College Is A Bad Idea

6 Real Reasons Why Going To College Is A Bad Idea

Going to college and university might be one of the most overrated endeavors. Here are six reasons why it might be better for you to skip a post-secondary education.

6 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Go To College Or University

Young people in North America, as they’re finishing up their high school diplomas, are usually getting ready to decide on which college they should go to.

At this phase, their school teachers and parents tell them, “so, what do you want to do with your life? Figure that out and choose a major that will help you get a job in that field.”

For many kids, it’s a stressful experience. In truth, not a lot of students know what they want to do with their lives.

In fact, there are a lot of adults out there, long out of college, who still don’t know what they want to do with their lives.

For whatever reason, despite the fact a solid chunk of adults don’t know what they want either, we tell high school students they better hurry up and figure out what it is they want to do.

And the idea we’ve accepted and pushed on to them is that higher education is the key to getting a great job.

Today, in the minds of many high schoolers, college is synonymous with success. It almost goes without saying that going to school is the best choice.

For a few different reasons, the notion that college plays a crucial role in a teenager’s transition to adulthood should no longer exist. The idea is that if you don’t go to college, you won’t get a job and you’ll regret it. But this couldn’t be the furthest from the truth.

There are several really good reasons for why we should stop telling kids to go to college, and maybe travel, or just start working right away instead.

Some have argued that government regulation including programs like “No-Child Left Behind,” has created school educations that have inadvertently diminished the standards of what it means to be an excellent student (15).

In the United States, teachers have to abide by a strict curriculum that is mostly inapplicable information to real life. Why don’t we learn things like: how to pay taxes? How to apply for a job, or how to use the internet properly as an informational resource?

And many kids who graduate with a high school diploma aren’t adequately prepared for the college beating they’re about to endure.

The debt they’re straddled with seems to be, in many cases, insurmountable, which brings me to the number one reason for why you shouldn’t go to college.

1) Debt

It turns out that the student debt problem is a lot worse than initially expected. Around 25 years ago, Congress unleashed a new system to protect undergraduate students from precarious student loans (3).

However, back in 2015, the Education Department released new data which shows that their new system is failing. And many colleges are laying immense debt on to students, that for some, is nearly impossible to pay back, and for others, takes 5 to 10 ten years.

According to a report from US News, researchers conducted a survey of three sets of respondents: one group consisting of 500 current students between 18 and 24; one of 518 former students between the age of 18 and 40, and one made up of 544 parents of college students currently in school (16).

The students in the middle of their studies predict to have between $39,000 and $42,000 in debt by the time they graduate, but they expect to pay it off by the time they’re 33.

Recently graduated students hold, on average, $30,000 in debt, and hope to pay back their loans when they’re 41-years-old.

As in most things in life, students without a lot of money from low-income backgrounds are typically the ones to suffer the most when it comes to eliminating debt (3).

After low-income students graduate from college –  if they graduate at all – they struggle to find well-paying jobs or even a good source of income.

According to the New York Times, colleges that are “historically black,” for example, are the ones hit hardest by the debt problem. These institutions include for-profit colleges, some public, as well as private and non-profit colleges (3).

Even wealthy universities and colleges with financially privileged students find it challenging to pay back their debt (3).

Back in 1990, when the Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, conducted an investigation into for-profit colleges, he found widespread fraud within some of these universities (3).

Some trade schools, for instance, went so far as to grab people out of welfare lines, sign them up for a loan, knowing full and well they would never pay them back. But the colleges kept the money, of course (3).

In response to these discoveries, Congress created a new rule called the cohort default rate. The cohort default rate is a rule whereby, every year, the Education Department conducts a study to figure out what percentage of borrowers who recently left college have defaulted on their loans provided for by the federal government (3).

To default on a loan, means, simply, to not pay back the required amount agreed upon in the contract or the “promissory note.”

A promissory note, in layman’s terms, is a written promise by the student, that they’ll pay back the loan by a specified date (2).

