I am likely a bit older than some of you out there and perhaps the situation has changed for the better. I certainly hope so, because it was a pretty manipulative state of affairs back when i was graduating from high school in the early 90's.
I remember my senior year and all the advertising that was taking place as we came close to graduation date. In a shell, we were told that we were "throwing our lives away" and subjecting ourselves to life-long poverty if we didn't go to college. The guidance counselors were always on our cases to be applying to this college or that college - what they didn't talk to us about was what we wanted to go to college to study. This didn't seem to be terribly important, but now here i am 20 some odd years later and I can say that knowing what you are going there to learn is definitely the MOST important thing to consider.
Story 1: Dan
Dan was my friend in college. We partied a lot but were also getting good grades. Him and I were an anomaly in that we were able to pull this off.
Dan majored in sociology. I took one sociology class in college and even after getting an A in the course, I can't really say what it was about. Dan graduated in the top 10 percent of his class, started looking for jobs to no avail, and the very next semester was back at the same uni to get his masters degree in Sociology. After graduating with a masters degree, guess what happened? You guessed it... still no good jobs. Dan spent the next 4 years doing a PhD in Sociology, eventually graduated (after a grueling fail on his thesis the first time) and finally is Dr. Dan. Now he has a great job..... teaching sociology at a university. The cycle continues.
Story 2: Adam
I met Adam when he was traveling through Thailand. LIke me, he really enjoyed it here and he started to live here full-time for a few years until the visas because a real pain in the butt to maintain. I hung out with Adam and he was always talking about the new computers he was getting for his house here in Thailand... I mean, really high-end stuff. I went over to his house one day and saw that he had a massive rack system and the only 4-monitor setup that I have ever seen complete with automatic redundancy backup and massive UPS power supplies and surge protectors.
I asked Adam what this was all about and he then boggled my mind a bit about how he does data security mostly for banks and financial institutions back in the states. He owns his own company, flies business class everywhere, and when he moves he simply sells all of this very expensive computers for pennies on the dollar because it doesn't matter to him.
I asked Adam where he went to college and he told me the University of Nowhere. He didn't go. He actually lived with his Dad for a few years after college and found out that he was good at ethical hacking by being genuinely interested in computers. He had to take a certification course here and there to get his foot in the door, but these were 3-week classes at a local community college and they cost like $500.
Adam is one of the most successful people I know and he is very happy with what he does for a living. He managed to accomplish all this without ever going through a 4 year program at any college.
Story 3: Willy
Willy is not a smart person. He was one of my roomates in college and one of my best friends to this day. His extreme lack of knowledge or general literacy is astounding. He is in his 40's now and routinely uses the wrong "your" or "their" in all correspondence. If you ask him about anything outside of his very narrow focus of interest, he doesn't have the slightest clue what you are talking about and this doesn't bother him at all.
Willy studied communications in college. This was considered to be one of the easiest degrees and it is specifically why he chose it. While he hated most of his classes and did very poorly, some of his video editing classes really caught his attention, but since it was a 4-year university staffed by PhD's with extremely outdated knowledge, he had to investigate the cutting edge technology on his own. It got to the point where he would ask his professors about the "latest and greatest" in video editing and they didn't even know what he was talking about.
Willy was able to barely graduate from college but found his calling in life by simply researching it on his own. He now owns his own production company and is a go-to guy for ESPN and many other sports channels for their broadcast. He attributes none of his knowledge to anything he learned in university.
Story 4: Me
I went to college because that is what you are supposed to do. I, like most of the people around me, had no idea why I was there other than the fact that partying was fun, and the alternative was to continue living with my parents. I had 6 majors while I was in college. They went like this: Psychology, Economics, Computer Science, Nutrition, Physics, and eventually Business Administration.
I finally stuck with Business because as I coin it: it is a degree in everything and also a degree in nothing. It is widely applicable to almost any job but not really specializing in any of them. I graduated in the top 5% of my class but since I had so many majors, it took me 5 and a half years to graduate. This of course looks bad on a resume and the jobs I was being offered after graduating had just horrible salaries. So I did the same thing that Dan did and went back to get my Masters. After Graduate school I got some good job offers, but to be honest with you, i really didn't know much more after an additional 1.5 years of grad school than I did before I went in. I was also $60,000 in debt to student loans.
I was not qualified for this job but because i could put MBA next to my name it opened doors for me. I was NOT good at my job but my shortcomings were overlooked for some reason (presumably because many of the higher ups also have MBA's and to call me out would be calling themselves out.)
I quit the corporate and government world after working in it for a mere 5 years and moved to Thailand to make very little money and leave the rat-race. I do not regret this decision. My biggest regret in life is going going to college at all (and subsequently racking up a huge amount of debt.)
TL;DR
While I will admit there are some genuine curriculums out there that are useful. The only ones I can think of are Engineering and something medical related. The computer science stuff (IMO) should not be taught by a guy whose breadth of knowledge likely can come from something 10 years old and as far as the computer life-cycle is concerned, this may as well be 100 years.
I feel that universities (in the US at least) have become big businesses and making the loans available to everyone is one of the worst things that could have possibly been done to the system. Colleges no longer needed to compete on price because everyone was simply going to have access to whatever extortionate amount of money they place charged. Do you really believe that any textbook should cost $150? This is theft.
I am trying to search my mind for anyone, anyone! that I know that is successful directly because of their university education and except for the people that went on to become university professors, I honestly can't think of any. 3 of the 4 children in my family graduated from college.... none of us work in the field on our degrees. The most successful member of my siblings didn't go to college at all.
I will never try to tell someone they shouldn't get an education but i will say this: If you don't know WHY you are going to college, you shouldn't be going. If you want to party (who doesn't?) move to a college town and party - and maybe take a few classes at the local community college until you find something you are truly interested in - then make your move.
The system of "get into college and then figure out what to study," is dumb and I feel it enslaves thousands of people a year to crippling debt that many of them are incapable of ever repaying.
What do you think? Were you directly benefited by your college education? Do you feel as though your college education was applicable to real-world situations? Are you happy you went, or are you an old cynic like me? :)