To those with college degrees.

1. No.
2. Yes.
3. Very.

 

1. No
2. No
3. It just put me in debt.

 

ye
ye
very

it

 

1. Partly
2. Yes
3. It was valuable in that I needed the piece of paper to get the job, however I cannot say that without the education I could not perform well in the job.

 

1) yes
2) no
3) very

I think college has far more value than just preparing you for a particular career. I went to a university with a strong liberal arts curriculum, where I had to take required philosophy classes in critical thinking, logic, and ethics. What I learned in those classes has been enormously beneficial in helping me articulate what I believe in, and why. Add to that the social aspects of the college experience, and I can't recommend it enough.

And yet, I work in essentially an artistic field, where no one cares where my degree is from. That's true of most artists. If you're an artist, no one wants to see your degree. They want to see your paintings, hear you sing, see you dance, watch your film, read your novel, etc.

If you're looking to get into engineering, medicine, law, psychology/therapy, science, etc., then I think it's safe to say that a degree is basically essential.

 

No.

No.

Yes!

Honestly, a university education, if done right, is more than glorified career training. It should teach you how to think critically, expose you to a variety of disciplines, and especially with an arts degree, to master rhetoric and how to form and defend an argument- very important in sales related fields.

 

1.No
2.Yes
3.Very

 

1) sort of
2) yes
3) yes

 

All three questions contain the word 'job', which is interesting. I guess getting a degree today involves taking on some debt, and so you have to consider it a means to an end - that is, getting a job. 'Education' here is really a training.

As for getting a real education, that is an end in itself, and can be done by reading in your leisure time.

 

no, no, not at all.

I went to college out of high school because it was expected of me. At that age, due to my upbringing and personality, I was much more in need of some basic practical life management skills than any higher education. I enjoyed going and partied my brains out but I was really just putting off the real challenge until I was 23.

I'm not trying to knock college and I know it works for plenty of people - I just think you have to be smart about it or you end up with a useless receipt in your filing cabinet after four years and however many thousands of dollars. I ended up working in construction for the next 14 years, taking a job whose description in the newspaper consisted of "must be physically able to perform the job". I actually really enjoyed that kind of work, at least partly because it allowed me the mental space to figure things out and get an education on my own time that focused on things that were more important to me.

Now I'm going back to school, to get a degree that I'll get a job with as soon as I graduate. I guess at 37 I've finally achieved the maturity I should have had at 19.

 

I'm going to share my opinion, although I don't have a degree, so my answer is a little longer.

I studied psychology for 2 years, with the intention of going on to get my Masters in MFT and my PhD in Clinical psychology. After 2 years, however, I was questioning whether I really wanted to be a therapist or not. At that time I also got married and decided to take a semester off to settle into married life a bit and figure out if my potential future career plans were changing. I never ended up going back to school after that.

It was a really hard decision for me, because I love school, I loved all my teachers, and it was a great growing experience. (It was also a bit rough on the ego to go from pursuing a future with a fancy "Dr." in front of my name, to being a college dropout.) It was also a lot of money, however, and I didn't want to spend so much money on a degree unless I was 100% sure I would need and use it. I didn't feel that was the case for me. I thought about so many different career paths, but I wasn't 100% sure about any of them and didn't feel right about spending the money and time unless I was.

Anyway, at that time I decided to transition out of my current job (as a housekeeper through an agency) into doing housekeeping on my own. As I continued to try to find something I wanted to study, to feel good about going back to school, my business kind of took off and was rapidly becoming very successful.

So ultimately, long story short, I didn't go back to get my degree, and I'm very glad that I didn't. For me, while I would have grown more and learned, and that's good, I think I would have regretted spending that much time and money on it. I also wouldn't be where I'm at today because I wouldn't have been spending the last several years building my career instead of sitting in a classroom. I also wrote a book, which was a huge lifetime goal of mine, and I don't think that would have happened if I had been so busy with school (at the time that I started writing it, it would have been the last semester of my senior year, which would have been crazy).

So... my opinion is, if you know what you want to do and you don't need a degree for it, college could just be a huge waste of time and money for you. But if the job you desire requires a degree, school is a good idea. And if you don't have a job in mind, but you know you don't want to go to college for 4 years, maybe you should try to pursue careers that don't require a college degree. Some jobs require certain certifications or licenses that you could pursue in a matter of weeks or months, rather than 4 years of school.

However, I will say that going to school for that 2 years is probably what helped me to grow enough and "find myself" enough to know that I didn't want to continue and I didn't want to become a therapist. So I think, for me, the 2 years was worth it, but any more wouldn't have been.

 

I don't have a job

 

I'm a housekeeper. I've been doing cleaning related jobs since high school, and eventually I ended up working for Merry Maids, making like... I don't remember, 9 dollars an hour or something, while they were charging 90/hour to their clients. So eventually I just said screw this, I'm gonna do this on my own and make more money. So now I make 25/hour, I get to work alone and be my own boss, I have flexible hours and can pretty much choose what days of the week I want to work, I can listen to music or watch TV while I clean empty houses... it's a pretty great gig. It took some getting used to the idea of being a professional housekeeper forever, since it's sort of viewed as a lowly position. But all those benefits I listed are better than what most people my age have, so I'm not complaining!

 

1) Yes
2) Yes
3) Extraordinarily so. Even Necessary

 

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Very important, degree was a ticket to get the job, but another question could be: how useful are the things you learn at Uni at your job - not much!

 

youtube video watcher ?? the salary sucks but the leisure and hours are great... almost like being a swedish blonde modal in Bjorgberg