Think back to the days of being fresh out of high school. You never have to see your immature classmates again, you can enjoy the summer air for a few months, and you’ve got your most anticipated step of life on its way — paying several thousand dollars to start figuring out what you’re going to do with your life.
What? No? You actually just want time to find yourself without student fees breathing down your neck?
It’s unreasonable to think that a high school student can figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Post-secondary should be a place to figure that stuff out more, instead of us needing to hit the ground running with debt and a life plan. With a free starting year, you can afford to make the time for things you wouldn’t normally do, like take an extra class, work a job, join a club, or even just make some personal time. You’d be able to make as much use of your young adulthood as possible.
Free first years for all those students would cost a huge amount of money of course, and that doesn’t come from nowhere. It’d probably come out of student fees and possibly government taxes, and realistically, some smaller healthcare and administrative fees might have to stick around. But once people have been given a mostly free year to figure out their life more, I’m sure that most of them would want to pay it forward to others.
