I spent four years at a private university and it was a complete waste of time – at least the academic part was.
I really couldn’t tell you more than a couple of facts that I learned from the numerous text books I read and countless hours of reviewing online research articles. The worst part is that, at the time, I felt like I was literally filling my brain to capacity with crap I would never need in my life. And in hindsight, I was completely correct.
While I do agree that there is a certain amount of foundational information that a person needs to learn in order to become a well-rounded and educated individual, for the most part people learn what they need to know through trial and error.
Yes, it’s great to have a head start so you don’t make the mistakes that others have in the past, but try to tell that to a pro athlete. Do you think a professional baseball pitcher gets good by reading a book about how to hold a baseball? To become a good pitcher, you need to throw the ball hundreds of thousands of times.
Little by little, a person’s skill improves in any medium by consistent repetition and immersion.
Comparing sports with education is a bit of a stretch, but the point is that our current ‘college experience’ for most university students is unbelievably unrealistic to how the world actually works.
Real education comes from real experiences.
Real experiences are not made in a classroom with hypothetical consequences.
Our collegiate system has been designed to create well programmed graduates who can simply move from the classroom to the cubicle – it’s completely true, if you think about it.
Higher education teaches you how to think and what to think, because the working world needed these types of people – preprogrammed workers.
For the last 100 years, the Western world’s economy has boomed from the formation of corporations that have a well defined hierarchy that allows workers of different skill to be plugged in on a variety of levels based upon complexity of tasks. Basically, schools are making human robots to perform simple yes or no tasks with an occasional think-on-your-feet decision.
And for the most part, this system has worked wonderfully. College graduates have been able to fall right into jobs that pay well, offer great benefits and provide a somewhat enjoyable working environment. Job placement for a college student was pretty much guaranteed upon receiving a higher-education certification.
Now things are much different.
We have industries like driverless cars and 3D printing that are disrupting the traditional style of commerce in such an enormous way that ‘traditionally educated’ workers are outdated.
Universities rarely even provide classes on the industries that are the future of our world, and most importantly, the fostering of unique methods and outlooks of creative thinking are all but squashed.
Yes there are some great schools out there that do provide some of these special education processes, but as a whole, we as a society are creating a working force of miseducated individuals.
I didn’t say uneducated, but miseducated.
That is why so many college graduates today are still hunting for jobs – employers simply don’t care about degrees. They care about skills and accomplishments that were developed from experiences.
As a current employer and someone who often hires freelance workers, I couldn’t care less about a college degree. I care about the work ethic, the work quality and the overall attitude of the potential employee.
I know tons of people who graduated from very respectable universities, but I wouldn’t trust taking care of my pet rock. Likewise, I have several friends who didn’t finish high school, but I’d invest all of my money with.
The stamp of approval that universities issue to their graduates means nothing to me, and lately it’s meaning less and less to other employers.
Why should I care about the information that was taught to an individual, when really what I’m looking for is the ability to produce quality work.
I don’t see the current college system disappearing anytime soon and unfortunately I don’t see it changing much either. Students will continue to pay money for an educational experience that is nothing more than a waste of time and an opportunity to rack up debt.
Furthermore, I don’t see the education process evolving until the market puts demands on the education system – which needs to happen from the ground up. Or in other words, universities will have to be forced to change strategies when college applications start to decline.
Slowly, parents and young adults are starting to realize that attending higher education institutions may not be the right path, and will instead choose to travel or immediately start working at the bottom of a company – or even better, start their own.
A four year college experience has turned into a baby-sitting experiment. High school students are migrating from their parents homes to college dorms where they learn how to drink beer, wash laundry and get into debt.
Instead of using the four year journey as an opportunity to become an expert in their field of study, students are wasting their time bouncing around different majors and different personal challenges. Really, there is nothing wrong with that, but college is not the place to figure those things out at $50k a year.
Perhaps a year of travel or work will sort out the maturity issues and add to the life experience resume that so many high school graduates need.
