Feeding your mind is an important aspect of your growth as a person. For most people, the last time they read a non-fiction book is when they leave high school. The traditional route to obtaining a higher education prescribes attending college to obtain a degree in your area of interest. Is this the best way? Like most things in life, I think the most accurate answer is “it depends”.
For some disciplines such as law, engineering, teaching, or medicine attending traditional college is pretty much mandatory. Those professions require very specified training that is practically impossible to get on your own. But what about other professions?
What if you want to be an information security professional, author or life coach? In those situations, formal college education might have less to offer. My primary reason for saying this is that a college education is very expensive and time-consuming.
Traditional Education is Inefficient
Take my daughter as an example. She recently started college in pursuit of a teaching degree. She’s attending a public college and staying on campus. Tuition, dorm, books, meal plan, and other fees add up to approximately $9,000 per semester or $18,000 per year. By the time she obtains her 4-year degree that’s over $70,000. Definitely not cheap.
Colleges have to find some way to justify keeping you in school for a number of years in order to generate revenue. Regardless of your target occupation, you’ll spend at least 2 years learning or re-learning generic subjects. Most every college student is required to take basic English, Math and elective classes. While being able to appreciate classical literature and solve quadratic equations can be useful, most people never use that information in their careers.
Instead of looking at college as a means of collecting wall hangings, let’s talk about its true purpose.
Feeding your mind is an important aspect of your growth as a person.
Purpose of Education
The word “education” comes from the Latin word “educo”. Loosely translated it means to “bring up or draw from within”. With that we can say that the purpose of education is to obtain the knowledge that brings out the best in us. The medium doesn’t really matter as long as it makes us a better version of ourselves.
With our definition established, I’d like to discuss a few avenues of education that I’ve found really useful in growing my career.
Specialized Courses
Say your goal is to become an information security professional. You could attend college but this probably isn’t the best way. I’ll share how I did it. I began by purchasing specialized courses on the subjects I was interested in learning. I ensured they offered certifications upon completion. Certifications are a great way to establish a level of proficiency in your field of interest. I was taught exactly what I needed to know through written material, video and lab exercises. This “no fluff” approach was a much more efficient way for me to obtain the knowledge I needed.
A large benefit to taking specialized courses is that the material is produced or taught by industry professionals with extensive experience. Instead of learning the theoretical way of accomplishing a task, you’re shown how it’s actually done in the real world.
The length of most specialized courses typically ranges from days to a few weeks. The time commitment is much less than traditional college. Because the material is very focused, it’s a better way to learn because you become completely immersed in the subject. This is very different from English today, history tomorrow, and political science at the end of the week.
YouTube, Internet Forums and Google
In the late 80’s, if you wanted to learn a detailed subject, your options were fairly limited. You could attend college, seek out an expert or visit your local library.
The Internet has changed all of that. In my opinion, it’s truly one of humanity’s greatest achievements. YouTube, Internet forums and search engines have placed most of the world’s information at your fingertips. If you want to learn something new there are so many options. You can read about it on a blog, ask someone on a forum or watch it being done via YouTube.
This blog is a great example. I built this entire blog by following guides on YouTube, reading forums and emailing experts when I needed help. Granted I’m pretty technical by nature, but that doesn’t mean I’m a web developer. By making use of freely available information, I was able to create a forum to share my thoughts with the world. It’s even available in multiple languages.
Could I have gone to college to become a web developer? Sure. But that would have taken a lot longer than the month I invested. The end result likely wouldn’t be much better.
A word of caution is in order. Even though the Internet makes large amounts of information easily accessible, that doesn’t mean that all of it is valuable. It’s important that you scrutinize the source to make sure that what you take in is actually beneficial or accurate.
Even though the Internet makes large amounts of information easily accessible, that doesn’t mean that all of it is valuable.
Teaching
I can imagine the weird looks I’m getting for this one. Using teaching as a means of learning might not initially make sense. Hear me out though. I’ve found that one of the best ways to test your knowledge in an area is teaching someone else. It forces you to dig deeper into the topic than you otherwise would have. Having your audience ask questions will expose your knowledge gaps. This will give you direct areas to focus on improving.
Venues that are great for getting started with teaching are local workshops. Most cities have groups of people that regularly assemble to share knowledge. The next time they’re looking for speakers, take it as an opportunity to share what you know. You may not be an expert, but you probably know more than some of your audience. That’s all it takes to provide value.
Use the fact that you’re teaching others to educate yourself.
Where Do Books Fit In?
Books are important. I use books to establish the knowledge foundation for my area of interest. Well-written ones offer in-depth coverage of the given subject at hand. My recommendation is to find and read the best rated books in your area of interest. Then use specialized courses and the Internet to fill the knowledge gaps.
