When I look back on things I said and did during my teenage years, I cringe. Put simply, I was a bad person who didn’t know anything about the world. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have trusted 18-years-old Alex around other human beings.

That’s why it confounds me that, at 18, we’re supposed to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives and promptly spend thousands of dollars in college to prepare for that. It’s no surprise, then, that some students will change their majors multiple times. When we go to college, we’re just kids whose world views are routinely dismantled by further education.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones, having realized in high school that journalism was the right path for me. I’m in my third year at WSU now, and that hasn’t changed. However, for other students, it’s difficult to commit to anything. They put time and money into classes, only to realize they’d rather do something else.

That might not be such a bad thing if a college education wasn’t an increasingly costly endeavor. A system that encouraged experimentation for students instead of asking them to decide what they want to do before they ever attend classes would be great.

Instead, some students are stuck putting work and large amounts of money into something they’re unsure about, something that might prove to be a waste of time.

Society deserves some blame, too, as rising tuition costs conflict with the feeling that, after we graduate high school, we absolutely must go to college. What else are we going to do? The choice, we’re told, is either get a degree (complete with years of loans to pay off) or work dead-end jobs for eternity.

A college education is much more of a financial privilege than it used to be, but the rewards won’t necessarily be there for many of us.

People like to joke about fine arts degrees being useless, but that’s a real threat to the livelihoods of our more creative peers. When those with degrees aren’t able to find sustainable income after graduation, it’s easy to wonder why we should bother at all.

There is no easy solution to all of these problems, but a good start would be to stop expecting teenagers to understand such a complicated world and their place in it. That wouldn’t lower tuition or create a support system for those who can’t go to college, but it would make the months between high school and freshman year much less stressful for many.