Our society has created the expectation that an 18-year-old person should know exactly what they want to do with their life and should know exactly what path they should take to get there. How unrealistic is that? There are simply too many complexities and options in our world today to expect a young adult to execute such a plan.
Furthermore, many of the educational opportunities that universities offer are unbelievably outdated. Areas of true opportunity in our real economy have very few, if any, college education opportunities.
Of course it’s easy to nit-pick all of the negatives in our educational system and I won’t be totally negative. There are certainly many, many benefits to higher education, especially when it comes to areas of study that require certification like the medical field.
The point here is that the process of learning that has been ingrained within our culture needs a major overhaul. An approach that allows each individual to first find their true calling and allows young adults to work (with a small amount of suffering) in a variety of industries, would drastically change the workforce that our economy currently employs.
The emphasis for high school students should be to figure out what they want to do at the lowest cost possible before they even consider attending a major university.
Whether it’s a one-way ticket to South America or a job as a brick layer, no one has ever been able to find their passion without first searching.
Couldn’t agree more! Yesterday we had an argument ( a constructive one) with my friends about collage education. We graduated from same high school and collage and it’s no coincidence that none of us is satisfied with their lives. I put most of the blame to the time I spent in collage and how such a waste it was. Your article tells it way better than me. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Cansu.
It’s funny, I received a lot of angry responses when I wrote this.
The majority of people were college graduates who said I was completely wrong. But… they didn’t really give me any reasons. They were more just angry.
It’s amazing how people can’t look at their lives and take a real constructive approach. It’s only those who are willing to say, “Hey I messed up here, but I’m moving forward and improving!” Instead of just being mad and bitter at your surroundings.
So, from one college graduate to another, thanks for taking a realistic view!
Hey Cody, I somehow came across your blog today (I cannot recall how) and blazed a trail through your every one of your posts that caught my eye.
I noticed in your reply to an earlier comment that you received a lot of negative responses to this post, so I guess I wanted to chime in.
Personally, the epiphany that I needed, regarding college, was when somebody phrased it to me this way: “College isn’t for learning, it’s for credentialing.” Put another way, college won’t teach anything to a person who won’t teach himself. I actually spent three years at a community college, intending to transfer to a state university. I did the whole bouncing around majors thing, until eventually I had a nervous breakdown because I didn’t know what the f*ck I was doing or where I was going and two of my professors were savants in their own right – geniuses at their work; challenged in communicating their knowledge. I got the first two Fs of my life, destroyed my GPA and basically dropped out of college after one more semester.
Sometime after that I ended up enlisting in the Army XD.
I definitely had to take some time to think through what exactly I wanted to do and how I envisioned my life to pan out. I admit I was only in college because I didn’t have anything else planned and I was too lazy and juvenile to find lucrative work. College was the easy way out.
At this point, I’m actually seriously considering going back to college, especially in lieu of the benefits that stem from being a service member. I have zero debt (but also nothing saved up lol), My main interest in returning to college could be summed up as the following, in no particular order:
-The college experience I never got
-Finishing what I started and turning all those credit hours into something more concrete than “Some College”.
-Harnessing the structure that college provides to supplement my own foray into my field of study. I’m a firm believer of being primarily self-taught.
That’s my story. Would you call it an exception, or would I still be wasting my life?
(Enjoying your blog, btw. Looking forward to reading more.)
Thanks for reading, Steph.
I’d call you’re first round of college a waste. Obviously many people need to figure out what the heck they want to do with their life. At $50k a year, a University is not the place (I understand you went to a community college). However, our culture has made the transition from high school to college a standard step. With no break in between high school and college (to go out in the world and see what is going on) failure is common.
From reading the three reasons why you want to go back to college (and not knowing too much about you), I still don’t think you have much of a reason to go back.
Now, if you said I want to go back to become a doctor or architect or electrical engineer, then those are great reasons to return to school.
But, if you want the ‘college experience’ you never got, you should just buy a plane ticket to somewhere fun and save a boat load of money.
Good luck!
Thanks for the response.
Cody, it seems to me that your primary argument against going to college is the cost of attending and the fact that most don’t learn anything in college.
