By Nicolaia Rips
Did you go to college? How much money did you spend on your degree? Did you take out a loan? Federal or private? Did you make BFFs? Did you meet your future spouse? Did you get a job? These are just a fraction of the questions we asked 214 college students across America. The higher education system is a ride — expensive, unreliable, and dominated by decisions intended to drive you crazy, but that also promise unforetold opportunity.
Across the world, the disconnect between the university system and students has never been more apparent. From the responders we polled (all between the ages of 18-25), a portrait of our society’s youth emerged — a demographic culturally fragmented, insecure, and addled by debt. A demographic that is the future of America. Seven of them stopped by to talk about the bigger picture.
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On a notepad, Emily Booskila has written out an itemised list of everything she wants to say. “I’m a very scatterbrained person, and I don’t want to lose my train of thought.” Her hair is slightly damp, and behind her is an impersonal kitchenscape. Emily grew up on Long Island, just a few miles away from where she went to college at Stony Brook University.
She felt like college was her only option, “You don’t think you have a choice,” she tells me, “but seeing the price tag of university when you’re 18 years old… you should be able to afford it, not your parents. $50,000? I don’t know how they think we’re going to pay that.”
Her mother, who runs a gift store on Long Island, agreed to cover part of her education. But if Emily wanted to go somewhere expensive (she dreamed of attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland), she would’ve had to take out loans. The idea frightened her. Instead, she decided on the cheapest option.
A month into her second semester of freshman year, the pandemic happened. With irony, she says, “I got lucky. My parents wouldn’t have been able to pay the fees if I had gone somewhere more expensive, and I would’ve had to take out loans.” "The decision, however, triggered an emotional crisis."
“You’re stuck at home, you have a lot of time to get to know yourself. Are you a hard worker? Are you motivated without the pressure?” Emily was studying physics at the time, which proved challenging in the isolation of her bedroom. She switched to English literature, in part due to a lack of departmental support. Looking back, it is a decision she regrets. “I just needed some words of support to stay, but no one tried to help one of the few females in physics.” College was supposed to be a golden ticket: “I thought all my problems would be solved, I thought I would have a job and a career, be smarter and better, but it also depends on the resources you’re given. Sometimes it doesn’t work out.”
Now Emily is 24, living at home with her mum. She talks about her mum with a certain pause that makes it clear they have different expectations for Emily’s future. Emily began applying to graduate schools in Germany, where the public tuition is around $1,000. In the morning, she wakes up early and goes to work at the library near her house. She likes the library; it’s quiet and she gets to be around books. A future in Germany provides a sense of possibility. If things don’t work out in linguistics, or she doesn’t get a good internship, at least she’s not in Long Island anymore.
For some, it’s daunting to imagine a choice you make at 17 altering the rest of your life. For others, however, the opportunity is exciting.
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Jasmine Said is also 24. She calls me from the basement of her summer internship at an architecture firm in Columbus, Ohio. Last year, she graduated from the University of Cincinnati and is currently enrolled in graduate school, where she studies architecture. Jasmine has always thrived in academia, but she has also maintained an interest in creative pursuits: art, design, and photography.
“I can’t go to school for photography. College is expensive, and I don’t come from a rich family, so I have to spend it on something that’s necessary.” Architecture guaranteed work in a creative field, but also a 9 to 5 and 401K. Her mum, however, saw pursuing architecture as risky. Both her mum and her grandfather are engineers and wanted Jasmine to be a mechanical engineer (arguing that they make more money than architects), but mechanical engineering bored Jasmine. She wanted to go to Parsons in New York City, and in 2020 she was accepted. To make her dream a reality she applied for more financial aid. The school, however, was dealing with its own financial troubles: the fiscal stretch of Covid. Jasmine decided to stay local at UC.
In 2021, Jasmine started university from her childhood bedroom. Because she graduated from high school in the pandemic there was nothing traditionally celebratory to demarcate the life transition, no real graduation or prom. She only moved onto campus in her sophomore year. She describes a first year of college spent crouching on the floor of her childhood home, trying to build miniatures.
