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.
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.