The Education Department, as a way of ensuring that Colleges aren’t ripping off their students, kick colleges with high default rates out of the federal loan program (3).

When they first instituted the law, it was a success. 15,000 for-profit colleges were pushed out of the program which allowed for students to get loans from the government to go to that school.

Both public and non-profit colleges had to bring down their default rates as well. In other words, the federal government is trying to make sure that colleges aren’t getting as many kids in the door as possible without any concern for what happens after they graduate.

They want to avoid situations where colleges are inviting in as many students as the possibly can, so they can take huge amounts of money from the government, and then basically leave the students to the wolves.

So, for instance, colleges with a default rate above 30% over three years in a row, or 40% in a single given year, are kicked out of the financial aid system (3).

In September of 2015, the Education Department, instead of looking at default rates, calculated non-repayment rates, which includes defaulters as well as borrowers who haven’t paid even a dollar of principal on their loans.

The non-repayment category includes people who are paying interest but haven’t made payments because of graduate school or loan extensions. They calculated the rates at one year, three, five, and seven years after leaving college (3).

The results of this study are a lot different than merely measuring people who have defaulted. American National University, for example, a for-profit organization offering degrees in business, healthcare, and information technology, has an official default rate of 8.5% (3).

But its five-year non-repayment is 71% (3).

And two years later, after seven years, most of the university’s students haven’t paid back even a penny of their loans.

The reason this is permitted is so students are allowed to delay making their loan payments in case they’re going on to graduate school, can’t find a job, or have some other kind of personal crisis.

According to the colleges’ data, this is “repayment success.” However, of course, it really isn’t a success, because all it means is that students have put off paying their loans long enough so that the college is beyond the federal default-rate window so they can continue getting government money.

It’s sort of like fudging the numbers, or rather, not telling the whole truth, for the sake of meeting the government’s minimum requirement so they can continue receiving money from the state.

And to prove that students are going through “economic hardship” is easy because the truth is that the typical college graduate only makes $22,400 a year – 10 years after they exit college (3).

Other mainstream colleges have non-repayment rates that aren’t quite as bad but still aren’t good. Georgia State University, and the Universities of Houston, Louisville, Cincinnati, South Florida, and Alabama, all have single-digit default rates and five-year non-repayment rates of 20% (3).

35 percent of students haven’t paid down their principal after five years at the University of Memphis (3).

At the University of Phoenix, more than half of the students who borrowed to go to that school have been unable to pay down their loan principal after just five years (3).

700 colleges and branch campuses have half of their borrowers fail to pay down any debt at all after seven years, and nearly all of them are still eligible for federal financial aid due to their ability to get students to defer their payments, so the college can still receive government money.

Because of the push from the government, the post-secondary education system, and the banks to get as many kids into college as possible, America now holds $1.4 trillion in debt.

While it’s not as much as the total credit card debt or the mortgage debt like many other publications have claimed, it’s still a lot.

According to the Huffington Post, 75% of the current student debt accumulated from 2003 until 2011. And it’s such an incredibly lucrative business for the banks, the government, and the university/college system.

In the last forty years, the cost of tuition has supposedly gone up around 1000%, meaning that it has grown much larger than the usual rate of inflation, which is typically around 3-5% per year.

In the United States, the average cost of tuition is between $8,893 and $30,094, while in Canada, it’s around $8000 per year (4).

And that’s only paying for the schooling.

Those numbers don’t take into account the sheer amount of money you’ll spend on food, clothing, textbooks, laptop repairs, computer equipment, paper, ink, printers, and so on and so forth.

Many young people are in a lot of debt when they’re done school, and they have to go back home and live with their parents. Moreover, if you struggle to find a job when you first get out, the interest on those loans is already starting to add up.

Forty years ago, you could take out a loan from the bank and go to college for less than a thousand dollars. Thus, one could pay off the loans easily.

The average college student didn’t even have to take out a loan from the bank, and they could easily pay for it by working during the summer.

