Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
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Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
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Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#2site down, cache:
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Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#3> “There’s no reason not to…” is not a positive argument for anything.
It not be a positive argument, but it does set a floor for considering alternatives. Whatever you do end up choosing to do with your post-high school years, if it's not college, has to beat what college offers you.
There's a lot to consider. Are you good at motivating yourself to do stuff? Can you think usefully at a high level? Can you chart your own course, using only resources that you, yourself can acquire and integrate, and get somewhere in the four years you'd be giving up by going to college?
Then there's there's this: Are the questions you're asking yourself regarding the decision going to remain relevant after the new reality sets in? Can you trust your 17-19 year old self to make decisions?
I chose not to go to school, and that decision threw me into a purgatory that lasted until the end of my twenties. I lost my goals and ambitions and had to find them later. Now I've found personal traction and am working on personal product-market fit.
I don't know how my life would have been different if I'd have gone to school. I like my life now but I can't use that to say that the college decision I made was good or bad. Maybe it would have been better. Maybe I'd have found the traction I enjoy now earlier had I gone to school. Maybe I would have never found it.
Maybe it's a wash. In that case, it would have been better to go to school, because at least I would have had better jobs and situations while sorting through all my personal stuff to find traction.
School is a good default decision to make in a world where there are very few good default decisions available to make. Think long and hard before you decide to not take advantage of that.
Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#4I'm glad this discussion is happening more and more. What I think it really comes down to is education doesn't automatically equal school.
Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#5> “There’s no reason not to…” is not a positive argument for anything. It not be a positive argument, but it does set a floor for considering alternatives. Whatever you do end up choosing to do with your post-high school years, if it's not college, has to beat what college offers you. There's a lot to consider. Are you good at motivating yourself to do stuff? Can you think usefully at a high level? Can you chart your…
Shouldn't the previous decade of schooling before college taught you how to make education decisions?
Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#6Need to come up with a long term strategy for dealing with credentialism. One obvious example comes from the military a couple centuries ago, buy and sell military officer commissions. I think this could work. If the primary purpose of credentialism is stealth enforcement of demographics, making it starkly monetary instead of stealth monetary isn't going to offend those people.
Another interesting aspect is spending your late teens/early 20s in school was, centuries ago, kind of a day care for young adults old enough to get into trouble and young enough to be utterly unable to run the family business (being nobility, owning a factory, stuff like that). So you need a new day care for kids who aren't old enough to play in the big leagues but too old to sit around and get in trouble all day. I propose mandatory national service. There's always .mil or peace corps, other alternatives could be envisioned. Some kind of 1930s CCC organization, perhaps. Something has to be done... there's not enough jobs to employ 22-67 right now, so increasing working years to 18-70 in the future will just doom us. Maybe lowering retirement age would help, what with natural ageism anyway, working years from 18-59 might be the ticket. You can either lower the upper limit formally and cheaply, or informally via ageism and welfare expensively, so may as well minimize costs. Besides, old people vote, and dropping to 59 will probably sell pretty well, so from a practical political view this is required.
If anyone has a better anti-credentialism strategy than buying/selling degrees, or a better baby sitting idea than national service, please reply.
Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#7There's a good case to be made that learning job skills is not the main benefit of going to college: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/10/10/bryan-caplan/murray-n...
Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#8The assumption that college is a four year commitment is absurd. AP classes mean you can get credit in high school, or the CLEP test allows adults to quickly get credit for classes. Community Colleges allow you to transfer credits. You can take extra classes, often at no extra cost.
It's only 4 years if you go in taking the absolute minimum amount of full-time credits to get the degree.
Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#9> “There’s no reason not to…” is not a positive argument for anything. It not be a positive argument, but it does set a floor for considering alternatives. Whatever you do end up choosing to do with your post-high school years, if it's not college, has to beat what college offers you. There's a lot to consider. Are you good at motivating yourself to do stuff? Can you think usefully at a high level? Can you chart your…
Shouldn't the previous decade of schooling before college taught you how to make education decisions?
No. The problem domain is more complicated than can be understood and modeled by an 18-year old.
Re: Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
#10> “There’s no reason not to…” is not a positive argument for anything. It not be a positive argument, but it does set a floor for considering alternatives. Whatever you do end up choosing to do with your post-high school years, if it's not college, has to beat what college offers you. There's a lot to consider. Are you good at motivating yourself to do stuff? Can you think usefully at a high level? Can you chart your…
This is a good example of confusing macro vs micro. In the short term, solely individually, you are better off going to school. Society long term might be doomed by it because of work skills mismatch, financial issues, class issues, and waste of time / waste of human potential, but you're individually better off going to school... for now anyway, or more accurately, at least in the recent past, maybe not today.
Its like in a discussion about fuel efficient cars, pointing out the death rate is slightly lower in a land barge and its real nice for carrying my skis. Yes, but that'll also "destroy the planet" if all 6 billion of us acted that way. Nobody wants to live in the high crime city so we'll "ALL" move out, leading to guess what in the burbs?