By Elizabeth Davies
When I was little Disney taught me to follow my dreams, it didn’t tell me to pursue my salary expectations.
Now I’m being told that my education was, financially speaking, a poor investment. I chose to go into debt in order to get a qualification in a field with notoriously low earning potential.
Did I make a huge financial mistake? Or perhaps I simply realised that you can’t put a price on a career that you love.
Before studying post graduate journalism I did a Bachelor of Arts in English and History. Needless to say I wasn’t inundated with job offers upon graduation. So I did what any terrified and lost 21 year old would do. I re-enrolled.
It’s taken me years, and thousands of dollars to finally find what it is I want to do with my life. But to call it a bad investment fails to do any justice to the personal growth tertiary education provides, and most definitely undervalues the final outcome.
The reality is, we can’t all study medicine and law. Just because these degrees have higher earning potential, they don’t immediately come with a job guarantee as a number of recent law grads will unhappily confirm.Then what are we left with, a fleet of extremely over-qualified baristas?
From the age of 15 we are forced to make decisions that lead to subject specialisations. These choices then directly affect the areas of study we can go into. So many teenagers are pushed through the system straight into degrees that perhaps don’t quite fit, all because they aren’t really aware of their other options.
I’ve seen dozens of friends rack up thousands in debt, only to get halfway through a degree before realising it was the wrong choice right from the beginning. Swapping out passion for financial motivation in degree choice will only guarantee an increase to the already staggeringly high drop-out rate.
In my personal experience a great deal of student debt could be avoided by slowing down the transition between high school and tertiary education. I wish I had taken a year off to work, and genuinely weigh my options.
The reality is, and thankfully so, we never turn out to be the exact people our fifteen year-old selves wanted, or expected us to be. Yet the hasty decisions we are forced to make as teenagers dictate the foundations of our career.
It’s like picking an outfit when you turn 15, and then being forced to wear it every day for the next five years. Cringe worthy.
My student debt is not to be dismissed lightly, but I feel it should be recognised for what it really is. The years of study and struggle and the thousands in debt are an investment in my future sanity.
Life’s too short to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week doing something you hate. That kind of stress is enough to drive anyone into therapy, and as we all know, I could never afford that on my meagre journalist salary.
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*Elizabeth Davies is a 23 year old post graduate journalism student at Auckland University of Technology. She lives with her partner in Epsom and spends her free time refurbishing vintage furniture and attempting to bake while fighting a daily battle against her bank balance. She writes a weekly article for interest.co.nz on money matters and financial struggles from a young person's perspective.
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