There's always been plenty ways for college to be a bad investment. The US is full of successful people who didnt finish or even enter college. The old cliche of middle easterners having businesses in the US...not all of them attend college. I am for the take destiny into your own hands, look at alternatives approach. I can see how being very good in one thing is beneficial. Though I wouldnt want that to mean be 1-dimensional, be linear and over simplistic. There have always been trade schools as well. Just that most dont pursue that path. And if its all about money and career, an artist isnt a great way to go. I say this as a NON-graduate. But its still plenty notable that education costs are getting out of control.
So the author is suggesting that 18-year old graduates venture into their own business and forgo education? Don't know if I've ever seen worse advice. If you don't want to get into major debt over college- instead of going to a private school that costs $25,000 a semester, go to a community college first and/or go to school part time so you can work part time to cover at least some of the expenses. I don't think a little bit of debt coming out of college is unreasonable, just don't go to a school that costs so much that you'll be paying off student loans for 30 years.
Sure you can be successful without going to college, but what are the odds of that? What percentage of people who did not finish college are successful? What college degree gives you is a chane to make a decent living without you being anything special. Area of study is also very important in college, that's why Asians all go in practical fields like accounting, medical, engineering, software engineering etc. There are so many fluffy fields in college, the value of those degrees are highly questionable.
Eh, I guess everyone gets something different out of it. Sure, there are a fair share of useless classes, but I felt like college was valuable to me (and not just in that it got me a job coming out). If utilized it can help you become a better thinker and learn how to juggle many things at once. Not that some people can't do that without college, but I think the majority wouldn't. There are always going to be those that we can look at and say "hey, he didn't go to college and he's successful", but not everybody can pull that off. I've seen PLENTY of evidence of people that need a college education. The key is not to go to a private school just because you want to go somewhere prestigious.
A large portion of college kids are also taking 5, 6, even 7 years to graduate which can set you back quite a bit. There is absolutely no reason you should not graduate in 4 years, but many don't do it.
I stopped reading here. Without being trained to think, research, and evaluate sources, relying on Google is a recipe for disaster. Think of all the people that interpret the Constitution or the Bible without an educational grounding in concepts and history. This guy is essentially advocating for more people to become business versions of David Koresh. Yikes. And incidentally, if your primary reason for going to college is the investment return on tuition, you're missing the whole point.
Most people are mediocre and will end up getting a college degree and working in a boring corporate office. The fact that dell, gates, and jobs didn't graduate college just proves they were real smart.
Bad advice. College does have many useless classes that have nothing to do with one's major or interest, but that is what makes someone a well rounded person. Having knowledge beyond what there studies are, able to have conversations about people about things other then what they studied. A doctor can talk business or Business man talk govt, etc. I am one of those people that hated takign all these classes and spending all this ridiculous amount of money for them, but college is for the best, and no person with a diploma will make more then a college graduate, well there are few exceptions, but the majority will not
"College costs -- along with living and medical costs -- are rising, and salaries are going down right now," Managing Director of Formula Capital and Wall Street Journal columnist James Altucher said. You can some up this entire nation's problems in that on sentence as long as you change right now to "the last fifty years."
It depends on what you pick to study, doing some Arts major is a waste of time and money. When they tell you that you should pick something that you will love doing for the rest of your life, it is BULLSHAT, do something practical. This world is way too populated and competition is only going to go up now, so you better be ready to do something you don't like.
I would agree with this article somewhat from personal experience. Some of the best stock and commodity traders I know today never learned their craft in college. They learned it in their early years reading books and learning from the internet. All they had was drive, extreme thirst for knowledge, and passion to succeed. The vast source of knowledge that is open and free is amazing. It makes the world work environment much more level since access is generally open to everyone. Check out MIT Open Course. Free lectures from MIT. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
I'm inclined to agree with this. That being said, college life isn't for everyone, but to insinuate that a person will be worse off with more education seems a bit backwards to me. Even with all the bashing that liberal arts/social science degrees take, they're useful simply because they're college degrees. While the actual major might matter less in the long run (I majored in political science and sociology and could just as easily be doing what I'm doing now with a degree in english or psychology), a college degree in anything will still open up more opportunities than not having one. I mean, there's nothing you can do without a college degree that you can't do with one. The reverse isn't true. And doing what most people consider "practical" isn't always best. I could've been an engineer and landed a sweet job right out of undergrad, but I would have hated my courses for four years and hated my job for forty. Happiness isn't everything, but it's something.
I can understand the other side, but as a current teacher, a college education is incredibly important for the kids in my class. I teach in a Title I school. While there are alternatives to higher education, I know that my students would benefit from a college education and the potential for more options down the road.
No disrespect meant to the OP, but this article smacks of contrarianism for contrarianism's sake. Why bring up Michael Jordan, a man supernaturally gifted as a basketball player, a one in a billion genetic outlier, to speak about the value of education? The odds of making it big without an education are probably closer to the odds of making it in the NBA. (And let's remember: dropout poster child Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, after he already developed some marketable ideas. But, and this is important, Gates took advantage of some of the first computers available in schools, both as an undergraduate, and crucially before as a teen.) Whether or not attending a university represents ideal training for a particular field (Personally, I don't care. I went to college to learn how to think, about ideas, not how to build a better specific mousetrap.), this article ignores that a person without a college degree is stigmatized in the workforce. A college degree is almost essential to land most white collar jobs. Without it, the resume goes in the trash. The self-employed and successful inventors at that age, especially those without some type of family or clan monetary backing, are few and far between. If nothing else, because of this social stigma a university degree represents a tremendous investment. Even young people make more money in the immediate years after graduating. Take these figures for median wages for workers aged 25-34, one of the first results off of Google (2006 numbers are slightly outdated, but in this recession much of what I've read shows that those without college degrees are the hardest hit and the first ones laid off): Source: National Center for Education Statistics. Notice that the trend favoring college graduates is increasing over the years to present time. As all the good union labor jobs moved overseas, those with high school diplomas only have been left out in the cold. Roughly $20,000 dollars is quite a difference. And that's just for young workers; extrapolate from that the amount of money that the college-educated worker will earn in his/her working lifetime, compared to the non-graduate. You can forget everything else you learn in college (and really, the whole point of university is to strengthen and discipline one's capacity to learn; treating it as only a prerequisite for a career is a waste of one's mind); it's still a terrific investment.
