By Jeremiah McKinney
North Cobb High School

Ever since I was a kid, college was never presented as an option. It was presented as the next step. Work hard, get good grades and get accepted into a university that helps build a successful future. That was the message I heard from teachers, parents and society for years. It wasn’t until I started looking at tuition costs, housing fees and student loan statistics that I realized pursuing an education could also mean taking on a financial burden that follows students long after they walk across the graduation stage.

The more I researched colleges, the more overwhelming the process became. What once seemed like an exciting milestone quickly turned into a series of questions about affordability. How much debt is too much debt? Is a degree worth tens of thousands of dollars? How many years will it take to pay off students loans after graduation? These are questions that many students are forced to consider before ever stepping foot on a college campus, and they highlight a growing problem with the cost of higher education in the United States.

College is no longer just about paying for classes. Students are expected to cover tuition, housing and meal plans. None of that even helps cover the cost for supplies which can quickly drive up the total cost of attendance. For many families, these expenses are unrealistic to pay out of pocket. As a result, student loans have become the norm rather than the expectation. Instead of graduating with a sense of financial freedom and opportunity, many students leave college carrying debt that can take years or even decades to repay.

The impact of student debt does not end at graduation. Many graduates enter the workforce already owing thousands of dollars, forcing them to make major life decisions based on their financial situation. Buying a home, starting a family or saving for retirement can become far more difficult when a significant portion of a paycheck goes toward loan payments. Rather than beginning adulthood with a strong financial foundation, many graduates spend years trying to recover from the cost earning their degree.

The impact of student debt extends far beyond graduation. According to Forbes Advisor, Americans collectively owe approximately $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, making it one of the largest forms of consumer debt in the country. Forbes advisor also reports that the average federal student loan borrower owes more than $35,000. These numbers highlight how common it has become for students to take on significant financial burdens in order to earn a degree. Rather than entering the workforce with financial freedom and opportunity, many graduates begin their adult lives focused on repaying loans that can take years or decades to eliminate. As college costs continue to rise, the question becomes not whether students will face debt, but how much debt they will be forced to carry.

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of rising college costs is that they discourage students from pursuing higher education altogether. According to the Nation Center for Education Statistics (NCES), concerns about affordability are among the most common reasons students choose not to attend a four-year institution. Many students are forced to settle for school they did not originally want to attend, while others delay college or avoid it completely because of the financial burden. Education should be an opportunity available to anyone willing to work for it, not a privilege reserved for those who can afford increasingly expensive tuition bills.

Higher education has long been viewed as a pathway to opportunity, personal grown and career success. However, as tuition and other college expenses continue to rise, that opportunity is becoming increasingly difficult for many students to access. While earning a degree remains important, students should not have to sacrifice their financial future in order to receive an education. Colleges, lawmakers and educational institutions must work toward making higher education more affordable so that future generations can focus on learning and building successful careers rather than worrying about years of debt. Education should open doors, not create financial barriers that prevent students from reaching their full potential.

By Fiona McGaraghan
Menlo-Atherton High School

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” 

Almost every high schooler recognizes this iconic opening line from the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and many could write a great essay incorporating it. However, few could write a line like it. For how much school systems emphasize the analysis of creative works, they are remarkably apathetic towards actually teaching creative writing. Creative writing is equally as important as traditional writing and requiring creative writing would add considerable value to students’ education.

 While many schools offer creative writing courses, they are elective courses–treated like a fun add-on to education and not a core discipline. This attitude ignores the fact that creative writing is an integral skill for many jobs, including ones where writing is primarily fact-based.

“Every writer, even if you’re a nonfiction writer, you have some elements within you that want to be creative,” says Piedmont Mass Communications Chair Joe Dennis. “I think creative writing has a strong impact in journalistic writing and nonfiction writing… When I was in college I was really close friends with a very excellent creative writer and she ended up taking a journalism class with me. Her influence in that class was so important because she helped people be more visual in their words and painting a better picture for people who were really well trained in writing facts… [she] really did a great job of embellishing the stories to make them come to life.”

The immersion in literature that a creative writing class offers gives students a new perspective on writing. “It’s experiential learning, and that’s something that I feel like a lot of people would benefit from,” says Madeline Willcocks-Hodlick, who took creative writing as a sophomore at The New School of Atlanta. 

