I have a college degree. I'm just saying, I should have done something else because I have an education loan I need to take care of now and my job sucks. Yes, I'm just a mediocre person that has a college degree, just like most college grads.
Or their parents busted their asses clawing and scratching out of the Great Depression and World War II so you could be born into a Leave It to Beaver pseudo paradise. "You" being me.
It's not overrated. If you don't go to college where do you go? 1. Military 2. Trade school 3. Start your own business 4. Work whatever job you can get without a college degree The first one I don't like for myself just because of the time commitment, I'd rather be working towards a degree. The second will cost you money as well and you likely won't make as much money as with a non liberal arts college degree. More power to you with # 3. God help you with # 4. To me a 4 year degree shows diligence, hard work, and that you are fairly well rounded. These are traits I value when I hire new people. IMO it's a safe path to follow where you can dabble in a few different things until your internal compass finds its true north. Community College is great because its cheap and if your high school GPA was in the crapper you can still get into a good 4 year school. What I would like to see is at least the Senior and maybe the Junior year in high school phased out and instead move towards community college and trade schools. If I could go back now I would drop out at 16 get my GED and go to community college. Your junior and senior years in high school are no different than freshman and sophomore years in college. Anyway if you want to make good money and you're not keen on starting your own business you've really got to look at at least a masters degree these days.
Regarding the bolded part above: 1) Just like any good company wants to say "Look at how educated our employees are," the military is no different. The military wants you to attain further education. It matters in terms of promotion and position, just like anywhere else. And think of the GI Bill in the same terms as tuition reimbursement offered by so many companies; they amount to the same thing: work here, and if you want it, we'll pay for your education because it benefits all parties. As for the time commitment, what doesn't require a time commitment for work/education/benefits/promotion? The four years required by the military is pretty much the best deal I'm aware of. 2) Maybe you don't realize it, but you can make a very decent living working in the trades. Just think how much your mechanic charges per hour. Or a plumber. An old friend of mine dropped out of SHSU after his freshman year and went to work for Mercedes as a mechanic. He was 19 and making $35K/year and living at home. This was in 1995-96. He was making $50K/year by the time he left to go work for someone else, and he has since bought the business which he has now owned for 10+ years making well over $150K/year. College is great, and I'm not arguing otherwise. But so many people seem to think it's the only way to get ahead in life, and I think that's about as far from the truth as one can get. Everyone needs to have a plan, sure, but you can postpone college or not go at all and turn out just fine.
I guess I look at the four year military committment and think I could have a degree already. I would rather work for a company while going to school simultaneously and have them help pay and have it done in 4 years then take 8 years the military route. As for the mechanic, kudos but aside from taking over a business like he did there is a bit of a plateau in a pay grade. Without being a business owner there appears to be a ceiling for a salary one can earn without eventually going to college. Now I know some IT guys who are contractors and make good money but again they own their own business. To be a cog in the wheel of a company like most of us are you need the higher ed to make the bigger bucks.
