If you ask a random student why they went to Point Park, chances are they’ll talk about the depth of practical experience in your intended career you can get here. While it’s fun to gently mock the phrase “corner of real and world,” it is accurate for our university: it emphasizes skills necessary to find employment after graduation.

I’m now nearing the end of my time at Point Park, and that means I’m starting to look at things through the prism of them having happened, as opposed to just trying to survive them. And what I can’t help thinking is that while the corner of real and world is a useful and valuable place at which to spend time, it’s also strangely limiting.

I don’t feel as if my degree has stretched my brain or critical thinking in the way I see my friends at more traditionally academically-focused universities being stretched. Sometimes I’m jealous of them and the choice they made to go to colleges less focused on career preparation.

We have a societally romanticized view of college in this country. It’s an institution of higher learning, we think, a marbled place that churns out academically enriched scholars. It’s easy to wax poetic about colleges as places where you go to expand your horizons to become a critical thinker and citizen of the world.

It’s much harder to live in reality, where tuition costs are skyrocketing even as a degree becomes increasingly necessary to get a job that pays a livable wage. According to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, “the list-price tuition at U.S. colleges and universities has risen by roughly 7 percent per year since the early 1980s. The inflation rate has averaged just 3.2 percent.”

And according to a May 27, 2014 New York Times article, “Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s.”

So, paradoxically, a college education is more prohibitively expensive than ever before, as well as more vital for a financially comfortable life than ever before. This is also as the minimum wage has failed to keep up with inflation for decades, meaning that college students trying to pay their way through school by working service jobs either have to take out more loans or work more hours than any of their predecessors did.

The problem, then, isn’t with Point Park’s philosophy; it’s rather with how necessary that philosophy is in today’s job market and economy. It’s difficult to actually survive in the world armed only with a solid academic background and no career-oriented skills unless you’re already wealthy.

So the hyper-focus on employability and practical skills makes sense for Point Park, and it’s doing its students a valuable service by so thoroughly preparing them for their future careers.

I’m grateful for the practical experience I’ve gained here. But I also can’t help but wish that it wasn’t quite so necessary to immediately begin the college journey with maximizing my employability, that instead I could have spent some time in the realm of the academic and theoretical and learn just for the sake of learning.

Until higher education prices become more reasonable, though, the corner of real and world is where it makes the most sense to spend your time and money.