27 Reasons Why You Should Not Go to College

Here are 27 reasons why you should not go to college. Skip college and live a great life!

Reason 1: The Great College Hoax by Kathy Kristof, Forbes magazine.

Offsetting that million-dollar income discrepancy is the $46,700 four-year cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board at a public school and $99,900 at a private one—even after financial aid, scholarships and grants. Add all this to the equation and college grads don’t pull even with high school grads in lifetime income until age 33 on average, the College Board says. Even that doesn’t include the $125,000 in pay students forgo over four years.

Reason 2: College graduates don’t necessarily make more than high school graduates, especially when factoring in the cost of college.

Reason 3: Why not invest what it costs you to go to college into a retirement savings account? By the time you retire, you’ll have earned far more than any college graduate.

Reason 4: Colleges no longer teach many useful skills. You’d be better offer learning software programming skills at a tech school or participating in an on-the-job training program.

Reason 5: You can become rich, famous, or successful without graduating from college. This College Dropouts Hall of Fame includes many successful, rich, and talented people who either never attended college at all or who never graduated.

Reason 6: The cost of graduating from college is now well over $100,000. Couldn’t you spend that money in better ways?

Reason 7: Create your own education. Take the four years that you would have spent going to college and spend one year traveling the world—the best education any money could buy. Spend the next three years working a variety of internships, even for low pay, to earn experience and get the kind of real world working knowledge college can never provide.

Reason 8: Avoid indoctrination. If you’re a conservative or libertarian, you’ll avoid 4 years of indoctrination in the socialist viewpoint of most college professors. If you’re one of the 99%, why expose yourself with the thinking of the 1% hoity-toity elite?

Reason 9: College is generally a waste of time, more of a reason to party than a tool for great learning.

Reason 10: College education is way over-priced. You could learn far more by paying a good tutor to teach you what you need to know to be successful in business and in life.

2/3 of workers have regrets about their higher education, most importantly about the high cost of college (PayScale survey in May 2019).

Reason 11: Colleges don’t really teach you success principles. They teach you facts. They don’t teach you how to think.

Reason 12: Tests. Tests rarely measure real knowledge. Why fret over them? Why stress over them? Why even take them?

Reason 13: Research papers. Research papers rarely have any meaningful connection to real life.

Reason 14: Incompetent tenured professors. Few professors are competent as teachers or knowledgeable about things that really matter.

Reason 15: Teaching assistants. Professors often rely on teaching assistants to teach their courses and grade papers, so you’re being taught by people who don’t really know much more than you do.

Reason 16: Expensive textbooks. Too many textbooks are over-priced, biased, and often inaccurate.

Reason 17: Frats and sororities, especially if you don’t like elitists. And you really hate hazing. You can have more fun in a college dorm or an old apartment house.

Reason 18: College sports. Too many colleges spend more money on the jocks than they do on the professors. That’s a twisted set of values.

Reason 19: Sexual pressure. There’s nothing like putting 20,000 horny people together to get the wrong kind of sexual pressure. Rape on college campuses is epidemic. Date rape is almost a given. Love is hard to find.

Reason 20: Google and the internet. You can find anything you need to know (or learn) on the internet. Wikipedia is amazing. There are websites for any interest, any need, any desire, any purpose.

Reason 21: The cost to society. The U.S. currently spends $1 trillion or more on education at every level. That’s more than the national defense budget! And what is the real return on that investment?

Reason 22: Facts are forgotten quickly. Most of what people learn in high school and college is useless and often forgotten. Schools focus on facts and unnecessary knowledge rather than teaching students how to discover what they need to know.

Reason 23: Education and income are unrelated. Internationally, there is no correlation between a country’s education level and its national income (other factors being equal).

Reason 24: College does not reveal competence. In the past, a college education revealed one thing to potential employers: That the student was willing to suffer boring classes, irrelevant tests, and more just to fit in—qualities that indicated the student might fit in well with a corporate culture. Surviving college signals employers that the student at least exhibits diligence, persistence, and conformity. In today’s world, those are no longer the qualities that employers need or want. See reason #7 for the experience and knowledge they would love to see in an applicant.

Reason 25: Only 5% will benefit from college. The other 95% would be better off learning a useful trade, learning to code, or following their hearts’ desires.

Reason 26: Too much time and money for too little benefit. College costs too much, takes way too much time, and delivers way too little results. Do you need any other reasons not to go to college?

Reason 27: If parents can buy their children into the best colleges, any college education has been devalued. Why go to college when even poor students can buy their way into college and then spend their time on the beaches of Fiji?

Schools teach children to obey. They espouse the things we—the ruling generation—want kids to know. No wonder most schools are pressure cookers where bored teachers meet bored children…. Modern education is a wasted investment. It doesn’t deliver what we need the most: creative answers to the challenges of our times… It isn’t a surprise that many of the people who’ve had the greatest influence on our times were—from the perspective of education—failures. — Jurriaan Kamp, Ode magazine editor

According to new research from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the college degree income premium has substantially declined, and for all non-white students, the college degree’s wealth premium is “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” The gains from a college degree haven’t totally evaporated, but they’re certainly shrinking and quite fast at that. Soon, the college premium might not even exist at all. … College is still of great use to some folks and does indeed add lifetime value for a certain portion of the student population. But it clearly produces a negative return for another portion of society, leading our average premium to spiral downwards so rapidly. The simple solution is that we need fewer students to attend university, not more. — Tim Worstall (Washington Examiner)