Is college really worth it?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself since the dawn of my time. Ahem, after I finished high school. Basically, we’re being told by our parents, friends, teachers, dogs, cats and the universe — that we have to go to college and get a degree, and most of us do without a question. But is this really what ensures us a bright future? You know… have a good job, happy family, loan-free house. And the anwer is yes… and no.

Working domain

So your working domain will influence the way you should make decisions enormously. If you hope to become a great doctor, having graduated a college is an absolute must. There’s no question around it. Same thing goes for being a teacher, lawyer and so on. But what if you want to be an artist, a web designer — basically a freelancer. Do you really need to face all those college fees, the seemingly unnecesary exams and all that fuss? Well yes, one might argue that there’s something to learn from anything, but if you’re a good learner you can optimize the content you’re learning to better fit your needs, in comparison to what they give you to learn at the courses. After all, those curriculums are mostly based on extremely vague areas of the domain.

College degrees do ensure you a stable job — most of the time. Although this is true, I would still argue that there’s a minimum of three years spent working towards completing it along with all the drawbacks it might have. Now I’m not saying everything about the college is bad, actually it has a lot of good things to offer:

• a place to meet potential partners
• learning
• great teachers
• a fun place (it’s the prime time of our life really)

These advantages should apply at least a few times during your stay at the university, alas it can have the exact opposite drawbacks — and most of the time, they are more numerous. We all have faced situations when the classes we’ve been attending to were utterly useless, the assignments we had to take were carelessly put together and the unnecessary informations we had to copy and paste to the paper through our mind. Also, depending on the college you’re part of, might also “offer” techniques that are truly deprecated.

The way you should think about whether college is worth it or not, is to ask yourself — What could I do instead of this class, that would ensure me a better future? If you do find a good answer, then maybe college isn’t just worth it in that particular scenario, which means that there might be scenarios where college is actually worth it. It’s really hard to find an answer, because there’s really no way to find out the outcome of a span of time of at least three years. Heck, we’re not really sure what we’re going to eat tomorrow.

Conclusion

The absolute truth is that whether college is worth it or not depends a lot on one’s life’s situation. It’s such a relative thing, that you can’t really argue objectively. My personal experience with college was close to being horrible up until now, although it had some small benefits to it.

Thank you for reading, see you next time!