Why I Hate the “College Student” Stereotype

I’m sure you’ve all seen these memes before:


The memes that treat college students like the dumbest, laziest, pettiest people on earth. These memes frustrate me a lot. I hate how the college student stereotype has evolved into such a negative thing.

College educated people used to be looked up upon as a higher class of society. To even be able to go to college was an amazing feat. Now, college is pretty open to most people and many students take advantage of it.

To me, college is an amazing privilege and I think that too many of us attending nowadays don’t take this seriously enough. There have been many days in the past year that I’ve considered dropping out just because I don’t feel like I’m putting my all into my education and I feel guilty about that! Like I’m spending thousands of dollars per semester to get some of the most important education of my life and yet I was so depressed that I could barely do any of my work.

Then, when I attended classes, there were people sitting there that were in the same situation as me grade wise and with hardly any work done but they are in that situation because of excessive partying or laziness. It just blows my mind that some people are willing to throw away this amazing opportunity in order to have a good time.

And that brings me to another point. Since when is college supposed to be the best years of your life?

For me, I am trying to make the most of the time I have at Saint Scholastica and now that I’ve gotten a lot of my mental health under control I can finally realize why people love college so much. There’s so much freedom and being able to spend time with your friends whenever you want is pretty amazing.

So I get that these memes do relate to people, I fully understand that there are people out there like that, I know for a fact that there’s at least one in every class for me. But at the same time, why do we have to stereotype college students in such a negative way. My friends and I are working our butts off, with activities and work every single day and upwards of 18 credits worth of work every single semester. We put our all into our education because we want to be successful and we want to prove that the college student stereotype is false. (At least I want to anyways).

College is more than parties or homework, though. It’s about finding out who you are in this big scary world but still having a buffer to fall back on if things get in your way. We can still change our paths, pretty frequently if you’re me! Or you can just sink into your original path and realize just how meant for you that truly is. There’s so much to learn about and I am so excited for everything I get to do before I graduate.

I hope that those of you who read this post come to appreciate college as much as I have and I hope that more people fight back at the college student stereotype and really show people that we’re more than lazy drunks.

Happy Wednesday everyone!