Of course, it’s possible to eschew these opportunities, but if you ever have a moment of clarity to try and live life a little better, the opportunities are there within reach. At any later point in life, these things can be hard to come by serendipitously, and they tend to require a relatively steep active effort.
In general, upfront life investment is exceptionally valuable, and the (all encompassing) human gestation period easily extends through college age in modern society. I think the issue of its worth is typically for people that were underserved in their grade school years, which is probably a decently large percentage of the country.
Your personal effortful reading and learning, and demonstrated efforts to apply that learning make up the investment so to speak. Ultimately, internet repositories, professional mentors, and public libraries are worth more than college degrees in and of themselves, but not everyone can access and leverage these resources properly, due to lack of information literacy or professional and academic preparation.
Simply put, college is not worth it—-you are what’s worth it. Invest in yourself, through paid or free human resource development, and you will reap rewards. If you attend college without applying yourself properly, you will have made zero progress and also face a financial deficit. If you do not attend college but manage to apply yourself and be resourceful, you will have certainly made significant progress and you will have avoided debt.
I think college is still the best preparation to become an educator, which I am (Ph.D. with 15y experience in academia).
I went to a T20 school in the USA with name brand recognition. I often hang out with close friends who did not. Let me tell you: school discrimination is real. People (including those who gatekeep the first 5 years of your career) treat me differently than my friends once they find out where I'm from. All of a sudden I'm much more interesting. I get told I'm smarter.
Hell, job interviewers softball my questions. My first big-boy job interview's final round went something like this.
Hiring Manager: "So, [T20 School] huh? You had a good time there?"
Me: "Yup, I say it was a great experience."
HM: "That's awesome. I love the campus so beautiful. My kid plays in their afterschool soccer program. You like soccer?"
Me: "Oh yeah I like following Premier League"
HM: "Awesome. How 'bout them Aresnal's right? Anyways, look you seem like a smart kid. You'll probably get the job -- we'll call you next week with details."
And I got the job.
(My second job's phone screen literally started off with "Oh my husband went to [T20 School]. He was two years ahead of you ever run into him? No? That's fine it's a big school. Anyways!)
And I pale in comparison to the kids who went to the Ivies.
Unfortunate. But there's a reason why many dedicate tens of thousands of hours of their youth to beat the competition and break-in.
Lots of companies pay head hunters good money to get valuable candidates. You can think of the Ivies and the other top tier schools as 4-year head-hunting agencies. They first do a selection to see which kids have the most potential. Some of the kids have potential in the fact that they are very hard working, or extremely smart, or both. And some have potential in the fact they have a strong personal network (the legacies). On top of this selection, these universities also provide training. But that's secondary.
In my field that means "a degree in computer science or equivalent". It's still the path of least resistance for getting through the door. Yes, there are often other routes, but they all involve working harder than everyone else.
Apprenticeships don't really scale for corporate roles, there are too many candidates, and it requires too much investment from employers. College outsources parts of this, it's one last filter to weed out "the weirdos" - the graduates come prepackaged, indebted and pliable, ready to be slotted in and adsorbed by the system.
A better consideration is spending a significant amount of time and money going to one college versus spending significantly less money going to a community college which might also require a smaller time investment. Unless you're attending a top 5 college then I don't think going to an expensive college is worth it. Find a cheaper place where you can still leverage networking opportunities and put your time and money to a more productive use.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, but the entire point of college is to commoditize labor according to a specialization.
And yes, for certain technical fields, you will need 4 years of rigorous education in the basics of that field to be basically competent.
For other fields, networks + connections + opportunities is what you will glean (on top of the socialization). And the location matters! I'm sorry, but if you're doing marketing/communication at a state school in Nebraska, you will have a much harder time than the kid going to USC/UCLA/LMU or NYU/Columbia on the same degree. Because those kids will be quickly snapped up for jobs at marketing firms that make enough money to pay them enough money to make the degree worth it.
The traditional 5-6 years of studying one core subject makes me a bit worried these days due to the speed of change in the current job market.
Ultimately, education should be a strategic choice, not an automatic one.
Seems like the job market has only gotten worse since then however.
I've recently stumbled upon a Supply Chain online course at MIT that takes 1.5 years with really decent content. This is obviously less than getting a traditional bachelor's degree.