You could probably manage to buy a car at the same time. And once you got out of school, the next step, typically, was to buy a home.

Once you have a mortgage, you’re now a part of the system and you’ll spend a good portion of your income working to pay off that house. However, nowadays, when students get out of school, they already have a mortgage, except they don’t even have the house.

2/3 of students leave school with a $24,000 debt.

The government has taken over the college loan business completely as they removed commercial banks from providing student loans. The students get their loans directly from the government now with an artificially low-interest rate.

In the past, if you took out a bank loan to pay off your tuition fees, some people would go all the way to medical school and then just declare bankruptcy so they wouldn’t have to pay off the loans.

But, back in 2005, Congress rolled out new laws so people can no longer do that (5).

Colleges, themselves, are taking in large swaths of debt as well to constantly undergo construction projects for the sake of building new gyms, stadiums, buildings, and fancy sports arenas.

They do this to impress the parents of the children who are considering attending that school.

Many colleges are actually in the red because they spend so much of their money on unnecessary construction projects that don’t actually increase the quality of education (6).

And university administrators and other people who work for them are making a lot of money. In the United States, coaches for football, baseball, and soccer teams sometimes make millions of dollars.

While coaches make millions of dollars a year, students pay exorbitant tuition fees and sometimes up to $300 for a textbook (7).

Tuitions fees go up and residence fees increase, so much to the point that student protesting against tuition hikes are frequent. And that isn’t even taking into account the extravagant prices for many of the textbooks.

Which brings me to the next point.

The textbooks.

2) The Textbook Scam

One of the more annoying elements to a college or university education are the textbooks, which – when they’re required as course reading – are extremely high-priced. The mandatory books are sometimes 300% more expensive than the books for electives (non-mandatory courses).

As it turns out, there are a few reasons for this.

The makers of the text reissue the same book every single year updated with very minor changes, under the pretense of needing to amend the content.

When students no longer need the text, they try and sell them to other students, but the old one is already out of date the following year.

While the book from the previous year would do just fine, professors and teaching assistants often encourage students to buy the new one. Some might even punish you for not having the most recent version.

This is done on purpose. They’re releasing new editions of the books, not to update the information, but to thwart the second-hand market (9).

Additionally, publishers have worked hard at trying to push students away from buying the less expensive international editions of the textbooks – rather than the American versions – which are found elsewhere online, or in used bookstores.

According to Henry Farrell, via the Washington Post, this has created “weird and distorted parasitic secondary” markets, where book buyers will come into a professor’s office and try to buy up all of the textbooks that publishers have given away for free so they can try and sell them to desperate students (9).

Moreover, the publishers are colluding with colleges to eliminate used bookstores and online marketplaces because they don’t want any students to buy them on the internet, or in second-hand shops (9).

While the aforementioned reasons all play a role in their price, the primary factor for their expensiveness is that colleges can sell them at that amount.

Academic publishers can charge whatever they want for the books because they’re required as part of the course.

As a result, the market is no longer price-sensitive, which means no matter the cost, demand will never decrease, and students will pay because they have to – if they want to take the class.

And, as it was noted above, textbooks that aren’t required reading are usually reasonably priced. In elective courses, for example, sometimes students can buy the book cheaply, however, not in all cases.

According to Farrell, in the field of International Politics, for instance, Kenneth Waltz book, Theory Of International Politics, was widely held as a standard and a classic. But as time went on, it’s influence began to fade, and so did its value.

While there are some exceptions to the rules of the racket, in the vast majority of cases, the books are expensive because increasing price doesn’t decrease demand.

The value of the textbooks is a classic case of supply-and-demand economics, however, if the colleges and universities really had students’ best interests in mind, one would assume they would encourage them to seek out secondary copies.

Perhaps, a more insidious aspect of the textbook market is how academic publishers and professors sometimes work out lucrative deals with each other.

