Should you go to college?

So College is what every parent wants for their child, but what matters the most is, is college what the child wants or needs? In the past I remember my parents telling me "You'd better go to college or you'll be digging ditches" and now those ditch diggers are laughing at us because they are making sixtyfive dollars an hour on average. In the past it used to be that when you got a four to six year college degree you were set for life, but we all know that is not true anymore. I remember reading in a article some time ago a quote from Karl Christopher, a placement councelor at the Columbia Area Career Center vocational program, where he was saying "A four-year degree in business? What does that get you? A shift supervisor at a store in the mall!". The reality is nobody is college bound, so I think it's not fair for High Schools to push everybody into these college for everyone ideal. What if you are a technical or a creative person, will going to college for computers for 4 years make sense? Sixty percent of what you learn in college is going to be forgotten by the time you graduate besides the fact that their curriculum is not current enough to match the changes in technology. A technical trade school would do that and they are only one to three years. Let me ask you this question, how many people do you know in college who go and have no idea what they wanna do? You know why they keep going to college? Because they have been going to school their whole life, that's what they know and that's what their parents expect of them. Now these people are just wasting time and money, rememeber the average student loan is about $23.000 by the time you graduate. Now that is a lot of money! Why wouldn't parents who may have saved a college fund for their kids take that money, give that money to a kid who is entrepreneurial and let him start their own business or use part of that money to pay a technical school meawhile throwing the bases of their own business? See, we are in this mindset that college means success and with today's economy it is just not the case anymore. Personally I would much rather have money now and find my way to invest them rather than spend those money in hopes to make more money later in the future, a college degree doesn't guaratee you anything! Now, I'm not saying they are not useful, if you wanna be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher than you absolutely need to get a degree as you may very well be aware of. The vast majority of jobs out there do not require a degree and if you are going to college just so you can say that I graduated from this college of that college than you are really making yourself an injustice. I'm not against intellectualism and I'm not here to say that colleges are just a waist of money, I'm just saying that the whole notion of a four-year college degree is just not practical for anyone. Remember that Mark Zuckerberg never graduated college, and Sean Parker never even went to college proving that succes and education are not necessarily linked.

Thoughts on life...

I've never been the kind of kid that studied. I've never felt the need to study maybe because all I was learning was a bunch of crap that I did not care about, maybe because I considered myself too smart for what I was studying; either way I never fit in with all the "good" kids of my town. When I was in High School every single time I woke up to go to school I felt like my day was going to be so unproductive and I have this thing that if I don't do something productive by the end of the day I start feeling "guilty" and I'll keep that depression-type felling for the whole night. Just lately I've discovered that if I do something physical, intellectual, social and work involving I feel balanced by the end of the day. Getting back to the topic, I kept living my life like a parasite, just because my parents were telling me to and because they approved of it. If it was up to me I would have never gone to college, even though I was studying stuff that I cared. I felt like my time was being wasted because those were facts that I could have learned just with a Google search. When I dropped out of college and got a job at a clothing shop in Washington I realized that I had been going through so much pain for nothing. School wasn't for me and it will never be. All the schools go around saying that they "prepare us for our future" when in reality they are just turning us into buckets filled with not useful knowledge. All they ever teach us about is humanistic concepts that wont turn into nothing. They are making us cultured people but they are not teaching me how to use it in order to "survive". What I mean by survive is make money, because at the end of the day what matters is money and everything we learn or know must turn into money, it's sad but it's true. So getting back to the original point (I know I ramble a lot) all I ever learned in school was notions that I've never used in my life. As I am laying here on my chaise long with a beautiful view of the Colosseum I am proud of myself for not being the typical American guy who goes on a hike on the weekend with his family. I broke the schemes, I was able to forget everything that was ever taught to me and I educated myself according to my schemes. I left everything I had in the US to start a new life and I have to say that I was worth it. I hope this inspires someone as just thinking about how much I have accomplished in the past year keeps motivating me.

If nothing motivates you, try this.

-Roger