Is it prudent to go to college?
Deciding whether or not to go to college is a major decision that people have to make in life. But, is it prudent for most people to go to college? I think we first have to explore the reasons for why most people choose to go to college. I think there are 4 major camps of reason for wanting to go to college:
1. Finance motivated: some people believe that going to college would put them in a better financial situation in the long term.
2. “Dream job” motivated: some people believe that going to college would allow them to obtain a job which would be preferable to any job you might obtain without a college degree
3. Relationship motivated: some people go to college in hopes of meeting their future spouse or making lots of friends that they couldn’t make in the workforce. Sometimes people wish to go to college simply because they want to party and have fun.
4. Education motivated: some people go to college to learn new knowledge and obtain an education. I didn’t include this category in the original OP but several people on this thread have stated it as a reason for why it might be a good idea to go to college.
I think there might be acceptable alternatives for all 4 motivations:
1. When considered the cost of going to college, one must not only consider the cost of tuition but also the cost of the lost income due to the inability to work full time and having to focus on school work. In addition, when calculating how much extra income you can expect after graduating from college, one must consider that a big reason why college graduates tend to earn more money than high school graduates is due to the fact that the average college graduate has a higher IQ and is probably more hardworking. It’s not clear how beneficial a degree is to increasing income once you adjust for those variables. An alternative strategy to improving your financial situation in the future is to live with your parents and work full time for about 5 years. Assuming that you’re saving most of your money, you should have enough money to buy a house without a mortgage in 5 years. Your expenses should go downhill once you own a house. Of course, you could also offer to pay a very cheap rent to your parents if they are not ok with you living with them for free. Would this strategy work better than going to college to insure a financially secure future?
2. Instead of trying to obtain a supposedly enjoyable job with a college degree, it might be a better strategy to save money and live modestly. Then, you can either retire early or work a part time job which might not quite be as enjoyable as your dream job but tolerable nonetheless. I think working a part time job is probably better since you don’t want to be completely unaccustomed to working in case you are forced to do so again. Either way, I think increasing your leisure time might be better because it seems like there is no guarantee that you will enjoy your “dream job”. Sometimes these dream jobs can prove to be a disappointment in reality so we have to be careful not to over-romanticize those jobs. It might be more beneficial to have more time to do hobbies which correspond to these jobs. For example, instead of trying to become a philosophy teacher, it might be better to simply do philosophy for fun. If you have lots of free time, then you can spend it on meaningful hobbies which you enjoy. Of course, we should also remember that there’s no guarantee that you will succeed in obtaining a job that you really like. Is acquiring more leisure time more beneficial than trying to acquire an enjoyable job which doesn’t pay very well with a college degree?
3. It’s not clear to me why people would go to college to meet people. Are colleges better places to meet people than anywhere else? Could you not meet college people without going to college?
4. It might be better for someone to educate themselves by reading books and watching YouTube lecture series from actual elite universities. The great thing about self-education is that you get to choose what you would like to learn about. This allows you to be specialized in topics which may not even be taught in universities. For example, I spent a lot of time studying prudential value theory. It would be really rare for me to find a university course specifically on prudential value theory but there is a decent literature written on the topic online. Could self-education be better or comparable to university education?
1. Finance motivated: some people believe that going to college would put them in a better financial situation in the long term.
2. “Dream job” motivated: some people believe that going to college would allow them to obtain a job which would be preferable to any job you might obtain without a college degree
3. Relationship motivated: some people go to college in hopes of meeting their future spouse or making lots of friends that they couldn’t make in the workforce. Sometimes people wish to go to college simply because they want to party and have fun.
4. Education motivated: some people go to college to learn new knowledge and obtain an education. I didn’t include this category in the original OP but several people on this thread have stated it as a reason for why it might be a good idea to go to college.
