The quality of undergraduate education in the United States has diminished significantly through the years. The vicious circle of rising tuition costs and government financing coupled with the onslaught of online for-profit universities have degraded the bachelor’s degree into a useless piece of paper. Reading a newspaper each day is more beneficial than a four-year degree. Students are brainwashed at such an early age that their GPAs or test scores will determine their success in life.

The unfortunate expectation that kids must attend college and outperform their peers adversely encourages them to take the path of least resistance — taking the easy classes just to get an A. As long as it boosts your GPA, it doesn’t matter if you learn anything. Now, this doesn’t really play to higher education’s golden standard of a well-rounded, liberal curriculum for all majors. Students shy away from hard classes to save their GPA and at the detriment of learning more. Instead, they end up taking classes like Severe and Hazardous Weather, which was an amazing class, but I’m not sure how it will make me, for example, a better certified public accountant.

As a consequence of our system, students end up in majors with no clear implications on career paths. They don’t consider the job market four years down the road. The uncertainty involved with picking a major is an incredible challenge 17- and 18-year-olds must take because once you’ve picked a major, the way the University structures its majors, it’s too difficult to change it two years in and graduate in four years. So, fresh grads finish with barely any relevant skills for competing in the workforce and fall behind their peers.

The tremendous pressure to conform to society’s expectations hinders our ability to think creatively, think differently and think ambitiously. Attending college may not be the answer for everyone. Should the entrepreneur or the inventor or the athlete be forced into this mechanistic system? We should be pushed to pursue what we want, not what we have to because a university tells us to. Eliminating the dogma surrounding the unconventional can help kids make smarter choices for themselves and follow their passion.

Is $200,000 a sound investment for the future pilot? My brother would tell you no. He tried it at one of the best aviation universities in the country. Two of them, actually. They both failed him. One year after what would be his graduating class, he is now flying for one of the largest airlines in the world. All without a college degree. Did he need to learn about some of these wild gen-ed requirements the University has us take? Will Contemporary Nutrition help him determine the amount of thrust required for takeoff? None of this makes him a better pilot. He will determine his own success.

Is $200,000 a sound investment for the tennis pro? My other brother would tell you no, too. He tried it, here actually. What he learned traveling at a young age to tournaments around the world far surpassed the education he could receive at any university. His living depends on his ability to think creatively, find new ways to train athletes and extract the potential out of his students. Not on a well-rounded, liberal education.

Is $200,000 a sound investment for someone like me? Probably. As a student studying accountancy and finance, the market requires credibility, experience and determination. But do I think someone who studies accounting without university courses is able to do the job as well as his peer who followed the conventional university route? It’s debatable, but I would say yes. The problem though, I could never become a certified public accountant because I wouldn’t meet the education requirements for the job: 150 semester credit hours. Surprising fact: only 30 of those hours deal with accounting and another 24 deal with business, about a third of the total. By the way, every accounting scandal in the past decade from Enron, WorldCom and more recently Hewlett Packard’s acquisition of Autonomy involved, supposedly, the best auditors and CPAs in the world.

Our society suffers from near inescapable delusions of grandeur. Kids are treated as cookie cutters, configured into perfect, little helpers that merrily go on their way — and this needs to change. Although I have been extremely pessimistic lately, I do believe there is an underlying shift in the mentality of today’s youth that will positively impact the future and allow us to surpass previous generations. We are starting to think for ourselves and to strive for excellence in what we want to do, not what we’re expected to do.

Tommy is a senior in Business. He can be reached at [email protected].