2006 / April 26^th/ Of higher education, lower education, and everything in between

Right now there are thousands of young men and women across the country approaching the conclusion of a very important chapter in their life: the end of their high school career. A great portion of these same people will be joining the ranks of the ever-increasing population of matriculating college students. Welcome aboard? but first let me ask you one question: Why are you going to college?

Throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school I was guided by counselors, advised by committees, urged by mentors, and influenced by printed material. The message was clear: going to college was of utmost importance. One might even consider it brainwashing. Few (actual) reasons are given for going to college during this time, and the young mind is very susceptible to influence, especially by those who we look up to. Everyone tells you that you need to go to college, but they never tell you why you should.

The money argument

The first argument for a college education is almost always the money factor. You will earn more money if you have a college degree. Or so they say, at least.

A college degree will demand a larger salary

Undoubtedly, thousands of 11th graders will be seeing some sort of pie chart, or bar graph representing those who went to college and those who didn?t associating these groups with their salaries. Some kind of figure will be pulled out and they will be told that if they go to college they will make $10-15k more a year than if they don?t. But these charts don?t take other extremely important factors into account such as motivation towards life, work ethic, and family background. Such factors often lead towards a college education ? and thus a false correlation between education and salary is communicated.

Your salary will correlate directly towards how hard you work, how long you work, and how passionate you are. Education or not, these will be the variables in your salary.

The cost of college

College is practically free, they claim. Grants, scholarships and loans, oh my! College is not free. It costs a lot of money. No, college costs an astronomical amount of money. To give a small comparison of how much the cost of college has increased: if you take the average national tuition and the average national minimum wage and scale them linearly from 1970 to now, the effective minimum wage would have to be $22/hr to account for tuition costs today.

Additionally, unless you are exceptionally intelligent or a minority ? the chances of getting significant funding for your college career is slim to none. A $500 scholarship may seem like a lot to a high school student, but when you?re facing expenses in the neighborhood of $30,000 a year ? it?s suddenly not that much at all. And $30,000 a year is not exceptionally high.

For those few that are lucky enough to have parents pay for your tuition, and perhaps the spare BMW every couple of years, you should consider yourself lucky. The unfortunate result from this situation is that undoubtedly your relationship between your parents will change forever. No longer will you be able to talk about how you just bought a new pair of awesome shoes (where did you get the money for those?) because nearly every conversation will either have money in the foreground or money in the background. There are rare exceptions, but for the majority of college students, there is no calling home just to see how things are going anymore. There?s always this looming loan that you can never repay hanging over your head.

Opportunity cost

By far, the largest expense of college is the opportunity cost. By going to school for an average of 5-6 years, you will not only incur debt, but you will not be making money. For many, this will accumulate to amounts much greater than $100,000. But what of foregone career paths and lost opportunities due to scholarly obligations? What if your band really would have made it big? Beware the opportunity cost of going to college. It is great, and will always wreak havoc on you ? no matter the opportunities that may be granted by college.

The lost

Talking to many of my friends and classmates, most of them are simply going through the motions. They are 22, 23 years old and still have no idea what they want to do with their life. They?re just going to college because? well, because that?s what you do after you graduate high school. They work hard to earn better grades. They attend conferences to network with people in their field. They interview with companies to attain better salaries. Sure, they say they know what they want to do. But really ? I mean, really?

If you know what you want to do for the rest of your life, you should be utterly enthralled with it. You should be so immersed in its culture that it wakes you in the middle of the night. You should be able to write complete essays on the subject without reference. You should bring it up when your BAC races past 0.31. Passion for your work is not found through catalogs, conferences, or classrooms. It is found within.

Why do you want to go to college?

I am hoping to open a few minds and provide a different point of view. Maybe college is not the best route for you to take. So I ask, why do you want to go to college? If you cannot form a solid response to this question, the answer is most likely that you do not.

