I love knowledge and education. I love the sense of pride that others get when they see the connections between one topic and another — and just how fuzzy those lines of connection are. Every day I can be found teaching or tutoring somewhere. My students range from elementary school to college and beyond, while they come from all different educational background from public to private to homeschooling and unschooling. My job is simply to help these students understand the world at large as best I can and with as little bias as I can.

But there seems to be some winds of change coming in the world of education that I can’t quite explain. Parents often sigh wistfully to their children saying, “You’ll need this when you go to college” while the students roll their eyes and say, “Who needs college?! It’s over priced and all you need are certificates for most jobs.”

The students are more right every day, but not completely. For those of us that have been there, we know that university life doesn’t prepare you completely for the “real world”. Sadly, Ivy League schools are among the worst for preparing students for a world full of failures and risk due to the amount of protection the students get from failure. However, there are other reasons why one should seriously reconsider going to a university, as outlined in the infographic compiled by LearnVest below.

Compiled by LearnVest. Click the image to go to their site.

 The cost of debt to what you get out of college now is just unfathomable. There are many people who are $80k+ in debt due to student loans, and there is no way to escape it. Sadly, we’ve known that college was not a great investment since 2012, but we have yet to really change our thinking about going to college as a whole. It seems that many people from my generation and before we’re stuck in the “go to college mentality”, while the younger generation is wising up to the fact that going to university is not a guarantee of a better life. They see the struggle happening in front of them and have become jaded.

I can’t blame them.

So, what does this mean for parents and educators that want the best for the kids? It means we should toss the college crutch and actually start preparing them for life. Let them indulge in the skills they are actually interested in, teach them how to survive in this big bad world with them, and actually embrace life in all its chaotic glory.

And you? How do you see yourself helping the future generation from any of your perspective roles? As a parent? As a business person? As an educator? As a researcher? How do you plan to change the status quo?