I think there might be acceptable alternatives for all 4 motivations:
1. When considered the cost of going to college, one must not only consider the cost of tuition but also the cost of the lost income due to the inability to work full time and having to focus on school work. In addition, when calculating how much extra income you can expect after graduating from college, one must consider that a big reason why college graduates tend to earn more money than high school graduates is due to the fact that the average college graduate has a higher IQ and is probably more hardworking. It’s not clear how beneficial a degree is to increasing income once you adjust for those variables. An alternative strategy to improving your financial situation in the future is to live with your parents and work full time for about 5 years. Assuming that you’re saving most of your money, you should have enough money to buy a house without a mortgage in 5 years. Your expenses should go downhill once you own a house. Of course, you could also offer to pay a very cheap rent to your parents if they are not ok with you living with them for free. Would this strategy work better than going to college to insure a financially secure future?
2. Instead of trying to obtain a supposedly enjoyable job with a college degree, it might be a better strategy to save money and live modestly. Then, you can either retire early or work a part time job which might not quite be as enjoyable as your dream job but tolerable nonetheless. I think working a part time job is probably better since you don’t want to be completely unaccustomed to working in case you are forced to do so again. Either way, I think increasing your leisure time might be better because it seems like there is no guarantee that you will enjoy your “dream job”. Sometimes these dream jobs can prove to be a disappointment in reality so we have to be careful not to over-romanticize those jobs. It might be more beneficial to have more time to do hobbies which correspond to these jobs. For example, instead of trying to become a philosophy teacher, it might be better to simply do philosophy for fun. If you have lots of free time, then you can spend it on meaningful hobbies which you enjoy. Of course, we should also remember that there’s no guarantee that you will succeed in obtaining a job that you really like. Is acquiring more leisure time more beneficial than trying to acquire an enjoyable job which doesn’t pay very well with a college degree?
3. It’s not clear to me why people would go to college to meet people. Are colleges better places to meet people than anywhere else? Could you not meet college people without going to college?
4. It might be better for someone to educate themselves by reading books and watching YouTube lecture series from actual elite universities. The great thing about self-education is that you get to choose what you would like to learn about. This allows you to be specialized in topics which may not even be taught in universities. For example, I spent a lot of time studying prudential value theory. It would be really rare for me to find a university course specifically on prudential value theory but there is a decent literature written on the topic online. Could self-education be better or comparable to university education?
Comments (74)
Fair enough, I suppose for some people it’s easier to find friends at university. Although, I actually had an easier time making friends at work than at college myself. It might have been because I went to community college instead of uni where people tend not to be as social with each other. I think it’s partly due to the diversity of people that are present in the workplace and in community colleges compared to the mostly youthful population in universities. I guess most people prefer to spend time with those around their age. I always preferred to befriend people who are much older than me so I tend to make friends more easily at work. I think another reason might be that most people in the workplace already have a family and so they are just not as interested in additional company as a university student might be.
It allowed you to land a job here as a moderator, so there's that.
But, does one have to go to university in order to be educated? Is it not possible to educate yourself by watching lecture series on YouTube and reading books?
It's possible to self educate for some. For me, I greatly benefited by being taught, discussing, and asking questions.
What career advice would you provide? And with your answer, you may heal thyself.
Anything but philosophy.
Damn it! That's the only thing I got a degree in and I'm now to learn it's the only thing I shouldn't have gotten a degree in.
Truth is there's only 2 things a philosophy degree is good for: chicks and money. Got a basement full of them. It's the curse @Michael and I will take to our grave.
You're a lawyer, so what you bitchen about?
....or psychology, sociology, gender studies, economics, political science, foreign language, English literature, art, music theory, etc. I think it’s probably not worth getting any type of degree in humanities. Although, I do think humanities are valuable to study. I think it’s more enjoyable to study it in your free time and choose exactly what you want to study.
The skill set is the same for lawyers and philosophers. It's a good undergraduate major if you plan to go to law school. Had I not gone to law school, I'd have been a thinker for hire and made a shitload. Maybe 2 shitloads if I ratcheted up my work ethic.
