College is a waste of time.

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When I was a kid everyone told me I was very intelligent.

Then I graduated from college, ended up with a job that pays about the same amount of money I could make doing an average blue-collar job, and people, including some family members, have joked that they used to think I was very intelligent.

College is a waste of time, folks.

God, I hope not. I have to go next week! : )
I'm sorry everything is kind of in the suck hole for you.

What did you go to college for?

Everyone starts out low when they start out with their career but they earn more as they get older. You have to work your way up.


No college isn't a waste because to have a career you have to go to school for it.
Some people go without college and they still succeed in life because they found a career and they didn't have to go to school for it. But I am sure they started out low first and in another job position and then they worked their way up and even got promoted.

College is not a waste of time because you gained new knowledge and understanding about things. My degree is an educational one but it doesn't mean I have to be a teacher. I can work for the U.S. Department of Education as an option.

It depends on your point of view. College for me has been a unique experience because I got to meet a bunch of new people, and I also had the opprotunity to discover who I am.

One of my friends got a computer programming diploma from a local business college in the late 70's. He was my supervisor at the time. A nephew of his got an assembly-line job for $10/hr and the family told my friend "Well, I guess he's better off starting at $10 an hour out of high school instead of going to college and making less money". Eight weeks later the nephew was laid off and the family shut up. A few months later my friend transferred to the programming department with a pay increase. None of his family congratulated him. Now he's the manager of a programming department. I bet they really love him now.

It's easy to kick someone when they're down, isn't it? Tell 'em to screw off.

I agree with you on one thing, college was a unique experience, but not because I had the time of my life or because I discovered anything about myself that I didn't know already, but because it was such a traumatizing experience, because of the state of isolation I found myself in and the derisive treatment I received from my peers, that it would be impossible not to acknowlege that it was indeed a unique experience. All that crap about being educated, etc? Well, there is the public library, and the internet; all you need is motivation to do things on your own. I estimate that out of all the stuff I know about life, only a tiny fraction of a percentage point I learned in college; the rest I learned on my own.

Last edited by Mw99 on 02 Aug 2008, 11:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There's a common thing about many succesful people and it is that they dropped college.

No, it is not that they didn't go to college, but they went for 2-3 years, then dropped. It happened with Billy Gates, the google guys, hmnn...

That's because they realized that, given their unique talents, the opportunity cost of going to college was just too great to be justified. The problem is when kids mistakenly conclude that if they drop out of college, great things will happen to them, too, by virtue of having dropped out of college, just like Bill Gates and all those other great men did. Trust me, there are people who actually think that way.

I think they received half the skills and knowledge a college provides. After this half all what the college teaches is mediocrity and how not to think for yourself. Perhaps this is my own bias caused by a lot of non-sense BS I have had to deal with this last semester...

It depends on what your degree is in and where you live. Some degrees are not worth the effort. A Computer Science degree used to be quite valuable. Nowadays in the US, a CS degree and $5 is barely enough to get you a cup of coffee at StarBucks let alone a job. I'm told that there are other parts of the world where you can still find work with a CS degree.

Other degrees, like Business, English, Math and Psychology, are in the same boat. Still, there are managers that look for college degrees as a sort of rite of passage and will only hire 4 year grads for unrelated jobs. I asked and was told that they felt that someone with a 4 year degree of any type makes a more reliable employee than someone without one.

I agree with this. Lots of what school - especially public school - teaches is how to take orders and regurgitate facts, not how to think for yourself and how to go about learning things. I think it's much more valuable to learn how to learn and how to gather information than just learning an approved list of things handed down by the government so that you can get good grades on standardized tests. What the Google guys and Bill Gates have that most college graduates don't is the ability to think outside of the box that conventional education forces you into and the intelligence to work in their specialized fields.

Not to mention that most public schools don't tell you how people really get hired or actual life skills.

Because of my degree I'm getting jobs I like. I'm considering grad school now so I can be a research scientist, my dream for so long.

I am in uni now, but it was because I don't think I am ready to work yet and I have no idea what to do, so I decided to study business.

Collegial topic

Going to college is not a waste of time and education. A basic degree is a stepping stone to higher paying positions, and many optional credits for upgrading require a basic college degree.