Clickbait title with boring content
Everyone has known for a good few years that spending $100,000 on a film degree is not a high-ROI decision
College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
81–90 of 195 posts
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#82if you read around on the internet, in various and sundry forums, there is a rising acknowledgement among people that maybe their friends who accidentally got their girlfriend pregnant in high school and then got married and started working right away were the lucky ones... at the time it seemed as if those friends had messed up royally, but in hindsight, looking back over time and it seems as if the ones who got a g…
There's a larger determinant in the US depending on what you chose to go into; entry-level or not, children or not.
If you were self-taught in IT or development, then you essentially won. Even the junior worker does well. You could self teach way faster than a degree program. If you were stuck to retail just trying to make ends meet, then you were fucked, comparatively.
If you were former enlisted military and did IT/dev/security and have a clearance, you can easily beat out civilian IT or development with salary and probably work twice as less. I bet it's even more ludicrous for former officers. So does that mean military is better than college?
Even though there were studies on lifetime incomes for degree-holders vs. not, there are a wide number of options so that you can avoid being a statistic.
College would have been great if internet education had never been a thing.
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#83I graduated 6 years ago and finished paying off the ~$120k earlier this year. I went into tech so paying it off wasn't really a problem.
I've wondered at times whether it was worth it or not. I'd been programming since I was 8 and for the most part I only felt like I learned something in a handful of the upper division CS classes (computer architecture set up my love of FPGAs, operating systems was another favorite). The math classes are something I'm happy I was exposed to.
I do know that I matured significantly though. I also obtained a large group of friends that I stay in contact with to this day.
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#84>> The truth is, college isn’t for everyone. It’s a virtual requirement for fields like STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), medicine, academia, and law. I would say it's true for academia and some other fields that a college degree is required. It has not been true in my experience with technology. Experience and demonstrable skills trump education. Certification also helps. This does vary from…
I agree with this. I have a trash bachelor’s degree from a for-profit school and it has never been more than a checkbox when applying for jobs. I’ve managed a couple dozen people, and with the exception of the couple of PHDs in that group, I couldn’t tell you if any of them even went to college.
With that said, I work in InfoSec (as a dev/manager) so I suspect my experience might not be the typical one.
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#85Chiming in as a recent American college grad... One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes. Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But g…
> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.
This reflects the world as a whole. Most people aren't curious about things that don't directly affect them, so I'm not surprised to see it reflected in the college population.
Many people in the US treat college as a vocational school, probably in large part because the US pushed hard to increase college attendance. So 75 years ago, someone would graduate high school and apprentice at a job and work their way up, today, they likely start at colloege then jump into the labor force, but they pick their major based on the job they want (just like apperenticing in a field.)
Personnaly, I treated college as an instructor led encyclopedia, and just took classes I wanted to learn about. I have never earned a penny with the degrees I received, but I never intended to. Most of my college carreer was spend in tandem with working a full time job. I've only stopped college for a while because my job is sucking up too much of my time. Once I retire, I'll go back to college to get a PhD in math (probabilities, specifically) as background for what I want to study in philosophy (bayesian epistomology)
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#86If college was indeed a mistake, I would encourage the author to renounce his degree and then A/B test leaving it off his CV, dating profiles, immigration forms, credit and insurance applications, story pitches, corporate bio, club and association membership applications, medical records, and arts or other grant applications, and share the results. Articles like these seem like middle class people knocking the ladder away behind them.
If you don't think you need to go to university, you are precisely the person who should go to university, as unlike the long tail of people who actually go, your consideration and self-reflection alone means it's almost uniquely the right bet.
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#87There's something extremely depressing about how popular this attitude of "college is a bad ROI, do something else with your time" is. For sure, in the US currently there aren't many alternatives, so this might be practical advice for the current situation. But that isn't how this argument is framed most of the time. Instead, it's often more akin to "poor suckers going to college, haha I beat the system!" as if skipp…
I don’t think 4 year college will ever go away, especially for great academic students. That said, the argument is that the cultural pendulum has swung far too much towards pressuring everyone, regardless of their life goals, into attending a 4 year college. There are so many great alternatives, especially if you don’t want to be a doctor/lawyer/ etc. as a society, we should elevate blue collar jobs and career paths, and not elevate the cultural value placed on 4 year degrees (esp from random non prestigious private schools). Most blue collar jobs (plumbers/electricians) are interesting, enjoyable, and fruitful work (150k+), but in the US many people look down on these careers and steer their children away from them.
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#88Tangential: I don't believe college teaches critical thinking, because many students would be quitting college once they realized they were receiving a horrible deal (no evidence completing the degree would increase chances of getting the job).
People say college (esp. liberal arts) teaches critical thinking, but in my experience, succeeding in liberal arts classes is about going to office hours and figuring out what the professor wants to hear in your essay.
Related: My friend - smartest I've ever known - wasn't a great writer, but got a perfect score on the SAT writing section by memorizing the SAT word list and making an absolutely incomprehensible essay where almost every word was a bastardized thesaurus word for what word should have been used (and many just didn't make sense at all). Undoubtedly, it was a bad essay. But simply because they couldn't read it and it sounded smart, they awarded him the perfect score.
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#89The only problem I see is how in the USA, no one is stopping young adults from taking ruinous loans for worthless degrees. Why do people keep doing this to themselves and why don‘t peers, parents and teachers advise them better. Many of them then start screaming for the government (=tax payers) to bail them out, which is absurd to me.
It doesn't just stop at college tho. After college, you can obtain a ruinous loan for just about anything. At least with a ruinous college loan you should be able to "come out ahead" at some point. Ruinous home loan? Generally leads to foreclosure. Ruinous car loan? Repo man. Payday loan? Good luck!
Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
#90I'll offer one anecdote of counter-college hate. I went to a local state school, graduated in three years with winter and summer classes, commuted for the second and third, worked the whole time, and came out with a very small amount of debt (maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember). I made friends in college, I was able to get into a great job via an internship that I got from the school job fair, and got…
Getting a STEM degree at a state school and getting out as quickly as possible is arguably the smartest way to use college. Unfortunately, many 18 year olds and frankly many adults do not have the decision making skills to do this. Just because it’s technically possible to use the system beneficially doesn’t mean it’s working well.