With the military, you have to train and work while going to school, same as any corporation out there. Or you can serve out your commitment and then go to school; it's your decision. It does depend on what job you signed up for, of course: If you chose the infantry and are currently deployed to a war zone, then attending classes might be more difficult. I'm fairly certain a sailor on an aircraft carrier or similarly equipped vessel can enroll at a university and take online classes toward a degree, same as anyone else can do. The difference is that you'd be doing it in the middle of the ocean, but the point is that you can do it, and you work your job and go to school the same as any civilian working in an office somewhere. I met a drill sergeant last year. He enlisted in the Army at 17. At the time I met him, he was 27 and an E-7/Sergeant First Class, which is virtually unheard of at his age. Anyway, he was a career guy, meaning he was doing 20 years and he would then retire, AT 37 YEARS OLD, with his full pension/retirement and all the benefits that come with it. His plan after was to sit on his butt for a few months and then go to college without spending a dime of his own money via the GI Bill. I just turned 35. I can't fathom being in his shoes. Edit - Now that I think about it, he may have had his degree already and was thinking about going back to school for his masters....I'd say most enlisted guys (or at least a very high percentage) have a degree when you start getting into the higher enlisted ranks; I really I can't remember which it was. But retire at 37?? Sign me up for that s**t. As to the mechanic, sure there's a plateau, but there are plateaus in everything unless you take steps to bump yourself to the next level. I'm not saying that my friend is typical, but he could have been very comfortable just staying with Mercedes. Like I said earlier, he was making upwards of $50K/year when he left, and this was years ago. I'll plateau at some point as an RN. I'll never be a millionaire, but there are several different certifications I can get to add to the title, some of which mean I get more money (and more responsibility); some don't. I can always go back to school and get a masters or doctorate in nursing if I decide that I want to. But it's all up to me whether I want to pursue those things or not. All I have to do is formulate a plan and work towards that plan, same as everyone else in any other field. Again, I'm not deriding college; far from it. But you don't HAVE TO have it. It all boils down to your own individual plan for yourself.
What's pretty clear in this thread is that you need to carefully consider the ROI of your investment in education - but your typical 17 or 18 year-old doesn't think like that and probably doesn't get any advice to do so, which is a crime. The gap year is extremely useful for many - why get into college if you aren't mature enough / aren't ready for it? I didn't graduate with my Bachelor's until I was 25 - but at least I didn't have a huge debt load - and getting out of debt quickly has helped me catch up for my late start.
For people who are really intelligent, college is a waste of time. I think that a college degree doesn't really mean you are a master of your craft, it just means you stuck it out to get your degree. I've seen too many people with degrees that don't know the first thing about really management. They may be smarter than say the average waitress I suppose. Few people want to dedicate themselves to a craft, the management decisions you see these guys make or the way they handle themselves are so freaking predictable and boring and any half intelligent person could make similar decisions. Colleges don't teach a person to be a real artist and that's why guys like Bill Gates and Ralph Ellison, and the guy from facebook, all dropped out, because they don't need it. The only thing college really teaches a person is how to approach learning. The rest is up to you.
You can also complete your degree then join the military. I believe you're able to skip basic and don't start out ranked as Private. I imagine it has to be a useful degree but that's a decent way to go as well.
You're right about the first sentence. It's what I did. With a degree you either go to OCS (Officer Candidate School) or enlist as an E-4. No one skips Basic, though officers have their own form of it.
Was gonna start another thread but figured this topic was semi-recent enough Facebook and PayPal's Peter Thiel Pays College Students to Drop Out Critic of college education believes part of "American Dream" is overpriced. <object width="640" height="390"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/P1SKBlIBnOI?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/P1SKBlIBnOI?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="390" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/fa...-pays-college-students-drop/story?id=13693632 by LINSEY DAVIS May 26, 2011 PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel knows a thing or two about finding the next big thing. Thiel was the first investor in Facebook and predicted the dotcom crash and the housing bubble. Now he believes the next big thing to burst is higher education, and he's willing to put his money on it. "Learning is good. Credentialing and debt is very bad," he said. "College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt." The 43-year-old with a net worth of $1.5 billion recently started a $2 million fund to get college students younger than 20 to drop out of school and start a business with $100,000 each. "We ended up picking 24 people to try to get them to work on very specific projects that would push the frontiers of science and tech in areas ranging from biomedicine to computers to robotics," Thiel told ABC News. Even