I think the statistics can be very misleading though since correlation does not necessarily imply causation. It could be that the reason why people who go to college make more money is because they are more intelligent and industrious on average compared to those who do not. Of course, I don’t think university education is what made them intelligent or industrious in the first place. I think genetics account for most of that. If you take a person who is average in both intelligence and industriousness, then would he necessarily have higher lifetime earning after he pays off his tuition? Of course, we should also consider that an average person is at risk of dropping out of college and end up stuck with the tuition. For example, I bet it’s not fun to be the guy who ends up dropping out of law school with heavy debt.
No.
The first thing will be to pick a subject for your degree, while the very concept of subject as some kind of subdivision of the world of knowledge is highly nonsensical.
Let's pick an example: psychology, economics,and sociology. No matter what definition you pick for these subjects, these definitions will highly overlap. Hence, they collectively do not form a legitimate partition of their superset, which itself is in turn not a valid partition of the domain of knowledge.
Would you want to study with people who do not even get the very basic structure right of what they are teaching? I certainly do not recommend it, because at the highest level, i.e. the most visible structuring of what they do, they already get it completely wrong.
When you read a typical curriculum, you can only decide that the people who composed it, are utterly incompetent. Hence, you will learn nothing from them, except for becoming incompetent yourself.
What plan in life after high school will pay off the best depends on a lot of factors.
How ambitious one is
How wealthy (or poor), how socially connected (or unconnected) one's parents are
What one's long term objectives are: stay on the farm? play it safe, work for civil service, retire? get rich quick and then get richer?
and so on.
One thing to remember: All colleges are in the business of getting students to buy their services. It never was in colleges' interests to tell students that college may not pay off financially.
This is the smartest thing I’ve heard on this thread so far. I really wish people would understand that about colleges and also high schools. I feel many high schools are trying to convince too many students to go to college. This is because high schools are often evaluated on their SAT or ACT scores and on how many of their students end up going to college. This creates a complete conflict of interest to encourage students to always go to college. This is why you will always see these misleading charts that show how much more college graduates are earning compared to hs graduates without isolating other variables.
How does this conclusion follow? BC advocated going to college, just for different reasons (intellectual development instead of increased earning capacity). Why should high schools not try to convince students to go to college if it will increase their personal growth and intellectual development?
It seems you're searching diligently for a justification to advise others that college is a bad decision, but very rarely is it. You still end up with a better type of job, associate with more intelligent people, make more money, and it will expand your intellectual horizons. Be careful with your loans and what you spend, but it's well worth it.
And the whole, "meeting intelligent people at college" is a joke, unless you get into somewhere like Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech, where the average IQ is above the norm, in some cases significantly.
Oh, come on. It isn't just at Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech that one will find intelligent people. Sour grapes?
Quoting Wallows
Well, gee whiz, if he is making close to 100k a month he must really be a wonderful person! And by selling cheap supplements of possibly dubious value. He might have done as well by beginning his importer business right out of high school.
Quoting Hanover
Where college is a bad idea is the situation of people taking out loans to attend college (whatever college), for poorly motivated reasons, and then not finishing. They don't have a diploma, they have new debt, and no greater likelihood of a better life.
But even if you take something less practical--like philosophy, merely having a degree (or degrees) will help your job prospects. As long as you don't go into too much debt for it, it's not going to hurt anything to go. It will only help you. I know it sucks thinking about 4-8 more years of school once you're finally done with high school, but the time flies by. When you're 40 or 50 the time will seem like nothing, and you'll be glad you did it.
If you'd be interested in military service, that's another good option that can help you with your schooling--you'll get training in the military that will help your career prospects, plus they'll help (or completely) pay for university outside of the military, too. That's something else that you don't have to do long term, but the benefits will be with you for a lifetime. And if you do decide to do it longer term, you can do 20 years or so and semi-retire already. You'll at least have a secondary income to supplement whatever else you decide to do with the rest of your life.
