Obtaining vs. Maintaining Higher Education

In a short-term sense, higher education is now more accessible than it ever has been before with the increasing accessibility of financial aid and opportunities to attend community colleges before transferring to more expensive and often more academically rigorous four-year schools.  But in a long-term sense, higher education may be becoming less accessible, because students’ loans and grants aren’t always enough to reasonably assist them in covering the rising tuition and supply costs they face.  Also, it often takes years to pay back student loans once one graduates and begins working full time.  A lot of people just don’t think that getting a higher education is worth it if they need to go this deeply into the financial hole to do so, especially in our present economy where many college graduates have a difficult time finding employment.  It seems like today, a higher education is more accessible to obtain but less accessible to maintain.

Years ago, the students who had a passion for learning were the ones who attended college (yes, they usually came from families of good means, but this also occurred during a time when achieving a higher education post- high school wasn’t expected of most.)  However, during this time, people could find decent, well-paying jobs that only required them to have a high school diploma.  But, we’ve gone through some drastic societal changes since then, and this is no longer the case.  But I’m starting to digress…    

Even there are many opportunities to enter into an institution of higher learning; many find themselves unable to complete their higher education, mostly either for monetary reasons or because they were unprepared to work at the level expected.  This is a big problem in our society where the majority of students feel as though they are expected to, or should go to college in order to find a job with a salary they can reasonably live and raise a family on.  I know that money is still a glaring issue, and there aren’t any cure-all solutions that I can think of to suggest.  However, to help fix this, our high schools need to challenge students more and the students need to rise to the challenge; maybe this would help to better prepare students to achieve long-term success in a higher education setting.  The primary point I wanted to make is even though we have ways of making a higher education more obtainable to students, we should be more concerned with making it more maintainable, and the best and fairest way I can think of to do this is by offering students the best education possible at the primary and secondary levels with the hope that they strive to succeed at these levels which prepare them for a future in higher education.