though Thiel has a law degree from Stanford, he's still questioning the value of a college education. New York Magazine recently rated the worthlessness of a college degree as "one of the year's most fashionable ideas." "Facebook was started in 2004. That was the right time to start that company," said Thiel, whose $500,000 investment in Facebook is now worth about $2 billion. "If all the people had finished their college education and waited till 2006, it would have been too late." College students Eden Full and Jim Danielson say they are not willing to take that chance. They've dropped out of college and put their ideas and inventions on the fast track with Thiel's financial backing. Full said she worried that someone would beat her on her idea for new solar panels, so she passed on a degree from Princeton. "These panels are so unique," she said, "I need to get them out there now." Danielson, who turned an old Porsche into a fully electric car while in high school, put the breaks on Purdue. "I feel like the electric vehicle industry is changing rapidly, and if I passed up this opportunity and waited till I finished my college degree, a lot could be changed," he said. "I could miss the boat on electric vehicles." Sixty-five percent of Americans have student loan debt, and the typical college student leaves school $24,000 in the hole. According to The New York Times, by the end of the year, the total is expected to surpass the trillion-dollar mark -- that's more than credit card debt in this country. "The price of education on a college level has gone up by a factor of more than 10 since 1980," Thiel said. "Adjusted for inflation, it's gone up by about 300 percent -- more than housing and tech stocks did in the '90s or housing [in] the 2000s. It's quite possible for a person to go to a top-tier private school and end up with a quarter million in debt." PayPal: 'Very Basic Idea' Nets Thiel $55 Million Thiel has already been credited with transforming the world. He said PayPal, which he cofounded in 1998, "was a very basic idea: take dollars and email and try to combine them." That combination turned out to be a winning one. Ebay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion; Thiel made $55 million. He used some of that to invest in promising startups, most famously in Facebook. Although others say he bankrolls big, eccentric ideas that he thinks will save the world, Thiel calls it "breakthrough philanthropy." "Technology is fundamentally about going from zero to one," he told ABC News. "If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange." He's donated millions to promote research into reversing the aging process to extend human-life expectancy. "I enjoy my life," he said. "I certainly would like to live longer." He also funds the Seasteading Institute, which is devoted to creating self-governing communities in the middle of the ocean. "Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned," Thiel said. "It's pretty far in the future but closer than say building cities on the moon." Thiel has become the poster boy for Silicon Valley libertarianism, the belief among many entrepreneurs that government hinders innovation. Openly gay, Thiel endorsed Ron Paul for president in 2008 and has donated heavily to Republicans. "I probably am a bit of an outsider in many ways," he said. "That has good things and bad things about it. It does have the tremendous benefit of forcing you to think about what's going on fundamentally with institutions, with our society and then for for ways to make them better."
^Trade school is likely more pragmatic solution, but many people don't know what they want to do, so college seems like a "life finding" experience to many that erases mistakes while getting that ever important diploma. Thiel is certainly talking about the crowd who knows what they're doing rather than those who idolize the paris hiltons or purchase garbage from MTV rejects and cling to that "win the lottery/Idol" hope.
Headline should read "Billionaire who got lucky creating glorified message board and wire service pays couple dozen kids with great math and science grades who already got into good schools and have middle class parents and likely college-bound friends who are willing to support/hire them if this all goes to **** two years of secretary's pay."
Yes it seems about not throttling back the already ingenious minds who are right there on the verge. And assuming that most everyone else has a spark of ingenuity that can get tapped into. I do think that most people do not want to see themselves as "filler" though thats more than likely what they'll be. And they'll take an easily accessible approach to inflate their worth beyond that. Which is Idol/MTV/Reality- show-that-chronicles-my-every-move type fantasy even as unrealistic as it is. Didnt think the 80s "Living on a Prayer" thing would carry over so much. Though I don't think overly expensive college is a viable alternative for those types either. So yes trade school seems an approach.
Eh, maybe I should made this its own topic for more snarky responses like this Could be that. Or, people who are looking to create ocean cities in its own self governing utopias away from stifling mainland civilization might not get the resources for that out of college. So in a sense he's right. In the interview, when he was told that college graduates make twice as much money in their lifetime as a high school only graduate, his response: "Doesn't that say there's something thats gone WRONG with our society, that its become so critical to get these credentials." I'd think a society need SOME kind of credentials to be considered for entrance and acceptance into any kind of institution. Its just a matter of deciding the mutually agreed upon criteria, and the price you have to pay.