Let's see. I finish college at 24 (BA, MA) and then 16 to 26 years later I'll finally be glad I did it. Is this really the right approach?
Along with these people, there is another batch of people who went to college and became exceptionally well educated. They read, they discussed, they inquired, they engaged. Some of them were well employed, some not.
The difference between the well educated and the not so well educated is the degree to which they read, discussed, inquired, and engaged.
the time will seem like nothing then.
I added "you'll be glad you did it" rather than being 40 and 50 and thinking about maybe trying to go to school or doing something with your life at that point (which is what some people do if they wound up working at McDonald's or something like that for 20-30 years).
Do you think going to college is good idea for those who end up dropping out and with lots of student loan debt? I’m asking this mainly because you said that college is “very rarely” a bad decision. Yet, dropping out of college happens pretty often and it seems to have a worse outcome than simply choosing not to go to college. I’ll grant you that I might be wrong about it being a bad decision for the average person with an IQ of 100, and average industriousness. My level of confidence on this view is maybe like 20% certainty. But, my level of confidence on it being bad for the average person who drops out is more like 90%.
Very valid point as well. The IQ of an average uni student is probably only like one standard deviation above the IQ of the workforce. Instead, you are more likely to meet some pretentious intellectual wannabe in uni who fails to recognize his ignorance.
Is it perhaps possible to effectively educate yourself online and find a community of educated persons there?
I agree with this, but this has less to do with the sometimes negatives of college specifically and more to do with the most often negatives of failure generally. That is, investing and failing is rarely a good thing, and I would only dissuade a potential student from attempting college if I thought their best efforts would be unsuccessful. One hopes that the admissions office is able to decipher the wheat from the chaff.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Do you think you won't run into a hoard of pretentious intellectual wannabe's on line? Guess again!
Yes, It is possible to educate one's self (autodidact) but it is quite difficult. One has to have a lot of drive, patience, persistence, and access to a good set of resources -- at least a good library and on-line access. One of the services that college provides is a 4 year guided trip through the process.
In addition to that, it helps enormously if one is part of a community that cares that you are trying to become a learnéd person. If all the people around you do not give a rat's ass what you are doing, then the task is even more difficult. It helps to have ready access to people who are interested in what you are learning.
Yes, one would hope. Vaguely interested students had best start at a low cost community college to find out if they can, and want to do college work. If they take a few courses, spend little, and do poorly -- no great loss to anyone.
But sometimes students misapprehend their readiness and ability, dive in and fail. There's nothing wrong with trying and failing, as long as one doesn't draw the wrong conclusions, like "I'm too stupid to do anything." And as long as one wasn't coaxed into borrowing money up front.
I wish, but wishes are fishes. slippery and hard to catch by hand.
But, do colleges benefit from deciphering the wheat from the chaff?
Yeah, it's not necessarily easy to do, especially if someone has to work at the same time--if they have to support family for example, and as I said, it's not a good idea necessarily if one is going to go into a lot of debt (so one might need to stick to state schools in one's state of residency, go to community college first, etc.), but if one can do it, I think it's definitely worth doing, and it's worth getting it over with early if one can.
At that, I did my degrees spread out over almost a 20-year period, but I had career opportunities I didn't want to pass up. But I still wanted to finish school, too, partially because I didn't know how long those career opportunities would last. So I did school when I could, when I had or could make free time, etc.
Would it perhaps be better to choose what you study instead of having to be compelled to study the material of the guided trip? Wouldn’t it be more fun to ditch the guide and carve your own educational path?
Well, that depends on your upbringing. My family would disapprove of me getting a philosophy degree due to concerns about debt and few future job prospects but they are perfectly happy about me wanting to educate myself.
An applicant should look at the credentials of the school when applying to be sure they're getting what they seek. I'm not suggesting you should go to any college just to go, but you should be sure they'll provide a reasonable education.