I've been thinking about the disdain that the industry seems to have with respect to education. People are largely expected to train themselves and learn through school, or outside of work. It feels like there's no time set aside during the work day to dive deep on new stuff or things you don't know about. If it's not "useful work", it doesn't get time and attention.
The best part of university is realizing how dumb you are and that you are ignorant in every way.
Realizing how ignorant you are and still thinking that you know more than people skipping university.
I frequently see posts convinced CS/Art jobs will be completely automated by AI in just a few years, and the only way to be safe is to get a business degree and go into management.
I think a lot of it is overblown, but I've already seen a few friends switch their degrees over it.
There are management and business focused CS degrees in Germany with significant overlap in the courses.
But economics/capitalism is only one lens through which to look at this. College is NOT vocational training. You don't go to college to become more useful to your overlords. Ideally, after college you would be useless to overlords.
What I would personally like to see is a study of class section pass-rates that properly segment first-attempt students from re-attempt students in the metrics. The Administration doesn't collect these because it would shine visibility on a decades old problem, showing they have a conflict of interest (they want a forever student, and to take your federally subsidized money).
There is a lot of fraud that happens in various different forms within these systems, that is undisclosed upfront.
Physics had the notorious 3 question fail test, where questions were dependent on getting the correct answers from all previous questions, along with undisclosed rules that contradict curricula taught rules (significant digits). If you rounded at each problem you failed, if you rounded at just the last problem you failed. In other words it embeds a causality property biasing the pass distribution greatly (only the top ~10-15% would pass).
Material may not be covered, but still tested on, and this may come in many different forms. Some are very tricky indeed to spot.
Answering inferential questions, for them to be valid they require that there be a signal that is easily differentiable from the material taught (SNR) which allows comparison between two similar answers but one correct straightforward answer, this signal is usually attenuated to the point of denial of service (jamming), or the wording used is ambiguous (having two contradictory meanings, one of which must be guessed).
The amount of time required to succeed may be non-standard (i.e. 3 hours / week per 1 unit is typical, but some classes are as high as 7-9). There are finite hours in the day, and to receive federal funding one must get 12 units. This may range from 34 hours/week for 16 weeks to 70+ depending on the hidden variables for the class.
Worse, the tools that are marketed to teachers for these classes use dark patterns, or do not disclose the effect (to induce additional failures). Pearson did this as recently as 2022, where they embedded per-student randomized exam pools and the teacher couldn't access the questions on the test (and you can't rely on a signal from the class because each test is unique), and other psychological patterns such as forcing you to confirm that you got the answer wrong before you can continue (with big red text), whereas correct answers just continue on. Almost like beating a mallet on the student every time they get it wrong, while tossing invectives their way. You think that won't have an impact on performance?
You can literally spend 20 years going to school and never actually complete a degree (same area of study), and not from a matter of not knowing the material.
Normally someone would mention that if there were problems there are routes you can take to address them but that's not actually true either. They do have feedback systems, but those feedback systems are broken feedback systems.
There is no duty to investigate a complaint. Any investigation is viewed by the faculty as creating a hostile work environment. They are all peers, from the Chair, to the Dean, to the Board of Trustees. Its all about social standing, and students have none.
I would be ineffably better off today if I had never gone to college just from the financial toll its taken over the years, and the health toll (in hours worked for a pipedream).
Bad options have crowded out good options, eventually like any lawn that has plastic sheeting blacking it out, the organisms underneath die leaving barren soil.
That may just be my personal geography I did try every college in my area in a 200 mile radius aside from the private ones which I couldn't afford, and the ones that wouldn't let me in, so this wasn't a lack of trying.
That burn rate continues churning forever on the blood of past students that were told lies with no other choice, and the tests are scheduled just after the full refund deadline.
I'd taken physics 9 times by the time I gave up on Aerospace Engineering. They used to do a lab contest among the colleges (same college district) in my area for physics and I directing my group repeatedly won.
Kind of farcical when your students flunk the course repeatedly but are the only ones in the contest to complete a proper egg drop with limited material selection from 6 stories where the egg survives without a crack.
I'm 90% sure they stopped the contest because it looked bad.
