Free college! But you have to be 21 or older....

There's a lot of talk right now, as presidential campaign rhetoric flies across the airwaves, about free public college educations for everyone who wants to attend college. I think that's a great idea. After all, these days a college diploma as a ticket into the working world has come to be the equivalent of a high school diploma when I was growing up -- a necessary requirement for most any job. Not only that, saddling students (especially young ones) with a mountain of debt before they even take a tiny step out into the world of independence (especially in our hyper-competitive job market) is a recipe for disaster.

But today I came across a post from one of my favorite bloggers, M. Blazoned, in which she puts herself in the shoes of a 17 year-old preparing college applications. Her very apt assessment of the mindset of probably most 17 year-olds triggered an "aha" moment for me that prompted what I'm about to say.

Seventeen is too young to go to college. So is 18. In fact, I'll make the case that what should be standard practice is keeping students out of college until they are 21. If for no other reason, it would entirely remove the underage drinking problems that plague so many higher education institutions. Maybe the fact that underage drinking IS such a huge problem on college campuses is a sure sign our kids simply aren't ready to take seriously what should be a very serious undertaking.

But more so, as M. Blazoned so accurately conveys, 17 is hardly the pinnacle of self-awareness that leads to the type of insights that can answer life-directing decisions such, "What should I do for the rest of my life?" If someone is going to spend tens of thousands of dollars in that direction, they better hope it's the right direction. And if they're going to spend four years of their precious time pursuing that path, no matter who pays for it, they certainly ought to be invested mentally in why they are on it.

When I graduated from high school, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, so I chose not to go to college yet -- as it would have been a waste of time and money. Instead, I thought it would be good to plunge into the working world and get that kind of real life experience before I selected my ultimate vocation. I think several of my high school classmates went on to college, joining other similar-minded young people who had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives, simply to postpone the reality of self-sufficiency in the adult world for another four years--ensconced within the buffering boundaries of the university walls and subsidized by their parents.

In the two years between high school and college I worked in a bank (and received an impactful induction into the realities of the 8-5 work world), traveled all over the country with friends, dabbled in art and photography, stumbled through various volunteer activities looking for life-changing inspiration, and somewhere along the way experienced another aha moment that told me I wanted to be a writer. So I went to college to become one.

Though my route to ultimate career fulfillment as a writer has been circuitous, I can honestly say I never wasted a single day of college life -- both when I was young and when I went back to school to finish my bachelor degree decades later -- on not having a good reason to be there. In fact, the perspective I held about my education led me to drop out of the University of California after my third year, at the age of 23, when I realized my educational experience was not moving me toward my goal.

Our young people need time to grow and learn more about themselves before they make a life- altering decision about higher education. They need time to learn to become responsible adults, including gaining real work experience, before they commit time, energy, and financial resources to an educational endeavor in support of a career. They need the chance to explore the world to understand how they can best contribute to it. And they need the opportunity to discover there are ways to be successful without going to college.

The path to all of this development is certainly open to discussion. While some view college as an opportunity for this kind of growth, there are others (like me) who view the immediate transition to college as often not much more than an extension of high school, but on a live-in basis. While this blog is not about a revamp of the entire higher education system -- and its first-two-years' curriculum in particular -- there is certainly room for deeper thought on why we send people to college and how to best serve them by doing so.

However, if as a society we're going to make a college diploma mandatory for success, we need to make it easily possible for everyone to participate. But let's make sure they're grownups first.