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Copeland 1
Chris Copeland
Mr. Elliott
Eng 100-56
7 October 2009
Success…Why Failure
Many students get the wrong idea when they think about college. They tend to think the work you do will be so overwhelming, but it reality if you use your time wisely it can be done. The main thing is to know when to party and when to study. You shouldn’t party all night knowing you have a test in the morning, your already setting yourself up to fail. You have to make yourself go to class even when you don’t feel like going. You’re slowly wasting money when you skip class. Most likely you won’t be prepared enough for your test or exam. You’ll end up retaking the class, which causes you to take longer to graduate and the money just flies out the window.
Estimates place student aid about 68 billion during the years of 1999-2000 which includes federal loans, subsidies, state grants and students loans. The last thing you want to do is spend more money because you decided to play around your first year in school. States contribute another 60 million directly to colleges so that state schools could offer lower tuition to their students. You have to be organized also, because you can easily fall behind, and it will take you a long time to catch up. Close to half of the students at four year colleges in the U.S. fail to graduate within six years of entering.
As one would know the more prestigious schools will have a higher graduation rate. For example, the University of Louisville has a 44% graduation rate, while James Madison University in Virginia graduates 81%. In 2002 74% of first year students returned for their second year of school, but as the work load and difficulty increases this causes the rate of students that actually graduate to drop to only about 50%. More than 70% of students attending four year institutions spend 8,000 or less a year on tuition and fees, but only 9% pay more than 20,000 according to College Board figures.
When you get to college you have to be more mature about the task at hand. Be sure to stay on top of things don’t wait until the last minute to do things, get it done while it’s still fresh on your mind. Make sure you choose a major that you are interested in, don’t do it because someone else is taking it, because ultimately if you don’t care for it you won’t put the effort in to it that you need to pass. As long as you go to class and take some time to study, instead of wasting time you should be fine. There’s always something going on so you’ll still be able to have plenty of fun. Among high school students who graduated at the bottom 40% of their classes, two-thirds had not earned a diploma 8 and a half years later. No matter how you were in high school you can still succeed in college. You don’t have to be a straight A student to be able to graduate from college. Some students that had straight A’s is high school may not even finish college, because they can’t take the fact that things are more difficult and that you can’t always get an A, but that doesn’t mean u didn’t pass. You just have to be strong and be able to deal with adversity.

Everything is not always going to go the way you want it. The only way you fail is by being lazy and not taking care of your responsibilities. College is supposed to be some of the best times of your life. You are the only one that can control what happens. This is the time you really grow up and mature and learn how to handle things without someone having to tell you to do so. What you do in college will affect the rest of your life.