Helping you ace higher ed

Should You Go to College?

In this article we’ll help you decide if going to college is right for you.

If you want to ace higher ed, it’s crucial you know whether pursuing it is in your interests, and which kind of higher ed is best.

We don’t give ordinary advice. We expose you to the harsh realities of work, passion and the professional world so that you make the most of your education and build the life you want.

Contrary to what most people will tell you, college degrees can be a waste of time, and even damaging to your career.

To start, let’s talk about the standard track that most college graduates take.

The Standard College Track

We tend to put college degrees on a pedestal, as though they were the key to having a successful, well-paid career. We at College Pirates know from experience that a college degree can certainly help you, but we also know they can also lead you down blind alleys.

This is likely to happen when you follow what everyone else does, based on the standard assumptions about higher education. What exactly are these? We can sum them up as so:

  • college degrees increase employability and salary;
  • passion is a marginable consideration compared to stability and high income;
  • so let me study the degree that will lead to the most lucrative career, without having experienced that career from the inside, and whether or not I inherently care about it.

Now, though you might never have questioned these maxims, each one of them is doubtful.

Sure, on average college degrees increase employability and salary. But there are plenty of college degrees that are useless in this regard. They’re too abstract and academic, so don’t provide you with real skills. They are obscenely overvalued and overpriced. What’s more, this overlooks the question of whether the employment is enjoyable and meaningful to the employees.

While stability and high income are desirable, you can’t replace passion with them. If you wake up every day with a feeling of dread at what awaits you, your paycheck won’t compensate for it. If you stifle your passion, you’ll feel it deep down, and it will gnaw at you for the rest of your career.

And before you’ve experienced the adult world, you have very little idea of the day-to-day experience of your future profession. It sounds sexy to be a lawyer, doctor, or accountant. But usually the cold, hard reality is much more mundane. You might get a shock at how wildly wrong your ideas were.

What’s more, these maxims all completely ignore the key question you should ask.

The Key Question for College

Before asking whether you should go to college, you must ask yourself what you want from life. In fact, you should ask this over and over again when you’re considering whether to enter higher education, until you have clarity. Make sure you get this point right. If you do, the rest of your career will fall into place.

Many people go to college simply because it’s what’s expected of them or because they don’t have a clear direction in life. The problem is that on this basis you won’t be motivated to learn, and even if you do get a degree and find a job, you likely won’t be passionate about your work.

If you don’t know what you want from life, you must explore a bit. Go work and travel in different places. Expose yourself to lots of input. Read books. Meet new people. Do new things. Then start narrowing it down.

On that basis, you start designing your career and sketch a rough plan for making it real. If it happens that college is the best way to do that, then you should go. If not, don’t.

Broad Advice

You might notice that our advice is to put passion first, and you might think that all this boils down to the old saying “follow your passion”, and therefore underestimate and undervalue it. There’s much more to it than following your passion. Here are the broad things you’ll need to create a passion-based career:

  • Skills: no matter what you want to do, you need skills. If it turns out college is the best way to obtain them, college is for you. If not, then look for specialised training. If you’re starting a business, you might need a broader set of non-specialised skills.
  • Money Generation: at some point, you need to figure out how this career will generate money for you. If you want to enter employment, that’s quite easy. If you want to work for yourself, this is one of the make-or-break factors. Seek to master the money-generation mechanisms in your field.
  • Focus on the Vision: as you craft your career, you’ll meet with many obstacles and wonder how you’ll overcome them. In these moments, focus on the vision. Don’t get lost in the how-to questions. Keep moving forward and trust that you’ll eventually gain enough experience to master the how-to.

We hope this has helped you clarify whether college is the right fit for you. Stick around for our future articles on skillbuilding and passion-first education.


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