College. Really?

An empty classroom

“A college graduate makes a million dollars more than a high school graduate over his/her lifetime!” Read a line from the last paragraphs of an article with the title “Is going to college worth it?”.

I was doing my research, on a clear night, in a silent room, sitting beside my computer’s ageing screen that flickered way too much every once in a while. It was a night that could, and would, define the next three years of my life. The night that I would decide whether I would go to college or not. I already knew which colleges I would select and which one had more priority over another, but the question bugging my mind at that moment was that whether I should even go?!

It is not difficult today to type in a search query like “Is College worth it?” or “Should I go to college?” into a search engine like Google or YouTube (Yes, I just called YouTube a search engine!) and get over 4,48,00,00,000 results (I copied that.) on this topic, of course, 80% of those are useless and unconnected, but of the remaining 20%, I am a firm believer of the fact that over 80% would advise people to move ahead, go to college, and land a higher paying job than an average High School graduate.

Those results aren’t baseless, they are based on years upon years of statistical data and facts. But I would like to give my views on this topic as well. Yet again, I have done nothing great in life, so take my words with a grain of salt, in no way is this article to lure you away or towards college. Make your own decisions, do your research!

I also might need to clear out what I mean by Traditional College, and by that, I mean any college that has been in existence for over 50 years either under autonomy or under a university.

BIG DISCLAIMER: This is not a rant about all colleges, it is just a rant about colleges who misuse their position to make quick bucks, and make a lot of them.

Let’s get started with why I feel College isn’t worth it or at least doesn’t deserve the amount of respect that it holds in the economy at the time of writing this.

1. College isn’t what it used to be.

It is easy to imagine our parents going to college, learning some stuff for around 3 years and then landing a job with the skills they acquired during their time at College. Whichever way you see it, it makes sense.

After all, college is a promise to an aspiring individual, that if he/she gives them money, attends their programmes that include a curriculum devised by Industry Experts (Cough! Cough!), he/she will come out as a better individual overall, having gained the necessary ingredients to help him/her start or switch a fruitful career, some colleges go as far as to advertise Guaranteed Placements if you enrol in their programme.

But… Like always, there’s a catch today. College isn’t what it was before, even just a decade ago, College was a great place to learn what was truly important to survive in that time’s economy, and shelling out top dollar for getting an admission into a great college was considered a viable investment into oneself or one’s child.

Today, let’s run the numbers from an economic viewpoint first.

The average inflation rate for education in India is about 10–12%.

The average savings account rate in India is 3.5% and the average fixed deposit Interest rate hovers around 6–7.5%. The average return over the past 10 years for the Sensex (BSE 30 — India’s standard Equity Market Index) has been roughly 8.3%.

Now consider this, the cost of education has gone up so fast, that not even the best mode of building wealth, the stock market has been able to beat its inflation.

The cost of college is only going up, and it takes no expert in Economics to devise the fact that college is significantly overpriced today, and a lot of people have to take loans to get to College, which sits there accruing interest throughout the student’s college.

Okay, that’s a bummer, but college pays for itself in the end, right? It gets you the job you need to survive later and pay off your debt, right? Well, not so much.

The intake of college students has grown exponentially in the past decade, but so has the amount of unemployment among those graduates.

It doesn’t take an expert to Google the sentence “Unemployment among Graduates” to get the data to back this claim. A record number of people who have graduated from college in the past decade are finding it harder and harder to find a job.

When you pair the unemployment with the fact that student debt is ballooning at an alarming rate, you get a deadly combination (In countries like the USA, you can’t even file for bankruptcy to waive off your student loans! Wait! What?).

There are a lot of reasons for this. Which are again, the further reasons that take this article forward.

2. Lack Of Valuable and Updated Education

The economy has become so dynamic in today’s times, that no matter what, there is something world-changing coming out every day, and human ingenuity still shows no signs of plateauing anytime soon, and why would it? We have great things everywhere because of this ingenuity.

I would go no further than to emphasise on my industry: Programming, Software Development and Tech in general to show the absolute extent of this ingenuity and the effect it is having on all of us.

There have been so many new and great creations in this field that it has been becoming quite overwhelming at many of the times. If you look at programming, JavaScript has a new framework or library almost every day, similar for Python, both languages have been finding their application in almost every field the mind can imagine. Be it Machine Learning or API development, there is something new every day.

Now, just because something great is coming out every single day doesn’t mean that people should flock to use it. After all, it could go away as soon as it came. But every once in a while, we see that a major number of people and businesses are using something that is a notch above the rest. And not just for a short period, businesses are basing their entire existence on these frameworks, I.E: They are playing a long-term game meaning that is going to be used a long way into the future. Forget stuff like Vue.js or React.js, coding oriented colleges don’t even teach something as simple as jQuery to their students, or even JavaScript for that matter.

It is not uncommon to see that most colleges are still teaching stuff using C or C++, and a little bit of Java just to diversify the curriculum. I am not saying these are bad languages, or that they should not be taught at all. But those languages are neither beginner-friendly or simple. Languages like C++ are powerful because only a select few can truly leverage the power of C++ or C for that matter.

