I went to an extremely selective college; probably the first one on your lips when you think “highly selective college”. I graduated summa, with all the other accolades you can think of, everything neat and tidy as a commencement speaker’s anecdote.

Great thing, yeah?

Well, in the +20-odd years since graduation, not once did anybody bother to check if I’d gone there or not, let alone cared about the summa bit or the then-important-now-trivial accolades I received.

Fact is, I could have gone to Oklahoma City Community College—and flunked out—and no one would have been the wiser.

And of course, nothing I did, professionally, required I prove I had my degree. I went to Hollywood, hustled as a film producer, then hustled various business deals in NYC and the EU, and all the while, I never actually needed my degree . . .

. . . yet I still had to pay off those fucking college loans. The $18,000 I had to take out over the four years I was there wound up being $24,000 that I paid off—and I was lucky, ‘cause I had the resources within just eighteen months after graduation to pay them off in full.

But that was way back in the very early Nineties.

Today, people consider 18 grand a laughably small amount, for student loans. Twenty-two year-old kids are graduating from crappy colleges with 50, 75, 100 G’s in debt.

And unlike before, a college degree guarantees exactly squat, insofar as job prospects go. When I graduated, I had three firm job offers on the table, from McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Brown Brothers Harriman—and I didn’t even fucking try, just showed up at the jobs fair, did the interviews, and voilà.

Today, even Ivy League college degrees are no guarantee of gainful employment—not even at a miserable Starbucks.

So question: Is it financially rational to go into $100,000 worth of debt, in order to get a basic college degree from a middling university, or even a “good” school?

The answer is obvious: No.

A degree is credentialism at its finest. In some careers, you need that stupid diploma: In academia, law, medicine, engineering, you need those acronym firmly attached to the end of your name. The acronyms don’t mean anything—but you need them, like getting a valid driver’s license if you want to be a trucker: You can drive, but if you want to drive a rig for money, you’ll have to get the fucking thing.

If those particular careers are your goal, then yes, you should go to college and pay up—but only pay if you’ve made the cool, hard, rational, awake calculation that the money you pay, the debt you go into, will definitely get paid back in full from your job after all that training. Paid back in full, and then some.

But if you’re set on being an entrepreneur? Then fuck that noise, you do not need a college degree—and you sure as shit don’t need the debt.

You ask, “Well what about the college experience?” I answer, “Well what about it?” Getting drunk with your dorm room bros gets old after a single semester. As to the sexual politics? Fuck that, it’s like four years of Russian Roulette, dealing with college girls. Eventually, in time, you’ll be accused of rape or sexual harassment or whatever. (BTW, the so-called “rape culture” of today? They were complaining about the same shit back in 1987.)

You want to do something smart? Go to college—for a year. Then take an administrative leave, and go live your life. Travel, start a business, whatever—just fucking go. You can extend your administrative leave multiple times; you won’t be kicked out of a college over a prolonged administrative leave.

That way, you can “experience college” for a long-enough while, then go off and live your life—gain experience—become a man. And if you decide—consciously, awake—that you want/need a degree, then you can go back and get it, taking on the debt and paying the cost.

If you realize that you don’t need college, then you just wasted a single year—not four.

If you want the education, that’s a different matter—and here’s a secret: You can get it for free. Go to the top-tier school in your area, check the courses, find the emails of the profs of the classes you’d like to take, and ask them—politely—if you could informally audit their classes during the semester.

Odds are overwhelming that he’ll say yes. He’ll even let you take the tests—and grade you—so you can see if you’re mastering the material or not.

That would be an astounding use of your time and money—and you’d never have to go into debt, just pay for living in the city and books and supplies—no tuition, no student fees, no compulsory meal plan.

Look, my point is, don’t fucking do what’s expected of you. Do what is rationally, logically beneficial to you. If you want to be a doctor, then of course, go to college, get your AB, ace your MCAT’s and then go to a good med-school.

But if those credential-dependent careers are not what you’re interested in, then I’m begging you: Think over your options.

The college paradigm worked from about 1945 until around 1995: Go to college, get a diploma, and watch how the improved job opportunities paid for the added expense of college.

But that paradigm doesn’t work anymore. So the issue for you is, are you going to take a gamble on college, or are you going to play it smart?

Hey, I’m just an asshole with an opinion—and the experience.

from SavageSense