“The public sees two characteristics as essential to middle-class status: a secure job and the ability to save money. Other characteristics — including owning a home and having a college degree — are not widely seen as necessary to be considered middle class,” said a Pew Research Center survey conducted Dec. 8 through 13, 2015.
Information like this plays a large part in the mentality of a college student who’s preparing to go out into the world as an independent adult.
It can be scary. The world of teenagehood is a pale reflection when compared to adulthood. Information found in the Center’s survey and elsewhere can seem completely different from the information incoming college students were given as teenagers.
Many college students were recent high school graduates before they ventured into the world of adulthood, where they experience realities of finding a stable income to pay bills and additional tuition costs they may never have thought of or known to ask about.
During college enrollment, a student is suddenly hit with the realization that while they have similar schooling responsibilities to what they have lived with for most of their life, they also have responsibilities that they never had as teenagers — the cost of living: a responsibility to pay for rent, insurance and food.
In some cases, the transition from teenage student to adult student can be smooth, as many high school students have part-time jobs and find they can juggle more hours or choose to live with their parents for the beginning of their college career or its entirety.
However, in other cases, the shock of adult responsibilities is not just overwhelming — it can seem impossible to juggle.
A large part of this is: before a young adult even decides to go to college, the idea is already is instilled in them. Throughout a child’s life, multiple sources, including parents, peers and popular media tell children that college is essential.
“More than 9-in-ten parents who have at least one child under 18 say they expect their child to attend college,” another Pew Research Center study said on May 15, 2011.
Despite this mentality being firmly set, the actual experience of college life is not always explained to the high school graduate.
Freshman orientation tells you how to sign up for classes but seldom tells you that you will most likely be juggling those classes and a minimum-wage job on a daily basis while hoping you can afford groceries and squeeze in a social life in whatever free time you're lucky enough to receive.
So, with that being said, is it shocking that the public would see a secure job and the ability to save money as more important than a college education?
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Not at all — putting an emphasis on one important aspect of adulthood while neglecting the other makes it all too easy to overshadow the desire for a college education when you find there is so much more to a career than just an education.
However, like with all transitions, an adult learns to adjust, to understand the value that both a college education and work experience can provide, not just separately — but together.
Perhaps the change in tuition rates and the economy from past to present play a large role in this mentality that students have to overcome to actually make it in the real world.
Either way, current incoming students are not the first to learn how to juggle school life and work life, and they will not be the last.
All that can be hoped for is that when new students enter college life, their graduating peers can play a part in not only teaching the juggling game to their fellow incoming students, but expressing a level of empathy for having experienced the struggles of the game themselves.
Nichole Harwood is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Nolidoli1. The views presented in this column are her own.
