Today’s post comes from native Texan and Democratic activist Rachel Farris (@MeanRachel) the author of MeanRachel.com, a progressive blog that follows politics, the legislature and how they both are affected by social media. Speaking from personal experience, Rachel has taken on the question of what a degree is actually worth, and provided this great pros and cons list for anyone currently making the choice between college and life.
Rachel also writes for The Huffington Post, serves on the board of Texas Democratic Women, and has served as the National Communications Director for the Young Democrats of America Women’s Caucus. She is also known for her work at the Austin-based PetRelocation.com, where she oversees operations and directs online communications strategies to create brand awareness and foster relationships with pet owners online. In the past she has covered the 2008 Democratic National Convention with The Texas Observer team and has spoken at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, Texas State University’s “Mass Communications Week,” and St. Edward’s University.
Skipping college to pursue my dreams of riding and working with horses for a living was a choice I defended for years. In my eyes, I achieved the impossible: not only did I get to spend five years helping start a horse barn and doing what I had always wanted to do, when I hurt my back in 2006 I managed to segue that experience into a career at a successful local start-up.
At the beginning of this year, I made the choice to start going to college to work on a degree. As I’ve continued working full-time and taking classes in the evening, I’ve had the chance to reevaluate my decision and my strongly-held beliefs that college would have been a complete waste of time. Uncannily, the anti-college backlash started right around the time I decided to go to school. For those who are thinking of taking a similar path, here are the pros and cons from someone who’s lived it.
Pros:
You are forced to define yourself.
The only thing worse than a non-college graduate is a non-college graduate without conviction and real-life work experience. By the time the people I graduated high school with were graduating from college, I had five years of full-time work experience under my belt. I had helped start a new business, managed employees, learned how to create invoices in QuickBooks and — most importantly — learned where my best skills were. When I had to switch careers, I could say without hesitation what I would bring to the table: my ability to commit to a company and contribute to its growth.
You lose the entitlement — and gain the experience.
My first job after I graduated high school at seventeen and moved out of my parents’ house was riding horses professionally at a horse stable outside of Dallas. They paid me $100 a week to work 6 days a week for twelve hours a day. Needless to say, I wasn’t in it for the money — I was in it for the experience. One common refrain I often hear in the college debate is that college graduates, after investing a significant amount of money in their education, come out on the other side taking low-paying jobs that can barely cover their loans. They hop from job to job, looking for a salary that will allow them the lifestyle they feel they worked hard for in college, instead of looking for a career that will give them the opportunity to gain a solid amount of experience. When I left the horse industry, unburdened by college debt, I was able to live on very little money and take a chance on a start up that, at the time, quite honestly couldn’t afford the salaries that would attract the best candidates. As the second employee hired, I now get to see people hired for the same job with double the salary I was originally hired for — but I’ve played a leading role in the success that allows that happen. That’s experience, and that’s valuable.
You learn whenever and however you can.
People learn better when learning is a choice. Most of my learning has been experiential. Research done by the Center for Creative Leadership found that the key elements involved in the development of successful executives include challenging jobs, hardships, off-the-job experience and, finally, coursework specific to the job at hand. That’s not to say there’s nothing worth learning in a traditional classroom setting. In the short amount of time I’ve been in college, I’ve been able to apply lessons learned in the classroom toward both my professional and personal life. Would I have remembered these lessons if I had learned them while half-asleep at nineteen years old with no real-world setting in which to apply them? I’ll never know.
If you have something to prove, you work harder.
I can’t speak for all non-college graduates but I will speak for myself: I have never stopped trying to prove to both myself and others that I’m just as good as, if not better than, a college-educated employee/girlfriend/daughter. At the core of everything I do — whether it’s writing a blog post or attending a networking event — is to make a statement: “No, I didn’t go to college and yes, I’m doing just fine.”
Cons:
You Become That Girl (or Guy) Who Never Went to College.
When I told my high school counselor that I was planning on graduating a year early and skipping college, she said “You know you’ll miss out on going off to school with your peers, right?” At the time I had to stop myself from saying That’s the whole point! But since then I’ve realized she was trying to give me useful advice; she just used the wrong example. Not going to college will completely change the social cadence of your life. You are no longer a part of your peer group or even your generation. You will become That Girl (or Guy). You will have trouble finding people your age to date or even get coffee with. No matter how many glowing reviews you have, your LinkedIn profile will eternally read “80% complete” because you never added any education details. You will explain your choice over and over again to people ranging from supportive anarchists to nosy hairstylists to critical financial advisers. Not going to college will permeate every part of your life — for better or for worse.
“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
I have to give credit to my CEO for that one. While it’s true that experience can be a great teacher, it tends to leave some gaps. On the first night of my Organizational Training and Development class, the professor wrote a T.S. Eliot quote on the chalkboard: “We had the experience but we missed the meaning.” While I’ve found the content of my college classes to be useful, what has really been changing and evolving is the perspective and paradigms I bring to each of my classes. Setting aside three hours a few nights a week to sit down and analyze my real-world experience has proven invaluable.
You’ll want to be a good role model.
I don’t have children, but I do have several neighborhood kids who come by to play with my dog occasionally and ask for popsicles. Most of them are lower income children who are in desperate need of an example of success in their life. I remember one of them asking me one day if I went to college. I felt a twinge of shame when I told him that I hadn’t. One common theme I’ve noticed in every one of my classes is that there is at least one parent who says they are going to school to set an example for their children. It’s a small thing, but it’s an important one.
Your passport will get dusty.
My single greatest regret in not having gone to college is that I never got to study abroad, or spend any significant amount of time traveling. Working through my college years meant taking short trips here and there with what little vacation time I had. I envy my mother’s stories from her college days traveling around Europe and my sister’s semesters spent on the beaches of Rio or studying bees at a farm in Virginian countryside. There is so much to be learned from other cultures and histories — college would have given me the time to experience that.
But I know someday I’ll have the time to travel and explore. At the top of my list will be to go do something I’ve been reading about since childhood: to see the Lipizzaners, glistening snow-white horses initially trained for fighting, perform their pirouettes and piaffes at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. I’m in no hurry. In his song about the eternal call of the foreign city, Billy Joel sings, “Vienna waits for you.” And, as it turns out, so does
college.
