Why I found my college education to be worthless

In My Humble Opinion
1

I graduated college and got my Bachelors a little over a year ago. I spent 5 years and $23 thousand acquiring something that is in no way useful or valuable to me. To emphasize how little my college degree has done for me, I’ll tell you what I am currently doing with my life. I’m in the military. And not as an officer, but as an enlisted member of the US army, a job I could have just as easily gotten with a GED. I genuinely believe, with all my heart, that going to college was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. It ended up being the 5 most useless, pointless, and boring years of my life. Let me start from the beginning:

 I went to college right after I graduated high school. And I chose to go to college for a few reasons: 1. Uncertainty. Like many recent HS grads, I really didn't know what the fuck I wanted to do with myself. 2. Cowardice: By going to college, I could put off entering the "real world" for another 4 years and play student instead. And 3. I felt it was something I was "supposed" to do. 
   
So now I'm choosing my major. I've heard countless horror stories of people who majored in art, philosophy, or some other liberal art and ended up working at Starbucks, or living with their mothers into their late 20s. So I choose a 'STEM' major- Industrial Technology. It seemed easier than engineering while at the same time still being "legit" ("Industrial Technology" sounds legit, does it not?) that would enable me to find a decent-paying work after I graduated.
  
 For the first 2-3 years, I'm taking classes that have no relevance at all to my degree. I'm majoring in Industrial Tech, yet I'm learning about fucking Greek gods and ocean biology and medieval Chinese poetry and marketing techniques. And when you think about it, education is the only business that gets away with doing this- making people pay for shit they don't need and is completely irrelevant to the reason they're there. Let me ask you, what would you do if you went to a store to get a bag of Lays potato chips, and as you're walking up to the register, the cashier says "whoa, hold on. If you want those bag of chips, you also have to buy this bottle of Pine Sol." You'd never put up with that nonsense. So why does the education industry get away with doing basically the same thing?
 
 Maybe about 60%-70% of the classes I took in college were **utterly** irrelevant to my degree, and the ones that were at least *vaguely* relevant to my degree, I'm barely learning jack shit in. I'm learning very few hard, practical, hands on skills that would make me at all valuable in the job market. Just bullshit make-work assignment after bullshit make-work assignment.

 So I'm about halfway through college, and I become utterly disillusioned. I flunked like 3 classes during my time in college, because I just didn't care. I was so stressed out all the time, because of the drudgery, and because I felt like everything I was doing was a colossal waste of time and effort. And though I could have very easily not graduated, somehow I make it. 
 
 As I'm nearing my graduation date and I'm about to get my degree, I quickly realize three things: 1. I don't know shit. 2. No one gives a shit. 3. I have no **"work experience."** And that's the thing, all these entry level jobs that pay like $10-$12 an hour require vast amounts of experience. I don't have any of this experience, and how *could* I? After 5 years in college, I have few to no practical, hands on skills. And with every middle class shclub going to college these days, a degree doesn't mean anywhere near as much as it once did. 
  
 I really believe the time I spent in college would have been better spent doing.... literally anything else. In my entire time in college, I didn't have a single worthwhile experience, meet a single worthwhile person, or LEARN a single worthwhile thing. If I could go back in time to do things differently, with the knowledge I have now, I would have gone about my life in an entirely different way. 
 
 There seems to be a "conspiracy"in not only this society, but in all present day "westernized" societies, to keep young people infantalized and dependent for as long as possible. The schooling system does not equip people with the skills they might actually use in their day-to-day lives, but instead prevents them from growing up and making their own living for as long as possible. For that reason, if I could go back in time, I doubt I would have even finished high school. I would have dropped out of high school as early as I possible could. I would have went into some tradesman skill (electricianing, carpentry, welding, industrial maintenance, heavy equipment repairer, etc etc). I would have been working and earning, at the very latest, by the time I was 19.
 
 **TLDR**: I have a motherfucking bachelors degree, and I'm working at a job I don't fucking like, that I can't quit for another 5 years, and that anyone with a GED could have gotten. If I had my college diploma with me right now I'd probably cut it into strips and pound it in the toilet.
2

You did it wrong, then.

3

It’s too bad you found your education to be worthless, but I have to say that if you spent 3 years taking no classes in your major, then either you or your school fucked up big time. That is very atypical. In fact, due to degree requirements and course prerequisites, I think it’d be almost impossible in most fields to complete the degree requirements for a BA in two years.

Also, the one “secret” about college is that if you don’t step up and work proactively to make the most of your courses and take charge of your education, you can come out the other side without having really internalized anything or developed useful skills.

It’s tricky because high school is not that way, in my experience, and no one really tells you or prepares you for that. I just look at myself, my peers, and all the people/students I have known go through college, and it’s very clear that people who learn worthwhile things are those who found something interesting in their education and followed that path.

If you spent 5 years having absolutely nothing worthwhile happen and learning absolutely nothing worthwhile, well, at some point that’s on you, not on the college.

