It’s not uncommon for college students to be taken advantage of. We’re bled dry by tuition costs and interest rates. Our landlords take our security deposits and don’t fix our problems. Many of us get our degrees and the only jobs we can find are unpaid internships.

Most of us will walk across the stage at graduation and find ourselves with a pile of new debt, new bills, and new responsibilities. We’ve just spent the last four years preparing for a career, but shouldn’t we also be preparing for life?

Castleton’s Director of Career Services Renee Beaupre-White feels that many of the students she works with are ill prepared to handle what comes after graduation regarding their finances.

In order to graduate, we must prove to be proficient in quantitative reasoning, information literacy, effective speaking and writing.

Shouldn’t we also be required to know how to handle our own finances?

Castleton offers programs and seminars on managing debt and learning how to create a budget and handle living expense for students who are so inclined, but how many college students do you know will willingly give up there time to talk about their impending financial headaches? Not many.

We’re at a time in our lives when nothing is quite real yet. We’re living the dream and pushing our problems back to tomorrow, but those problems are going to get real – real fast. When that happens we’ll wish we went to those seminars.

Beaupre-White would like to see a requirement in place for all students to complete a financial literacy course in order to graduate.

This is something that will greatly benefit Castleton students, and give us an advantage over all the other clueless 20-somethings out there.

The cost of college, the obscene amount of debt we accrue and the fact that we, as college students, are treated as profit centers is a huge problem, but it’s not one that will be resolved in the next few years, so we need to do what we can to arm ourselves against this problem.

Learning how to manage this debt and manage our living expenses is imperative to ensuring we enter the world as fully functional adults, not as students to be taken advantage of.

Knowledge is our best weapon in this fight, and it’s a knowledge that as important as everything else we’ve learned in the past four years