Whenever she complains, she feels guilty. Her mum had a much harder time––immigrating from Tanzania to study engineering and getting pregnant with Jasmine in 2001. She would take Jasmine to school with her, and, as her mother recalls, Jasmine would never cry in class. Being a single mother was difficult, and her mum ended up dropping out. When Jasmine started elementary school, her mother went back and finished her degree. Jasmine remembers her mum working double time: going to school during the day and working nights at a car manufacturing company. Then she got her MBA. Comparatively, Jasmine has it easy. Her mum came over from a different country, raised a kid, and got two degrees. All Jasmine has to do is focus on school.
“I think I’m good at giving the impression that I’m straightforward and driven,” Jasmine says confidently. “Inside, I don’t know what to do.” The anxieties she has come from an abundance of options, not a lack. She wants to be an architect, a photographer, a designer, a historian, a writer—she had a teacher tell her that she was a really good writer, so recently she started a Substack—and a creative director. Her role models, the architect Willo Perron and late designer and renaissance man Virgil Abloh, are masters of weaving multiple threads into a creative career.
Jasmine dreams of moving to Los Angeles and starting her own creative studio. She’s never been to LA, but is a fan of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, and loves the way they described the landscape and lifestyle of the city. Her question is how to combine it all into a multi-disciplinary practice. Her degree only opens so many doors
The decision to go to college isn’t one big choice, but a thousand cumulative ones: the choice to take an AP in high school, the choice to go to a high school that offers APs, the choice to take out a federal loan or a private loan, the choice to stay in school every day, to do your homework and go to classes.
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Jonathan Cervantes is 20. The number weighs on him when he tells me, the years stretching out without signposts or an exit ramp. He grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a big military town, where he’s lived his entire life. For the past two years, he’s worked at a local restaurant. He has a sweet, melancholic nature—soft-spoken and sensitive. He dropped out of his local community college after the first year because it was moving too slowly for him, and he got bored. Without a challenge, he didn’t want to do the work, and his parents couldn’t force him.
Originally, though, he was excited. He wanted to study anthropology, but then, what would he do with an anthropology degree? He considered teaching, but teachers don’t make a lot of money. He likes languages, but thought it would also be hard to make a career out of it. Language is used to connect people, but when you have nobody to connect to, it’s a lonely practice.
Everything Jonathan says has that cadence. He likes music (his bedroom is covered in posters of Bikini Kill and The Beatles), but he can only play the flute. He could see himself working as an AR at a record label, but that would require connections he doesn’t have. He wants to live in New York, but it’s expensive. He has a single pink curl in his dark hair. He wanted to dye his whole head pink, but was afraid he wouldn’t like it. His mum inspires him. She just wanted him to study, but if he wasn’t going to study, she wants him to save the money he’s earning to see the world. His dad wanted him to become a lawyer or a paralegal. All Jonathan wants is to be happy.
Jonathan describes the silence in his house after he decided to drop out. “It was honestly… really embarrassing. It wasn’t what I thought would be happening. It wasn’t what my parents thought would be happening,” he says.“I’m a first-generation American in our family, so it was devastating. I thought I would live up to more, and I know I still have time, but for me to drop out and work at a restaurant wasn’t really part of my plan.”
After trying to explain the prohibitive costs of attending college to his father, they conceived a plan: cobble together a mixture of financial aid, scholarships, and loans. “Everybody knows college is expensive, but when I really told him the number, and how much books cost, he wondered how we would have made it work.” Often, at the restaurant, Jonathan will ask older patrons for advice. The advice: “School’s always going to be there. You’re fine, your life is not over just because you’re not in school.” He’s not sure the advice is totally clicking.
