I graduated in 2010 as #2 in my HS class. I went to Yale. My current opinion is that I should have never attended college. Am I wrong to feel this way?
The benefits of going:
- I think my critical thinking skills improved (hard to verify)
- I became a good writer
- some friends and I’ve benefitted a bit from the social network and brand name
- first couple years were enjoyable, before I got sick of lectures and started having panic attacks
The cons
- I wasted 4 years not developing employable skills
- I wasted 4 years not understanding how companies operate, and gaining work experience (which companies demand)
- Stress - dating back to me be a perfectionist in K-12, and lasting until the mental health crisis incubator that is Ivy League
- I think the Ivy League tract took a huge toll on my social skill development
Further thoughts…
“Consumption Good” - was Yale worth it as a good in itself?
Yale was cold, stressful, and boring (long lectures, for years). Read the Yale Daily News on any given day and you will find that poor mental health dominates the headlines. After Yale, I moved to sunny California, joined the fitness scene, started skateboarding, and enjoyed life more than at Yale.
“Investment” - was Yale worth it as an investment?
Had I been a doctor, lawyer etc. then perhaps it would have been. I’ve had jobs in strategy, pm, product marketing; not the sort of thing for which you absolutely need college (i.e. doctor). So… my jobs have never required me to use the course material from my four years at Yale.
What I particularly regret failing to acquire from Yale, which I would have acquired from other paths are (A) employable skills, and (B) a knowledge of how different career types differ
(A) employable skills - I can’t code. I only just taught myself SQL… with Udacity. I had to work very hard to find jobs that would train me skills like financial accounting and Google Analytics. I don’t give Yale credit for helping me get those jobs.
Perhaps you’re thinking that I should have better selected courses. Yale had just one class for financial accounting and the reviews were terrible. There were also terrible reviews for computer science so I took neither. In short, it fails its students by giving them a dearth of employable skills. In retrospect, I should have attended something much more similar to General Assembly, and taken at least 6 credits in job functions i.e. a class in Content Marketing, a class in Digital Marketing, a class in Product Marketing, a class in Google Analytics, a class in SQL, a class in finance.
(B) Yale didn’t teach me how career types differ. I did two internships when I was at Yale (the third year, I was unable to get one). One was on Capitol Hill. The other was a quarantined office in a corporate headquarters. After college, I knew I wanted something non-technical i.e. strategy, business analyst/associate, consultant, marketing specialist, content marketer, product marketer, digital marketer, business and operations associate. I didn’t understand how these jobs differed. I made efforts to understand the difference, but it took a while. Only once I got to a 400-person heavily matrixed company, where I was exposed to the different job types, did I finally get a good understanding of all the business functions and how they differ. I wasted years post-Yale without that understanding.
Yale also failed to prepare me to succeed in my career by © failing to inform me of basic truths about how companies work. Example - I applied for jobs by ruthlessly pitching myself as a renaissance man. (I took my first job in finance because I figured that finance is harder than marketing, so if I do a year of finance, then I’ll be chosen for any marketing job. Wrong!) I’ve since learned that is the stupidest strategy possible. Employers cast people by type, and want to hire someone who has done that specific job and ideally, only that job. While my failure to understand that might seem uniquely stupid, the point is that diving into the real world post-high school rather than spending four years in fantasy land would have done me good.
Closing thoughts
- Junior years, I started having panic attacks. To this day, I’m anti-social. Those attributes are too common at Ivy League schools.
- Lastly, OPPORTUNITY COST. Those who advocate going to college, especially in this day and age, suffer from a lack of imagination regarding other means of leisure and investment, IMO.
- Watch video of the 2015 protests. There is plenty of anguish on campus.
I’M VERY INTERESTED IN OTHERS’ THOUGHTS. THIS IS NOT SO MUCH A RANT AS AN INQUIRE REGARDING HOW I MIGHT BE WRONG.