cheated

If I could change one thing, it would be my decision to have gone to college. I bought into the lie that "you can't get ahead without a degree". Like many people I know, I swallowed academia's perennial sales pitch. Please, before you decide to make a commitment of thousands of dollars and 4 years of your youth, check out the other options. Please take a look at the U.S. Labor Department's projections of where the jobs are. Compare the percentage that will require a degree to the percentage of people who will receive a degree. The numbers won't be stacked in your favor when you graduate. I hope that many of you will check out careers in the building trades and other skilled trades that actually pay more than most jobs that actually do require a degree. Instead of paying for 4 years of education, you'll be in a payed training program for about a year. Then you'll have a a job that pays real money.

Academia won't tell you about this. It can't. My experience, like that of many who majored in fields that were marketable only according to an academic advisor, is that most of these people will lie very convincingly about job prospects and earnings potential. They have to in order to get you into their classrooms, so that their jobs (cushy, well-paying ones), will continue. Please don't ever kid yourself about academia's bottom line motives. It is a business. And it needs your tuition dollars to survive. And it will do what it has to do to get those dollars.

Please, before you make the decision to go to college, do your homework.

Best of luck.
Scott