How interest, not conformity, must drive success

Careerism is a growing and overwhelming issue in college. The essay touches on how students feel pressured to take business-related courses in order to get a high paying corporate America job. However, it takes a high emotional toll on students as they have to cope with the perpetual feeling of inadequacies. As the author writes "Unfortunately, I knew my state government internship was a scarlet letter of inadequacy" (Glassman). However, I think she misses an important solution that could alleviate not only student stress, but make a college education more productive. In the United States, where college costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend, a college education is not a transaction, so much as it is an investment in one's own future. The student is effectively saying to the university "hey, I am paying you all this money so you can give me the tools I need to have a successful career and future." The university's response is to effectively get students to major in a high-yielding field like business, regardless of their interests. This is not a problem-posing way of helping students. A way to alleviate this stress is to teach students how to hone their interests and forge a successful career out of it. It individually develops each student to be able to turn their interests into life skills that go on to yield a career. As Freire says, "In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves" (95). An effective way of teaching students would be to prepare them for the world by showing them how best to shine with their own unique interests, rather than training them to conform. This way they will have beneficial, and happy, careers.