4

Those classes unrelated to your major aren’t worthless. They are supposed to make you a well-rounded person with diverse interests and knowledge. If you just wanted to learn job skills you should have gone to a trade school and learned plumbing or electrical work. I am not demeaning those careers. They can be very lucrative and more people should consider them instead of going to a university and racking up debt.

5

As a college graduate from many moons ago, I feel for ya. The problem is that there is a contradiction in society as to what the purpose of college is. The original purpose, and the reason they insist on teaching things like history and art, is to make intelligent, well rounded members of society. But that’s in conflict with what employers want them to do, which is to teach trades and careers. So the colleges teach a little of both and it’s not ideal any way you look at it.

I managed to get my 4 year degree in 7 years, which sucked, but I am blessed that I accomplished it with zero debt. I feel so bad for young people today, graduating with “the mortgage without a house”. That’s a serious problem that we as society need to rectify because it’s got ramifications beyond the individual owing money.

There’s another problem that you haven’t reached yet due to your youth: I was shocked when I encountered it. I got a STEM degree also, Computer Science. It got me into a pretty good career. However, nobody ever told me that it had an expiration date. I don’t know exactly when it went from “proof of skill” to “checkbox item” but somewhere around halfway through my career it stopped mattering to anybody but the HR drones. Maybe earlier, not sure. So that’s another reason not to go too far into debt for a degree. They are apparently perishable!

6

I’m sorry your experience sucked. However, what you got out of college is not universal, nor is it a conspiracy. My four years in college were transformational. Not only did I learn a great deal about history, literature, politics, and other interesting fields, I learned to study, write well, and organize my time. I met fascinating people, and had some amazingly fun times. I certainly didn’t feel infantalized or dependent at all.

7

See, to me that sounds really cool, being able to learn about all sorts of different things. (Although any subject can be made interesting or deadly dull, depending on how it’s taught.) Being able to learn about all sorts of different things that are unrelated to your degree may or may not come in handy to you somehow, someday; it may reveal to you a passion or knack you never knew you had; and it’ll open you up to things that make the rest of your life more interesting because you’re living in a bigger, wider world than you otherwise would be. At least, that’s how it works ideally.

No, it isn’t. If all you want is chicken nuggets and fries, don’t go to the buffet restaurant, because you’ll be paying for shit you don’t need and is completely irrelevant to the reason you’re there.

So you should have gone to a trade school.

Without knowing more, I don’t know how much of this is
(1) your fault, for not taking advantage of opportunities and doing college the right way,
(2) your school’s fault, for not providing you with a quality educational experience, or
(3) that the kind of person you are/were just isn’t a good match for college.

8

I have a similar but almost opposite story. I’ll share it to provide a counterpoint for anyone thinking about college.

I, too, went to college straight out of high school. After about a year, I dropped out, coming to the same conclusion: college was a waste of time.

So I went out into the world with a high school diploma and saw that it got me very little. I could get a customer service job pretty easily, but management positions were out of my reach. I could get a job in data entry or QA, but everything with a higher pay grade required higher education.

I found an OK job at a tech company doing QA work, but it was a dead-end job, and I could tell the tech bubble was about to burst. So I left.

I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I just knew that I couldn’t do what I had been doing.

When I went back to college, I declared my major as computer science. But I kept my eyes (and options) open. I saw which classes I liked, which ones I disliked, and tried to reason out why. Just about the time I finished my GE requirements, I realized that while I like computers, I liked writing more. So I got an English degree instead.

That was a drastic change in my educational experience. The computer science degree was amazingly demanding, causing me all sorts of stress. By comparison, the work in the English classes cam easily to me, and I breezed through. Maybe all it was is that I chose an “easy” liberal arts degree, instead of the more challenging science degree. Maybe I copped out. But I was happier, and that’s what was important.

I had no real-world experience in my chosen field, but I had prepared for that: I took a couple of classes that involved writing projects that I could show to prospective employers. One of those projects got me my first job out of college, and the rest is history.

College is (or is supposed to be) a place of self-discovery. I saw a lot of students choose a major in something they disliked because they thought it would get them a better job. They were absolutely miserable. Almost none of them (according to the alumni newsletter I still get) are in a job where that degree is relevant. So they could have chosen anything. Why didn’t they choose something that made them happy? Why the derision for liberal arts degrees, when other degrees will likely get you the exact same job?

Happiness is important. Choose the things that make you happy. It reduces stress, and you’ll enjoy life more.

Just be happy.

9

Something that I think not enough colleges push is internships in the summer. My department had a 100% placement for engineers and once the oil field jobs dried up they created an internal internship program so that no one graduated without work experience.

I saw a lot of my friends come home in the summers and screw around on the lake maybe getting a summer job as a camp counselor or whatever else they did in high school and I always got funny looks from them when I came home for my one week of summer of vacation before going to work.

I think the T in STEM is misleading as well unless you’re getting a BS it shouldn’t be considered a STEM degree and even then the people I know who graduated with a BS in Economics all struggled to find work. I wouldn’t even be able to guess what an industrial technologist does for a living and it seems the OP never figured it out either. While degrees that “teach you how to think” are great unless they come with some useful career support you end up going nowhere most of the time. Of course, I also went to an engineering trade school where we didn’t really have any breadth just depth so I agree with the OP about how taking most breadth courses are a waste of time and money that would be better spent training you to do a job.

