Thread:RePeat/@comment-1693968-20140305220535/@comment-1693968-20140308212037

I totally have to agree with LSB about college. College degrees are very expensive; I forget the exact number, but I believe it was around 20 years of having a higher paying job due to your degree, in order to make up the difference of simply skipping college and having a lower paying job. Additionally, whereas most college students spend around 4 years spending money on education, you could spend that 4 years working at a job. If you are even able to make minimum wage, then in that four years you would have been spending money on education, you will have just made $60,000. That money is in addition to the 20 or so years it would take to make up the difference from having a degree.

That reasoning primarily applies to private universities like Harvard, MIT, and CMU. However, much of it still can be applied to cheaper schools.

That being said, I think college degrees are very appropriate for a large portion of the population. I think there's some requirements that should be filled, though.


 * 1) You're not going for fun. You're going to learn.
 * 2) You're trying to obtain a specific degree, so that you can go into a specific field. If you're just trying to earn a general degree, then your time and money can be better spent on other resources that would have the same effect on getting a job.
 * 3) You're not going to a private university. Unless the government's paying.
 * 4) You do extensive research on the degree, the field/job you're interested in, and you weigh the pros and cons.

Those are my personal requirements for college. If someone can't complete those, then I don't recommend that they go to college. I won't be upset if they don't listen to me, but it's still my advice.

One more comment: college is for a degree, not for learning. If you're only interested in learning, then you can easily read Wikipedia or some other site, or you could even purchase high school curriculum after you graduate. You can almost always get a subject from high school that is as advanced as what you'd learn in college. This learning method may not be as convenient as college, but in the end, you will have learned just as much, in a smaller amount of time, and for much cheaper. My point is really that, with very few exceptions, everything you could ever learn in college is available on the internet. So if it's just knowledge you're looking for, college may not be the best option.

But I did mention that college is good for something: a degree. If you have an incredible amount of interest in a specific field which requires a certain degree, then go for it. It may be prudent to get that degree. However, if the field you're entering only requires the appropriate knowledge, then you may be better off learning it yourself. In fact, I've actually heard of companies preferring people who taught themselves. Statistically, these kind of people have a far greater capacity to learn new things than people who were taught by others. This is especially important in quickly evolving markets such as technology. If you spend all this time working on a degree in computer science, you may be wasting your time. In two years, only half of that knowledge will apply, since programming methods, algorithms, and even syntax changes so rapidly. Companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. are all hiring employees who are either minoring in computer science, or just learned it all on their own and have demonstrated adequate abilities. People who learn this way are typically better at learning quickly. There are other fields that don't change quite as fast, where this reasoning doesn't apply. But there are plenty of areas where you do have to be able to learn quickly in order to stay competitive. Often, college may not be the best answer for these fields.

Again, I just want to emphasize how strongly I believe that college is important for some individuals. Depending on your interests, your aptitude, and many other personal factors, college isn't necessarily going to be bad. It's one of those things that everyone should pray about before deciding whether or not to do it.