College . 02/22/2008 08:54 AM . Aaron Olmstead

Dear high school seniors (and the rest of you who haven’t figured it out yet),

Babyhood is ending, and it’s time for some straight talk. I feel compelled to share with you that College, despite its societal glory, is, in reality, a poorly concealed racket.

As your impending completion of grade school looms, you’re probably confused about what to do with your future. Easy kiddo. There’s no need for a what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-now-I-can’t-eat- cheetos-and-fruit-roll-ups-and-bum-with-my-high-school-buddies-forever crisis. The path is laid before you, and everyone is pushing you in the same direction.

The instructions to the game of life make it unmistakably clear that to enter the professional world and avoid becoming an utter failure, you must attend a university and get a degree. They might also say that you have a choice, but they’re lying. Society has already made it for you.

Now don’t get me wrong about the whole racket thing. I’m not here to argue with the cultural mandate. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go. I’m saying you must go. For better or worse – it’s a mold that you can’t escape.

A college degree is like a passport. It takes a lot of money and effort to acquire, but without it, you’re paralyzed. The possession of a passport doesn’t mean that you have traveled the world, but that you can travel the world. Similarly, the possession of a degree doesn’t denote money, position or intelligence. But if you want a job in the professional workforce, it’s a prerequisite that’s difficult to circumvent.

The truth is that most employers aren’t going to have you recall what you learned during those four years of undergraduate classes. They just want to know that you have a degree.

Thus, you may as well face the fact that you are going to pay exorbitant sums of money to get an education that you will probably never use in a field that you will probably never work in.

And what’s worse is that most of you are going to be coming out of college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt that you will spend the rest of your life paying off. It’s a vicious cycle: you need the college education to get the job, and you need the job to pay for the college education.

As to the ultimate financial viability of a college education, it’s true that you’ll get a more prominent position and more dollars for your hours with that coveted diploma. However, economically speaking, those years of education constitute a pretty significant monetary expenditure, not even counting the loss of four years’ full-time income.

For example, I was making $15 and hour working full-time before I left for school. At 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year for four years, that’s $124,800. The average cost of a private 4-year school is between $20,000 and $30,000. So, in four years I could have saved up over $100,000 – without spending that amount on college tuition. And that’s without even considering grad school.

With the right financial plan, I could have invested that, continued working and be sitting pretty sweet by the time I was thirty. That’s a bit of a contrast to a typical college graduate that is still paying off his school loans at that age.

Of course, I’m being fairly utilitarian here. We all know money isn’t the only factor. College is crucial to gaining knowledge and intelligence, right? Interestingly enough, while many people have benefited from their collegiate experience, many of the most successful and intelligent people of all time never got a degree: Bill Gates, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney, Peter Jennings and Thomas Edison….to name just a few.

While it is an error for intelligence to be associated with a framed piece of paper, it’s not an error to have a social and professional demand for education. History has proven that an educated nation tends to be more stable, economically sound, and beneficial to the world as a whole.

We probably all agree that education is a priority, but the list of successful people above should destroy the faulty assumption that success is impossible without a diploma. If you invent something like Microsoft or Facebook prior to gaining a degree, a future need to make yourself presentable on paper to an employer is pretty slim.

But, in all likelihood, you aren’t the next Edison or Jennings, and for you, a college education might just be a good idea. Depending on where you go, what you study and how you apply yourself, it’s probably going to be pretty beneficial.

After all, you’re telling yourself, it’s not just about the money. It’s about gaining wisdom, understanding and making yourself into a better person. So you can, in turn, help make the world a better place. Well, honestly, you’re half right; college is great place to get a taste of real world experience.

The “real world,” as employed people – and recent graduates – like to call it, isn’t the only place full of flaws and difficulties that need to be overcome. College has its own hefty share of issues.

Students, as a whole, continuously complain about aspects of their respective schools – the education, the professors, the housing, the lack of attractive women….This could mean one of two things: either college students have a tendency to gripe just for the sake of griping or the standards of college education are seriously lacking.

I’d argue that it’s a little of both. Undergraduates do have the tendency to be critical of pretty much anything that taxes their sensitive beings. And every college does have its own blemishes, incompetent professors, and inedible cafeteria fare.

As a result, most graduates—in addition to their newly acquired knowledge of history, philosophy and science, etc.—should have a better capability of dealing with the pressures and inconsistencies of the professional world.

That’s a pretty significant reason for a four-year degree to carry such weight with potential employers.

But anyway, I’m donning my cute little gown and tasseled hat this May to leave that all this behind. I just thought I would welcome you prospective college students to four years of disillusionment (a.k.a. growing up a little).

Happy college picking,

Aaron Olmstead

Aaron Olmstead is the founder and publisher of Kritik.


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