Interesting.

[bladespark]

College will kill your entrepreneurial spirit, while simultaneously turning you into a worker bee.

I like the Violent Acres girl. I don't always agree with her, and occasionally she even goes over the line just a little, and I get the feeling that in person we probably wouldn't actually get along, but she says it like she thinks it, and I like that a lot.

Anyhow... she's got a very good point here. If I had it to do over, I'm not sure I would go to college. I learned a little there, sure. I had a little fun there, okay. I also wasted hours and hours and hours there when I could have been doing things that would actually better myself, or that I would have enjoyed, or that could have helped other people, or any number of other things. As it is now, I wasted the better part of ten years of my life trying to get a degree that I never did manage to obtain, in a field I found I didn't really like anyhow, which would have enabled me to get a job that pays only slightly better than my current pathetic income, and for which I am not remotely suited anyhow. I happily managed to stay more or less out of debt, but with all that money I earned and poured into education, I could have moved out, gotten a car, gone on vacations, and done all the other things I'm only just now starting to do. And there is that tiny bit of debt, which is going to cost me twice what I actually got out of it by the time I manage to pay it back with the miniscule payments I'm currently able to make.

College isn't a total waste. For some people it's the way to go.

But it's really not an absolute requirement for a happy life or even for a good job.

Comments

[lanabananaotter.livejournal.com]

I agree for the most part.

I plan to move to China soon. I'll go to a foriegner's Chinese university and study Chinese, then just get out into the world and do what I do best. :3 I'll probably be some sort of author/English tutor/artist. It will be good. I don't have to spend years at some college to be successful.

[silveradept]

The difficulty with college is that it's predicated mostly on the idea that an eighteen year-old person knows the field they want to work in for the rest of their life. Which is a rare thing. I wonder, though, whether having a job at the high school degree level ever gives you enough money to go to college if and when you should decide to do so - and most people we know of who have been working for a while just can't up and quit to go to college for four years.

Anyway, what I guess I'm really saying is that the college cycle is vicious. It doesn't like people who don't know what they want (excepting those that can continue to pay extra semesters) and it's not kind to people who, after figuring out what they want, have to try and balance schooling with the work needed to pay their expenses. I don't think college teaches people how to become worker bees - I think the way that we structure the working world does it instead.

[rabbitsystem.livejournal.com]

Worse in England. Here you have to know what you want by the time you turn sixteen, because you can only study four things, at most, to pre-college level.

[silveradept]

Ick. From what I recall of learning about the French schooling system, that kind of decision gets made in middle school, so possibly even earlier than sixteen.

It's kind of sad that we expect people who aren't completely sure of all the changes their bodies are going through to have planned out a significant portion of their lives by choosing a career.