The case against going to a 4-year college

When i speak to people about my college experience it is mostly a tale of regret. I consider going to college to be one of the worst mistakes I ever made in my life and there are a number of reasons why I feel that way. I also believe that a lot of people that go to college / university have a similar experience to the one I had. I'll try to not get too conspiracy theory-ish in here but i may go off on a tangent, because i tend to.

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Why are you really going?

I had a wide variety of friends while at university and I can't really think of any that were there for anything they were interested in before they arrived there. The one exception would be art students - they seemed to be very dedicated and knew why they were going to college in the first place. Pity that degree, for the most part, isn't going to do anything for you and basically it's just a really expensive workshop you get to use for 4 years.

The rest of us however, jumped majors like crazy. I had 7 majors before I finally graduated about a year behind schedule (I got fantastic grades, just wasn't interested in the topics as much as i thought it would be.) I started in Psychology because I liked Alan Thicke's character on Growing Pains. I left that after the first semester and moved on to Nutrition, Physics, Economics, Finance, Computer Science, and eventually landed in Business because it was time to graduate already.

A vast majority of my friends had no idea what career their field of study was leading them to and also had very little to no interest in that field but chose it because it didn't sound too difficult or their tends to be a lot of girls in it such as Marketing.

Did your high school pressure you to go?

Maybe this isn't a thing anymore, but my high school would constantly lecture us about how we Must go to college or you will be a loser and I think that is just horrible to subject 16 year old kids to that. They presented us with statistics about how we will be accepting a much lower status in society, both financially and socially, if we didn't go to a university. I believed it because the school would allow recruiters to come on campus and give us sales chats with wonderful videos and colorful packets that lead us to believe that we really should go.

The sales pitch was relatively relentless and looking back on it (and after briefly being a teacher myself) I think maybe our usual teachers might have just been looking for a day to not have to teach by allowing the presenter into their classroom.

Crippling debt

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This is probably a major demotivating factor for anyone considering going to college because it is "free." One of my first college courses in Economics we walked in and saw T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L. written on the board. The professor later told us something that sticks with me to this day and it seems so obvious

There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Those low interest student loans you are getting? Well, your pea-size 17 year old brain can't even begin to understand what compounded interest on a 40-100 thousand dollar loan is going to do to your future earnings and this is one of the only loans that declaring bankruptcy will not protect you from.

The existence of easily-accessed-by-everyone student loans has kept the cost of University climbing. If these loans didn't exist or even simply existed in a much smaller capacity various colleges would be forced to compete with one another on price and value - they do not need to do that now as college education is one of the only things that is available everywhere that continually gets more expensive.

In many ways it is a racket

A few of my friends have gone on to be university professors. One of them did this because as it turns out there aren't really any jobs outside of education in the field he chose to study (that's another story) but both of them have told me that as educators they are constantly contacted by textbook manufacturers to make their books "required reading" for all of their students. The professors are given gifts, invitations to "conferences" in luxurious places, and sometimes even a cut of the profits in exchange for requiring their students to purchase absurdly overpriced books.

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_{if you haven't been to college, books are routinely around $100 each with many classes requiring multiple books}

Students started picking up on this so instead of purchasing new books, the used books could be acquired at a much lower cost. This obviously didn't appeal to the publishers so they would make new editions of the same book and the professor would require that edition. One accounting class i was in I had the previous term's used book that a friend gave to me. The book was EXACTLY the same except the chapters were in a different order and the numbers involved in any practice questions were slightly different. How is this legal?

In a particularly bad situation, the professor of my class required us to purchase 2 books that he was the author of ... how is this not a crime?

Does your degree actually prepare you for anything?

Sure the piece of paper is going to open some doors for you but does that mean that you are actually good at anything? I graduated with honors, was in the top 10% nationwide and a member of multiple honor societies. When i began my first job literally nothing i had been taught was even remotely relevant. I think the only thing I had studied in college that was even used at all was MS Excel and you can learn more than i know about that program if you spent a couple days looking at YouTube videos or doing free classes on codeacademy.com .

Non mathematical degree programs (which is most of them) are basically environments where you learn to bend to the will of your professor who is likely very subjective in their interpretation of the art. Most of the teachers in my business curriculum had never even been in the workforce and had only ever been educators. Several of my teachers didn't even teach their own classes but rather had their free labor graduate assistants teach their classes for them.

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there are many other reasons i think 4-year college is a bad idea but this list is already getting too long

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tl;dr

I think you can tell that i am not a fan of the 4-year college system, at least, not in the capacity that it exists in the United States. There is really no reason that this should cost as much as it does other than the system being well and truly rigged. They have pigeonholed the youth of the USA into believing that if you don't go to Uni, you are going to be subjected to a life of poverty and have no skills.

Based on a majority of the experiences that myself and most of the people I know have gone through, college is going to get you a job but in many situations your education doesn't make you any better at it. The most successful people I know (financially and how well they enjoy their line of work) didn't go to college at all but rather found something they were truly interested in and became excellent at it.

I don't think that most degrees actually add any value to the person who ends up holding it. This is particularly true if the degree has the word "studies" in it.... and I include Business Studies, which is what my first degree was in.

The only real advice that I give to younger people is based on my own life experience: If you don't know why you are going to college and you aren't truly interested in the subject matter, you probably aren't going to get much out of it.... and it will cost you dearly.