Jonathan is the only one of his high school friends who’s not in school. The gap is apparent in group settings, although he knows they’re not intentionally making it awkward. He’s happy for his friends, but feels like they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum in life. I ask him how many of his friends had life figured out when they went into college. Most of his friends switched majors multiple times, and a lot question their choices. He acknowledges the undue pressure he puts on himself. “I guess I’ve been so focused on what I wanted to study that I didn’t think I could just go in and figure it out as you go.” But Jonathan sees the pressure as a rite of passage in your twenties, that it’s normal to feel so scared about your future, your heart feels like it’s imploding. He asks me if my twenties were scary. He’s relieved when I say yes.
As Jonathan alluded to, college is more than a degree. It’s a social network.
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“Working in the city in the summers is kind of a Yale pipeline,” Kathryn Ortiz tells me. She calls from her internship in Manhattan, working in artist management. She’s sitting in a massive swivel chair, the kind of chair usually seen on a Twitch stream. She’s the only woman on a team of five men.
Kathryn, who is 20, grew up in Miami and went to an all-girls Catholic school for Cuban immigrants. Both of her parents were born and went to college in the U.S. They were happy to fund her education, with the expectation that she would go to a good school. In fact, everybody at her Catholic school was expected to go to a four-year college. She’s going into her senior year at Yale. When she got into Yale, she thought she would go for computer science. She was in a massive computer science lecture when she decided to switch to art, specifically photography. “The program is better, the classes are smaller, and the professors are better.” It never seemed like a viable career path, but going to college showed her how many different trajectories there actually were.
To Kathryn, college is about connections. “All my work has happened through connections. That’s the nature of Yale.” At an internship last summer, she worked with a Yale alumnus at a record label, scouting musicians. Then her grandbig (that’s her big’s big—a sorority term for a peer mentor) in her social org connected her with a former boss. Currently, she works for another Yale alum. On campus, she helps run the student radio station and takes photos at frat formals for $200 a night. She thinks the disaffiliation of fraternities on Yale’s campus has been both a good and a bad thing. “People care more about their academics and clubs than social organizations, which cuts the cost and lowers the barrier to entry,” she tells me. That means frats are more inclusive, but also it means that there’s less of a regulating body.
I ask her what the collegiate dating scene is like. “Yusband?” she says, wrinkling her nose distastefully. (Yale + husband.) But it’s not inconceivable. She knows a lot of people whose parents met in its halls. Even if people aren’t actively looking to meet their future spouse, it’s not off the table. It’s not on Kathryn’s mind, though. She’s more worried about her future career. Many of her friends are older, and she struggles with not feeling as accomplished as they are. But she reassures herself. They’re two years older, after all.
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Like Kathryn, Detta Hadid also values community, though theirs exists outside of an institution.
Detta’s cat nuzzles his shoulder. Detta is 21 and lives in Chicago with his best friend. They met while in high school, at a gay youth centre in Charlotte, North Carolina. After Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Detta left North Carolina, worried about losing access to healthcare because he's trans. The South, Detta tells me, is complex: “You can get away with a lot more, like you can just go into a field and shoot BB guns and nobody cares.” Ultimately, he decided not to attend a four-year institution after high school because they didn’t think they’d appreciate it. Detta just didn’t love school, and also didn’t want to be someone who went to college for six years because he was unsure of what he was doing. “It was a big deal when I didn’t go to college.” Both of their parents graduated, and “they thought I was wasting an opportunity that not everyone gets.”
In Chicago, Detta is cheerful and content, part of a vibrant art scene. Growing up visibly queer in the South pulled Detta towards radical fashion. “Changing my aesthetic when I can’t change a lot of things is really comforting.” In the Fall, he is going to beauty school. He cuts all of their friends’ hair. The cost of cosmetology school still requires a loan, but not as much as a four-year college. Currently, he work at Starbucks. Detta describes a life filled with art openings and parties, shared interests, and an exciting future. One day, he wants to help people feel good about themselves, providing gender-affirming aesthetic care, as well as working on editorials and runway shows. Detta lights up when he talks about his community.
