How College Failed Me
By: Vincent Monteleone
I’m not a psychiatrist; I’m not a psychologist; hell I’m
not even a writer; I’m just a regular guy who has a regular guy’s opinion. As a kid you could dream anything and truly
believed that one-day in the real distant future when you grew up that you
could achieve that goal. Unfortunately we then actually grow up and “reality”
sets in, you get to do one crappy job that you went to college for till you
retire or die, whichever comes first. Only a very lucky few get to hit
homeruns or score touchdowns to pay the bills. The overwhelming majority
of us are forced to, as Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club put so elegantly,
“Work jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need.”
In high school we are pressured by college advisors to
decide what we want to be for the rest of our lives at 16-17 years old, this
way we could pick the school that would in turn determine our futures. We
would hopefully get into this school by how well we did on some four-hour test,
that tests you on exactly zero things that will matter in the real world.
Now suppose you are one of the lucky ones who scores high
enough to get into the college you want to attend. Being accepted into
the college allows you the privilege to send them tens of thousands of dollars
per semester for the honor to go to their school. The money you spend on tuition is an
investment into your future, but this investment does not guarantee you a
single thing. If you brought the investment of a college education into
the shark tank Mr. Wonderful would laugh in your face and say “But how am I
going to make my money back?"
Society
makes us believe that only people who receive college degrees can be
"successful" and get a good job. Tell society that you are
supposed to be successful when you have six figures worth of debt and are underemployed.
Can you ask for a refund on your tuition? Can you get the four
years, and in some cases more, added back on to your life? That is what we call
opportunity cost which is never properly taught through the many years of
education we are put through before we are lucky enough to go to college.
Opportunity cost is simple it is what you need to give up
in order to do something else. For example you can work at McDonalds full
time for $7.75 an hour for four years or go to college for $25,000 a year.
One will earn you $64,480 and the other with cost you $100,000.
That means your opportunity cost to go to college over working in
McDonalds is $164,480. And who knows within that four years you might work your
way up to assistant manager.
In all
seriousness a 16-17 year old doesn’t look at it as a business decision or as in
the example above a $164,480 decision, because they aren’t trained to think
that way. You know why they don’t think
that way, because they were never taught the concept of money. Sure they know that a pack of cigarettes cost
$12, but they’ll still buy a loosey from someone for $1 without knowing they
are giving that person an amazing 67% return on their investment.
Phrases like opportunity cost and return on investment
will draw you a blank stare from the vast majority of high schoolers. If you ask them what they expect the
principal on their student loan for college to be they will be confused as to
what Mr. Johnson has to do with their student loan. It seems right that when people are about to
take out what most likely will be the second biggest loan of their life, that
they have no idea about money and how it works.
They don’t know simple things like what compounding interest is and the
difference it makes whether your loan compounds bimonthly or monthly.
You all heard your parents and grandparents say it to you,
go to school study hard get good grades so that one day you can get a good job. The goal for everyone who goes to school is
that when you are finally done going to school you can get a good job. Regardless of what this job is or what field
it is in this job will pay you money.
All the while kids can understand Pythagorean theorem and tell you that
the c in a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is the hypotenuse, but they have not the slightest
idea of what a 1031 exchange is and the tax benefits it provides.
I realized this one day upon getting close to graduating
college when the safety net of being a student was about to be ripped out from
under me; I haven’t been taught anything tangible that I can take with me to
one day be a better man, better husband and better father. That’s a horrible feeling to be feeling upon
completing the supposed biggest accomplishment of one’s life. I was then a pissed off college student and
am now a pissed off college graduate.
The day I became a pissed off college student was during
my last core class which was a science class.
I was zoning out thinking about how this stuff will never apply to me
and how real little I knew about the real world and how to get ahead. I was thinking about getting caught in a life
living paycheck to paycheck and how would I ever make enough money. I knew very little about money and how it
works and I went to a school known for business and was graduating with a
business degree.
I skipped my next class and walked to Barnes and Noble and
made a pledge that I am going to spend most of my free time self-educating
myself. So I picked up a book titled
“Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert T. Kiyosaki and couldn’t put it down. “Sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn”
was a quote from the book. That day was
the biggest learning experience of my life, college teaches you how to be an
employee not the boss. College teaches
you how to be a good soldier wake up early go to work put your 8 hours plus in
and go home. Get your paycheck spend the
whole thing on a house, lease payments of cars you can’t afford and designer
clothes. You want more money work harder
and make your boss more money and maybe you will be lucky enough to get a raise
for a fraction of what you made him.
College specializes you into one small field and turns you
into something that you must be for the rest of your life. For example, if you go to school to be an
accountant you are an accountant till the end of time. You can’t just decide to be a teacher in a
few years, you made your decision on what you would be when you were in high
school. But I thought college promised
to make you a well-rounded individual? I did too.
It actually did the exact opposite by specializing you
into a distinct industry. Instead of
teaching you a little about a lot, it taught you a lot about a little. Knowledge is power they say, correct, yet it
is one of the easiest resources to obtain.
I am not an accountant yet I just hire an accountant to help keep my
books in order and I have the knowledge of accountancy for a small percentage
of what those accounts earn. Having
computer trouble I just hire a computer technician to help me with that. If I want to know about anything, I can just
pick up a book that someone else spent years researching on and read it in a
week and have the same knowledge as them.
The most important knowledge you can have is knowing when to inquire the
services of someone who knows more than you do.
Ignorance is not bliss, ignorance allows you to be taken
advantage of and put into a never-ending cycle of never getting ahead. People think that money is the answer to
their money problems, but that is not true, “Money without financial
intelligence, is money soon gone” – (Robert T. Kiyosaki). There is a reason why
people who hit the lottery or get drafted in the NBA lottery go broke; because
they have no idea how to handle the large amounts of money they receive due to
ignorance.
The school system has failed us all; sure I am smarter and
became smarter with each year of schooling but in what? I put in countless hours of studying in
Chemistry, Calculus and Shakespeare in the hopes of becoming what every college
promises “a well rounded individual”. School
has failed me and continues to fail us all and keep us stuck in the middle
class that gets further and further away from the rich.
Think about it, who was the last big success that graduated
college? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs?
Mark Zuckerberg? Jenny Craig? Michael Dell?
Ray Kroc? Henry Ford? Walt
Disney? Andrew Carnegie? They all did not graduate from college and I think
they turned out okay. Thomas Edison
founder of a company that we all know today, General Electric, also did not graduate from college. He was even called dumb and
thought to be stupid by many of his teachers growing up.
School takes the individuality out of us and makes us
believe that mistakes are bad and that we are stupid for making them. The greatest inventions in our lifetime have
come from someone making mistake after mistake and learning from it. We all learned how to ride a bike by making
mistakes. No one was taught to ride a
bike. There is no book you can read that
will teach you how to ride a bike. You
simply need to make mistake after mistake until you finally learn how to ride a
bike.
Making mistakes and learning from them is what makes us
human and brings out the best in each and everyone of us. College teaches from the book and turns you
into someone that doesn’t think outside the box because it is frowned
upon. Some of the best businesses came
from outside the box thinking, but us college graduates will never be the owner
of those businesses. We will be stuck
working for those outside the box thinkers for a modest wage and counting our
pennies till the day we die because that is what college taught us to do.
