College is a 21st Century joke: a colossal waste of time and money.
Undergrad is not very difficult and it doesn’t teach you many (or any, depending on your major) useful, market-ready skills.
It’s a lot of high-minded, jargon-laden garbage to fill the time between binge drinking at parties.
The primary job of colleges is to prepare you to be a cog in the corporate machine.
However, with the rapidly evolving technology, we don’t need nearly as many cogs as we once had. So the system is misleading – giving you a false sense of security.
Many college graduates will be unemployed and saddled with soul-crushing debt they may never repay.
Why does college cost so much? A) because it’s government subsidized, which means they can keep inflating the prices and know they will get paid by Uncle Sam and B) administrative bloat – they layoff professors (the only absolutely necessary employees on the damn campus) and hire a bunch of paper pushers to do nothing but take your tuition.
But how to end that is a discussion for another day.
The fastest way to end it is to not go. Don’t buy into the machine. Reject the notion that you must do the society approved route.
With tech replacing more and more jobs (I bet we have less than 50% labor participation rate for the first time in history by 2025), you need to learn useful skills – how to build a WordPress site would be a great start.
You can (and will) learn more for infinitely less money using sites like: Udemy, Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy and TeamTreehouse.
You will learn practical skills to make money from people like: Tim Ferriss, Gary V, Ramit Sethi, Derek Halpern and Maria Forleo. For free (or like $12 to buy their books through my Amazon Store).
You will learn so much more by reading on your own and learning by doing. Read Inc, Fast Co, Wired, Entrepreneur and Forbes. All free.
If you need a couple years to grow up and all, I totally understand. I needed that too.
See if you can get a loan to pay rent for two years while you do a self-directed high quality education.
That’s my multi-billion dollar business idea I can’t do right now (unless you want to invest a few million in me and this): create a college-like experience without the ivory towers and charge a fraction of the price while guiding students through useful education to help them build and create things that will matter.
That’s what we need. Not more cogs in the corporate machine.
We don’t need to keep pumping out waiters with $30k in debt from the college carousel. Waiters don’t have too long before tablets replace ordering and their jobs are done by robots anyways.
Let’s take your average public school tuition of $10k/year. That’s rent for a year in most places in the country (not NY or SF). Spend $750/mo on rent and utilities = $9000/yr. Spend $1000 on courses and books (the aforementioned ones are a great start).
Food and drinks would cost you the same. Spend what you would have spent on the absurd racket known as college textbooks on alcohol and marijuana (if it’s legal in your state – if not, I suggest moving to where it is – it’ll be good to travel, meet new people, get outside your comfort zone). That’s another $1200/year… which is a LOT of booze and pot. Or a round-trip ticket to another continent.
And you could work part-time as an intern for a startup at Venture for America to get an amazing experience and network.
There’s just so many better things to do with your time and money than go to college. It’s just not worth the price of admission anymore.