By Gus Wezerek
Mr. Wezerek is a graphics editor for Opinion. He transferred from Oberlin College to Northwestern University after his freshman year.
A couple of months after I started college, I flew to Mexico City to spend a weekend with my dad. He had promised me that if I studied Spanish during high school, I could join him on a business trip abroad. There’s a photo of us from that weekend at the base of the Teotihuacan pyramids; it’s one of the first pictures in which we’re the same height. I’m wearing a wool peacoat that I had just bought from Zara. The coat was too heavy for the weather, but I thought it made me look like an adult.
A few days after returning from the trip, my dad called me to tell me he had been fired. It was the height of the 2008 recession, and the unemployment rate was climbing. The peacoat hanging on my dorm room door suddenly seemed like a ridiculous extravagance. So did the loans I had taken out to study creative writing.
I transferred to Northwestern University, close enough to home that I could commute to school and save money. I didn’t drink or go to parties; I studied and worked. I got a less risky degree in journalism and folded clothes after class at American Apparel. When graduation rolled around, I decided to stay home rather than pay $80 to rent a cap and gown.
I know I was lucky to go to college. And I owe the life I have now to my diligence during those years. But I still feel jealous when friends reminisce about college experiences I thought I couldn’t afford, like studying abroad and taking classes in Russian literature. And there are nights when I wonder whether I could have hacked it as a fiction writer if I hadn’t been so shaken by the recession.
I’m not the only one with mixed feelings about their undergraduate years. More than a thousand people wrote in after Times Opinion asked readers to share their college regrets. Some put too much stock in college rankings, applying to top schools rather than ones that matched their personalities. Others felt they went to college before they were ready. And many, many readers regretted taking on enormous student loans that weighed them down for decades after graduating. Below, we’ve published interviews with 10 of the readers who shared their stories.
As part of Times Opinion’s close look at the college selection process, we’re also inaugurating a tool that we hope will help students avoid college regret. The tool encourages students to reflect on their interests and desires. Then it generates college rankings that better fit those priorities.
I hope that high schoolers find the tool and the following interviews helpful. There is hard-earned wisdom in the hindsight of the graduates who shared their stories.
Most of all, I hope that today’s high school seniors don’t brood over dream schools that they didn’t get into. And that unhappy graduates don’t let life become an elegy to what-ifs, as I admit I sometimes do. College is just one of many forks in the road. There’s a lot more life after you graduate.