Every day, I read articles on Medium arguing against college.
For some readers, this is sage advice. College is not for everyone.
If you do not know what you want to study, you might be better off taking a gap year to explore your options.
There is plenty wrong with higher education.
It's too expensive.
It's inherently conservative and slow to adapt.
And, yes, tenure can stifle change.
And adjunct faculty take on the heaviest teaching burdens.
But to say that college no longer serves a purpose is to ignore the real-world experience of thousands of students.
Just because your college experience did not live up to your expectations, or you think what you learned is not applicable in your life, does not mean that is the experience of most college students.
Nor is it necessarily the expected experience of those young people these articles discourage from going to college.
Entrepreneurs and popular creatives on Medium are a small subset of the general population.
If entrepreneurs and creatives are 10% of the population (and that might be overestimating things a bit) and 90% of businesses fail in the first 5 years (to quote a popular statistic), then potentially successful entrepreneurs are only 1% of the students considering college at any point.
This is the definition of survivor bias.
Discouraging the remaining 99% from attending college, or otherwise pursuing further education (expensive as it may be), is reckless.
The Main Arguments Against College
Many anti-college advocates take their position based on their own experience of college life.
They look at how their college experience impacts their current situation, and they find either it did not contribute or it had a negative impact.
The authors of these articles tend to make their arguments in 1 of 3 categories:
College Is Too Expensive
On this point, I generally agree. College costs, especially in the U.S., have far outpaced inflation over the past 30 years or so.
At private colleges, where student debt can easily reach six figures, excessive costs often mean delaying life after graduation.
Students with too much student debt find it difficult to start families, buy homes and cars, or start businesses.
But there are ways to mitigate the costs of college. Choose a public college. Get scholarships. Use school resources to help you start your business.
College Doesn't Teach Anything Useful
This argument is popular with the entrepreneurial crowd on Medium.
I am not directly using anything I learned in college in my day-to-day business, therefore my time was wasted.
There are ways around this problem, too.
Find better teachers.
I have taught many classes at the university level, and I have never used rote-memorization as a teaching method.
Bad teachers do not make college a bad idea.
College Doesn't Teach You How to Write
This argument is another popular one on Medium, this time in the creator community.
The authors of these articles argue college writing does not work online.
On this point, I would agree.
But that is not what good writing courses teach.
I taught students how to write to their audience. When to follow the rules, and when to break them.
I taught how to write better essays, yes. But I also taught my students how to write memos…and newspaper articles…and short stories, and social media posts…you get the idea.
Getting Value Out of College
Just because someone did not have a good experience in college does not mean that going to college is a waste of time.
In many cases, it simply means that the way they attended college, the way they attempted to create value from their time, wasn't very effective.
3 Ways to Make College Worth the Money
- Use the time to build your network. Use the student card. Tell people you are doing a class project so you can interview them about their experience. Get to know your classmates — one could be a future boss, major customer, or investor.
- Use the time to explore. Take classes you wouldn't otherwise. Unless you need to get into grad school to qualify for your chosen profession, concentrate on learning rather than grades. Although Steve Jobs never finished college, a calligraphy course shaped the design of the Mac interface.
- Start something new. Colleges and universities have resources that reach beyond the classroom. Learn the value of joining clubs. Start a business. Attend lectures from visiting experts. Be on the lookout for new opportunities to add to the value of your time spent at college.
tldr
Most of the advice not to go to college comes from entrepreneurs or creatives who did not have a good college experience.
They are also among the fortunate 1%.
Their advice might not be widely applicable, so be curious and a bit skeptical before applying it.
Enrich your college experience by:
- Building a network that will serve you long into your future.
- Exploring new options and possibilities for your life.
- Starting something new to help take your experience into the wider world.