I personally can't remember anyone that didn't go to college tell me that its not worth it. Either they say its not for them, they don't like sitting in a classroom, or they were faced extraordinary circumstances where they decided to pursue an opportunity.
> And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're hypocrites
I would accept the argument of a college educated individual if they actively discouraged their children from attending university. Telling strangers on the internet is easy, but with your own children you have skin in the game. To me that's more telling of their true beliefs
We can't accept people who never went to college saying college doesn't matter, because how would they know never having experienced it?
And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're hypocrites.
All the statistical arguments are detracting from the actual issue. College is not worth it because it is expensive and time consuming but does not guarantee you'll be able to earn a living in the future. And unlike a skill or a business, you can't pass your degree to your children.
I'm almost thirty with a degree in philosophy. College was easily the worst financial decision I've ever made. It's scary to reflect on how I made that mistake as a teenager. The people I've met that were able to successfully leverage the advantages of a college degree fall roughly into two categories: 1) people whose parents had the money to support them financially but also the sense to guide them with respect to a career; and 2) highly ambitious people with a plan. The problem is that there was a generation of students (myself included) that thought a university education led to a well-paying job. I know how incredibly naive that sounds. But it was also the understanding of many parents without formal education encouraging their children to attend. But I think in general there's an increasing awareness that this isn't the case and now we're having these anti-college conversations.
I'm not arguing against a choice an individual seems fit for their benefit at all. I only question the value of college education in today's society. It is less magical and great than people proclaim it to be, college education needs more investment than just sitting in front of a computer or in lectures.
Also people with college are not necessarily better than people without college, that is an offensive view and very disrespectful to the millions of people without college educations who have done great things for this country and all over the world. Yes education is great (college is not the sole source of education), but one has to appreciate and work hard at their education to really claim that they are 'educated'.
That mirrors my college experience, but I'll also point out that people who don't go to college usually don't just sit around on the couch all day doing nothing. They have experiences too, and meet other people that they would never have come into contact with had they gone to college, and often have jobs or other experiences that are much more varied than their college-educated peers.
I think the bottom line is that it doesn't actually matter whether you go, it matters that you make a decision and follow through on it, and that you make a decision based on your life and not the desires of your parents, teachers, the Internet, or society at large. Yes, not going may shut off some opportunities and experiences that you could have, but there will be other opportunities and experiences that fill that void.
I've made the same argument as the writer, and I have children. Frankly, I'm not sure how to advise them when the time comes. It may well be that for some, I'd suggest a college education, while for others, I might suggest learning a trade and getting ahead in it while they're young. That is to say, I think your comment makes a conclusion based on your assumptions about people who question the universal value of higher education, and you don't have anything real to back it up.
I don't buy it. Looking at college-educated versus high-school educated people is the wrong comparison when advising people whether to go to college or not. The relevant populations are people like you who went to college and people like you who decided against college.
You missed the point of the post. It wasn't about how I don't like people telling me to do something I don't see the value in. It was about people dogmatically asserting the necessity of a process which has been fed to us by society without reason. Yes, college is great for some people; but society today has almost turned it into a religious thing. We're told "you have to go to college to get a good job" or "you have to go to college to be successful", essentially "you can't be smart without college". That's what I don't like. Many people instantly look down on you or assume you are less-intelligent if you don't have a degree.
Maybe you haven't had the same experiences, but I've definitely had the debate with quite a number of people who religiously insist that I should go to college, but can't reason with me why.
I believe that going to college is worth it if you're being selectively taught by the top 1%. The rest of the 99%? Forget about it-- you can learn more with an internet connection.
The only acceptable opinion would be from people who went to college and became successful, and then encouraging their kids to not go to college because it doesn't matter.
I passed up a National Merit Scholarship that would have let me go away to school and attend one of the big two colleges in my home state. Instead, I attended a local college for two years, living at my parents, taking whatever federal grant money was available and my parents covered the rest, in part because going to the local college kept tuition and other expenses reasonable.
(I'm 55. Tuition has changed in the decades since and this approach might no longer work. It did at the time.)
I then dropped out without a degree and did the military wife thing for a lot of years. I returned to school when I knew what I wanted to do, career-wise.
