So I'm going to start college today and while I have no doubts about attending and getting my degree(not sure if I'm going for master or Ph. D) I been noticing that people think that college isn't necessary and they can make a good living without going, and while I can understand where there coming from I still don't understand why people don't want to achieve more. Where is the drive or ambition to climb as far as you can to the top and make good money off it? So do you guys think college is important life that people should attend or no?

Well, there are no colleges in Finland and I think we are doing just fine without them

Depends on the career field, but by and large, no; the statistics speak for themselves, only about 23% of Americans have a college degree, but the average income is still a livable $50k.

Now, as to whether it's important? Absolutely, though of course this is coming from a more intellectually-inclined mindset than most. More education is invariably better because that means more knowledge, and knowledge is good.

I do think, however, that in some (many?) cases, it's impractical; a typical college debt, for someone from an average-income family, ranges from about $40,000 to about $120,000 for a Bachelor's degree. In some cases, the amount extra you'd make won't pay that off. Depends on the degree, though; for example, I'll be studying computer science for 5 years ($150k), but as the average income for a programmer is $50,000 more than that of the average person, I'll be profiting from that within a few years after graduation; a Bachelor's in something less useful, however, is much less likely to do that.

That said, if someone can afford it, they should do it.

Yes, it's necessary. A "good living" is entirely subjective, but the bottom line is that those who have college degrees are almost always going to get greater consideration than those without degrees. Even if the degree in question is in an unrelated field, they will still receive greater consideration. Frequently, what you learn at college doesn't even factor into getting hired, but those who are considering you will tend to gravitate to applications who have degrees.

And there are certain things that you simply can't learn or do without having gone to college, like plumbing, electric work, and other similar areas. If these are fields you want to work in, you have to be qualified.

And yes, some people get lucky and happen to find a good job without having gone to college, but again, this is unusual, especially in a more difficult job market.

College/university can be a good social experience. I learned a lot about how to throw myself under a bus by being irresponsible...and then how to salvage that situation and that I really shouldn't do that to myself moving forward.

Beyond that I think that it has a lot to do with what you're getting out of it. I know people that got into a lot of debt by going to college, only to find that they didn't major in something that ended up being worth the time and money they put into their education. Now they're struggling to find jobs that provide a decent salary so they can have a good standard of living while paying off their student loans. I also know people that make a great living due to the degrees they earned in marketable fields, as well as people that make a great living by getting good work experience and working hard despite not going to/finishing college.

I guess you're probably better off skipping secondary education unless it's being paid for by someone that you don't have to pay back or you're majoring in something that will truly increase your market value after graduation. There are quite a few fields where you can make fantastic money without a degree if you're willing to put time into building your resume. There are others that are difficult to gain ground in at all without the right degree.

Not to refute this, because in many cases it's not far from the truth, but I'm currently looking at two examples that show marked exceptions to this.

I'm currently hiring software developers (2 or 3...it depends on how much we end up paying for the first two). Of all of the resumes, phone screens, and in-person interviews I've conducted over the past month, the most promising candidates are a guy with a biology degree and no real on-the-job programming experience and a guy with no degree and a few years of experience. The majority of people I've spoken with have B.S.'s or M.S.'s in computer science or mathematics, and very few of them are able to solve problems in creative ways and many have poor organizational skills. The most successful programmer I know personally also does not have a degree in anything related to software development.

That said, for most people it's a good idea to get the degree. I'm just playing Devil's Advocate. A lot of places won't look at your resume without one. I think they're missing out on some really promising people by having policies like that, but it is a reality of the industry in a lot of cases.

Absolutely not.

I finished my bachelor's degree (Accounting) 2 years ago with a 3.7 overall GPA. I've never successfully obtained any job, not even part time or temp, in my field due to lack of experience. And the presence of a college degree (and 4, now 6, year gap in work history) on my resume means that employers at places like retail, fast food, and manufacturing (my former occupation) turn me away immediately because I'm not the right fit. I'm actually alot less employable now than I was before. The good news is that I only walked away with 10k in student debt. But with no job...well, yeah. Going to college was the most monumentally stupid mistake I have ever made in my life.

Is it a necessity? I don't think so, but it will help you a lot more than if you didn't have one.

Yes if you're going into medicine or law. Otherwise I think it makes no difference.

You can go in life without a degree. Some of my coworkers however don't have degrees. But, they make decent amount of money. Some people even get lucky. A former friend eschewed pursuing a degree in college. Instead, he inherited tons of money that allowed him to travel the world but wasted it all due to bad judgment. Now, he's dependent on his mom.

My first Bachelors is barely useful, but it helped me get a second Bachelors. So, now I have two degrees, but only one really useful degree. But, that's fine. In the career I'm pursuing, I plan to go get my Masters and hopefully get paid $160k five years from now. Honestly, in my field, you rarely can get a job in the local area nowadays unless you have a Bachelors.

Necessary? Absolutely not, unless you plan on going into a highly specialized field that requires it (law, science, medicine, and etc). Is it nice to be educated? Sure, but don't break the bank, or else it'll be 4 years wasted for crippling debt.

