If you could study a subject that you have never had the opportunity to study, what would you choose? Explain your choice, using specific reasons and details.
Students graduating from colleges today are not fully prepared to deal with the "real world." It is my belief that college students need to be taught more skills and information to enable them to meet the challenges that face everyone in daily life. The areas in which student need training are playing the credit game, planning their personal financial strategy, and consumer awareness.
Learning how to obtain and use credit is probably the most valuable knowledge a young person can have. Credit is a dangerous tool that can be of tremendous help if it is handled with caution. Having credit can enable people to obtain material necessities before they have the money to purchase them outright. But unfortunately, many, many young people get carried away with their handy plastic credit cards and awake one day to find they are in serious financial debt. Learning how to use credit properly can be a very difficult and painful lesson indeed.
Of equal importance is learning how to plan a personal budget. People have to know how to control money, otherwise, it can control them. Students should leave college knowing how to allocate their money for living expenses, insurance, savings, and so forth in order to avoid the "Oh, no! I'm flat broke and I don't get paid again for two weeks!" anxiety syndrome.
Along with learning about credit and personal financial planning, graduating college students should be trained as consumers. The consumer market today is flooded with a variety of products and services of varying quality and prices. A young person entering the "real world" is suddenly faced with difficult decisions about which product to buy or whose services to engage. He is usually unaware of such things as return policies, guarantees, or repair procedures, information of this sort is vital knowledge to everyday living.
For a newly graduated college student, the "real world" can be a scary place to be when he or she is faced with such issues as handling credit, planning a budget, or knowing what to look for, when making a purchase and whom to purchase it from. Entering this "real world" could be made less painful if persons were educated in dealing with these areas of daily life. What better place to accomplish this than in college?
