Don't go to college

Don’t go to college.

I just finished my computer science degree and I highly recommend everyone in the United States against going to university. This is not some political thing so don’t expect me to talk about how college is just transing the kids because honestly I really do not care either way.

This is about a purely financial aspect of why college just is not a good deal if you aren’t already rich or upper middle class. For anyone lower on the totem pole you are pretty much just digging yourself further into the hole that you were born into unfortunately.

I guess I should start off with the positives of university. It is said that you will meet a lot of long time friends and like minded individuals that will help you achieve career success and ultimately help you achieve a more fulfilling life through those relationships.

Another benefit of going to college is the education, you are paying to receive an education in a very specialized field that will bring you at least financial stability.

The last thing I can think of about going to college that is good is that you get the college experience, you get to drink and party and have fun time away from your parents. Now I definitely do not agree with that final bullet point but I know someone will jerk themselves off at that point.

Wow geez this makes college sound like a phenomenal deal to anyone at about any price as statistically speaking you are going to make more money as a college graduate than high school or lower however personal experiences have shown me differently.

There are a lot of people who are motivated to sell you on the idea of going to college, the same is true as for not going. However I have literally no motivation to dissuade you from going to college as I won’t gain anything financially or spiritually or anything at all really from you deciding to not go to that money sink.

First I want to say do not go to college if you are only going there to party, you are spending THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of dollars to be there and years of your life there just to fail out with no degree and the negative money glitch.

Now even if you actually want to be there and get an education in a specialized degree I am here to tell you that is still a bad idea.

Starting out, if you are poor you will have to work fulltime through college. This is a problem because you have to simultaneously make enough money to survive in this economy on your own in my case to support an apartment, food, internet, phone, etc, while having to maintain 4-5 different classes at the same time if you want to graduate in 4 years.

This takes an exceptional human being to maintain throughout the entire four years, the only way I was able to achieve this is by completely sacrificing my social life not that I had much of one prior and putting literally every ounce of my being into succeeding over the course of four years. This is overkill for most people, especially those with children who require additional attention. This pressure could be eased by having some help from family or even financial assistance from almost anyone, however in my case I did not receive so much as a thank you from the professors who gleefully punished my existence from a day to day basis.

Here is an example of a time where a professor took joy in making my life even more difficult than it needed to be. I was required to take a general education course and we will talk more about them later where we were scheduled for homework due the next day when the class was only once a week for 2 and a half hours, naturally I had to work after class. I told my professor that it would be nearly impossible to finish this homework by the next day, and asked for the assignments to be due on Sunday at midnight because they did not get to grading them until the following class.

Now to me that sounds like a very reasonable request however the professor responded me in this way ‘if i make the assignments due that day then most of the students will wait to the last minute to complete them’ I again reminded them of my situation and how i literally have to work until late after this class and by the time i get home I definitely would not get to complete the assignments on time, they didn’t care and left it the way it was. I then turned in every single assignment that semester either late or I just didn’t do them. Luckily I barely passed that class and that professor got to enjoy their cushy bs job.

Now this is just me with no kids, imagine the pain those with children would have experienced. Thank god I do not have kids to take care of.

Secondly, the thing I want to discuss about college is that it is filled with years of fluff. Looking at my transcripts the overwhelming majority of classes I was required to take were classes that had literally nothing to do with my major and the thing I wanted to do in the future. As a freshman I had ZERO programming or computer science classes. I complained about this to not only my academic advisor but also a professor employer I had about this and I received the same non response from both of them. The response being ‘oh these classes round you out as a student. You should enjoy these less rigorous classes’

Personally I do not enjoy paying thousands and thousands of dollars to do a set of english classes that I already experienced in high school. The reason I went to college is to do computer science and get a job in that field.I do not have time to play around and have fun with everyone in the english classes to talk about whatever is popular for the week, me personally would have liked to only take those relevant to getting me employed and to financial stability.

I am a very strong believer that the reason universities pad your required classes with nonsense is to further inflate the price of education, which in the US is astronomically high. However there are government requirements that also force the university to force us the customers to attend these courses, they could make them less expensive not only financially but time wise as well, but there are no incentives for them to do that. In fact they are more incentivised to force even more of these classes onto you as it is a lot easier for someone to teach an english class than it is to teach in a more specialized STEM field and it takes more training to not only learn the STEM material but also learn how to teach that STEM class. So I don't see this ever changing. In fact I think if they ever make any changes to university to make it more accessible this will be the very last thing they will change.

Overall my experience in university was about 70% these gen ed courses and 30% computer science and mathematics.

