Analysis Of Two Years Are Better Than Four By Liz Addison

The Ever Changing State of College

As college degrees are becoming the norm for most jobs now, as well as the price of tuition at college has and is skyrocketing. Many older graduates are questioning how important the college experience is in today’s time. Liz Addison, a biology major at a community college, reacts to Rick Perlstein’s disdain taste of college nowadays in the essay, Two Years Are Better Than Four. The piece explains that college is just as (if not more) rewarding and worth it as it was in the past. By explaining through her own experiences, Liz Addison hopes to convince future college students that going to college- especially a community college- is essential to one’s intellectual maturity, and springboard for getting jobs.

Maturing intellectually and emotionally is the most important process of college believes Liz Addison: “you will grow up a lit bit with your first English class”. This is the reason I am most excited for college. I believe at all levels my mental capacity will be tested. College students are dealing with debt, an abundance of classwork, hours of lectures, finding new friends; essentially, college is where I will learn to be an

adult. Rick Perlstein, an American historian and journalist, says he grown from his college experience. The evidence explains that the average college student is between the ages of eighteen and twenty four years old. That is the age most people find their identity, so plainly college and maturation correlate.
Community college is an key part of the American educational system.

This is most affordable option to continue education after high school. Although I concede that point that Liz Addison makes throughout her essay, I dispute the fact that every person should seriously consider going to one. Some people are merely too intelligent for the capped level of education at a community college. Most community colleges only offer associate's or technical degrees (usually two more years of schooling). In addition, bachelor degrees are becoming a standard in some careers, resulting in their students becoming inadequate for jobs. I want to major in biomedical engineering; therefore, should I even consider a community college? No because I can not even major in that subject at the more affordable and smaller

college.
Liz Addison attacks Rick Perlstein’s opinion first by pointing out that students have to complete a “Curriculum Vitae not a book list” (Addison). She is certainly right about college being as hard now as it ever was. Degrees are not as easy to get today, because the requires for getting a degree grows perpetually. The perpetual growth stems from the constant rate of new innovations around the world. Reading a set of books will not give the college graduate the education, nor experience level needed to succeed in today’s fast paced environment. As a result, current college graduate can better adapt to the new problems in the world.
Has college changed in the last twenty five years? Rick Perlstein, graduated from University of Chicago in 1992, makes the case that “College as America used to understand is is coming to an end”. Liz Addison believes very strongly that college has gotten better in the last twenty five years, stemming from her poignant use of vocabulary in her essay towards Rick Perlstein. I believe, based on Rick Perlstein’s quote above, that college is completely changing. The experiences and growth of a human being is still happening all over America at every University; however, the values of the colleges are significantly different. Universities have skyrocketed the prices of tuition because many jobs demand degrees. Students at college used to cherish learning new material for the sake of acquiring knowledge. In 2016, people do not go to college for the enjoyment of new information, but to use that new information to directly help them get a higher paying job. Going back to the old values of college would be good for America, but it would have to start with the greedy colleges reducing tuition.