But of course colleges benefit from being competitive.
It’s true that it’s easier to motivate yourself in college because you are making a sacrifice to attend. Free education is never going to be as effective as education that can put you in massive debt. The same goes with other things like therapy. Free therapy is also not as effective as paid therapy because the patient isn’t as motivated to take it seriously. But, is it perhaps better to learn how to motivate yourself over time? It takes practice and perseverance, but I think it’s an incredibly useful skill to have.
Are there a lot of intelligent and hardworking people today that choose not to go to college? Could this perhaps contribute to the rarity of the self-made man? Were there not more self-made people in the past before college education was common?
And no, it's not better to do it yourself for most people. Most people would just end up less educated.
That’s a good point. But, can some of the competitive incentives they provide be dangerous? For example, I have a friend who decided to go to an expensive university because she was given a full scholarship as long as she maintained her GPA. Within 2 semesters, she lost the scholarship because she failed to realize how difficult the school actually was. She decided to remain at the school and pay the full tuition with no scholarship because she wanted to continue her program without transferring. I actually told her back in high school that I thought she would lose the scholarship so it was a real “told ya so” moment for me. She also turned down a free scholarship at a community college which I took advantage of. Although, even I didn’t benefit from my associates degree in Information Technology, to be honest. At least I didn’t pay very much money though(I didn’t even buy textbooks half the time). Overall, I’m concerned about scholarships being used as bait for over-optimistic young people.
Yes, but that’s because there are consequences to not doing well. If you have bad grades, you might lose your scholarships or your parents might stop paying for your tuition. Whereas, there are no consequences to refusing to self-educate. People are usually more motivated by loss than by gain.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
That's why you need a community -- not just your family. My family would have been of limited utility as a support group. My parents were in favor of education but were not themselves educated beyond high school (they were born on farms in 1906 and 1907). By the time I got to college they were in their 60s and glad to see the last of their children finally out of the house.
Well, if you are borrowing money, you should be worried about debt and job prospects majoring in philosophy. English lit, sociology, philosophy, biology, etc. are all perfectly fine liberal arts majors as long as you don't tie your job search strictly to your major. A BA in sociology won't qualify you for many jobs in 'sociology'. But the same degree in sociology proves you have certain basic skills and interests that a corporation or government agency might want -- persistence, broad literacy, ability to meet deadlines (papers due next week), interests, and so on. Philosophy does the same thing. So does English lit and biology.
Yes there are costs to refusing to self-educate. Look, all education is self-education. You are the one that has to pay attention in lectures, read the text book, go the library and do research, write the paper, and so forth. The teacher is educating you only in an indirect way.
If you don't somehow educate yourself in something you will be what is known in the field as "stupid".
Well, there seems to be one of 2 ways that these “design your major” programs work. The first way is one that simply allows you to select which classes you would like to take. This doesn’t really give you full freedom to choose what you study. This is because the material you can study is limited by the class selection at your institution and the material selected for each course by the professor and the school as “the most important stuff for you to know”. Whereas, you have a much greater selection of study material online that would allow you to customize your education completely. For example, if you want to study philosophy you can read any article from any philosophy encyclopedia you want. You can also read the source material for the encyclopedias which you can download for free about half the time(of course, you can also choose to buy the resources you need from the authors at a small price.). You can buy or download for free any philosophy ebook that you want to read as well. You can check out any philosophy lecture series on YouTube recorded in actual classrooms often in elite universities. You can also listen to interviews with important thinkers on YouTube(although, it’s kinda hard to find an interview that is highly educational). I personally find it helpful because it makes it easier for you to specialize in what you think is most important knowledge to understand and learn. For example, I’m interested in studying the philosophy of personal decision-making which is a subject matter that very few philosophers study and write about. I don’t think I could find a single good course on this topic in any university. It’s actually even hard to find a lot of helpful material online about this topic. I usually try to focus on studying psychology, personal finance, persuasion skills, value theory, and do research on various important life decisions. Unfortunately, these are just not things they teach you in school. There are some schools that would allow you to completely customize your degree. For example, I once heard of guy who got a degree in stand-up comedy and became a professional stand-up comedian. Of course, he wasn’t actually taking any courses at the institution that awarded him the degree. He earned the degree by writing some essays and then giving an hour long stand-up performance. Basically, he paid an institution to give him a piece of paper which says he’s qualified to do stand-up comedy(even though the institution itself is not qualified to access that). Basically, if you truly want to have educational freedom, then doing your learning online definitely has a huge advantage I think.
