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The only thing that matters is from which university you graduate, not the one you entered. So much pressure is put on high school students to push beyond their limits so they can enter a top notch university....and go broke doing so. It simply does not make sense.

When young adults graduate from high school, everything they've ever known about the world disappears. It's a tremendously stressful time, but they'll go down the tubes before they admit they're not thrilled to be free at last and heading off to the big time. Entering the overwhelming new world of a university campus after the oh-no-what-now shock of compulsory schooling is over, and most likely a summer of reckless partying to dull the fear of freedom, is often far too much for budding young adults to handle. There's a reason why college drinking is on the rise and the "freshman ten pounds" has now ballooned to the "freshman twenty pounds." It's a bucket full of stress dressed up as success, achievement, and accomplishment. There's got to be some relief from all the turmoil, and often food and substance abuse are the most easily obtained relief values.

Why suffer the frenzy of fierce competition to enter a prestigious university right out of college when at least 20% of those entering freshmen will burn out or be in rehab by their junior year, leaving plenty of space for transfer students? It is worth burying the pleasure of one's last carefree years as a kid in school just to say, "Hurray! I got accepted at a school that scares me to death and my parents can't afford!" Those aren't the exact words spoken, but they are the sub-text.

Community college is a fantastic way to ease into the next stage of journey from childhood to adulthood. It's a chance to get used to handling the freedom of non-compulsory attendance, class schedules that bounce all over the clock, and a class grade determined by as little as three chances to get it right. It's much better to ease into the strange new world of self-discipline if you have the added benefit of being able to fail and get back up again without spending a fortune or humiliating yourself in front of your classmates. A very large part of success in higher education, and life in general, is learning how to play the game. You can't learn without failure, and community offers the opportunity in abundance. There's nothing more valuable we can learn than how to pick ourselves up and keep going. Why not take the opportunity, and take

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