Many college students admitted today have declared majors and start taking classes towards their degree immediately. But how many even know what their field is? How many even know where their passions in life lie? At the ripe age of 17, while filling out applications for colleges ? I know I sure didn?t have a clue in the world as to what my passions in life were, let alone what I wanted to do for ?the rest of my life.? Going to college is one of the biggest decisions of a person?s life. Do not base this decision on something as superficial as future salary.

1. 

   Michael Egan

   April 26^th | #

   In my school my class was pressured into going to university. They made me feel like if I didn?t want to become at least an engineer that I was throwing my future away. When I went into the guidance counselor?s office and asked for the college application forms she wouldn?t let me leave until I also took the university forms and books on the local options.

   I?ve wanted to become a designer every since my hobbyist high school days. But if I wasn?t sure on a career I probably would have picked a good trade school. People sometimes think of tradespeople smugly but if you look at the numbers most journeymen take home more than the average college or university grad.

2. 

   Poldo

   April 26^th | #

   Here in the Philippines, you not only have to deal with the increase of tuition fee rates annualy, but you’ll also have to deal with the lack of jobs after graduation, not mentioning the fact that college graduates here lack the essential training for employment. What I’m trying to is, theories taught in school are outdated and not applicable to the corporate world. Sad but true.

3. 

   Nathan Smith

   April 26^th | #

   I’m almost done with grad school, and can say that neither my bachelors nor masters degree actually helped me prepare for what I now do for a living. I think that one thing education does give you is credibility. It says, “Hey, I’m willing to work hard, set goals, etc.” That being said, it doesn’t do a whole lot else, unless you’re one of the few people who ends up doing what you went to school for, in which case I applaud your foresight for having chosen correctly from the get-go. I think the most important thing is to be a self-learner.

   Reading your second paragraph under “The Lost” made me think of SXSW. There were guys there talking about usability and information architecture while staggering from the bar to their hotels. Most of the people there did not have IT / Comp Sci related degrees, because the truely successful people in web design / development are using methods too new for any school curriculum to have caught up with (aside from maybe Mike Rundle at RIT).

   Case in point, my college site WSU.edu has not changed since I was a student there. I thought their “Accessibility” link in the footer referred to the website, but all it basically says “we have ramps on campus,” while neglecting the whole picture. Anyway, I digress. Good article, and very true. If you were to go to college, I would say a good degree would be one related to business. That way, whatever you end up being passionate about, you know how to handle yourself in the cut-throat world that is the world marketplace.

4. 

   Jared Christensen

   April 26^th | #

   Many businesses (especially large ones) still operate under the assumption that no college degree = less qualified and less commited. While it is important to know what you want to do with your life, you should also consider that you may end up choosing a career that requires a college degree. Not because you need college to be good at it, but because the hiring culture of many organizations is built around the relatively sound belief that all thing being equal, a candidate with a college degree is more qualified for the job. Call it wrong, outdated or whatever, but that’s the mentality you may run up against. It would be a shame to find your calling only to realize that you are not qualified in the eyes of that field. The world of web design is a bit unique in that many of us did not complete college or, if we did, we have a degree in something totally unrelated to web design. Don’t count on that lasting forever. Schools will catch up (sort of) and businesses will start looking for designers and developers with web-specific degrees.

5. 

   Justin Ruckman

   April 26^th | #

   Nice post. I’ve been thinking about this alot myself. I started as a music major (clarinet & education), then switched to graphic design, and in the process have changed schools twice, each time to a school that was more specialized in what I had chosen to do. I’m fixing to transfer again, for the last time, and will likely be settling into a communications / mass media degree. Pursuing graphic design directly involves a lot of studio work: drawing, painting, etc. Not that these things aren’t valuable, but school is expensive, and if I’m going to be paying out the ass for classes, they should at least be more directly related to my field of study, and at the very least not absorb so much of my time that I can’t pursue my real interests on the side. In the end my degree will not have been so much for an actual education, but for mere certification — so that if a job opens up that takes more into consideration than my portfolio and skills — I’ll have a B.A. in something, for whatever it’s worth.

6. 

