Study well at school, go to a college, graduate, find a high-paying, stable job, work hard and live happily ever after – this is the mantra people all over the world have been repeating for the last hundred years. And it was a right thing to believe in during the industrial age.
But the industrial age is no more; the world has firmly entered the territory of the information age, and many people today believe that it is time to go over the preconceptions that seem self-obvious. For example, the necessity of college education for achieving success.
And it becomes glaringly obvious that the times when a college degree was a sure-fire guarantee of an affluent life have passed. With more and more people getting a degree every year the comparative value of each degree gets diluted, and we see the results: a large percentage of graduates are simply incapable of finding jobs – or, at least, jobs they studied for.
We live in curious times: as college degree is no longer a guarantee of a good job, the issue of surviving with college education becomes as viable as that of surviving without one, and there hardly can be a definite answer as to which is harder. After all, unemployed graduates usually have student loans to repay, loans that are biting even for the budget of a well-paid specialist, let alone a person with no job and no immediate prospects of one.
We don’t try to prove that college education is completely unnecessary or even detrimental to achieving success; we simply try to show that there can be different opinions. In addition to that, you should define what you understand by ‘success’ before you start thinking about this subject.
If your goal is a stable high-paid job, then college education may and will be of help, for it is impossible to enter many fields without one. Medical professionals, engineers, lawyers, government officials are all well-paid positions you cannot get until you receive a corresponding degree. If you manage to find your place in the system, you are set up for life – or at least until the next recession.
If, however, you want to earn a lot of money, live a dynamic life, set goals and achieve them, then spending several years in college may turn out to be a tremendous waste of time – and the most productive time of your life, mind you.
There are numerous professions that don’t require higher education to find well-paid jobs in, and here we talk about the jobs of the future: programmers, app developers, web-designers and other IT specialists, for example.
You don’t need college education to start your own small business – or you do need education, but not the one you can get in college. Real estate brokers, pilots, construction managers, executive chefs – all these are extremely high-paid jobs in industries where no one cares about your degrees, only about your ability to work. And rest assured, the greater part of higher education adds nothing to your ability to survive in real world.
