The cost for college education has steadily increased over the years, and average family incomes are not keeping up. During the second half of the twentieth century, a good college education became available to members of the middle class for the first time due to the advent of federal student loan and grant programs. However, as the asking price of college education has grown by leaps and bounds, more and more young people are finding themselves in an enormous amount of debt. In the twenty first century, many people are asking themselves whether the cost of a college education is worth the benefits.
Certainly, there is extensive evidence that people with college degrees have more job opportunities and make a higher wage than those who have only graduated high school. However, for many individuals the cost for college education necessitates carrying a heavy debt burden that may cancel out those higher wages. It is therefore worth considering whether you actually need to attend college to have the career you want. If you want to go into a professional specialty like medicine or dentistry, then going to college and graduate school is not negotiable. In those cases, college education costs, however extensive they may be, must be viewed as an investment in the future. However, if your goal is to become an actress or a writer, I humbly suggest that you not go directly from high school to college because the cost for college education may not be worth it.
If you have artistic aspirations or want to go into communications or the entertainment business, it would behoove you to take a couple of years off to pursue those activities in the field because the cost for college education is so high. For example, if you want to be a Broadway entertainer, move to New York City, wait tables, take some individual acting classes with professional instructors, and audition as much as you can. Acting is a career that the exorbitant cost for college education is not worth forking over. If you find after a couple of years that you are not able to make a living as an actor, then you can consider a new career and reassess whether going back to school is worth the cost for college education.