The relationship between the publisher and the professor is an important one, because, when a professor agrees to use one of their books, they’ve solidified a market.

This makes professors very attractive to publishers, and they’re frequently trying to convince them to use their book. This is for an obvious reason: hundreds of students will buy the book, every single year, for maybe 10 years or more. It’s very profitable.

And because of the amount of money they make in this situation, sometimes publishers bribe the professor with thousands of dollars so they structure a course around their book (9).

A professor isn’t going to deviate from it either, because he/she has created an entire course around it, and it would take a lot of effort to pick a new book and restructure the material accordingly.

Due to the high price of the books, one would think that the information within it would translate to better job opportunities.

After all, a book that costs $200 must have crucial information in it that only a student at an elite university could acquire. It must be a part of what makes a university education so special for employees.

But that’s not the case either.

 3) Going To College Doesn’t Help You Get A Job That Much

Many people, incorrectly, believe that going to college/university will ensure that they have a much better chance of getting a good job than a non-college graduate.

While a college/university education will definitely help your case, it won’t help enough for it to be worth $35,000 – $100,000.

Perhaps, a college education could’ve meant something in the 1970’s and before then. But these days, it’s significantly less important.

Following the signing of the No Child Left Behind Act, and then the Every Child Succeeds Act, as well as the push to get more students into school, the college/university experience became a normalized thing in culture.

After high school, you go to college. It almost goes without saying.

According to the Huffington Post, the government and education system achieved this by having officials from universities go to high schools and put up posters, hold conferences, give speeches, all in hopes of recruiting students (17).

And it worked.

When people got out of college or university, they were able to land high-paying white collar careers.

However, nowadays, around 70% of high school graduates are getting ready to go to college. And the mechanics of why it doesn’t work are simple.

There are simply not enough white-collar jobs to employ 70% of the population. Not everyone can graduate college and then work on Wall Street or for Google for $113,000 a year (18).

It’s one of the main reasons why there is a huge, overabundance of school teachers right now in both Canada and the United States (19).

Too many students with bachelor’s degrees are looking –  at the last minute – to become a teacher because it’s their only option after spending so much time in school.

Some students decide to attend law school because their expectation is to graduate and land a $250,000 a year job as soon as they get out of college.

The reality is that most lawyers who actually get a job – if they get a job – get out of school and make $62,000 for the first couple of years of working according to CNN Money (12). Some of them earn much less.

And if they’re paying off a $115,000 loan, at a 5% interest rate, that means they have an additional $5,750 tacked on to it every single year (11).

However, there are so many lawyers right now in the United States and Canada that a lot of law school graduates actually find it difficult to find employment.

According to a report from the New York Times, around 20% of law graduates from 2010 are working jobs that don’t require a law license. And in a new study, 40% are working in law firms, in comparison to 60% from the class a decade earlier (14).

According to Deborah Merrit, following the 2008 economic recession, the legal profession hasn’t shown that much of an improvement regarding potential careers (14).

Many law firms cut back on their resources; corporations slashed their legal expenses, and the vast majority of positions taken by law school graduates are given to “modest-paying” categories like, “solo practice, small firms, government work, or business jobs that don’t require bar admission.”

But in the same New York Times article, the author writes that some resorted to opening up their own firms which handle things like divorce and family law.

Although they’re not paying as much, at least it’s a job, and it’s their own business, no less.

Nearly 85% of law school graduates have to take out student loans to pay for their tuition, and according to Law School Transparency, 2010 Law Graduates have debts of $77,364 at public law schools and $112,007 at private ones (12).

For some, to get out from under that debt might actually be quite difficult.

There’s no doubt some individuals with a tremendous work ethic, discipline, and perseverance, can beat a debt that big, but it probably wouldn’t be easy.

The question is: why bother putting yourself through such an endeavor when you don’t have to?

The legal profession aside, back in the 1970’s when getting a college degree still had significant utility, the federal government, and the college system collaborated and jacked up the price of admission because they could.

