Originally published on December 17, 2020 11:49 am
All throughout high school, Brian Williams planned to go to college. But as the pandemic eroded the final moments of his senior year, the Stafford, Texas, student began to second-guess that plan.
"I'm terrible at online school," Williams says. He was barely interested in logging on for his final weeks of high school; being online for his first semester at Houston Community College felt unbearable.
"I know what works best for me, and doing stuff on the computer doesn't really stimulate me in the same way an actual class would."
Paying for college was always going to be hard, but it was even harder to justify the expense during a pandemic. "We had no money for it," he says, "and I'm not trying to go into debt and pay that for the rest of my life."