Why College Is Still a Good Idea

There's a little trend that keeps bugging me: successful people writing about how college isn't that important. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, so surely the rest of us would be so much more successful if we dropped out of — or simply skipped — college.

I faced the same dilemma. I was already employed — in a job and company I love and have continued to work for — during my last year of college. A college degree suddenly didn't look so important, especially when balanced against the growing bills said degree was generating. I seriously considered dropping out of college with only a couple dozen credits left to finish.

And why not? The world's changing, and a degree is no guarantee of success today (though really, was it ever?). Education seems to only be a click away — who needs to study when you could check Wolfram|Alpha and Wikipedia for the answers? Plus, if you did want to study, there's all those online courses for free, right? And even if you did go to college and get a degree, everything you learn will be obsolete by the time you graduate.

Not so fast. I did finish my degree — and am glad I did, even if graduating didn't directly change my career — and here's why I believe a college degree is still a very worthy goal, even in 2013.

College Forces You to Study

Deadlines are a blessing. No, really. If there weren't deadlines, I highly doubt I'd have ever gotten through my classes, and I definitely wouldn't have gone through them as fast as I did.

Many people think they could study the very same stuff that you'd learn in college from the internet. After all, there's tons of online courses for free (thanks, MIT OpenCourseWare and Coursera), and you could just purchase the same textbooks from Amazon that real classes use, and study them on your own. Throw in online tutorials and more, and you'll be well on your way.

And you might be. Odds are, though, you'll quit the class before finishing. You know how many tutorials you've bookmarked and books you own that are collecting dust.

"But I might quit college too", you could counter. Ah, you could, but after working towards the degree and investing any money and time into it, you'll be a lot less likely to just throw it out as quickly as you'd close a browser tab.

College Makes You Broaden Your Horizons

I highly doubt I'd have learned what letters of credit were for if it hadn't been for my international business class. Macroeconomics, international business, and music didn't seem like they'd be important to my career, definitely not as much as database design theory and writing classes.

There were tons of classes in my degree plan — especially business classes — that seemed like a total waste of time. However, they gave me a well-rounded education, and forced me to think beyond the things I'd learned on my own. I would have never, ever studied these things on my own. Honestly, many of the things that I studied in college that seemed to apply to my degree — Calculus II and database design theory, among others — were likely things I would have never pushed through if I hadn't been required to study them.

But I'm glad I did study them, and do believe they have helped me in my adult life already, and will continue to do so.

College Costs

I know, I know. This sounds like the worst point of them all, but I happen to think it's true. We tend to value things more when we invest more in them, and that's true with your degree as well.

Now, this won't work if you put your whole college bill on a loan, and figure you'll pay it off post-graduation. But if you have a goal of getting your degree with the least debt possible, and work very hard towards that goal while you're in college, you'll find that it teaches you a lot.

You'll find ways to make college affordable, including buying — and then reselling — used textbooks, and applying for grants, scholarships, and more — a great exercise in working with bureaucracy, something you'll have to do in real-life. You'll have to budget, plan for the future, and work hard, while still keeping your college education deadlines. It won't be easy, but it will teach you a ton of valuable lessons.

But, it's Just a Goal

All that said, if all you have under your belt on graduation day is a degree, you've failed. Everything every pundit has said about college degrees not being valuable will turn out to be true, because they're not very valuable on their own. Jobs are tough to come by these day, and life-long careers in the same company are increasingly rare, so you need to invent your own job. And you need to start that now.

College isn't the time to only focus on studying what's in your class, but it's also the time you should be building your own career. Do anything you can for experience, even free stuff (contributing to open source, volunteering, blogging) that will gain you recognition. Build your own following. Start making the stuff that you want to make post-college. Whether you plan to make physical goods, software, movies, books, or anything else, the experience will serve you well, and will give you a chance to put at least some of the stuff you're learning into action.

Also, don't quit studying. If you're interested in something your college isn't teaching you, go study it to death. That's equally important. The internet is great for that, as is the old school of trial and error. All that extra learning and doing, combined with your classwork and deadlines, will teach you what you need for life.

It's not easy. Dropping out of college — or not going at all — is easy. But committing to getting a degree, and building a career, and learning more than what you're required to, is difficult. It's the difficult stuff, though, that makes you grow.

Investing in yourself is always a good strategy.

...and no, this isn't an April Fool's joke, despite today's date.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.