With more and more kids going to college because of the belief of how good it is for you, the price went up, on account of the increased demand.

It was easy to make it happen because, for years, the belief in society is that winners go to college, and losers don’t. Parents everywhere still have the belief that going to college and university is the first step on the path to future success.

It almost seems like the value of a college degree is a self-fulfilling prophecy; they have value only because we assume they do.

And besides, your experience is actually a better determinant in whether you’ll get the job or not.

For example, if you’re walking into a job interview with four years of college education under your belt – but no experience; and your competitor has four years of work experience, but no college degree, there’s a good chance the employer will hire the other person instead.

Employers are far more likely to hire you based on your past work experience, portfolio, and your personality.

A small example is the use of a cash register. Even though it seems like such a trivial thing, knowing how to use a cash register is a fundamental skill that’s useful in a plethora of positions.

Moreover, prior work experience shows the employer a few things: you can probably keep a schedule and get to work on time; you can work hard through the whole day, and you’re capable of being trained.

An employer may also look at what kind of relationships you’ve had with prior managers.

And your personality is equally important. It’s hard to work with someone if they don’t fit in with the workplace culture. In my personal experience, I’ve seen countless people fired from their job, not even because they were a bad worker, but simply because no one liked them.

And college degrees are simply not that relevant in today’s marketplace. Thirty of the fastest growing jobs in the United States over the next decade don’t require a bachelors degree. In fact, only seven out of the thirty require a degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the top ten growing categories, only two require college degrees, accounting, and post-secondary professors.

Jobs that actually need workers include registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives, and store clerks.

None of these jobs require a college degree according to The Atlantic (13). Like I mentioned earlier, one of the most overlooked hiring factors that people don’t discuss is your character.

Often, law firms won’t hire someone just because they give off a bad vibe. They want to hire the sort of person who is easy to have a beer with after work, not someone who is unpleasant and doesn’t work well with others.

One could argue that building up social skills is a better endeavor then spending thousands on a post-secondary education. Simply put, there are better uses for one’s energy.

 4) Time And Opportunity Costs And The Increased Availability Of Information On The Internet

Your time in college could be used working at different jobs which teach you valuable work skills that are actually transferable to a real marketable skill later in life.

If you didn’t spend 4-6 years of your life in university/college, you could’ve collected valuable work experience that would’ve made you a far more valuable candidate for a solid job rather than somebody who shuffled papers and wrote essays for the last half-decade.

Due to the enormous swath of information available on the internet, one doesn’t have to look far online to find useful books on philosophy, marketing, computer science, programming, music, economics, or marketing.

There are many things one can do with their time rather than go to college.

Rather than spending four years at your local university, one could travel the world, which is arguably more of a life-changing experience than anything you could get in a post-secondary institution.

In addition to the sheer amount of wonderful experiences a person can have, including visiting places one has only read about, eating great food, and making new friends, traveling exposes a person to difficult situations which require problem-solving skills.

You may find that you have to learn about how to get through customs; how to update your passport; how to get travel insurance; how to negotiate; learning a new language; getting better communication skills; learning lessons in history and culture; how to be independent; how to make decisions; becoming more openminded, and so on and so forth.

Another thing you can do is start a business. Even something as simple as starting a cleaning service, where you hire employers to clean people’s apartments at an hourly rate.

This sort of endeavor will teach you more about business, paying taxes, filing an LLC, and managing difficult personalities. All of these things are arguably more important than reading Shakespeare or learning about marketing strategies without ever applying them in real life.

You could also volunteer at a local charity, or at a concert festival such as Osheaga or Burning Man, where, not only you get a chance to have a great time, but you’ll also see from the inside how these events function.

Or, for example, say you’re an artist or a musician. Four years is a long time you could’ve spent working on your craft, advertising your content on social media, uploading YouTube videos, and in general, learning how to become an effective social media marketer, which is a skill in and of itself.