Whether you pursue education within an institution or pursue it outside of the same, it is mostly a practical matter. Do you need a recognized degree? Can you afford college? Will you be admitted? Do you have the personal characteristics required to do well in college (and at the same time, do well outside of college)?
If you do not need what a college offers, and you can get what you want and or need elsewhere, then fine. But I don't know what your situation is; how old you are, how knowledgeable you are, what your history and long-range plans are.
Researchers do study personal decision making, from various angles. Take risk, for example. Whether you are risk averse or risk tolerant will affect the kind of decisions you will make, and to some extent, how you will make them. Risk averse people are likely to be cautious about how they make decisions (gathering safe, reliable information for example) as well as which decisions they make. Risk tolerant people may also gather reliable information, but treat it different than a risk averse person. People are not always consistent from thing to think. An individual may be risk averse about money, but be risk tolerant when it comes to sex.
I think you are probably correct that no single field of research (wherever it is done--on campus or off campus) treats "personal decision making" as its territory. Too bad, because that is where most of us make our worst mistakes.
One of the most important personal decisions is, "What do I want to accomplish in life?" I have sometimes asked college students to think about the next 5, 10, or 15 years. What do I want my life to be like in 10 years? What kind of home will I live in? Do I picture myself being married, partnered, single, with children, no children, how employed? How much money (in today's dollars) do I think I will need to live, and so on. Paint as detailed picture of your planned future as you can, then working backward from the future, "What do I have to do to make that possible?"
I agree, it would be nice if there was a greater focus on the topic in high school at least. In high school, they taught me about cellular reproduction and Punnet Squares for 3 years in Middle School Science and High School Biology and they taught me the 3 types of irony, and how to draw a plot pyramid for like 6 years straight in English class. Yet, they never bothered to teach me about what to consider before marrying someone or what to consider before having children or deciding to buy a house.
I agree and I’ve read some research on that. This is why it is important to actually be aware of your cognitive biases so that you can be at least a little bit more in the driver’s seat of your own life.
Well, I have studied neuroscience actually (I’m assuming you probably meant neuroscience rather than neurology in your comment because neurology is about treating brain and spinal cord injuries while neuroscience is about studying the functions of the brain.). How would believing in fate impact your decision making in a positive manner?
I’m definitely belong to the risk adverse camp for the most part. This is because of the Law of Diminishing Utility which is recognized by most economists under a slightly different name(Although, I’m not sure to what extent we can call this a scientific law, it’s mostly an intuitive observation about utility.). The Law of Diminishing Utility basically states that we gain less utility with each additional unit or level of improvement of a utility-giving substance. For example, the difference in utility between having an income of $50,000 and having an income of $30,000 is greater than the difference in utility of having an income of $70,000 and $50,000. This is because the extra money in the former difference is more essential in fulfilling needs and important wants rather than trivial wants like having a fancy car. If you have a choice between a guaranteed $50,000 income and a second choice where your income will either be $30,000 or $70,000 which will be determined by a coin flip, then it’s better to choose the first option because of the Law of Diminishing Utility(I know real decisions are more complicated than that but I think it’s helpful to have these models in mind). This law also applies to other things like the attractiveness of your sexual partner for example. The difference in utility between having an average looking partner and an ugly one is greater than the difference of utility between an attractive partner and an average looking one.