I made that decision in part because I was personally acquainted with two people who each had a bachelor's degree (and more schooling beyond that -- one was two quarters short of a master's and the other was working on his second bachelor's) and were financially dependent on someone else while they delivered newspapers (one also spent some time selling shoes and he eventually killed himself).
One was in his thirties and living with his mother. The other was mooching off a wife at the time who eventually left him.
So I was never fooled into believing that a college degree guarantees you a successful professional career. I felt I could deliver newspapers for a living without a college degree and I would be better off if I had such a job without being saddled with college debts like at least one of these two men was.
I don't regret my decision. Given the details of my life, I think I made the right choice.
We need to do a better job of educating young people about when it makes sense to go to school. Far too many people seem to think a degree is a magic wand and don't understand what else needs to happen to establish a career, especially one that pays well enough to justify taking on student debt.
The same comments, the same threads, the same post-hoc justification (from all sides), the same faulty logical extrapolation, the refutation of aforementioned, etc., etc., etc.
"Anti"-college people: Hi! You do not need an article on a blog - even a great blog from an expert - to justify your life decisions.
"Pro"-college people: Hi! You do not need to act uncomfortable because you did go to college. What an idea. Where's the defensiveness coming from?
"Try inventing anti-cancer shark-mounted LASERS without college degrees!" / "You sure wouldn't hire a BRAIN SURGEON without a degree!" people: One of these things is not like the other. The kids who bypass university thinking they will strike it rich with a social network for iguanas would not go on to invent anti-gravity boots -- or torts -- if only they'd tough it out thru 4 years in a state school.
Who'd I miss?
Remember, folks, historically speaking, many of the world's greatest minds had no university education in their fields. And a lot of them did, too.
Who the fuck cares?
EDIT: PS: I dropped out of high school at 14. Take that!
tl;dr: The author didn't enjoy his college experience, so he believes no one else will or can or should even try.
For me, college was an important stepping stone to personal responsibility and a real career. The cliched (if not actually all that typical) four-year away-from-home college degree can serve as a transitional period from complete dependence to independence. That's not how the political sphere talks about higher education, and the author denigrates that idea as "extended childhood", but I think it serves a valuable purpose for those lucky enough to experience it. Yes, it's outrageously expensive, yes student loans are a growing drag on the economy, and yes far too many people are excluded, and yes it's not for everyone. But it's a core part of our society, and it can't just be dismissed as unimportant because you had a bad personal experience.
The problem with universities is they create a self fulfilling prophecy, one that most students graduating from their will support, willingly or unwillingly, for their own benefit. If I go out and tell that XYZ uni I graduated from is not worth it, I would also be decreasing my chances of getting a job.
I know the 4 years I spent in my college were not worth it in an industrial perspective. Yes, I made friends, I learned how to learn, and I also got a degree to show to potential employers. But going back 4 years, would I repeat my decision? Absolutely not.
It's hard to accept what you did. But then again, you never graduated, so it might as well not affect you.
I couldn't agree more regarding college education. Speaking as a member of the highschool graduating class of 2015, the pressure on every single child to go directly into college was insane. Even the mere act of telling an adult that you weren't interested in college could get you referred to a school counselor or called into an impromptu parent-teacher meeting.
During my senior year, I was personally pulled out of class to discuss this topic on five separate occasions. I was an unusually stubborn kid, but even I eventually caved in and pre-enrolled at a local technical college. Of course, I almost immediately flunked out of the program. Who wouldn't quit something making them miserable when they didn't even want to do it in the first place?
I was one of the lucky ones, actually... Many like-minded cohorts in my graduating class wasted years of time and money with nothing to show for it. They deserved adults who'd help pair them with the pathways that best suited their individual talents and risk tolerances -- not some blindly optimistic, cookie cutter college-for-all solution.
What about you, dear reader? Perhaps you're responsible for teenagers of your own... can you say with certainty that the adults in their lives have had consistently honest and thorough conversations with them about the paths before them? I bet some parents would accuse me of being totally full of shit right about now. That's fine, I'm not some nostradomus bringing news of impending doom -- I only want the next generation to have things better than I did. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to entertain the idea, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwNiZ_j_24
> And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're hypocrites
I would accept the argument of a college educated individual if they actively discouraged their children from attending university. Telling strangers on the internet is easy, but with your own children you have skin in the game. To me that's more telling of their true beliefs
reply