to college. your option is to be worse educated or to be better educated. that’s why it’s propaganda. the right doesn’t want people to go to college, because then they develop the critical thinking skills to see through manipulation and corruption.
or you go to business school and you learn how to manipulate and corrupt and exploit others.
I also don’t know about you, but people’s critical thinking skills tend to disappear when those skills get in the way of their own profit.
Yeah I’d say it’s at the heart of every MBA program. Step on other to get what you want. Aka capitalism.
College is and never has been a scam. Some people have been mislead as to their job prospects, some assumed that having the diploma was all that they needed to do, and others have gone through the process only to get the paper and not actually learn from the experience. What you get out of it is up to you. Are you willing to continuously grow? Then getting a bachelors will be a good footing to start out on.
The idea that college = success was always a correlation/ causation mistake. People with degrees were also the people who could afford to go. Success is correlated to wealth and wealth to education. Whatever wealth was reserved for the educated is spread thinner and thinner as more people graduate.
If everyone has a degree, class won’t go away, they’re just going to have to sort us by something else.
The problem is folks think just showing up was the ticket to being wealthy.
Everyone told me my life was ‘done’ once I got into college, like as in college will let you coast the rest of your life. They were 250% wrong. I also had some friends in high school who failed out of college because that’s how they approached it.
Truth is regardless of your wealth, effort is needed to learn things. You either make that effort, or you don’t. A lot of people wealthy or not, refuse to make the effort.
College is a scam in that it’s expensive, but if you go to class and put in the effort, you will still come out better educated than before. The big lie is that a degree will get you a job. It won’t, but it can help get a job.
It depends on what you want to learn. If you want to do a trade or tech, community college or trade school are decent options that are cheaper, probably more hands on, and don’t require the extra core classes that a university requires to graduate. With trades, you can try to get an apprenticeship somewhere and get on the job training. For tech, you can self study, build projects, and make a portfolio. Some fields you have to have a degree, like being a nurse/doctor, teacher, or lawyer.
If you want to get better educated just for the sake of being more intelligent, there are tons of resources available, many free. Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and others are free or low cost, you just have to search for what you want to learn about. Some schools like MIT have free college courses that if you complete, you can get a certificate but not a degree unless you pay.
Came to say the exact same thing, the only scam (with any real college, no for-profit/etc. colleges) is the cost. If you can go for cheap/can afford it, college is a great thing to do and a great way to better yourself.
I really hate to break it to everyone. But even with all the capitalist fuckery in the job market, the second most reliable determinant of where you’re going to go in life, is your level of education.
First of course, is how much money and social status your parents have.
College isn’t a scam. It’s just something people say to cope with their inability to go, or their mistakes they made when they attended.
The quality of your education is mostly a product of your own personal efforts and investments in that education. Plenty of crappy schools have excellent students who get great jobs.
The passivity of your question belies a problematic attitude that college is a ‘investment’ that must give you a financial return. It can, but it won’t do necessarily unless you seek a job-focused specialized education in a lucrative field w/ many job openings, like petroleum engineering.
It kind of has to be an investment though if you’re going to be paying it off for the next 10 years, there’s lots of ways to learn things if you don’t need a piece of paper proving that you did.
It does not have to be an investment. Plenty of people go to college for free.
The only people who freak out about it being in investment are those who have to pay full freight, and those folks already have money and huge advantages in life, even if they personally don’t feel that way about their life. They also typically tend to be upper middle class types who are paranoid about money and have internalized the concept that if you aren’t constantly building wealth you are ‘wasting’ money. That concept isn’t as common among the poor or the old money rich, who don’t treat wealth accumulation as a ‘High Score’ you are trying to achieve in life.
Nobody at my school cried harder than the kids who had no loans and were so angry their parents had to ‘sell stock’, and they were especially bitter at people who got free rides or financial aid, whose families had like 1/10 of their parents wealth.
I have family who are wealthy who are incredibly bitter about having to pay 80K a year to attend a college… and they act like they have no other choice, even though their children were offered free tuition to state schools. But they are ‘too good’ to attend a public college, and they’d rather incessantly feel angry and aggrieved at how ‘unfair’ life is to them even though they have millions of dollars in the bank.
The best educators still teach at colleges. It’s certainly very expensive but it’s your best chance to get a better education. You really do get out what you put into it. I challenged myself to get a degree by doing the bare minimum and while it worked, I was not better off for it.
I’m very successful without a degree. I am atypical and would still recommend going to college
Community college/trade programs.
Almost nobody should go to university on a whim. Unless your career field specifically needs a degree, it’s pointless to take out loans.
You’re just starting in a bigger hole of debt if you go and don’t need it.
A lot of good stuff has been written here already. I’d like to add some observations from my side of the Atlantic:
- there was a push for more people to go to college up until ca. 10 years ago, since it was assumed that a highly automated service industry would need less physical jobs
- as a result, more people went to college who never should have gone to college
- as a result, trade degrees have been seen as worse, and have issues with finding good applicants
- as a result, in the last 10 or so years, there has been a push for people to get into trades
- this trend is even more extreme in Eastern Europe, where you can find people with, say, geography degrees working in ‘basic’ office jobs
- a bunch of local, external factors come into play as well, like the end of mandatory miltiary service in Germany meaning that the averade college applicant is likely to be younger and less experienced
I have to say that I’d probably trust someone with a 30-year old advanced electrical trade degree way than someone with a fresh bachelor in EE, even ignoring the work experience. That does not mean that college is a scam. Trade degrees (ideally) teach you skills, college degrees (hopefully) teach you a way of thinking. Both of those have value.
Industry certification. Cisco, microslop, Comptia, Linux foundation, Red Hat.
College. It’s not that you won’t get an education it’s that an education doesn’t guarantee a good job - you need connections for that. I heard college described as a way to launder privilege and it’s hard to disagree. Some non privileged have to succeed for that to be effective but it doesn’t matter who or for what. That said, I think it’s a better bet to get an education than not but don’t expect high pay to be guaranteed. Definitely recommend having a solid plan for the job you want and taking classes specifically to get there.
“That’s the neat part…you don’t.”
-JK Simmons
Europe /s
Education doesn’t guarantee a job. It is meant for you to learn how to learn and retain knowlege and depending on the program pick up some skills. Being able to apply that in the workforce is on you. Some people can do all of that without paying someone to help them get there but most of us need guidance, hence college & university. The part that has played havoc with the last 20 years of grads is that they were sold on the concept that degree = high paying career and that there are dream jobs obtained by attending dream programs at dream universities while going into debt at levels equal to buying a family home. Anything you ever do that needs financial credit needs to be fully understood and analyzed with payback determined before that debt is taken on.
