Thinking About Ditching School? Think again.

August 17, 2007 by Marcel

Wash U Entrance

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the value of a college education and how a degree is almost mandatory for many white-collar employers. In many cases it is not because the employer thinks there is no way a person without a degree could do the job, but because they want to speed up the hiring process.

Imagine you are the hiring manager responsible for hiring a new employee. You send your request out to Monster.com and receive 100 resumes. The first thing you are going to do is what I call a “superficial elimination.” In this process, you are going to weed out all the resumes that do not meet some arbitrary criteria you have established. In my experience, the first thing I look at is a college degree. Not because I think non-degreed people are incompetent, but because I want a fast way to eliminate a decent chunk of resumes.

However, some people continue to push their belief that college is unnecessary. Now, to be frank, I agree with them to a point. Mostly on the following:

Rather than learning what you need, you’re buried under mountains of information, most of which you’ll never use, and the rest of which you’ll probably long have forgotten — or it will have become obsolete by the time you need it.

This was certainly the case with my undergraduate education. However, I retained the core principles of most classes. I just forgot the details.

I think the rest of his argument is downright dangerous to preach to 18 year olds. Some people can do very well in life without going to college, but they are the exception not the rule. The majority of people I know would fail horribly if they had to follow his path to getting a job:

Have a mentor
Read key articles and books
Attend conferences
Do apprenticeships along a master practitioner

Bottom line: Get a college degree at a public university to save on tuition costs. Allow yourself to mature through college and do some internships. If you want to take some financial risks by starting your own business, do it. You have time to recover, and 22 is not too late to follow the rest of their advice about career advancement.

7 Comments so far »

My New Choice said

am August 17 2007 @ 3:22 pm

I’m torn on this topic because I do think a college degree is necessary for most people that plan to join the ranks of the working world. If you see yourself as more of an entrepreneur, you can certainly benefit from taking courses in college but the degree may be unnecessary.

I’ve written before that one thing I regret was my selection of schools for my education. While I loved the experience and received a quality education, I never really “needed” the college degree after I landed my first job. It would have been a much wiser decision to attend the state school rather than a private university that resulted in a hefty student loan balance upon graduation.
Brian said

am August 17 2007 @ 3:46 pm

I agree with your second point. I also attended a private university and do regret choosing them over a public college. My student loan payments continue to be burdensome even at a low interest rate because of the size of the amount I owe.
My New Choice said

am August 17 2007 @ 4:07 pm

Absolutely. Even though I had dirt cheap rates with various discounts and everything, it was still painful to do every month. I’m happy to say that I paid off my student loans almost two years ago but that money could have been a very nice addition to my retirement savings instead.
pfblogsround 18th August 2007 : plonkee money said

am August 18 2007 @ 6:35 am

[...] thinking about ditching school? think again @ financial dominance, college degrees are pretty much required for white collar jobs [...]
January said

am September 5 2007 @ 8:29 am

I just don’t understand this idea of student loans that are incurred on an annual basis in North America. Here in Nigeria, parents are financially responsible for their children’s university education. so there’s no question of student loans. Furthermore, we have a lot of public universities and this takes care of tertiary education for our teeming undergraduates. I agree to a large extent that a degree is necessary in today’s corporate world. However, I would prefer if we really gave a deep thought to what we study when we go to university. Saves us the stress of cramming through school. that’s my only regret. If I had known that brand advocacy would have been my career path, I would not have read Economics.
Offering Graduate Degrees said

am February 5 2008 @ 12:58 pm

Pharmaceutical Sales Careers for Business Degree Graduates…

So you graduated with a business degree or even a MBA and you don’t want to become an accountant or get too heavily involved in the finance or banking areas….
komodo dragon said

am June 5 2008 @ 8:10 pm

it is necessary, the statistics are unquestionable, a college degree is vital to a profitable degree these days!