   Robert

   April 26^th | #

   Having talked with many recruiters of large business and having done a lot of hiring myself, a college degree is not really about using your degree for your future career. The key factor that most all businesses look at first, is how long you have been with each job you have had. They are looking at your commitment level. A college degree is huge, and I mean a huge, plus in showing that you are commited to improving yourself and you are commited to sticking with what you have started.

   There is a lot of money put into each new hire for any business. These businesses don’t want to lose money because they hired someone who isn’t commited to starting a career with them and quits in a month.

   Another aspect that doesn’t receive much attention is that college teaches you how to learn and be diversified in your learning. Also, if common sense is applied, then students learn to give their professors what the professors want when completing homework, which is key in any school and work environment.

   Although you may not use the knowledge you gained from earning your degree within your career lifetime, you pick up skills along the way and improve your marketability towards future jobs. That alone is a plus.

7. 

   Mark

   April 27^th | #

   You know, it’s about time some puts this in their blog.

   I’m 19, and right now I attend a Jesuit university in Wisconsin, Marquette University. And you know what, it was the biggest, most expensive mistake of my life. I wasted away around $15K for a year of college that was basically high school all over again. I slept in class, I skipped when I could and the entire environment was everything I hated about school.

   Looking back on it I feel as though I was pushed into the more expensive, private school because the mentality goes “The more expensive, the better the education.” Little did I know that damn near everything they stood for was everything I did not want to stand for.

   So, now I’m faced with the debackle of going to a state university or just not going. Not going is kind of out of the question because a college degree gives credibility, connections, general knowledge, etc.

   My advice is to really and I mean really sit down and dwell, not just think, but dwell on the idea of going to college. It might be for you, but it might not. I have yet to see what I want to do, and I’ve been dwelling for over a year.

8. 

   Michael Pidde

   April 27^th | #

   There’s really nothing wrong with going to a community college for a year or two before transferring to a university. God forbid you save yourself thousands of dollars while you take gen. ed. courses. They can hardly teach you anything different between the two types of schools, unless I’m greatly mistaken.

   Depending on what you want to do, a Technical College is a great choice. That’s what I’m going to now. As far as networking, programming, web developement, and so forth they really are keeping current. Next semester one of the teachers is even putting AJAX into his curriculum, believe it or not. Then there’s the comparative pricing. While at a state university you pay 10-15 k a year, i’m paying a third of that.

   So what I’m really saying is there’s no problem waiting to go to a university. Community colleges and trade schools are just fine, and nobody should think less of them.

9. 

   Cody Lindley

   April 27^th | #

   Why do I want to go to college? Simple. It creates more opportunity then if I did not attend. I don’t like the fact that most employers regard a college degree as vital to a particular position, but the fact remains that most do! So, instead of limiting my opportunity, I would choose to attend college, jump through the hoop, and open doors that might not be available to me unless I had attended college. Sure, if you can get a foot in the door without a degree then the degree is not likely relevant. However this is not what happens the majority of the time. So, I was the question, Why not go to college? It will certainly create more opportunity than if you didn’t go.

10. 

    robert canales blog Archive » The new school is no school.

    April 27^th | #

    [...] The new school is no school.  And that’s alright with me. Tagged: Design / blogosphere [...]

11. 

    April

    April 27^th | #

    I think that every person should go to college, regardless of the cost, because it presents room for a lot of growth both mentally and emotionally. I always encourage every Freshman I meet, however, to not declare their major until after they have take their basics. That way, they know what it is that they are good at, bad at, and more importantly, what it is that they are passionate about. From that point, they can move forward. This is not a perfect recipe for success, but it helps.

12. 

    Josh

    February 20 | #

    Hi, if you don’t have to college to marry someone, get that person pregnant and take care of a baby and raise a kid, then why do you have to go to college or why is a degree required if you’re going to work at discovery cove and train or work with dolphins? Also if you want a degree but don’t want to go to college you can get a degree without going to college. just do a google search for instant college degrees online . if you want you can email me about this at jkenn337@gmail.com .

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