When is it okay to drop out of college?
Hey Folks, I've been in college for six years now and have dropped classes left and right. I had been consistent in the beginning and, of course, Covid had caused a bit of problems with consistency. Since that time, my grades slipped. I've dropped classes as well. I should have graduated two years ago however i've been working to survive since. I've got roughly 40k in student loan debt. each time I try and take classes again, I manage to for about two weeks and then after i have some random event in life come in and just ruin my motivation. (death, sickness, major change in lifestyle, etc.). I've been working in a career that was based upon my major and it is a decently comfortable and consistent job (IT), with some stress just due to the human interaction, however I do have issues with debt (working well to get out of but won't be completely out of non-student loan debt until 2025). I'd consider going back in about six or seven years depending on how life treats me, but is it worth cutting my losses, start paying back student loans, and focus on my job? If I do manage to take classes, i'll have about two years worth of classes to bust through but I'm not sure if I can push that much effort back out.
My belief is that college is a means to an end. That is, you go in with an explicit goal of achieving so-and-so, and achieving it will directly help you achieve so-and-so after college. For instance, say you want to be a doctor, and to be a doctor you need a degree. Or you want to become an engineer, and to be an engineer you need a degree. These are valid reasons to go to college.
I find that a lot of students go to college because they think they need to go to college. Or because they think it gets them a higher paying job, but they don't know which job it is that they want, just that it'll be a high paying job. Or because they want the degree for the bragging rights. Or to satisfy their parents. I interpret these goals as stemming from the belief that finishing college is the ultimate goal, and that as long as you finish college, you're guaranteed a satisfying life.
Having these kinds of goals, I think, aren't going to get you to make the most of college, and frankly, I believe that having these sorts of goals are fundamentally misaligned with what the college experience offers students.
I don't know what your situation is like, but I believe that the solution to your question lies in answering this more fundamental question: why are you going to college? And is your reason because you plan to use college as a stepping stone for a more ultimate goal?
100% agree - college is only legitimately useful if the career you want to do requires or hugely benefits from a degree, or if you somehow do some crazy networking to get into a position thanks to a corporate person getting you in. For IT it’s arguable if you even need a degree or not outside of specialized fields, but I would liken getting a degree in some IT-related field to getting a cert: great to have on a resume, but experience and attitude will always beat it out.
If you’re in the business of getting a non-STEM degree, honestly just look into going into a community college for a couple of years to learn how to socialize and maybe get a taste for higher ed stuff (this benefits anyone and everyone). After that, if you’re not gonna go for a STEM career, I would consider dropping out and focusing on work experience.
EDIT: Should clarify, this is strictly for the US. To all fellows across the pond: yes, it is that bad.
This take is super depressing, but like I said elsewhere, maybe it makes sense in the US. And that sucks, to be clear.
For what it's worth, I spent maybe a decade in university, bounced around a couple of things before I got my actual degree. I did not do a STEM degree, I still got a lot out of it in both soft and hard skills. Also in relationships, experience and general ability to approach situations and extract information from the world. Frankly, if your time in higher education has to be driven by a securing a specific job or goal then you're in a broken higher education system. If it leaves you in crippling debt you're also in a broken system, but I'm pretty sure you guys know that already.
Unfortunately, the US lives with both broken education and financial systems where the latter system has turned the former (and many other institutions that should have been public services) into a for-profit institution where the main goal is to push out as many students as possible (regardless of the quality of the education) to get as much money possible, student debts be damned.
This bit by the late and great comedian George Carlin encapsulates how bad it’s been in the US for at least the past 30+ years when it comes to this kind of stuff.
I appreciate your thoughts. From a purely ideological perspective, I do agree with you. I believe that educating as many people as possible is ultimately beneficial to society. I see that someone else has already brought up the logistical nightmare that is academia in the US, so I won't discuss that.
As someone who is in academia, I'm granted a perspective that I think few other people are able to see. And while it is true that logistics is a valid reason for discouraging academia in the US, I'm more intrigued by the fact that so many students seem not to put any thought into their life after college. That is why I bring up in my original comment that college is a means to an end. I'm not necessarily even implying that going to college needs to be for a job. But so many of the students I meet have never even thought about what it is they're getting from college and how it benefits their life. These students don't seem to know why it is that they're going to college, other than maybe the vague promise that it gets them money or that it's merely expected of them. In my perspective, these students are here merely for the grade, not for the actual learning.
If you believe that having a particular skill (hard or soft) is beneficial for your life, and you believe that college is a reasonable way to gain that skill, then I think that's a valid reason to get higher education. I just don't want students who drift aimlessly through college and later realize that they wasted 4 years of their time and money and gained nothing for it.
But I stumbled upon those, I didn't plan on acquiring them.
That's why college kids don't plan on what to make of their lives after college. They're kids! If they knew, they wouldn't need to be there. It took me a degree and a half, a number of failed creative projects and taking a job out of necessity to end up back in a completely different, adjacent career, eventually in multiple different countries. I could have predicted none of that when I started my first degree. For one, I didn't know what I didn't know, that was the entire point of university. For another, I didn't know half of the options I ended up taking even existed or were available to me. Many weren't, in fact, until a particular set of circumstances lined up.
But I'm sure glad that in the meantime I learned crucial things that made me more capable of taking advantage of those circumstances when they came by.
There's this girl I remember from that time. I was a bit older than my classmates, owing to that whole changing tracks thing, so a few gave me more credit than I deserved in some areas. This girl once walks up to me and asks me if I'll read some stuff she wrote. I didn't know how to say no, so I said yes. And it was terrible. No style, no flow, no command of language. It's a high school essay at best, corny and florid in all the wrong ways. I weaseled my way out of giving her feedback and mentally discounted her as a writer.
She's now a professional journalist involved in many high profile activist movements. I've read her stuff. It's great. Turns out the reason she was bad at it back then is she was twenty and had many years of getting good at that crap ahead of her. That's fine. It's fine to figure yourself out and learn to do things as an adult. That's supposed to be the point of higher education when it's universally accessible.
Anyway, I don't think you're wrong, for the record. I think you're right in your context. If public university wasn't basically free around here that would have been a very expensive approach to learning creative writing and figuring yourself out. At most all I'm contributing is I'm glad we do it that way over here. I spent ten years, give or take, doing that stuff and I spent between sixty and six hundred bucks a year doing it. And that's because I didn't qualify for any grants or government student aid. For some of my classmates it was free, or they even got some help for books and housing. I go to vote every time (and pay taxes) thinking that contributing to keeping that up is the most important thing I do in life.