Don’t Go to College if You Want to Be an Artist

We go to primary and secondary school to learn the basics: language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Sure, your school curriculum might have thrown in a couple required years of foreign language or art, but we all knew what the big four — the ones that actually mattered — really were. (Unless you went to some fancy performing-arts school or something, this was the reality for education in the United States.) For most of us, our success in school was dependent on our success in language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies, which was directly tied to measuring our so-called “intelligence.” The question of smarts came down to whether or not you had perfect grammar or if you memorized the quadratic formula and its application.

Often, this is the extent in which we think about education, never truly putting any emphasis on arts and music. In fact, if you attend college in pursuit of an arts degree people will undoubtedly ask you “what’s your backup plan when you graduate and can’t get a job?” — or they’ll just congratulate you and then say the same thing behind your back. There’s a reason for this stigma, and that reason is the image of “the starving artist.” This stereotype is so ingrained in our minds that we condition young people to believe that in order for them to utilize their passion for creativity as a career they’re going to have to sacrifice their chances at making money and being financially successful.

For Julia Benedicto, an 18 year old graduate of my alma mater Kearny High School in the northern New Jersey town of Kearny, this stereotype is one that she is more than familiar with. “I’m not good at math or science. I’m an artsy person. It’s looked down on…my teacher wouldn’t let me go to music lessons,” she recalls. Julia struggled to get the adults around her to validate her choice to prioritize music. And it’s not like she was a bad student academically either! An honor roll student who prides herself on succeeding in juggling a number of AP classes on top of her already loaded schedule, Julia was not afraid of rising to the challenge of the conventional standards of common core. When I describe her schedule as busy I mean Julia had to practice the instruments of violin, cello, piano, guitar and flute while also attending ballet lessons and actively participating in countless extra-curriculars. But what sets Julia apart from any other “prodigy” student able to maintain good grades and a busy, creative schedule is that Julia is not enrolled in a traditional institution of higher education — that is to say, she’s not going to college.

Julia Benedicto’s formal education started in her home country of Brazil, where she attended school from 2000 to 2007. When her parents made the decision to pack up and migrate America, all they could think about was how much of a better education she would be receiving in the land of opportunity. “Everything [in the United States] is so much better,” Julia’s parents would say, believing they were giving their only child the world. But when she started school in the states, she realized that things were a bit different than they seemed to be.

She recalls her experiences in Brazil’s education system and compares the fact that to her, the pacing felt much faster than it is in the U.S. “Education wise, everyone that comes from a foreign country, when they get [to Kearny] they excel in school…they already know the material. What takes us ten steps they can solve in two,” Julia remarks. This perspective can be true in certain cases, many people used to view the United States as the hub of education but the reality is we can barely keep up with competing countries. But this didn’t hold Julia back. She still managed to focus on school and it was then she began to find her outlet in music. Things really started coming into perspective for her when she started high school and the big, scary C word creeped into various conversations — college. When I asked her about when exactly it was that she knew she wasn’t going to go to college she told me that it was a long and slow path toward that decision. “When I was younger I always [thought] I wanted to go to college,“ this belief stemmed from the thought that college was just something everyone did after high school. “It was senior year that it kinda hit me that… I’m probably not going to go to college.” She looked into some performing arts schools, but the reality truly sank in when it became time to apply for FAFSA. Having been brought to the United States by her parents at such a young age, Julia is what’s called a DREAMer, an undocumented youth protected by Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act. While DACA allows students like Julia to get an education in America, it doesn’t allow her to qualify for any federal aid like the Pell grant. This limited the options Julia had for college, confining her to either pursue a traditional college degree and let go of her dreams to focus on furthering music or to go to college for music and be in debt for the rest of her life. Julia says the decision was easier for her to make than it was for people to accept, “obviously I couldn’t afford it…I would much rather start working by teaching orchestras and dancing and all that I’m doing now with my life because it actually is what I wanna do.”

To any rational person, this pressure to conform to society’s expectations can be draining to have to deal with. Julia admits that people’s judgement of her path in life was hard to deal with at first. “I feel like it affected me a lot especially because of how much I care about other people’s approval… here I am doing all these other things… but people still just say ‘okay, are you going to go to college though?’” Despite all of this, Julia still feels confident in her ultimate choice to reject the traditional formal education system and become educated through real-world experience in her field. To Julia, education is “to have knowledge about things that are going on around you… you don’t have to know all the biology, chemistry, or calculus in the world to be considered educated,” as long as you know that the process of education is an ongoing journey and that learning is a constant part of life.

-Eduarda