Education and Schooling

“You teach kids how to succeed when they successfully foil the educational system.”

Arlo Guthrie

I am an educated individual.  I successfully achieved and completed a full education including a business degree from the University of Oregon.  That’s how I was told to be successful.  Stay in school, get an education, get good grades and you will be taken care of.

That is not how it worked and nor do I think its the best way to do things now that I have gone through it.  What did college teach me:

How to mange my time, how to have self discipline, how to take care of myself, how to effectively communicate with a diverse group of people and how to start and finish a project/task.  All very good skills to have.  However, is my student debt worth those skills instead of what I should have learned.

The real world skills such as: budgeting, investing, mortgages, how to start a business, how to market a business, insurance, credit cards/debt…All real world issues and priorities. My classes didn’t tell me how to do any of these things.  They made me regurgitate information from a book or chalkboard and taught me how to become a valuable “employee” and work my way up to management.  That may be a good path but I think we should strive for more.

I am happy to have my degree however, imagine if I didn’t go to college and just started working right after high school (Have not had any jobs that required a degree yet.) Instead of being thousands of dollars in debt I would have starting making money 4 years earlier.  I would have also been learning real world life lessons at an earlier age.

I am not saying don’t go to college but the opportunity cost of time with college vs. real world lessons is the argument here.  Its an interesting conundrum.