College: a big mistake

A personal account of how students are unprepared for the pace and debt that will decide their future.

I went to college.

That was possibly the biggest mistake of my life…

Certainly, it helped me get acquainted with the harsh financial reality awaiting me in my independent adulthood, but it also ruined my financial status for the rest of my life.

I met people and dedicated many hours, days, even years with them in order to try and reach for the opportunities waiting just beyond my grasp.

To no avail.

The biggest lie of college education is the term “Aid” in the “Financial Aid” packages they offer to unwitting high school graduates. That “aid” includes (and is primarily made up of) Student Loans which infer that — upon graduation — the student will QUALIFY FOR and Acquire a job or career that will allow said student to make payments on those debts incurred while attending higher learning institutions.

I attended 3 colleges in my lifetime.

The first was my biggest mistake, the last was nearly as horrendous. The first set me on a path of ruin and demise. It vacuumed dry all grants and scholarship opportunities, leaving only private and federal loans.

Upon entering this first college, I was unaware of the rapid force with which one must dedicate every waking moment to studying and forgo any and all non-course-related distractions. In High School, there are weekends, after-school activities, and classmates you can hang out with. You have time to fool around and not worry about homework for a while. Being accustomed to this lead to my failure to complete or pass half of my classes in the first semester.

The first college I attended compacted an entire year of High School work into 10 weeks time. Out of the 15 courses I took that first year (3 terms with 5 courses), I only passed 10 of them.

The courses I failed are as follows:

Calculus II: I did not fail, but dropped out of Calculus II. My high school (which is in the same town) only taught mathematics up to Algebra II/Trigonometry (one course), and the college I went to began its most basic of mathematics levels at Calculus II. This created a gap wherein most of the local high school graduates would have to attend a local community college for 2 years in order to arrive at the level of the local college, mathematically speaking.

Freshmen Preceptorial: This is a mandatory course all college students must take in their first term at the college. It is a humanities course that details all of the classical writers, psychiatric and psychological theorems, and exhaustive reading of Tolstoy, Jung, Freud, etc. Most students passed this course very easily. In my particular class, only 25% of the students passed with a “B” or higher. Every one of those particular students had declared their major to be in the exact field that the ECONOMICS Professor (who was teaching this Humanities course) specialized in. All students who had declared a humanities-related trajectory were graded far more harshly and not given the courtesy of leniency shown to the mathematics, statistics, or economics-specified students.

Poetry: Yes, I am a poet, a writer, and an etymologist. I love words, their meanings, their history, and how they correlate to one another. I had written (at the time) more than 100 poems, so I figured that Poetry would be a breeze. After the second week of Poetry class, I was flabbergasted to find myself at a loss for comprehension or ability to memorize all the various “proper poetry” forms. This course entailed memorizing and reciting verbatim works by famous dead poets, in-depth analyses of the hidden meanings, correlation of lifestyle, cultural influences, and religious undertones of the poets’ lives, all while taking tests on the rhyming structures and syllable counts for specific poetry styles. It was too much in the already over-crowded homework of memorization I had to endure with the other 4 classes.

Suffice it to say, I gave up after 2 weeks of trying.

Spanish II: I had taken Spanish 1 in high school, after having taken Latin 1-3, so Spanish (which I found to be a twisted version of Latin, pronounced differently) was as easy as tripping up the stairs when you’re drunk (even though I have never in my life been drunk) (just ask a glass of water ;)… Spanish 1 class — during my first term at college — was easy and fun. The instructor made every day a thrill and — by the end of the first term — I was fluent in basic conversational Spanish. Spanish II, however, was taught by a white American woman who spoke to every adult student in the room as if we were pre-school children. She did not like it when we pronounced the words in a Spanish accent, as we should have, and insisted that we use American pronunciation of the words instead. I resisted for as long as I could, but — gradually, like a leech — her teaching style decimated my comprehension and knowledge of the Spanish language.

And then…

Spanish III: After suffering through the torrential Americanization of Spanish II, I entered Spanish III hoping to bring back everything I had lost and solidify my fluency in a foreign language. The Spanish III instructor spoke absolutely no English. She spoke Spanish and only Spanish. Those of us who had been in the class with the American woman failed or dropped out of Spanish III by the end of the second week. I gave it my best effort, but the Spanish III professor began speaking so rapidly that half the class eventually gave up trying and just did the homework to pass with a “C.” I have to say, though, that these three Spanish classes really brought out the most stereotypical personalities in two men who were in all three terms with me, who just happened to epitomize the “Dumb Jock” persona.

After that first year of college, I retreated and looked at my options.

I settled on the local community college and moved from the path I had planned (Acting and Journalism) to this newfangled invention called the World Wide Web. I chose to dedicate my focus to Computer Programming.

My second year of college (first at this new school) was much more lenient, with a better pace for someone who expected to have a life outside of class work, someone who had a job and responsibilities.

I spent two years learning PASCAL, QuickBasic, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and WordPerfect. WordPerfect really confused me because I was used to working in Word (which I had already mastered in high school), but the instructor held the position that Microsoft Word was a far inferior product.

That third year of college, I was homeless.

The student loan bills started arriving at my grandmother’s address.
They have not stopped in the 20 years since.

Eventually I made my way — clawing and scraping for every opportunity to get out of my home town and make some money — to the Chicago suburbs, where those “Now Firing” signs from my home town were replaced with “Now Hiring” signs in nearly every business window I looked.

I returned to college after several years, to finally get a Bachelor of Science Degree in Animation.

I used every method of getting financial “aid” I could find — student loans, private loans, and loans with interest higher than their value. I figured that a degree in Animation would set me on a path of success for life. Countless films and television shows, video games, and commercials use computer animation, so I thought I would have a guarantee of career the moment I graduated. The college introduction materials all promised that — with so many of the instructors working in the fields they taught — I would have connections to guarantee success in finding a position that paid beyond my wildest dreams.

All lies.

The “Career Services” department in the college I graduated from only helps students and alumni find minimum wage retail jobs in local stores. They have so few connections to industries for the majors they promote that they are completely useless. I have tried to work with them countless times, each time encountering a different person, as the previous person quit, got fired, or moved to a different department. All they offer me are jobs in retail, jobs in restaurants, jobs that pay nothing compared to the career that their introductory brochure promised.

What a sick joke.

So now I am here with a student loan debt (after interest) exceeding $90,000. Sallie Mae (who operates and collects on student loans) keeps harassing me for money.

I work as many hours as I am allowed at my job. I am trying to find a better-paying replacement or supplemental-income second job.

I want a career.

I want to join a company where I can utilize my knowledge of words, images, graphics, film, animation, pop-culture, and character design to make something that will WOW the world.

And I need a career that will support my paying of the endless student loan debts, which I must currently avoid paying so that I can eat once a day.

If anyone has read all this, and has any ideas for improving my situation, please feel free to contact me.

Thank you for reading my diatribe…

—Xoandre