[High Praise! to The Matt Walsh Blog]
College is a means to an end. It isn’t a destination unto itself. Don’t go for the “experience.” You want an experience? Move out of the house and get a job. Pay your own rent. Get evicted from an apartment for failure to make a payment. Work three minimum wage jobs at the one time. Mop floors. Go a winter without heat because you can’t afford to keep it on and eat at the same time. Run out into that cold, wild world and muscle your way to the top of it. THAT’S an experience.
You want to be an engineer? A doctor? An astronaut? An architect? By all means, go to college. You want to build cars or become an electrician? Maybe a trade school is in your future. You have absolutely no clue what you want out of life, what your talents are, or what career path best suits you? College isn’t for you. In fact, college is an objectively BAD idea for anyone in this category. And this is a category that includes, for instance, most college students.
More sound, practical advice at the link.
I went to college in the Fall after graduating from High School in the spring because I liked going to classes, and they wouldn’t let me stay in High School anymore.
After 3 years and 1 quarter, I’d attended lots of classes, and had absolutely no marketable skills, so I joined the Coast Guard instead.
For some, college is a day-care center for young adults who just aren’t ready to face the world yet.
The really hard-core reality avoiders become tenured professors and stay there forever.
Guy who joined the Navy after three years and thousands of wasted dollars in college (and also two years of minimum wages positions) concurs.
Sad but true:
Q:What did the English major say to the Chemistry Major?
A:Would you like fries with that, sir?
What arik said. But then I went back after getting out of the Navy. Left a lot of my peers in the dust. Good feeling. (“Apostic, what is best in life?” “To crush frat boys, see them drriven before your grade curve, and to hear the lamentation of their parents.”) Of course I had a some unfair advantages: (1) more focus, (2) less faith that things would work out on their own, and (3) history courses were twice as easy because I’d lived through twice as much history as the average peer.
Apostic: I finally got my (appropriately initialed) B.S. in December 2011, almost 14 years after I left the Navy, but I earned an A.S from my C school and have been doing that work now for almost twenty years. I just wish I hadn’t been such a fat lazy slob: I could have retired last year…
My favorite courses when I went back to school were the opinion-driven writing classes. Of course, I had morphed from a mush-headed liberal into a well-informed conservative and had the good luck of finding some of the closet conservative professors on campus. Or at least some open-,inded ones.
Living through history isn’t enough when you professor has been raised on the same lies the left has been pushing for the last century or more.