Are you considering college? In this article, I’m going to give you some warning reasons why you shouldn’t go to college. Don’t forget to check out this article as well on 10 reasons why you should go to college.
At the end of the day, this choice is yours and you have to think everything through yourself. This is meant to be a collection of reasons to avoid college based on my own experience and I also have a collection of reasons to pursue college as well.
This is not professional advice. Please talk to your school counselor, consult your parents and your friends.
Table of Contents
1. It’s costly
It’s no secret that college can be very costly. A lot of people end up going to college because everyone else is doing the same thing. They spend tens of thousands of dollars on a degree without a second thought.
There are jobs that you can obtain without a degree and they make the same if not more.
2. You may not be able to get a job using your degree
Every year, students graduate with a degree that is essentially useless since they can’t get a job with it (think a degree in sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and psychology. Those degrees require you to pursue further studies in order to maybe become a teaching assistant or a professor and then make a career out of).
In the past, people go to school to get a degree in order to obtain a job but a lot of people over the past few decades have gone to school solely to get a degree because it seems like a natural next step to take. They do this without thinking twice.
There is also the fact that many people realized they don’t have the necessary grade to get into second-year study at the program of their choice. They ended up having to settle for another program in school that doesn’t have a high employment probability when they graduate.
Ps. something to consider when deciding which college to attend is whether it’s difficult to obtain the grade necessary to get past the first year into the second year. Some colleges are easy to get into but difficult to get out of.
3. It’s time-consuming
College can be time-consuming. The average undergraduate degree is designed to be finished in 4 years but on average, college students take 6 years to finish their undergrad degrees. That is if they finish at all. The average dropout rate in college is 40%.
Instead of college, that time and money can be used for something else. You can start a business, develop a brand online, travel and meet new friends, or start your career sooner (one without a degree as a requirement).
The time between 13 and 18 is slow. It’s the time when you are going through high school. During that time you may desperately pine after the time of independence and true adulthood. It seems like you have an entire lifetime left to live as a high school student.
So when leaving high school, you may think that spending another 4–6 years in school before deciding what you really want to do with your life is fine because you’ll still have a lot of time left after you’re done with school. However, once you emerge on the other side, you’d realize just how much life has passed you by.
I wanted to be a doctor at some point and I naively thought, “It’s just 4 years of undergrad and 4 years of medical school and then I’d be a doctor. Residency would take another 3 years but it’s only 3 years right?”.
If you don’t know, there’s a thing called ‘aging’ that happens to all of us. If you don’t enjoy life while you’re young, you’ll realize that all that time is gone when you emerge out of a choice you made when you were 18.
After the initial 4 years upon leaving high school, your life will flash by you in a blur. Soon, you’re in your mid-twenties and then your thirties. You may be married with kids at that point. The choices you make at the age of 18 regarding where you go next will either save you a lot of time or waste a lot of it.
Obviously, for certain careers, you do need to get a degree from an accredited university in order to obtain a job. In such a case, your time wouldn’t be wasted since you’d be using it to build your career.
But if you’re entering college without the intention of using your degree to build a career, you may be wasting your time. You may want to consider other careers that you can enter without spending 4 years in college. An example is being a realtor.
4. A college degree is overrated
I met people whose sole purpose of going to college is to get a degree because their parents want them to get a degree.
Some people may even consider a lack of degree to be a reason not to date someone.
There are also parents who consider a college degree to be a sign of success and if you lack one, you are obviously not “successful”.
It’s important to not let anyone’s opinions of success define your own definition of success.
Don’t go to college just because if you don’t have a college degree, you’ll be looked down upon. A college degree is overrated. You’d be exchanging it with time, money, and youth that you can’t get back.
It’s likely that many Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids won’t attend college as more and more people wake up to the fact that a college degree is pretty useless in a lot of cases not to mention how costly it is.
5. You can make a living online without a college degree
The purpose of going to college should be that you need to get a degree for a career of your choice. If you aren’t going to college to get the degree you need, what’s the point?
In fact, you can make money online without having a degree.
When I was in school, there was the general consensus among the students that those who have high grades have a bright future ahead and those who don’t have good grades are most likely not to amount to much. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Many people my age have never gone to university or college and are doing tremendously well for themselves by making a killing on the internet.
I’ve seen it all. There are people who become rich via dropshipping, FBA, blogging, vlogging, selling slime, selling bath bombs, writing books, YouTubing, Instagram Influencing, etc.
You can totally make a living on the internet without having a college degree. Would it be easy? No. But it is worth a try. To many, it affords them the lifestyle to work a few hours a week and use the rest of the time to do whatever they want whenever they want.
It may be a risk worth taking and if it doesn’t go well, you can always choose to attend a college later if you wish.
6. You will have to study a lot of useless stuff
Believe it or not, you won’t just study the subject of choice you made for yourself because there’ll be electives. Those are extra courses that you have to take in order to gain enough credit to graduate.
Schools make more money by assigning a bunch of unnecessary courses to students to increase the time that a student may need to finish their degree.
So even if your program is engineering, you may still find yourself taking electives such as English, music, history, anthropology, health studies, psychology, etc.
It’ll take you quite a bit of time to study for those courses and you may find yourself feeling overwhelmed with the subject because it doesn’t interest you at all.
You may think you get to choose elective courses that you want and you’d be partly correct because many of those courses get filled up quickly. You’d be looking at a long wait list. You’ll end up settling for an elective course that it’s not your first choice but you need the credit and you don’t want to stay in school one more year so you just take it.
7. You may be forced to work with people you don’t like
I think it’d be a nightmare to not be able to choose who you have to interact with. I find certain characters to be quite unlikeable and would much rather stay away from them.
I’m sure we all instinctively sense that someone wouldn’t get along with us before.
When you’re a student in high school or college, chances are, you’d be assigned seats or group projects that involve people you much rather stay away from. But you got no choice.
8. Some professors are a nightmare
You will for sure meet some professors that you don’t like as much because they can be unreasonable. They may give you vague instructions or hard-to-understand rubrics which gives them the perfect chance to assign whatever grade they want to you.
It totally depends on their mood and how they want to grade you. Anytime there are short answers or essay-type questions where there isn’t a definitive answer, it’s a chance for the grader to express their bias for or against you.
A grader can literally give you a 60 when another grader would give you a 90 and you have no choice but to accept the verdict.
Some professors are brutal. They may have a terrible life at home and now they want to make everyone’s lives miserable too. I’m sure you know the kind of teacher who does that kind of thing. If you have made it this far, I’m sure you’ve met your fair share of unreasonable teachers.
They’d make the class extra hard, causing students to drop the course only to raise the course average to what the university required. For those who don’t know, universities have an average class grade that the professors should aim to maintain. In my school that’s 60%–65%. If the course average gets to 70%, the professor would make the next exam harder to take the average down, if the course average is too low, the professor may curb the grade so everyone may get an extra 10% for instance.
Some students don’t know this and when the average course grade is 30% for the first exam, they panic and drop the course. If you want to pass every course, just make sure you study more than half the people in the class, then you’ll for sure pass.
Some professors also don’t know how to teach. They’d spend half an hour teaching about something everyone already knows and then spends five minutes brief through something everyone is confused about. It makes the college experience that much more stressful.
Final thought
There’s no right or wrong answer here. It’s your life and your decision to make. I can only give you an insight based on what I have experienced. I hope this helps you with your decision-making.
While you’re here, please also read this article on the 8 reasons why you should go to college. It’s important to consider both sides of the argument before resigning to one choice.