Only reason why I got my bachelors of science in chemistry, is because I wanted to get into medicine. Currently, I got accepted to pharmacy school, so, I'm almost there.

Not true. There are a lot of engineering fields that you'll never get a foot in the door into without an applicable degree from a good school, and that's just one of many examples.

There isn't a "yes" or "no" answer to this question...it depends on what you want your career to look like.

Depends on what kind of job you are looking for. Also, I should mention that even though the cost of a college education continues to skyrocket, the overall quality of education continues to dwindle. They are now mostly McCollege degrees.

College certainly makes things a lot easier, however most major employers like large companies (like Blackberry or CBC) and even certain government offices (at least, here in Canada) will consider you at the same level as they will consider someone with a degree as long as you have at least 2 1/2 years of on job experience within the field you are applying..

however, it can be difficult to get that experience without a degree.. so while not crucial, it will make things alot easier..

I found it very hard to get my foot in the door, even with a degree, though it was in chemistry. A good issue is that the value of the degree has inflated, making it worth less, in a sense. From what I've experienced and talked about with the owner of the company I worked at, experience is really what seems to be the major thing for most companies, and that hiring someone with little to no experience (0-1 year) is quite the risk. Most science-based places seem to demand at least 2-5 years experience first and foremost.

The idea that going to college somehow limits your work opportunities more than not going to college is pure nonsense. You have to gain experience during college, such as through internships (either during school or on breaks) and work-study programs, as well as after college. And frankly, a lot of these opportunities are going to start out unpaid or with very low pay, but you accept these positions because the ceiling is far higher than accepting a minimum-wage job directly out of high school (which anybody can do, but severely limits potential upward movement).

I couldn't tell you why you had/are having such difficulty finding a job out of college, but telling someone that they're better off NOT going to college is only harmful.

If you get a student loan to pay for a degree that doesn't increase your market value then you're better off not going to college. Some degrees aren't worth what they cost to get. It's sad, but true.

I'm certainly not saying that people shouldn't pursue a degree. That said, if you plan to get a $100,000+ loan for a degree in photography you might be causing yourself a lot of unnecessary heartache down the road. I know someone that did just that (philosophy rather than photography), and she's in a really bad spot now. She's working her way up in an unrelated field as though she had no degree...she just has crushing debt on top of it now. She fell into the "everyone must go to college and get a degree" trap, and it did nothing but hurt her.

All I'm saying is that if you're going to get a degree, get the right degree. Don't go get a degree just to have one if you're getting loans to pay for it...that doesn't always work out.

That's not necessarily the case across the board. I mean, of course, if I were to utilize my high school's concurrent enrollment program and get a community college Associate of Science, it would be a relatively crappy degree. However, a PhD in Atomic Physics from MIT is still just that. That is to say (and this seems to be a trend beyond college), the averages drop, but the elites stay where they are.

Well, that's by-and-large a conjecture as it's two years until college for me (I can say, however, that my community college does indeed have crappy classes), but given that we still have theoretical physicists worthy of Einstein (e.g. Edward Witten, who created M-Theory), the quality of that level of education can't have changed much. And speaking more about my own chosen field, Google was created by two PhD students just sixteen years ago, so they must have gotten a pretty decent education.

MIT is one of the exceptions. DEFRON once linked to an article about how most computer science courses today are pretty much 'java-school' workplace training (with places like MIT being the exception).

No

This. This. This. Oh my God, this x 10⁹.

Hindsight's a [censored], but it really helped me understand what student loan debt really means for your own wages and way of life. I mean, who gives a damn if you're educated if you got no way to pay this back later on. If I knew then what I know now, I'd do my second degree as my first, get every scholarship and grant available to me, and work the rest with a menial job to pay the rest of the balance while taking advantage of tuition reimbursemant. Every undergrad I meet nowadays, I tell them the same thing. Be smart how you finance education and get a degree that pays in the long run.

This thread is pretty funny, I especially like the post where the recent college graduate complained that he was now overqualified for a burger flipping job.

Is it cooicidental that this thread started the same day US News and World Report released an article about a federal study showing that the economic benefits of a college education still outweigh the cost?

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/06/24/benefits-of-college-still-outweigh-costs-fed-study-says

"The earnings of a college degree – bachelor’s or associate – have fluctuated over time but have had average returns of about 15 percent over the past 10 years, the report showed. This is in large part because wages for those without a college degree have steadily declined, which boosts the college wage premium while worsening the prospects of the less educated, according to the report."

How long do people pay for there college debts?

The problem is that those types of summaries don't tell the whole story. It's extremely misleading to tell prospective college students that having "a degree" means they will earn more. Certain types of degrees earn significantly more than others, so it's not necessarily actionable information for students. These are averages. It also doesn't factor in things like the number of college students that lay waste to their credit history via student loans. It only says that - based on the averages - students "should" earn enough more to pay off their loans in about 2.5 years. How many do? To what degree (npi) are the very marketable degrees carrying these averages? Reports that use averages and calculations based on ideal circumstances oftentimes don't reflect reality.