Rose Klingsporn, a rising sophomore at Berklee College of Music who took creative writing in her senior year of high school, adds: “you’re doing a lot of reading of creative writing, and therefore you’re doing a lot of interpretation of creative writing. And that really helps in terms of general media literacy… a lot of English class is, like: these are the characters’ motivations. This is the character’s feelings. This is why they’re doing these things in the universe of the story. Creative writing is more [from] a technical perspective: why does this work? What technique are they using to make this poem good?” 

Getting hands-on experiences is valuable for students’ academic growth as well as their confidence in applying their skills outside the classroom. Klingsporn explains, “I go to music school. I’m talking about art all the time, and it helps to have those tools where I’m able to engage with art on a critical and technical level.” 

While not everyone has the opportunity to directly apply creative writing skills to their jobs, they can still apply in everyday life. Klingsporn says, “Going into that class, I was like, I don’t really like poetry… Now I write poems for fun sometimes, which I never used to do.” 

Writing in free time can boost vocabulary, critical thinking and empathy. An English class that encourages students to write outside of class is valuable to students’ personal and professional life, but also to their academic success. While discussing the idea of creative writing as a core class, Willcocks-Hodlick predicted that, in addition to promoting success in English,  “Work for other classes would be higher quality, too, because people would fall into the norm of kind of forging their own path and being creative with every process.”

Creative writing class gives students the chance to see academia from a new perspective. At the prospect of adding Creative Writing as a core English class, Klingsporn lights up: “[It would give] students a different way to engage with writing,” she says, “and hopefully foster some creative spirits in kids, because we need more of that.”

By Evelyn Jeffords
Whitfield Academy

Social media has changed the way people shop and discover products, but it has also made it harder to identify trustworthy information and easier to buy unthinkingly. Influencers, trends and targeted advertising often encourage overconsumption and impulsive spending while hiding concerns about product quality and company ethics. As a result, consumers must be more aware of how social media influences their purchasing decisions.

A common problem many people have in this social media centered time is how to determine false information from the truth. When deciding what brand to make a purchase from, many social media users are not properly informed on how to find reliable information about the brand and their credibility. Once a micro trend emerges from the internet, all companies move fast to take advantage of it and hop on the boat. Some companies don’t just take advantage of the trend but also take advantage of the consumers, “greenwashing” and falsely advertising the quality of their goods and how they treat their workers. 

According to an article from Medium: How Much Is Too Much? Overconsumption in Social Media, “When talking about ethical practice, companies like Temu and Shein may come to mind. They sell poorly made, cheap products. Both have a reputation for unfair labor practices and a significantly poor impact on the environment.”

When it comes to making purchases some consumers prefer to pay less for lesser quality products rather than invest in a sustainable product that will last long term, making these companies increasingly popular. Some other social media platforms, like TikTok have come up with new strategies to make making purchases more convenient, encouraging shoppers to spend more impulsively. 

TikTok shop was founded in 2023 and has strongly outsold some of its competitors. It gained 47 million shoppers to the site, and had an estimated 11.9 million U.S. purchasers in 2024, according to an article from CNBC. By using the strategy of convenience, shoppers on TikTok shop don’t even have to leave the app to make a purchase, leading consumers to be able to quickly make purchases, leaving them with less time to contemplate their decision. This leads to more impulse buying and buying in bulk. Influencers can also post videos on TikTok of them using a product and get paid for it, making it easier for potential customers to have exposure to the product.

Online it’s been normalized to have 10 versions of the same blush, 12 different scents of the same shampoo and 30 colors of the same water bottle. When people post videos of their morning routines onto the internet and show how they own 100 different products from one brand, it’s often because they receive PR from that brand and sponsor them, which isn’t always disclosed in videos. After watching these videos, people get the wrong idea that it’s a normal lifestyle to have an excess amount of products. Then they spend on products they’ll only use once a month, quickly go out of style, or expire before they get the opportunity to fully use everything they purchased. It also portrays an unrealistic lifestyle that can make other users who may not be able to afford that lifestyle feel less than, unless they have those items.

In an article from Medium: How Much Is Too Much? Overconsumption in Social Media,  “This desire to have what everyone else has affects people beyond the screen. It promotes unhealthy spending habits, unrealistic expectations of others, and substandard goods created to meet demand.” 

The internet has made overconsumption more common by promoting impulse buying, unrealistic lifestyles and fast-fashion focused companies with questionable practices. By researching brands, recognizing advertising strategies and making informed decisions, consumers can avoid being influenced by misleading trends and spend more responsibly.

By Addison Pendegraft
Johns Creek High School

Space — frequently described in religious, historical and mythological contexts as physical extension of heaven and the divine — is something humanity has always sought out to reach. But that trip comes with many perils and dangers, so much so that you might question if it’s reasonable to make that journey at all.