Heck, I am not even saying that colleges should go all-in on teaching extremely high-level stuff such as Machine Learning using Python, but I am willing to replace the likes of C classes with Python instead, to make the curriculum more up-to-date and student-friendly, given that Python finds more applications of itself in a year than C can ever find in one’s lifetime!

The focus should also be shifted towards application-based learning. For example, Java courses in colleges don’t do much until they are used to do something like building a desktop application using Swing or building an Android app using Android Studio.

In context, the biggest problems colleges are facing today is :

And a lot of the readers might say, that a college is a place that is not supposed to be job-oriented, it is a place to learn stuff, to meet new people and to discover opportunities. And that is right to an extent, for most disciplines. Sure, if you are an anthropology student, then the discipline doesn’t change a lot from time to time, thus the curriculum is supposed to be that way, but when you come towards the tech side of the college, you cannot help but notice the stark contrast between what the colleges teach and what is being used outside the boundaries of the college.

It is not a coincidence that so many college graduates are finding it difficult to find a job, primarily because they lack the skills valued in the industry. After all, who would you hire, someone who knows all the Data Structures by-heart or someone who can build you a workable application? Similarly, it is harder for students to even find themselves an Internship during college because the companies hiring interns are the very companies looking for employees and their needs are very different from what the college offers.

In such cases, students either have to opt-in to an extra course for an extra-curricular skillset, shelling out more bucks for getting the skills they truly need, something they paid for in the first place while getting into college.

And the irony is that their very college appreciates these extra-curricular skills and programmes for gaining an “Added advantage over your peers.” At which point the students have to ask “Weren’t you the ones supposed to be giving us an edge over the others?!”

3. Unnecessary Clutter and Incompetent Teachers

If I had a rupee for every time I had to say “What am I going to do with all this?” while learning complex formulae regarding Norton’s and Thevenin’s Theorem, trying to memorize complex diagrams related to Frequency Shift Keying, etc, I would have been a millionaire today very very easily! And I am pretty sure a lot of those people reading this article are also going to relate to this.

We have all had that “Where am I going to use this in my life?!” moment at least once. And the fact is that nobody knows the answer. I am still waiting for the day I will use anything that I learned in High School, in real life.

If you ask my teachers, they don’t know either. Half of them are going to say the following eternal words:

“I don’t know! It’s in your syllabus and you have to learn it.”

I guess you can now imagine what effect it has on a person. There has always been a movement to educate people, to educate children, to send them to the best colleges possible or to at least educate every single child to a minimum of Eighth-grade education. But why? Or even if it is needed, which it is, shouldn’t education be free from the clutter and useless stuff there exists in the textbooks which the people who framed the curriculum are too lazy to update?

I am a firm believer in knowledge, don’t get me wrong. But I feel that education, in general, has taken the form of forcing something unnecessary on someone who doesn’t need it. What am I going to do learning to construct Thevenin’s circuits if I am never going to touch electronic circuits in the first place? What am I going to do learning the laws of motion if they are of no use to me? The curriculum of today needs to go through a major shift, and teachers who are not willing to update their skillset and knowledge to suit the changing needs of the world, are incompetent.

There are many incompetent teachers in the world, present both in schools and colleges alike. But more notably in schools. Colleges have to maintain their standards for some reason, they admit to only having faculty that have at least a PhD. But they certainly do not realize that even though a PhD is an identifier that the person holding it is an expert in that field, it doesn’t mean that they know how to teach the subject. We have all had that one teacher or that one friend, who knows a lot about something but is just not able to teach it well. And the point is, they will never accept that they are not doing a good job at it.

Nowhere is the above more prevalent than at College.

Why does College hold such status in society then?

So, after all this, one might ask, why is college still a super-trillion dollar business? After all, if all this is true, then how does College continue to demand such status in the modern economy?

In fact, people who have pursued a Bachelor’s degree in a college that has not given them anything good would still come back to college to pursue a Master’s degree after having a job for a few years if the prospect offers a raise.

The biggest reason for this is that: At least on the surface, college seems to work!

Most of the students in colleges are there because they feel that just going to college is enough to land them a sufficient job, which they can use to further increase their opportunities and exposure over time to further progress their career. And employers do buy that, most of them come to college placements not to hire the most talented individuals, but to rather just hire those who have sufficient basic knowledge and can be trained to become real assets. Sure, they could skip that process of training altogether by hiring people from bootcamps, or coachings that specialize in the area they want to hire in.

The above creates an environment in which people go to college just for the sake of it because, in the end, the student feels he/she is going to get what is desired from college. The people who don’t get jobs after college are disregarded by many as being non-competitive, but people fail to realize that is a reflection of college as much as it is a reflection of the candidate.

Conclusion

If you have read this far, you might either feel any of the following three:

And I take full responsibility for those feelings because they are normal. As always, do your research, work your way to your conclusions and do what’s needed.

The above is in no way an image of anyone’s college. I have taken generic representations of college life from various accounts and I won’t step back from the truth.

Before signing off, I would like to just say one thing.

If you joined a non-college class, went to it and found out that the teacher there didn’t know what they were teaching entirely, used presentations downloaded from sites you could easily go, and were teaching stuff used back in the 1970s. You would immediately be running for your money back. Then why is it that, most colleges are getting away with the same thing every single day?!