t rely on teachers to make sure each and every student gets a good grade, instead, the administration needs to step up and start talking to kids and making plans about what they can do. Third, we need to make it easier to get into college. Grades should not be as important as they are when it comes to college. I agree they shouldn’t be failing every class, however, it should still be easier. Did you know that in Europe college is free? That can also happen in America. We spend trillions of dollars on a military that hasn’t done anything in years and it should stay that way. If we took some money from the military, college in America would be free. It is already hard enough to get into college, so why make it impossible to pay for it. We are constantly being warned about the professional shortage, but then why do they continue to make it nearly impossible for students to get an education? High School is a stepping stone, but it shouldn’t decide what you do with the rest of your life.