Additionally, the amount of previously unavailable information you can get online is immense.

You can download pretty much all of the books that university professors recommend online. You can practically give yourself a university education if you really wanted to.

In fact, legendary entrepreneur and Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates, said precisely this during a Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe in 2010 (21).

According to Gates, the traditional way of getting a higher education is going to change dramatically in the future. Bill made his prediction back in 2010, stating, “five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

And looking at YouTube today, one can find a lecture on pretty much anything, from environmentalism, physics, the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Freidrich Nietzche, Karl Marx, summaries of Shakespeare, and so on and so forth.

Moreover, if you want to learn how to code, you can just use Codecademy or FreeCodeCamp for free. Or if you’re feeling more ambitious, you can grab a subscription for around $20 per month.

The information is out there for those who want it. Additionally, Bill said that students who learn on the internet should be credited for that learning, regardless of where the information is coming from. Although, one could argue that this is a step too far, due to the sheer amount of unreliable information on the web (21).

However, he didn’t say that all of this mitigates the role of educational institutions such as primary and high school education. Specifically, Bill praised charter schools where, according to him, kids in school spend approximately 80% of their time getting a solid education (21).

In his view, one of the primary problems with the college education system now is the extravagant cost, the difficulty of getting into good schools, as well as the size of the textbooks (21).

“They’re giant, intimidating books. I look at them and think: what on Earth is in here?” He remarked (21). With that said, learning how to read difficult a text is a useful skill.

While there are certainly a lot of good habits one can acquire from a post-secondary education, including the ability to understand information that is sophisticated and nuanced, there are also a lot of bad ones.

5) College And University Culture Might Actually Make Your Habits Worse Rather Than Better

For many students, life consists of going to bed extremely late, waking up late in the morning, rushing to class, hanging out with friends, eating junk food, and spending their evenings studying.

The library is often filled with students who are barely even working. They sit in the library for 6 hours and study, but in reality, during that entire six hours, they really only hit the books for an hour.

Some students pick up on a lot of different bad habits on account of the college and university experience, including going to bed extremely late, not getting enough sleep, drinking, drug use, smoking, eating junk food, and procrastination which are all hindrances to your productivity later in life.

While many people are perfectly capable of performing well during the day on 5 hours of sleep, the truth is that a high-stress, high responsibility job – or managing one’s business – takes a lot of one’s energy.

If one is to achieve their goals later in life, it’s going to take a lot of sacrifices, time, energy, sweat, and perseverance. A bad night’s sleep, or taking 3-4 shots of tequila the evening before your meeting with a client or before your show the following morning, can be the difference between an A+ or a D- performance.

And when competition is cutthroat, one needs every advantage they can get. People aren’t cut from a different cloth, it’s just that some have an inexorable work ethic, and are willing to make sacrifices to get what they want.

After a certain point, people move on from post-secondary education, as well as many of their old behavioral patterns, but many people tend to hold on to the things they learned in school.

For instance, many students on campus develop a substance abuse problem over the years, which is a fact academia has noticed for quite some time.

According to a report from College Drinking Prevention, around 40% of students state they have had five drinks or more in one night in the last two weeks (22).

College and University presidents have identified drinking as their number one problem on college campuses, for a couple of different reasons. Alcohol abuse, as most people know, is associated with fatal and non-fatal injuries; alcohol poisoning, blackouts, academic failure, and violence (21).

It’s also associated with rape and assault; unintended pregnancy; sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS; property damage; STI’s, and other vocational and criminal consequences (21).

Admittedly, however, not all colleges have problems with drinking, and not all students are excessive binge-drinkers. But the ones who are, are far more likely to find themselves in bad circumstances in the present and in the future.

Data has shown consistently that alcohol and physical and sexual aggression are inextricably linked. The more you drink, the more inclined you are to become aggressive and violent (21).

The consequences of a violent altercation are often life-changing if something goes wrong. Many men find themselves in prison, or dead, after getting into a fight.