Every single general ed class that I attended had a stuck up professor that always and I mean always wanted their unimportant irrelevant loser class to be your most important class, often requiring customers to write long meandering essays about whatever is current in the news or something else related to ethics so that the professor can grandstand about either being knowledgeable about the topic, about how unbiased they are, or how important this is to your lives.

This is a complete lie. This class is completely irrelevant and is only required to steal your time and money. There is actually no point in attending, doing the homework or even knowing the professor's name. You would actually be spending your time in a better way if you sat at home and masturbated or went to the class to flirt with that hot girl or guy you are interested in, there is actually no point in doing anything else when required to take these classes.

The reason I did not do that is because I wanted the piece of paper at the end of all the endless coursework.

Another reason why you should not go to college is that when you actually get to attend the courses related to your major it is very VERY hit or miss on whether you will get a good professor. The entire point of you risking your future to attend this is to learn from these intelligent people in the industry about the specific craft you are interested in.

However there is a deep deep cancer with professors mindsets, since they are financially stable or honestly working towards something better in the background a good few of them will just leave you to your own devices and have you pretty much teach yourself the content of the course with no feedback or explanations or help in pretty much any way for the cheap price of a billion dollars and about 3 months of stress. Now back in the past I guess this could be acceptable as books and question packs weren’t nearly as accessible as they are today, I would highly recommend you instead just torrent the book for the field you are interested in or go to a library or book store to get this information instead of paying some arrogant pompous professor to stand there and read the slides from to their course that they made a million years ago and leave it at that. You would probably do a lot better doing that considering you don’t have deadlines, and they don’t force you to stop at the middle of the book at the end of the course because this book is broken up into 2 different classes. You could get the full experience for none of the millions of dollars it costs to be there in university.

If they are actually teaching the material then you lucked out, I have received a few different professors that actually cared about my being but they are few and far apart and I would never roll those dice again.

Another type of professor is the yapper, this professor loves to talk to the more entertaining customers ad-infinitum and pretend as if these customers are so much better than you because they provide entertainment to the professor and they like current marvel movie and you are only concerned with learning the material so that you can get a job and feed yourself which makes rich professor uncomfortable. This professor will yap and yap and yap and yap until their favorite customers fail out of the classes then they will be sad and teach the remainder of the course very mediocrely but you will still pass because you never had that help unlike the yappers.

Obviously I am thinking of a specific professor when talking about each of these types but I don’t remember their names because they are ultimately irrelevant to my life.

Finally the last professor type if you don’t receive one that proficiently teaches the course. That professor I honestly don’t blame them and I don’t give them any crap because it’s not their fault. It is the poor english speaker, as a STEM major you will experience this professor but again it’s not their fault. Majority of the time they are one of the best professors in the university and really cares about the customers. However, they have to learn both their professional field and native english skills and that seems like it would be rather exceptional to achieve. As someone who is teaching themselves another language I can say being at that level with not only the language you want to learn AND a STEM field would be a minority of a minority.

Finally, the last reason you should not go to university is that no employer values a degree. There is not a single employer that values your degree no matter which field it is in, I will say this again, I acquired a computer science degree and that is one that takes endless rigorous work to get, there are a lot that takes more and there are degrees that are definitely more challenging to get I am not dick measuring the difficulty of the degree, I personally do not care I would rather have a refund for my degree instead of the degree itself.

No employer actually cares about your degree, the gatekeepers to you starving or not are recruiters, HR, and CEOs. None of these people actually care if you have a degree unless they know you personally. This degree might as well be interchangeable with a boolean value, unless you go to one of the mega rich schools which you won't be able to due to most of those going to legacy students, rich kids, and people who had head starts in life that you will most likely not have. These people will encourage you to finish school and tell you how much better your life will be once you graduate until the end of time, but the frame you graduate they will completely ignore you and tell you good luck. I am not sure why they do this but this is the reality, this is the behavior I have experienced first hand.

I remember before going into school, I had to do a year of community service. I asked someone who was speaking to us poor people, she was a news anchor and tech journalist. I had just taught myself python and I asked her how I could be successful in the tech field and get a job to support myself. Her answer was to make a social media account and talk about it there. At the time I felt so hurt and insulted that she told me non advice for what I was doing and she did, what I took from it definitely wasn’t her intention and she was not profound. But looking back at what she told me was incredibly based, the only way to succeed in this life is to be a social media influencer and to pretty much maintain your own separate business.

This is why I am going to at least try to get use out of my degree or as I call it my piece of paper by making a youtube video about it and talking about my experiences acquiring it. Also posting the scripts online to hopefully meet literally anyone who can help me in any way as I need it desperately.

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