I say that but really think like an engineer is all I learned in school since I’m not working in a field even close to my major anymore except for the engineering part.

10

You go to college to learn how to learn.

In the real world you will never encounter the work you did or the exact same sequence of things as you worked on in school. However what you walk away with is a good foundation of learning skills so that you can solve problems in the future for your self and employers.

11

If you went off to college for the reasons that you stated, I think the bulk of responsibility lies with you.

Trying to blame societal pressure, because you felt it was expected, or because you were hiding from taking adult responsibility for your life is crazy talk.

There were choices to be made. Adult choices. You don’t like the choices you made, perhaps they weren’t right for you. But you still gotta own them.

No one put a gun to your head, you could have, as numerous other young adults manage to do every year, choose to take another path until you DO know what you REALLY want.

It’s not society or the college system that’s at fault here. You made an unwise, for you, choice. Always easy to see in hindsight, and something everybody does, in regards to one thing or another.

Moving past it means owning it, not trying to blame outside forces, in my humble opinion.

12

College worked, its purpose is two fold. First to certify that you are smart enough to do the work. Second to certify that you are conscientious enough to do lots of drudge work.
Every job involves countless hours of drudge work and if you are an employer you don’t want an employee who just tries when it is fun.
The way it worked is that it showed you about yourself and what you want to do with your life. A degree will expand your options going forward and now that you know you don’t want to do intellectual work but hands on work that will further narrow your focus. The purpose of this time in your life is to learn about what you want to do.

13

I feel sorry for you, OP. College was amazing for me and while I never worked at anything remotely connected to my major, I can honestly say that I use my education every single day. A good chunk of the reason for attending college is learning how to think, analyze, write, and research. Those are tools you will use. If you expect to come away from college with nothing but a set of skills or a list of memorized facts, you are bound to be disappointed with the experience.

14

I was actually enjoying your OP (normally TLDR, but I was OK with this one), but then you lost me right there. College is what you make of it, and honestly, it sounds like you squandered a good opportunity.

Just FYI, I majored in the "hardest " of the hard sciences, worked for years in tech, and maybe used 1/100th of what I learned in college. Don’t sweat it. You made a decision for the next few years. Make the best of it, get some experience and you’ll come out the other end a better (and more employable) person for it.

15

In a similar vein, the purpose of an education is to teach you how to think, not what to think.

16

So college sucked, and the Army sucks, and yet millions of people seem to have been able to have a lot of fun and gotten a lot of awesome experiences out of both.

17

There are some aspects of the OP that are 100% correct. But the OP should own his decisions and probably as others have said, did college wrong.

The prevalence of cheap student loans has resulted in more people going to college, that really shouldn’t be there. Check out Mike Rowe’s youtube or Facebook pages. He is a big advocate of returning to trades training, as we as an industrialized nation are short of qualified people to handle industrial jobs. And many people do waste their time going to college and finding themselves in over their heads in debt, without the employment that they wished was there.

18

OP, did you learn your lesson? Will you now avoid doing marriage, home ownerwhip, parenthood, etc, simply because you feel that’s what comes next, what you’re “supposed to do”? Will you instead examine all your options and take time to figure out what you want to do and not merely what’s expected of you? If so, you got your money’s worth, just not in the fashion you may have expected.

19

College is just another form of boot camp. Just as some people positively respond to military-style boot camp and the discipline it instills, others respond better to the rigors of college life.

Instead of being pressured to go to college, what you probably needed to hear was “whatever direction you choose, you’re taking a gamble.” Going to college is a risky decision, but so is joining the military, backpacking across Europe, taking a gap year, or working at your uncle’s used car dealership. The answer isn’t “don’t take risks”. It’s “play your hand smart.” Part of “playing smart” is course-correcting at the first sign of trouble (like failing a class).

I don’t think there is a conspiracy working against young people. I think young people today are simply faced with a lot of choices and thus are bombarded with lots of conflicting and unhelpful advice. And young people are also victims of their own misunderstanding of what they are “supposed” to do. People are always going to tell you what you’re “supposed” to do. Go to college. Get a good job. Get married. Buy a big house. Have 2.5 kids. Go into management. Make six figures. At a certain point, you gotta be able to say “wait a minute, this isn’t what I want” and ignore what “they” say. Or at least, an individual needs to own up to the choices they have made and not put all the blame on the “pressure”. There’s societal pressure to get married and have children, but you don’t hear people blaming their dysfunctional marriages and families on “pressure”. Probably because people know that for every fucked-up relationship, there’s another one that’s awesome. The same thing for goes college or any other gamble.

20

Indeed, it is true that many go to college for a 4 year degree when they’d be much better served with a 2 year technical degree.

However, first of all, why are you enlisted? That BA qualifies you for Officer.

https://www.goarmy.com/ocs.html

Next, there are thousands of Federal and Sate entry level position that require nothing but a BA.
College probably wasnt the best idea for you. And indeed, American oversells college.