Here’s an example:
Say you want to learn how to invest your money. I would probably start out by finding a well-written article on the subject. The article will outline the process and identify the books you should read to get started. Upon reading those books, you’ll have a base to learn from. From there you could seek out seminars on investing or participate in Internet forums. This will help you round out your understanding. You’ll be able to approach the actual art of investing with much more confidence following this route.
At no point did you set foot in a college yet you were still able to acquire a very valuable skill.
Closing Thoughts
I don’t want this article to come across as me bashing college. Education is very important and for some professions, college is the best way to go. I simply want to challenge you to become more creative and ask yourself if what you’re trying to do really requires that kind of time and financial commitment.
College is touted as the conventional path to success. Conventional paths are based on conventional thinking. Conventional thinking comes from what most people consider to be the best way of approaching or solving the task at hand.
Here’s the issue. Most people don’t achieve extraordinary levels of success. Unless your plan is to be ordinary, it makes sense to consider options outside of the status quo.
Unless your plan is to be ordinary, it makes sense to consider education options outside of the status quo.
Do you agree with my line of thinking as far as alternate forms of education? Am I wrong to discourage college for all be very certain fields? Let me know in the comments below!
This Post Has 4 Comments
Hey Ron,
I think you raise a good point that college isn’t for everybody. That’s not to say not everyone would do well in a college-setting, but rather an admission that college isn’t the best path to get people to where they’d like to go. There are definitely better routes to success than pursuing a college degree. And even some of the people who don’t need a degree will see a negative stigma of not having some prestigious university’s credentials attached to their resume. We’ve been conditioned to think college is the first step on a path to realizing our goals and the younger generations have paid dearly for it, your daughter being a prime example.
When I look back on my formal education, I’m very grateful for learning what I did in the classroom through attending lectures, studying, writing papers, and creating projects. However, most of the skills I use in my current role were learned outside of that setting through free and open access to online resources. Sure, I learned a lot about the principles of finance and economics in college and graduate school, but a lot of that information never gets used outside of pursuing my own personal interests. My marketable skills have mostly come from self-instruction and persistence. However, in my profession, my degrees helped my career because they serve as indicators to my employer (and potential employers) that I’m capable of doing the work required of someone in my position.
To follow on that point, I argue that degrees are quite often just signaling devices used for an employer to separate you from someone else who may perform the same or better than you. The difference being that they don’t have a clear accomplishment to point to on their resume. That’s the value of a formal education. That’s why you see companies paying outside consultants gobs of money to repackage and sell them ideas already created in-house: a third party can independently verify that a recognized brand has signed off on a person, project, idea, etc. Unfortunately, degrees confer this recognition more so than most other items you can include on a resume. But none of that matters if you’re a sole-proprietor, or you’re pursuing a career path that sees formal education as lagniappe.
Which leads me to agree with your original point: college isn’t for everybody. Not everyone needs a degree to get what they want out of life. Those people who don’t need it and end up taking out large amounts of debt are in a much worse place compared to those who made the same decision a generation ago. Eventually, there needs to be a reckoning of this mindset with reality. I think the ever-increasing cost of formal education will reach that point and cause us all to evaluate what we want and how to go about getting it.
Thanks,
Riley
Riley,
I completely agree that a degree is typically used by recruiters and HR as an easy sorting mechanism for potential candidates. That said, I’m still not sure that the getting past the gatekeepers is worth the time and money invested. Consider that most people are in their current jobs because of a personal referral. Now when it comes to certain disciplines such as investment banking and the others I mentioned in the article, there’s no way for you to get the position without a degree. Doesn’t matter how awesome you are as person or how great the referral.
I just hate seeing kids fresh out of high school signing up for mountains of debt for something that they’ll likely realize little return on. A lot of the problem is due to how our student loan system is currently implemented. More of it has to do with the myth being perpetuated that success in life is going to be realized via a college degree.
Working hard, smart and with a direct sense of purpose are greater predictor of future success than where you go to college.
Thanks for the in-depth comment!
College certainly isn’t for everyone, and at the dramatic costs of rising tuition, more and more parents and their children have to decide if it is a worthwhile investment and not look at it just as a rite of passage.
The problem for our kids – how do you do that at 18 with such little world experience?
For example, I am an attorney and could not be one without college and a JD. I love what I do, but didn’t even know I would choose this path until my junior year in college.
As parents, we have to provide our kids with as much world experience as we can do they can better decide what they want to do, and if higher education is a useful (yet expensive) tool to get there. But there is only so much we can expose them to.
“Not just a rite of passage.” That’s an excellent way of putting it. Many kids use college as an expensive form of personal growth.
To me, the primary reason for formal higher education is to learn a skill that allows you to take care of yourself and loved ones. With most undergrad degrees costing north of 50k, there *has* to be some return on the investment.
A college education is much like anything else you buy. Try to get the best value for dollars spent. Other than perhaps law, pedigree doesn’t contribute significantly to your career.
I’ve never asked my dentist or physician where they went to school. Thanks for your comment!