The College Rat Race

Personal Anecdote on the utility of college

American society has always looked highly on getting college degrees, and according to NCES, students with a bachelor's degree tend to earn, on average, a 59% higher income than those without one. It is almost expected that after high school, kids should always go to college, even if it means taking out loans. In American society, we applaud individuals with high potential who act on their ambition and make something of themselves. In Europe, they really don't like people who aspire to make something of themselves; it's really peculiar, but it's true. In the UK, France, and the Scandinavian countries especially, chasing success is not valued by the culture. Ambition is associated with stepping out of line, quite a different attitude compared to the US.

The pursuit of success is the biggest reason people go to college in the first place. Even Life, the board game, allows players to choose to take the college route in order to make a higher income. That game has been around since 1860 and has sold hundreds of millions of copies just in the past few decades. This is a widely accepted cultural norm that we all ascribe to.

Now, the truth is, cultural pressure had very little to do with my decision to go to college or not. At the time, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had always admired philosophical and psychological books and speakers (probably not the best thing for a high schooler), and I thought I could go down that field, get a medical degree, open a psychiatric clinic, and serve society that way. I was very close to pulling the trigger on that, but I knew in the back of my head that that was an awful lot of money and time on the line for such a decision. The last thing I wanted was to be halfway through medical school and lose interest in the degree. That would make it very difficult to finish. The medical school process is a decade-long endeavor, and I didn't have enough confidence that my interest wouldn't drift elsewhere in that time. So I figured the best solution would be to delay a life-changing decision of significant time and financial magnitude and see whether I wanted to do it in a year.

Thank God I made that decision, because it took about two months for my interest to completely change in a different direction, and another two months for it to become defined enough to set a clear goal and try to obtain it.

It became very obvious to me I would be running a business in 10 years. In those four months, I realized that I absolutely despised being confined to the school education system that I already thought was stupid, like the classroom setting, for example, which was developed by fascists in the 1800s to produce factory workers, or the medical establishment, which everyone can see is fundamentally broken, overregulated, and mis-subsidized, especially on the insurance and pharmaceutical front.

When the way of doing things doesn't make sense to me, I have a strong inclination not to participate. This is why I like the idea of running a business so much, because the rules within the company are determined by those who have a desire to see it succeed and are redetermined every day in order to serve that goal. This is one of the reasons I steer clear of heavily regulated business fields, because there is significantly less incentive to enact radical change within the company in a way that increases productivity and profit.

This narrowed the area of exploration significantly and resulted in a new look at an old interest in tech, programming, and cybersecurity, which had been my main focus from about 12 to 15. Tech is a low-regulation field; I already had a significant bit of knowledge on certain aspects of the field, and I saw incredible market potential with the rise of AI LLMs. The before-described thought process was taking place probably around December of 2023; I decided to go all in on tech a month later. I didn't know what area of tech I wanted to go into, only that a business in tech was the desired goal. In that case, the idea is to study these systems enough to get a job in a particular area where I knew the least, spend a few years learning the field, and switch to another area where I was lacking, and so on. Eventually, I would find an area with significant market potential and fill that gap with a good product or service.

In January of 2024, I took an online course, going over the fundamentals of software development, learning a couple of different coding languages, and seeing whether this field was more or less interesting afterward. The answer was more, and I began considering getting a degree in this field. That would be a degree in software engineering or computer science, which would allow me to easily get a job after the four-year degree.

In order to decide whether the degree was worth it, I did a simple cost-benefit analysis. Would the money and time spent on this degree justify the potential competitive business advantage?

I have always been very good with computers; I understand how the machines work and how to fix them, and I already see incredible market potential in certain aspects of the field. I was skeptical of the accreditation value from the colleges, and after looking into it, it turns out that all of the major tech companies don't require college degrees, even for engineering and software development positions. A degree might make it a little easier to break into the field, but every tech company values experience over a college degree, mainly because the field is changing so rapidly, college courses are often outdated. The alternative is to get an entry-level position in one of these companies, and that will open the door to higher positions further down the line. Learning the material and building a portfolio turned out to be all that mattered in this field, not really the accreditation. Okay, I thought, what is the quality of the college material compared to what I can teach myself? Turns out, it's not really that good. I went through the curriculum of the first two years of the degree; turns out I know all of this material already. Why would I pay an ungodly amount of money and time to learn something I already know? This seems stupid.

Can I teach myself the necessary parts of the curriculum for zero cost? Yes.
Can I get the same job today, that I would have gotten right out of college? Also yes.

***Update a couple months later***
The job I am currently working at is a corporate IT job. I literally just talked my way in, and negotiated a much higher wage than my regular experience level. I didn’t even know you were supposed to put the IP address in your search bar to connect to a server’s web console that’s how bad I was.