20 sats \ 2 replies \ @orthzar 6 Aug 2023 \ parent \ on: What’s the WORST advice you’ve ever received? meta
I was told something similar: "go to college or you'll be poor forever."
My parents regretted not finishing college, so they tried to vicariously relieve their regret by making me get a college degree. They even had the gaul to make me pay for the debt. Joke's on them: I never got a college degree and now I tell people that college is a scam.
I'm not sure college is a scam, but it is a bubble and provides a horrible ROI for most people. I ended up going, majoring in engineering it sounded cool, and flunked out because I had no motivation. I eventually got a different degree at a smaller, cheaper school and $25k in student loans as a constant reminder to apply critical thinking to major life decisions.
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My reasonsing for college being a scam:
- College is sold as a means to getting a job, despite the fact that the skills/knowledge required to do most jobs are taught by the employer or can be learned on your own.
- College is very expensive considering it checks a box for many jobs that don't actually need a degree.
- Colleges never tell you "hey, this is gonna be expensive, so maybe you should consider whether you actually need it," because they get the money up-front, and lenders are guaranteed by the US Federal government to be repayed.
- Few jobs actually require the sort of training that a college provides (e.g. engineering, academia, lawyering, etc).
- Most of the knowledge that a college degree provides can be learned by simply reading books, which are inexpensive.
- Most of the skills you'd need for a job can be learned without any formal instruction by reading books, watching YouTube, and practising at home (e.g. welding, programming, vehicle repair, cooking, tailoring, etc).
- Some professors will let you sit in the classroom and listen to their lectures for free, because so few students care about what is said in lectures and a curious student is a breath of fresh air to those professors.
College might have been useful for most students 50 years ago, but today it is a scam perpetuated by at the very least the US Federal government.
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