Rape victims are typically drunk, or the aggressor is intoxicated during the incident, and one has to live with that pain for the rest of their lives.

There’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun once and a while, but for many people, drinking becomes a problem later in life.

Alcoholism is a very slow-working addiction.

It starts with binge drinking, but becomes more insidious over time, as the number of drinks one needs increases the longer one continues as a drinker.

It’s possible to have a successful career as an alcoholic, but substance abuse and the other habits that go along with it are a handicap to your future success. It slows a person down.

Other bad habits which come from the college experience include overconsumption of unhealthy foods, due mostly, to poor time management in addition to insufficient money to buy nutritious food.

Some students use the term, “Freshman 15,” referring to the tendency for first-year students to gain fifteen pounds during their first semester.

According to an article from The Washington Post, the “Freshman 15,” is a bit of an exaggeration. But students still manage to gain weight during this period in their studies (23).

In actuality, students gain around 7-and-a-half pounds, rather than 15 (23).

It’s funny to joke about these kinds of things because they’re not a big deal, but for many the habits acquired in this phase in their lives are hard to break later on.

Another problem often incentivized and rewarded by the college and university system is procrastination. Students often leave all of their assignments and studying until the last minute, and end up wracking their brain at the very end to get it all done.

According to a study from BlueBanner.net, 95% of students admit they procrastinate frequently. When it comes to studying, students tend to use their time for almost everything but – what should be – their priorities.

Professors and TA’s don’t want to fail their students either upon submission of low quality work, because it reflects poorly on them. The administration might not even allow the profs to fail students as much as they’d like to.

In a report from CTV, Charles Pascal, an education professor, claims that a professor or teacher handing out a failing grade has more “to do with the educator” than the student. As a result of this, educators believe now that teachers and professors have responsibility for their students’ success (25).

However, an unintended consequence of a policy such as this is that educators, rather than figuring out how to meet a child’s needs, simply won’t fail a student, even if they deserve to fail (25).

This style of productivity – or lack thereof – is catastrophic to your work habits later in life, and it won’t go unpunished. All of these bad habits bleed into each other, and this one, in particular, can influence the way in which one goes about finishing a task.

Will-power and determination can certainly allow for one to overcome many of life’s problems, but in relation to college and the university experience, a person has to ask themselves if exposing themselves to all of the downsides of post-secondary is really worth the time and money?

Does an 18-year-old really need to spend between $30,000 and $100,000 for an education? Especially an education that exposes them to ways of conducting themselves they’ll eventually have to unlearn when they start a business or get a full-time job.

And by the time this article has been published, there is good chance tuition rates have already increased marginally, a fact about which administrators are not very honest.

6) They’re Not Honest About Why Tuition Rates Keep Increasing

This topic has been covered in another article which you can find at this link. 

Conclusion

With all of this said, if you and your family can afford to go to college without taking on insurmountable debt, go for it.  If you’re looking to get into the STEM field, Computer Engineering, Finance, Commerce, or Accounting, then University is definitely not a bad idea.

Go to school and learn an actual skill that will help you in the future.

Sources

(1) Marty Nemko 

(2) Consumer Finance

(3) The New York Times – Student Debt 

(4) CBCNews

(5) Nolo

(6) National Post – Stonehedge Of Idiots

(7) NBC News – Coaches 

(8) LA Times – UCLA Student Protests 

(9) The Washington Post – Text Books 

(10) Edweek 

(11) Credible 

(12) CNNMoney

(13) The Atlantic 

(14) The New York Times – Law Students 

(15) Chalkbeat 

(16) US News

(17) The Huffington Post 

(18) PayScale 

(19) USAToday – Too Many Teachers

(20) The Huffington Post – What To Do Instead Of Going To College

(21) Tom’s Guide – Bill Gates

(22) College Drinking Prevention

(23) The Washington Post – Freshman 15 

(24) BlueBanner.net 

(25) CTV – Failing Students