“Risk! Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her,” said Gene Roddenberry from Star Trek.

In terms of scale, the dangers of space travels are, quite literally, out of this world. NASA has categorized these lethal risks into five core hazards: space radiation, the physical distance from earth, microgravity and gravity changes, isolation and confinement, and hostile closed environments. Astronauts are exposed to high doses of ionizing radiation from galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events, drastically increases the long-term risk of cancer. Astronauts also experience accelerated muscle atrophy and bone loss, cardiovascular deconditioning and vestibular disruptions that cause motion sickness and balance issues upon returning to a gravitational field. They also are prone to sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression and interpersonal friction with their crew mates due to being in such a confined spaced for long periods of time.

Not to mention, the training and preparation the crew does before launch is grueling. The crew will spend hundreds of hours in exact vehicle mockups learning to operate all onboard systems and executing mission procedures. Instructors routinely introduce emergency malfunctions. In preparation for spacewalks (EVAs), astronauts spend roughly 10 hours underwater in massive facilities like the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) wearing weighted, pressurized spacesuits to stimulate microgravity.

However, one might say that not traveling would be a missed opportunity for humanity. Not only due to the educational value space travel provides, but also to its tendency to surmount social hurdles and restrictions. Spaceflight has historically shattered gender barriers in STEM, inspiring diversity and leadership at a global scale by shifting public perception of female capabilities. Like when Soviet cosmonaut and doctor Valentina Tereshkova flew in 1963 and Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, dismantling the pervasive social narrative of the time that physically and mentally demanding careers were exclusive to men. “A bird cannot fly with one wing only.” Dr. Tereshkova said. “Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women.”

Another example of space travel enabling social progression is NASA’s “hidden figures,” which were brilliant African-American female mathematicians and engineers that worked for NASA during the Jim Crow era. The intense pressure NASA faced to beat the Soviet Union during the “Space Race” forced the agency to leverage underutilized talent, enabling these “hidden figures” to transition into pioneering roles in computing, management and engineering. And this shared effort required to win the “Space Race” led to further equally, with black and white women being permitted to work together in the same integrated offices.

“To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage, single-handed, in an unprecedented duel with nature—could one dream of anything more?” Said Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to orbit Earth.

The most recent major spaceflight taken place was NASA’s Artemis II crew to the moon. This flight successfully launched on April 1, 2026, sending four astronauts around the Moon and returning them safely to Earth by April 11, 2026. It was a very significant historical moment, as it the first crewed flight to leave low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972 and marked the first woman, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, to travel into deep space and journey around the moon.

Space travel serves as an inspiration to the entire world, As the crew witnessed the far side of the moon, the entire world was watching them from below. What’s most captivated viewers was the humility and emotion spoken by four astronauts speak about their experience. This flight marks a historical and inspiring moment for us all, as their words remind society that this otherworldly and remarkable mission was accomplished by people like you and me. “I found it really refreshing to see how people have followed the mission,” says Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. “What I have seen has brought me more joy and more hope for our future.”

So while space travel might not be the safest thing in the world (haha), its merit to society is undeniably potent, both for social progress and inspiration. “If you can’t take love to the stars, then what are we even doing?” Said Amit Kshatriya, NASA Associate Administrator.

By Kaya Collins
Forsyth Central High School

College tuition, student loans, piles of money for average education, and…wait – free education across seas?

Hearing something like “low cost” may sound like low funded schools and poor education, but universities in Europe are actually found to have simpler yet more effective learning structures while remaining cost efficient and affordable. According to GBSB GLOBAL, bachelor’s and master’s programs are shorter in Europe while maintaining low-cost or free tuition. This allows students to focus more on their education and then entering the workforce much sooner than average American students, as well as sustain a higher quality of life throughout their college years.

Trigger warning: Admissions.

One large stress factor for students in America is the admissions process in their senior year of high school.

Essay this. GPA that. Clubs and sports and test scores this.

It can quickly get suffocating. Universities across seas still have an admissions process of course, but schools tend to focus more on grades and test scores of classes related to the intended major of the student compared to the complex route the U.S. takes. This way, students are able to focus on their specialized interests and skills and truly prepare for higher education before they even graduate high school.

American universities have great pieces to offer and provide incredible opportunities for students, but may not be worth the heavy costs that come attached with exceptional, cost effective schools in Europe.

Forget the “American dream” for a moment. Instead, switch to the mindset “when in Rome” and head on over.