Believing in Fate wouldn't help, as far as I can tell. I was aiming at the idea that there are forces (like the way our brains work) that we do not have control of. What we can do is recognize that urges, wishes, desires... are affecting our thinking (often in non-obvious ways) and that we [or what we think are our consciously deciding minds] are not entirely in charge.
The upshot is to exercise caution and reflect on decisions for awhile (if at all possible) before we put them into action. This is, of course, easier said than done.
Here's a simple example: hunger (low blood sugar) and fatigue can creep up on us without our noticing. Both can affect our thinking and decision making. An event that is viewed as a threat before lunch might well be viewed as irrelevant after lunch--and we won't necessarily be aware that eating lunch altered our mental functioning, slightly.
What's significant about that is that it isn't only the amount of wage that is paid, but the status one has in the distribution of wages in a group. That sort of thing can affect decision making in an unrecognized way. It's a sort of "better to reign in hell than be a servant in heaven".
Yep, I think it would be wise to have a law that says that a judge and jury must have a meal tray with any food they want provided within reason and be allowed to eat during any hearing where they might be required to make a decision.
But when one meets someone and is infatuated with them, like as not no calculation took place anywhere that you had a chance of observing it. One might end up in bed with them before rational thought can come into play.
This is something I thought a lot about. Many people seek wealth not because of the material goods that it brings but rather the status and the opportunity for relationship formation. It could, of course, be argued that status provides benefit to one’s life. This is especially true for men as it may lead them to be more desirable to women. Of course, the law of diminishing utility applies to status and women as well. You only need so much status and you don’t need to be attractive to every woman. Although, I don’t think the benefits of status is worth the cost myself.
I agree that most people are only able to consider these laws in situations that are less emotionally influenced. But, perhaps it would be useful to also apply these laws to relationship matters. Of course, we might not be able to be as cool headed in those decisions but I find that being aware of this can actually help you be the exception to the rule. You can’t live a good life by being like everyone else. It doesn’t matter how rare or difficult it is for other people to do something, what matters is that you do what makes sense for you to do. This is also similar to my intuition regarding self-education. It doesn’t matter if other people can’t pull it off. What matters is whether you can. Of course, you also have to be aware of the possibility of failure and how this may impact your life. Luckily, there’s no harm if I am wrong about being able to self-educate or being able to apply the law of diminishing utility. I’m not taking a real risk by doing these things as far as I can tell. But, if I drop out of college or marry the wrong person, that’s a different story. So, I have more reason to doubt my abilities there.
Get a associates or go to an online college and then if you are capable of it get a CDL and drive trucks the rest of your life.
I actually do have an associates but it didn’t turn out to be very useful for me. Luckily, I didn’t pay anything to get it.
College is really only good for teaching you how to teach yourself which is why i suggested an associates. The truck driving thing is a great job for people who are capable of doing it. In some cases IT companies will train people with an associates in how to write software. In some cases (assuming you don't have a criminal record) you can get IT certifications and get a decent job. Have you considered becoming an electrician?
Well, I actually got an associates degree in IT but I wasn’t able to find a job in my field within my area. I didn’t want to move away from my family and look for jobs in other areas. Plus, I started to doubt that I would enjoy working in the IT field. My stress tolerance isn’t very good and I’m very much against excessive spending and having children from a prudential standpoint so I don’t need a super high paycheck to get by. Plus, I still live with my mom and I should have enough money to buy a house without a mortgage within 3 years. My prudential strategy is basically save a bunch of money by living with my mom and then buy a house without a mortgage and then live a minimalist lifestyle and save a $100000 emergency fund and then I can maybe afford to only work a part time job. I haven’t thought about becoming an electrician but I definitely don’t want to be a truck driver. I’m a shitty driver lol
Better plan than most.
Nope, I’m just weird lol
Cool :cool: , I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being autistic or weird either lol
Yeah, being weird IS cool. I’m weird, though, so I’m biased. :wink: