The Price of Admission

School teaches us to compete long before we understand what we’re competing for. We’re ranked, graded, and sorted, set against the child beside us and taught to measure our worth by who finishes ahead. Then, just as we reach adulthood, we’re handed the next step as though it were the only one: pay for a place in the system. The degree is sold as the ticket in, the proof that we’re worth hiring, and most of us sign for it willingly, at eighteen, with barely a handle on what we’re agreeing to. So we begin the ladder of life already owing, our first act as adults a promise to repay. In my view, that’s no accident of the market. It’s how the script reaches its next chapter: a generation trained to compete, then tied to the system by debt before it has had the chance to ask whether it wanted a place there at all.

I know this trap from the inside, because I walked into it with my head held high. I completed a Higher National Diploma and went on to finish a degree in a single year, graduating with a 2:1 in subjects I could not honestly say I cared about. I wasn’t driven by passion. I was driven by the need to over-achieve, the same need that had kept me safe as a child, now dressed up as ambition. I was praised for it, and the praise felt like proof that I was doing life right. But when I stood there with the certificate in one hand and a debt of  more than £30,000 in the other, I realised I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had bought a place in the system without once asking what I wanted from it. The achievement was real. The direction was missing, because nobody had ever asked me for one.

The debt is where the trap closes. We sign at eighteen, before we’ve earned a penny or understood what we’re agreeing to, and from then on a slice of every pay cheque goes back to the system that sold us the ticket. For many, it follows us for years, shaping where we live, which risks we dare to take, and how long we stay in jobs we’ve outgrown, because owing makes us cautious and cautious makes us compliant. And the cruellest part is that the door we paid for is often held open by the very people who profit from us paying. Employers ask for a degree as standard, filtering out anyone without one, while someone who started at the bottom, learned on the job, and worked their way up can wind up at the same level a few years later with no debt at all. Same destination, different price. In my view, that gap shows how much of the cost was never about learning. It was about permission: proof that we were willing to pay to be let in.

Debt is only half of the story. The other half is status. A degree becomes more than a qualification: it turns into a badge, a way of being sorted into above and below. Letters after a name, a graduation photo on the wall, the quiet shift in how people listen when they know you studied: all of it tells us who counts. And the ego, which has spent a lifetime looking for proof that it’s worth keeping, grabs hold of it. We want to be somebody, and the system is more than happy to define what somebody looks like: the right title, the right salary, the right certificate. So we chase it, and we look down, or feel looked down on, depending on which rung we’re standing on. In my view, this is how a hierarchy sustains itself. It doesn’t need to enforce rank, because we do it to each other, and to ourselves. But the soul never asked to be somebody. It doesn’t need a title to feel whole, and it can’t be ranked or measured by anyone’s grade. The more tightly we cling to who the system says we should be, the more distant we grow from who we were before it told us.

Once you’re taught to climb, you’re taught to look sideways, because the ladder only works if there’s always someone beneath you. From our first report card we learn to measure ourselves against the child next to us, and that habit hardens into something much bigger: top sets and bottom sets, good schools and bad ones, the educated and the uneducated, the professional and the “unskilled.” Every label draws a line, and every line becomes a division we help to maintain. We chase superiority because we were taught that worth is relative, and so we spend our energy comparing instead of connecting, competing instead of cooperating. In my view, that’s how human nature gets shut down. Curiosity, generosity, and the simple instinct to belong are crowded out by the question of where we rank. In their place come the unwritten rules: dress this way, speak this way, want this, don’t ask that. Nobody has to say them aloud, because by adulthood we have absorbed them and learned to enforce them on each other, and a population divided against itself has little energy left to ask why the ladder was built in the first place.

All of this follows us into the careers we choose. We pick a path according to what we were taught was sensible and what the grades said we were good at, and then we give it everything. Work stops being something we do and becomes who we are. We answer emails at night, skip rest, cancel plans, and tell ourselves it’s temporary, until stress and burnout become the baseline and health and relationships quietly slip down the list. Money sits at the centre of it, the ultimate currency of life, the measure of success, security, and worth. But it’s a currency with no ceiling, because the moment we reach one target, the system shows us the next. So we’re always wanting more and never quite satisfied, running on a treadmill that tells us the next promotion, the next raise, or the next purchase will finally be enough. The cost is paid in the body and the mind: sleeplessness, anxiety, exhaustion, a nervous system that never fully switches off, and a creeping sense of emptiness that no pay rise can reach. In my view, the saddest part is how normal it feels. We call it ambition, even as it slowly takes the things the soul actually needed: rest, connection, and time.

The effects spread into our friendships. When worth is measured in titles, salaries, and possessions, we learn to measure each other the same way. We size people up within moments of meeting them: what they do, where they live, what they drive, how far up the ladder they’ve climbed. Our own lives get judged by the same yardstick, and usually found wanting. Things stop being just things and become status symbols: the house, the car, the holiday, the carefully chosen photograph. They signal to the world that we’re doing well, even when we’re not. Friendships suffer for it. Conversations turn into quiet comparisons, and we celebrate each other with one eye on our own standing. Vulnerability gets crowded out by the performance of success, so even in a room full of people we can feel like we’re the only one pretending. Underneath, many of us are miserable, tired, anxious, and lonely, yet we keep running, because we were programmed so thoroughly to believe this is simply what life is. We become slaves to a system we can no longer recognise, too busy running to see the wheel and too conditioned to imagine stepping off it.

Whatever we earn, we learn to live up to it. A bigger salary brings a bigger house, a better car, and a longer list of things we suddenly can’t do without, until the lifestyle swallows the raise and we’re running just as hard as before. So we’re never satisfied, because “enough” keeps moving. And once we’ve climbed, going back down feels impossible. Stepping down from a career, taking a quieter job, or moving to a smaller home doesn’t register as a choice for peace. It feels like failure, as though we’ve slipped on the ladder in front of everyone. In my view, that’s how tightly the status has been stitched into who we think we are. We’d rather stay exhausted at the top than be at ease somewhere the system says is lower.

So I’ll ask you plainly. Who are you without your job title? If you took away the salary, the house, and the badge of being busy, what would be left? Is your career something you chose, or something you were steered into by a grade, a parent, or a fear? What are you chasing, and who told you it was worth chasing? And if you could do something that earned less but felt like yours, would you, or would you feel like you’d failed? Seeing the system for what it is doesn’t free you overnight, but it changes everything. A cage you can’t see is a cage you’ll defend. The moment you recognise you’ve been a slave to a system you never agreed to, you stop mistaking the bars for your life. From there, freedom begins in small, quiet ways: a choice made because it’s yours, a “no” you no longer apologise for, an hour spent on something that earns nothing and means everything. You may not leave the wheel all at once, but once you’ve seen it, you can never un-see it. And that, I believe, is where freedom starts.