It's also worth considering (IMO) that in some cases the possession of said degree is circumstantial. Many people don't pursue college degrees because they lack ambition, which is likely to result in a less-than-stellar career path regardless of their lack of degree.

For some things, yeah. But for the most part, No, college isnt necessary.

I make over a hundred grand a year and i dont even have my grade 12, but i also live in a place that has huge demand for work so it's easy to start up a company and get business here, a lot of places in the world dont have the same opportunity here.

It all depends on your field too. Petroleum Engineers and Doctors should have to go to school, you need that extra knowledge, whereas artists dont need any schooling whatsoever. You can go get hired by disney and pixar to do their movies and cartoons if you built up a portfolio of artwork that relates to what they do without having to spend a single minute in a college or university (and of course it was good, but university doesnt teach you any super secret art tricks that you cant learn from a 5 minute online free tutorial). Basically anything in the arts can be done without post secondary school period.

Now a days, I honestly think we dont even need a physical college/university campus. Stuff that needs hands on training (Doctors or chefs) can be done in much smaller facilities. An intern doctor can learn much quicker about their field if they tagged along in an actual hospital or doctor's office rather then in a university. Most classes in school dont use hands on training as it is.

The only thing keeping Universities and Colleges running now is because they have turned into big money businesses, tuitions across north america have increased WAY beyond that of inflation because there's a huge demand for colleges and universities because of the mentality kids are taught at a young age that "you have to go to post secondary for the sake of going to post secondary" which is bogus.

Not to mention there are way too many useless classes like Women's Studies (nothing against women or feminism but women studies is a useless degree that gets maybe 100 people in all of north america jobs as the manager of a YWCA), Music studies (again, useless degree, i can learn just as much as someone doing music studies on my own time on the internet while smoking a joint after work without paying tens of thousands of dollars and being in debt for a majority of my life), Philosophy (honestly, what the hell kind of job do you get as a philosopher? who hires a philosopher now a days? It was a useless job 500 years ago, it's still useless. Even if you do find a decent job with that degree, how many of those jobs are out there? Not more then there are people graduating that class, that's for sure).

Then on top of all of that, you get the bureaucracy that runs the universities, that it doesnt matter what you know anymore, it's Who you know. A friend of mine just graduated from Mcgill University in Montreal a year ago as a Mechanical Engineer and moved back here to Calgary (the booming city of Canada) and he cant find a job with his 4.0 GPA, whereas he knows other people who graduated with him who spent all their school time partying and have [censored] grades (he even said one guy had a 2.0 GPA, the lowest you can get without failing) and they all got jobs because their parents were Engineers.

Hell my friend even said when he goes to apply for engineer jobs, the main questions on their applications are "Do you have any family that are Mechanical Engineers?", which shouldnt mean jack [censored]. That's like saying that hey, I can fly airplanes no problems because both my grandpa and Dad got their pilot's license (my dad got his at 16 years old), despite the fact that i know nothing about flying besides flying airplanes in GTA and battlefield.

Then you got high profile universities, like Harvard which is supposed to be the best of the best law school in north america, yet the last few Harvard graduates that have been in politics here in Canada have been stone cold stupid, yet with the air of intelligence around them, thinking they're smarter then all the dumb ass hicks because their parents paid 300 grand for their schooling.

Good examples of that are Alison Redford (Premier of Alberta who got punted out of office for her sense of entitlement and using tax payer dollars to do whatever the hell she wanted, spending 16,000 taxpayer dollars on a one night stay in chicago and so much more, yet whenever she talked about these issues she always brushed them off like we were a bunch of [censored] rednecks who dont know the big picture in life - that big picture i guess being that we are the peons and the harvard graduates are better then us in every way imaginable), or Michael Ignatieff (who was brought in to be head of the liberal party of canada - canada's most ruling party in the last 50 years - to run against stephen harper and all his stupid moves ended up losing the liberal party 100 seats out of a grand total of 306 for the entire country leaving them with 30 seats left and they even lost their official opposition status, but he thought he was smarter then us and was brought in as a super intellect who was going to put canada straight).

As far as im concerned, a Harvard degree means you're a stone cold idiot IMO (which is obviously not the case for most people, but the way the bureaucracy has been running it, will eventually come to fruition for a majority of harvard graduates, especially when graduating depends on how much money you got, rather then your own merits).

Universites have turned into bloated money grubbing elitist campuses, that squash out any opposing views to their narrative and frankly, are against the furthering of knowledge of mankind because you cant dare say anything against the crap that they are promoting without being silenced by them, even if you have cold hard facts that show what they are teaching is blatantly wrong.

What's the opposite of Diversity? University.

Until it's paid off. Which can be a broadly varying time; I know a 55-year-old who's still paying his, whereas, if my calculations are accurate, it should take me about 15 years (age 40).

I don't think it meant they'll be paid off in 2.5 years (I could be making a Google average fresh out the door of college and it'd take me seven years), but rather that the increased amount they would make would break even with the cost in 2.5 years (which is from the average incomes, which, unless it was in this case, is not usually starting income, rather midcareer).