Why You Don't Need College...

…if you happen to be me. I haven’t even told all of my friends yet. Here it is, though: I’m dropping out of college. How many semesters in I am or how many are left before a degree is irrelevant, honestly. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with post-secondary education from the start. Varying circumstances from year to year and semester to semester left me feeling either very excited about my education or yearning to be away from it all. It wasn’t until the past month or so that I actually realized I could be doing something else with my time and not wasting my parents’ money.

As most high school students know – and hell, even people who aren’t in high school if they have access to any sort of heavily used medium for the exchange of information – there is a substantial amount of pressure on graduating seniors to have plans for college in place well before they receive their diploma. Everyone knows that you can’t be successful or even a respected person if you don’t get a college degree to supplement your high school education. The sad part is that, to some extent, they’re absolutely right.

First, it should be noted that not all degrees are made equal. I love writing. There is a sad part of me that always wanted to be an English major, but I had no desire to turn an English education into some form of hardcore linguistic study nor to teach other people how to properly use the language. My only interests as far as English goes are posting to blogs (clearly) and writing books. Do you need a degree for this? No. This realization made me think that I wouldn’t be so bad off getting a degree in something that was easy for me but did not “light my fire”, so to speak.

I started off college with my major being Engineering Physics with a concentration in Computer and Electrical Engineering. My love of physics in high school due to an excellent teacher (RIP Mr. Ridgeway) carried me through the first two semesters of college with no troubles. Coming back after my first summer away, though, left me with no academic momentum. I had expected my classes to pull me back into the subjects, but perhaps I had been spoiled by the engaging staff at my high school. There’s something deeply terrifying about realizing, halfway through a semester, that you have no interest anymore in pursuing a career in your chosen major. Would it have been cool to say I was an engineer living on an engineer’s salary? Of course! But the hoops they were holding up for me to jump through were in my range of capability and beyond my range of motivation.

A new major was on my horizon. I thought about Mathematics, having had a strong intuitive grasp of math throughout my schooling, but I felt like it was something that would be both easy and at the same time far less enjoyable than a physics-related degree path. Having also been around computers for all of my life (my father has been a systems analyst for our state for 40+ years), Computer Science seemed natural and, after some investigation, kind of fun! There are some instantly rewarding things you can learn with a computer education that make it seem so satisfying at the outset. The rewarding feeling ramps up with the difficulty, too. “You just wrote a program that calculates factorials!” vs. “You just wrote a text-based game that generates a map based on a text file and allows you to move around killing monsters and collecting items!” The workload for creating that game was significantly higher than my initial foray into variables and recursion, but it was amazing to me to think that I was playing through a game with the source code in a window right behind it…and I wrote it. I developed an interest in artificial intelligence. I started wondering about the differences in the back ends of programs that caused performance differences. This is some heavy stuff if a year ago you had always just wondered how to make a complex program.

Clearly my beginning education with programming and programming methods had made an impact on me, but I don’t think it was the one my teachers had hoped for. Rather than trying to gear myself up to learn more from them so that I could improve my programming, I realized that all I wanted to do now was code things for myself so that I could prepare for self-employment later in life. I had no doubt that I would end up in some sort of programming-related career, but I was suddenly finding the teaching methods at my school dense and horribly paced.

The Internet contains a lot of information. A lot of it is rarely accessed, but even given that some of the information on it is more valuable than others, it ought to be a horribly inefficient place for teaching yourself things. On the contrary, it has been specifically developed so that you may access just about any necessary bit of data at lightning speed. While I was pleased with my newfound interests in programming, I was horrified to find that my school was actually less efficient than the Internet at teaching me how to code.

So here’s my point: I wanted an education. I picked a school. I figured out what I wanted to learn. Then, I figured out that they couldn’t teach me. What I regret now is that I didn’t discover sooner that I could teach myself programming faster with online resources (and in some cases with better teachers). So! While the Internet is not a place to go if you want to be an electrical engineer, never accept that you must go to college if you want your life to be enjoyable. Lots of job postings do want a bachelor’s degree, but there is no guarantee that being granted the job will be worth the money or time you spent on the degree. This is time that I cannot waste any longer.

What are my life plans now? Numerous. That is perhaps the clearest answer I can give you. I will be moving across the country. I will eventually be starting my own business (with a partner). I will be playing in a band. I will be producing a show. Most importantly, I will be living a life in which I produce things, beautiful things, that make me happy. I don’t need college in order to make beautiful things.