I only have two real goals for my life: pay off my student loans before I turn 60 and marry Daryl Dixon.

Unfortunately, it looks like the latter, of matrimony to a fictitious zombie slayer, is the more realistic of the two.

Maybe one day, I will realize the reason behind an institution charging $40,000 a year and maybe one day I will stop pretending that a portion of that goes toward funding a bunch of young men and women who would not give me the time of day to play sports on fields that are better taken care of than the old building where I take most of my classes.

I think somewhere down the line, colleges forgot, or consciously chose to ignore, that most people cannot afford $40,000 a year for aeducation that they are only getting so that they can join the job market where they will make $25,000 a year.

I think that that little fun fact has been forgotten/ blatantly ignored because for those of us whose parents are not CEO’s, there are terrible things called student loans, which, to add another fun fact, are one of the only types of loans that cannot be written off when declaring bankruptcy.

Personally, I take out around $25,000 a year in federal and private loans, because regardless of what the FAFSA says that my family is going to contribute, I am on my own in this academic nightmare that I have found myself in.

So, when I graduate in roughly a year and a half, I will be in a debt hole of about $100,000 and I cannot possibly imagine ever saving up that much money.

Right now, my choices for financial stability are becoming a gold digger, winning the lottery or the Viking apocalypse mercifully wiping me, my debt, and every living thing away in a flood of fire because I know for sure that my degree is never going to make me a millionaire.

So, my question is: why do people let this happen? Why do we just blindly accept that some school is going to suck us dry and make us thank them for it?

We should be telling high schoolers that private four year institutions are not all that they are cracked up to be.

We should tell them that community college and public university are just as good, and not quite as evil.

I don’t think when I am 40 and living in a studio apartment with a roommate and at least six cats I am going to look back at my college days and think “I am so glad I experienced the power of a small college.”

Paige Jurgensen / Columnist

Paige Jurgensen can be reached at [email protected]