Prepare yourself, chill out and read it happily while sipping out of your favorite tea or coffee. Don’t take the post too seriously but also don’t take it too lightly. I am not into convincing someone to not do that and that - I am the one who claims the best teacher is you making your own mistakes.

TLDR; - For me it was not worth it, but it can be for you

Introduction

I’ve got an engineer’s degree now. I’ve studied software engineering. Now I know how to code, make websites, databases - connect all these things together and also understand how they work behind the curtains. I have to say it was yet the most difficult path of my entire life. The amount of information, knowledge and skills gathered is enormous and I can feel the “now and before“ difference. One thing I am not sure if it was because of my burning enthusiasm to learn new things or because the college forced me to. One way or another - I would say both had an influence on me but I’ve got a feeling that I was the one responsible for learning so much. Why I think so? Because the school hasn’t taught me (technological) things which I am making money right now with. I’m not saying all things school taught me are worthless - some was really worth it.

What was school good for

School forced me to do projects. “We want you to do Z and you start from A”. You’ve got a few things for start and we want to reach some result Z. They don’t tell you anything else. This is where all the fun ends. You need to research all things from A to Z. And in IT problem solving doesn’t work at linear scale. It kinda works at quadratical/exponential scale. In usual case, for example if you don’t know how to cut a tree, you buy a book “How to cut a tree” where you learn step by step how to do it. First you have to sharpen your axe, then slash the axe to the tree by some angle and repeat the process until you finally cut your tree down. The process of learning was linear because the steps are well described and in physical world very well imagined and doable. In software however, things usually aren’t linear. Learning and doing things requires a lot more time and effort as previously planned.

When you learn new things in computer science you usually don’t know how deep the rabbit hole is.

Imagine you are completely below the tree and need to get on top of it for some reason.

In software engineering you are unable to say how tall a tree is. All you can see is how thick/big is the tree from below. As you can see on the image, both of the trees look the same from the below, however their heights are different which we realize after we climb onto that tree later. When you want to solve the problem in computer science, all you see is a problem and almost never can predict all subproblems which can occur at some point in the future. This was exactly what I was experiencing at learning new things. I wasn’t driving directly to the Z solution. Instead one problem leads to another subproblems to be solved - it maybe goes further and one subproblem requires another subsubproblems solutions. This way I’ve learned a lot of things not directly needed for the final problem solution and of course required time was higher than expected.

At this point you may believe me it wasn’t sleeping in a bed of roses. It taught me how to solve problems, search for solutions and get tough overall.

The main question though is, if the college is needed for acquiring all these super abilities. College was in my case threat telling me if I didn’t complete all my duties up to the specified deadlines, I would mess up my grades which would lead to failing the subject. With decreased amount of credits you can get into another troubles leading to dropping out. Thoughts on spending time and effort without result isn’t something one wants to experience. In this way the college was perfect for getting work done. On the contrary, if I wouldn’t go to college and had time to learn things by myself - there is a big chance I would procastinate a lot and don’t learn anything.

A good thing about my country is free education for all - which is not a case for the USA for example. Imagine you don’t know what to do with your life and you just decide to go to college. Gaining student loan and after a year you realize that this is not for you, drop out or anything else - now you need to pay these loans off, get a job and live at least some comfortable life. A lot of people end up with thousands of dollars with debt unable to pay it back.

Motivation

What is really your motivation to study? Knowledge? Money? Social status? For me it was money and I doubt that there is a big mass of people going study only to find a cure to cancer - of course a lot of people want to go study for applying to those better paid jobs. With the knowledge I would gain a job in the IT. With the degree I would gain a job with an even higher salary. Well guess what, you can get a decent job without a degree. Have you ever thought about how much money you would make after 5 years of working right after high school? On the other side, when you end up with a degree - well, you are probably poor as a church mouse and have nothing but degree and cosy place inside your parent’s house (and maybe liver cirrhosis from frequent alcohol feasting).

Self-taught is not for everyone

My field of study is perfect. Demand is enormous and salary is high. Work in most cases doesn’t require accountability for anything (not banking sector case). You can learn from free documentation, online courses, YouTube videos, you name it! You can freely use other people’s libraries, packages and open-source software and make money from it without reinventing another wheel. Big companies like facebook, google, microsoft are consistently creating tools for even faster and cleaner development and don’t want even a penny from it.

On the other side, would you trust self-taught heart surgeon or “before and after” name titled? I would probably choose the other option. What about lawyer? What about {name whoever you trust with a title}? For these types of job degree is must be - and should be rewarded proportionatedly to responsibility the job itself requires.

My motivation to go to college was simple - I want to learn to programme, make code, web and other stuff with which I would be able to make pretty good money. However, I didn’t know what the internet provides - the endless space of information on whatever topic you can imagine. Then the next thing I didn’t know was an IT employers are pretty benevolent to those skilled, but without a degree at the same time - You won’t be hired everywhere, but lack of developers and high demand sets market in the way employers don’t have another option. I know what I am talking about because I was hired to my first IT company before I got a degree.

The money thing

Image two parallel paths you would choose - One in which you would study really hard, had no work, had nothing for 5 years and in the second one you would work in some worse paid job. After college you would make two times more. How would you end up with money?

If you would make 2x more after 5 year college as your second without-college parallel self, you would overtake your hard-working self in 5-6 years after the end of college.

What about the case when you would be really smart and invested that money to index funds? Index funds had really good appreciation in the last few years - 18% a year. We must take into consideration financial crysis which can happen over time. So I set this appreciation to only 6%.

In this case, the college student would overtake its working path in 8 years after college.

6% is in my opinion really conservative scenario. What would happen if we were lucky and had at least 10% for a long period of time ?

As you can see, blue college path would maybe overtake red one in a long distant future.

Conclusion

This is of course only hypothetical and math-only reasoning about future. You can’t predict what can possibly happen. You can get sick and unable to work. On the other side, you can fail an exam and drop out from school and got no degree at all. Market can crash. Parents can kick you out of a house for some reason (extreme case). Whatever can happen. What I want to say and picture here is that you shouldn’t go to college for money. If you truly love to be doctor or heart surgeon at some point in the future - you should go there and do what you love. But if you study because you believe you wouldn’t have a financial problems - don’t go. A lot of people with a degree have financial problems as well. If your parents persist on you going to college - good luck for convincing them about the opposite. If their reasoning is flimsy or even better case - no reasoning at all as to why you should go, this is the warning finger telling you their thinking is obsolete and stubborn (because they said so).

I know, all paths are unpredictable. But thinking college is the all-problems solution is not really healthy. Every path carries its own issues - you won’t find sweatless solution for the problem. In this post I’ve shown you a different point of view on the “go vs not-go college” issue which is quite popularly discussed in modern society. Make your own opinion and your own decision - because bad ones can make you a lot of trouble in the future. Remember, time is money and college requires a lot of time, money and effort.