If I could get free college and was guaranteed to learn (because I really want to) would you still say it isn’t worth it?
Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s a good deal. Also, do you need a degree to prove what you learned?
First, time is our most precious asset. Once we understand that, then we start to prioritize our life goals much more realistically.
So let me lay out an example.
Say you want to go to college to get a degree in business/finance, so you can pursue a degree in real estate investing.
You’ll spend four years doing your undergrad (you already got a lot of credits in CC, so I’m generalizing here), then another two years getting your masters, so you can prove that you are an expert. This will cost easily well over $100k, if not close to $200k. (Again, I know you are getting your education for free).
Let’s compare this scenario with someone who goes straight to work for a large construction company. First they are digging trenches and really working their butt off. But, because they are smart and hard working, they quickly move up the ladder. Within the first year, they become a construction site assistant manager. Then a year later they become a regional manager, overseeing many projects. Then a year later they work out of the company’s headquarters. Then two years later they are a vice president of the company. Then another couple of years they are a junior partner of the company. And then a couple more years go by and they have a large share of the company’s stock. This whole series of upward movement by this one guy who started at the bottom could take ten years. Guess what the CEO thinks about this guy? Everyone in the company respects him because he has worked at every level. And no one cares that he doesn’t have some degree saying that he is qualified to do the job. He is obviously qualified by what he has done.
Compare this upward movement with someone who graduates with their degree and tries to enter midway into a company.
Now, this scenario I’ve laid out is not perfect by any means. Because that guy who worked his way up the ladder in his company would have a very hard time going to a different company, where as someone with a degree might have an easier time.
But, the guy who worked from the bottom up was learning real-world lessons, not theoretical ‘what-ifs’ in the classroom. Additionally, this guy was getting paid the entire time, instead of paying for school.
And in your case, because you don’t have to pay for school, you’d still be missing out on getting paid.
Look, I went to college and got my degree, so I am not saying it’s evil and the worst thing you can do. I’m pointing out that there are other methods that may be just as effective, if not more.
I understand. The truth is, I realized a while ago that college can be fairly useless. If I’m willing to admit that I’m going to have to teach myself anyway, then it would make no sense to invest money (mine or the taxes people pay) and time (mine) into doing it in a classroom setting.
Thank you for you time.
Hello Cody,
I am a 22 year-old with a masters degree and I 100% agree with your views. When it comes to learning, I would say that college is pretty much useless. I studied at a top university (to put in perspective, my nation’s prime minister and finance minister have both attended this very university). I have read similar articles like yours where the author gets hammered for saying ‘Uni is Useless’. One of the funniest arguments that I always see for going to university is that they make great/life-long friends and learn social skills (drinking and partying, I guess). Paying 50k or more a year to enjoy life and make friends? Ever heard of travelling to other countries? Cheaper and more fun.
Anyways, I learnt it the hard way, i.e. after spending money on universities. Thankfully, I was sponsored so I don’t have any debts.
Did I have a good time at the Uni? Yes. Would I do it again? Hell NO. Why? Those 4 years of my life could have been spent on actually learning something on-the-job whilst I was getting paid or starting a small business.
I read your post and one thing I will add is that the value of college also comes from one other part of the college experience, you being in the same boat in life as many others. From the way I see it, college will likely be the last time in a person’s life when they will get to experience that sense of community and other common traits with others who are around their age.
I didn’t go away to college at 18 and instead started out of a community college, regret it with my life. Making friends was rough because people were all over in terms of age groups and I never really had that experience of making friends with other 18 somethings. When I transferred, I made friends with other 20 and 21 year olds but again, by then it was tougher to build those bonds.
After college, you just don’t get those same opportunities to have an active social life, make a lot of new friends, or enjoy fun experiences. Although I hate the idea of being an alcoholic, it is nice to party with your friends every now and then.
Agreed 100%.
You’ll always get negative feedback from those who are not willing to look at topic constructively. Most college grads have so much money invested in their education that the thought of looking back in regret is not an option.