College is supposed to prepare students for the future. As a soon-to-be high school senior, I am working my butt off to get ready for college applications and, of course, the experience of college itself. But I have serious concerns about how my future school might be investing in fossil fuels and, if they can’t be convinced to divest by student activists like me, how that might render my college education useless.

With the way the climate crisis is progressing, it doesn't look like Gen Z is going to have much of a future to study for. As temperatures increase all over the world, the oceans acidify, ice caps melt, habitats get destroyed, storms become more frequent and deadlier, and species go extinct, it’s scary thinking about what our world might look like in 10 or 20 years.

According to the United Nations, we have only about 11 years to intervene in order to save life as we know it on earth. In the span of 11 years, we will need to have completely transformed our entire society and the way we get our energy. So lately, I’ve been wondering what exactly it is that I’m preparing myself for with my collegiate aspirations.

We the students are putting in the work, trying hard in high school, taking exam after exam, and going through the college application process, all for a future that requires a stable climate and environment, not the “collapse of civilization,” legendary naturalist and Planet Earth narrator David Attenborough has warned us of. Meanwhile, our leaders are taking donations from fossil fuel corporations — and they’re not alone.

The very institutions some us are planning to attend, universities and colleges across the United States, are still choosing big fossil fuel over our lives by continuing to invest in fossil fuel companies, even if their research points to climate disaster.

I believe we are in the sixth mass extinction, which means this is the sixth time in earth's history that there are species dying off en masse. It's time institutions start acting like they want to stop it. This is especially true for educational institutions, the entire purpose of which relies on there being an actual civilized future to study for. (Not to mention, how can we pay back all these student loans if there’s no future?)

Right now, Ivy Leagues and other prestigious universities are in a place of major irony. Schools like Harvard University have invested their endowment funds in coal, oil and gas companies. In Harvard’s case, their endowment is totals roughly $40 billion, the largest academic fund in the world. As reported by Vox, about 1% of that endowment is invested in public holdings, meaning most of it, by far, is in funds, bonds, and other financial instruments, the nature of which they don’t have to disclose. For the good of their students, Harvard needs to disclose how heavily their endowment is invested in the fossil fuel industry, and then they need to withdraw those investments.

It is a fact that Harvard and other Ivy League schools are invested in fossil fuels, but how much money they have invested is difficult, if not impossible, to know. As of 2018, Yale’s endowment fund was $29.4 billion and Princeton’s was $25.9 billion. In addition to Harvard, Yale and Princeton have fossil fuel ties, but neither has disclosed how heavy those investments are, and none have agreed to divestment. These schools are actively investing in destruction, while at the same time claiming to prepare students for a future that will not exist if we keep doing business as usual.