The question of support emerges: fraternal, familial, financial, institutional, academic, governmental. Do you have the support of your friends? Do you have the support of a thriving alum network? Do you have the support of your government?
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Hannah P., who is 19, grew up in Acapulco, Mexico. She has a flippy little bob and two long braids that fall past her shoulders—a haircut inspired by her favorite singer, Aurora. She’s just finished her first year of undergraduate study and is living with a roommate in Chicago. She tells me she’s on a very limited budget. She doesn’t have many close friends, though she’s clearly outgoing, but the friends that she does have also have cool haircuts.
When I ask Hannah anything personal or biographical, she demurs. She’s nervous about telling me too much information. It’s not a good time to be an international student from Mexico, with ICE raids deporting hundreds of thousands. Her parents are very worried, but she’s not. “It’s limited how much my friends and I hang out outside, but I do believe there’s still kindness. I’m optimistic. I don’t want to be hiding,” she says.
Coming from Acapulco, Chicago pulses with new experiences: concerts and festivals, museums and galleries. She’s pursuing two degrees, one from a four-year college in Chicago and one from a Mexican university online. That means when she’s not taking IRL courses, she stays up late to do virtual classes. Navigating time zones is difficult. For Hannah, a degree from an American university means open doors, connections, concerts, and being part of the action. As for a culture shock, she giggles at the American penchant for school spirit, “You really like your colleges, dude.”
Hannah’s father is a photographer. Because of her father’s profession, the idea of earning an income in a creative field doesn’t frighten her. She’d like to make a living, of course, but she thinks of this as a time for her to learn and experiment. She plays Dungeons and Dragons for fun. Her avatar is a wizard named Amanda. I inform her that’s not a very wizardly name, and she rolls her eyes. “That’s because Amanda is a human wizard!” She wants to do everything: take concert photos, edit a magazine, and help content creators and streamers create material. She’s in her first year, so hasn’t picked a major yet, but acknowledges, “In the arts, a degree doesn’t matter as much. You have to be good at what you do.
”Studying the humanities and the arts is, more and more, regarded as a money pit—only viable if you have a safety net. How do creatively minded people adapt?"
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In Atlanta, Abigail Abdi is currently still unpacking boxes. The week prior, Abigail graduated with a degree in Pre-Law from Northwestern University. Now, she’s finishing her move back home. Abigail is a confident 22-year-old with narrow glasses and impeccable taste. Her family is from Ethiopia, but they moved from Kenya to Atlanta when Abigail was a toddler. She was raised around a plethora of cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity. Her public high school, she felt, prepared her well for college.
Abigail applied to school as a QuestBridge scholar—a prestigious nonprofit that supports low-income and first-gen students with full scholarships to top colleges. The financial freedom offered by QuestBridge meant Abigail could go to her dream school. Northwestern, Abigail thought, was beautiful. Once in Chicago, Abigail took full advantage of everything the school had to offer: a study abroad program in South Africa (where she ended up meeting some of her best friends), internship placements at local law firms, room for self-exploration (“Yes, I called my mum every day, but also, college helps you figure out who you are outside of your family”), and online research articles that would otherwise be paywalled. “There’s a lot of knowledge locked behind the walls of academia,” she tells me.
It’s a dream of Abigail’s to work in fashion. She follows fashion week and fashion commentary accounts online like @MustbeMargiela and @boringnotcom. On her Instagram “Close Friends” stories, she’ll do her own Met Gala reviews. In college, she worked at the on-campus fashion magazine, but she thinks working at a magazine is off the table, explaining, “I don’t ever want to be in a position where I can’t afford my basic needs or can’t take care of my family.” Some of her friends work in fashion. In fact, the current editor-in-chief of Elle, Nina García, went to Northwestern. “A lot of friends are in journalism. It doesn’t really pay that much,” she tells me. There are ways that she can be involved without sacrificing, combining law and fashion. She believes the job market is terrible because “a lot of entry-level positions are being replaced by AI. Most of my friends do not have jobs yet.”
