Am I wrong to regret attending college? (Yale)

Colleges & Universities Yale University
1

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:

  1. I think my critical thinking skills improved (hard to verify)
  2. I became a good writer
  3. some friends and I’ve benefitted a bit from the social network and brand name
  4. first couple years were enjoyable, before I got sick of lectures and started having panic attacks

The cons

  1. I wasted 4 years not developing employable skills
  2. I wasted 4 years not understanding how companies operate, and gaining work experience (which companies demand)
  3. Stress - dating back to me be a perfectionist in K-12, and lasting until the mental health crisis incubator that is Ivy League
  4. 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

  1. Junior years, I started having panic attacks. To this day, I’m anti-social. Those attributes are too common at Ivy League schools.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

2

One more thing. I don’t think most people at Yale (or any college) are there fore the right reasons. We go to college because it’s the thing to do. We pick Yale because it’s selective and prestigious. It doesn’t matter to us that professors are largely chosen for research ability rather than teaching ability because we’re not there to learn. It’s a mentality that I find very troubling.

3

Something else that Yale doesn’t teach is lifestyle design. Five years out of yale, it occurred to me that I’d never taken a vacation. Going there might condition you to be a quarantined workaholic. You might never learn to maintain a good social life (main social activity on campus is drinking), achieve balance etc. This was a real struggle for me.

4

Yale people are successful because Yale only lets in talented people. I think Peter Theil is right to compare Ivy League school’s to nightclubs. Their value is not so much in what they add but in the exclusivity they offer.

5

@Doncic42 : I believe Ivies are the best place for pre-professional students. IMHO, a terminal degree from an Ivy is not ideal. Most people get an advanced degree afterwards. A lot of students from Ivies don’t need to find jobs. (their parents arrange jobs for them) I remember George Bush’s speech which reminds graduates C-grade students can achieve greatness too. For those who need to find jobs after Ivy, I agree with you most Ivies are not the best place to learn employable skills. My spouse’s cousin’s daughter is graduating this year from a Midwest flagship with an accounting degree. she already has an offer from one of the Big Four accounting firms in Chicago. It is major, major, major which matters. The name of the school often backfires. We don’t hire people from big name schools. The owner of the company said they are using us as the stepping stone due to bad experience in the past (we have a total of more than 1000 employees in the group). I have talked about mental health to the point that annoys some people from UChicago. Yale is not too bad in this regard actually. I have also talked about the difference between undergraduate-focused and graduate(research)-focused schools to the point that people get bored. Thank you for your honesty sharing your experience.

6

Doncic42, I am so sorry your experience at Yale was so negative. It was heartbreaking to read it. I have three kids who attended Yale so I have some perspective. Yale was clearly not a fit for you given your expectations. Yale is essentially a liberals arts institution with an overarching ideal of encouraging students to explore new ideas and study broadly. All of my kids took coursework entirely outside of their academic interests…and consider it to have been a gift! None of them graduated with majors that would be considered pre-professional (Yale doesn’t actually offer to many of these unless you count Economics, Math or Engineering). All three secured selective positions in Finance and Consulting upon graduation. In fact, one of my son’s college roommates was a music major and secured a job at a boutique hedge fund upon graduation. None of them secured these jobs through family connections. Again, I am so sorry that Yale was not a fit for you. But I don’t want others reading this post to generalize from your experience, or more importantly, generalize about “Ivy’s”. The eight schools in this sports league are very diverse and will offer very difference cultures and academic opportunities. Students looking to prepare for an accounting position following graduation will likely not find what they are looking for at Yale. Students who are eager to and will appreciate four years to explore diverse and disparate academic interests and ideas will love it! Best wishes to you.

7

Thanks for the responses. I didn’t mean to be overly negative. Just putting out a certain perspective and genuinely curious about the responses.

Part of why I wanted to throw out that perspective is that people’s psychological attitude toward college tends to be so ra-ra i.e. wearing school name on t-shirt, donating to your school etc.

8

@Doncic42 Did you go to Yale for free, i.e., get financial aid? If so, not too bad. I also went to an Ivy long time ago, for almost free but I hated STEM courses even though I got 800 in SAT math (mainly because I could not imagine electrons and atoms swirling around me), and took whatever courses I wanted to take without ANY regard to getting a job in future. Like you, I guess I improved in reading and writing and realizing that colleges don’t teach you all that much. I worked one year after college, went to law school, set up my own company after one or two years and did well enough to retire early. Looking back, going to college helped me in following ways:

  1. Getting a degree.
  2. Knowing I was just as smart as other kids at an Ivy college even though I got 3.0 GPA and didn't study as much. I got 4.0 one semester when I studied just to see if I could get good grades. I also found out what qualities I lacked and what good qualities I possessed; and more importantly, I learned to go with my strong qualities instead of worrying about my bad qualities. This was the key for me: I could go on and on thinking about my bad qualities, but I realized suddenly that not many people had my strong qualities which was very good for someone who wanted to start his own business. I can honestly say I was totally unafraid to start my own business and not too afraid of failing because I failed plenty before.
  3. Finding out what I wanted to do with my life.

Unlike most kids, I could not wait to graduate from college and get on with a real life. But unlike you, I never regretted going to college because I was not psychologically or emotionally ready to start my own business or venture after high school; a college for almost free was not a terrible place to be for me to realize my own shortcomings and strengths and getting sick of academics and wanting to do something in the real world.

9

“Students who are eager to and will appreciate four years to explore diverse and disparate academic interests and ideas will love it!” Yeah, but they’re paying a price, and not just in money (or years spent before Yale preparing to be a candidate). If they jump into the workforce post high school, they learn an enormous amount, and get 4 years of work experience, the latter of which is really important. Companies demand that work experience and it helps the maturity of the person getting it. And at the right company, it could be more enjoyable. The opportunity cost of college is so great, IMO, (even for a school like Yale), that I think it’s hard to justify. Again, just my opinion. Thank you very much for your thoughts.

10

A college degree is still a minimum requirement for a vast majority of professional jobs…whether that’s “fair” or not, or whether the degree gives you workplace knowledge or not, without a diploma you will be shut out of many, many, many corporate jobs. I know that you feel like you missed out on a lot of workplace experience, but as a brand new high school grad, with no work experience, I’m not sure what valuable workplace experience you could have been eligible for. This is a factor that you are completely missing in your analysis.

In general, I believe a college education is not really meant to accumulate workplace skills…that happens in the workplace, and as you’ve learned, there is so much variety there that it is really a learn by doing thing. College deepens your critical thinking skills, communications, basically I look at it as keep expanding that brain and a use it or lose it kind of thing. Also you are developing the soft skills that will transfer to the workplace…time management, collaboration, leadership, “followership”, working under deadline and under pressure, organizational skills, and yes, some hard data that may transfer directly to your job…or may not.

I do agree that college is not right, or “worth it” for everyone, and further, Ivy Leagues are not right for everyone.

11

“The name of the school often backfires.” There’s a lot to this. I think one of the lessons from my five years post-Yale is that doing the tough and prestigious thing (with regard to school selection and other decisions) can easily backfire.

12

@websensation I didn’t pay much. The chasm between my negative opinion and the “lets all donate” rah-rah opinion of others toward their schools is part of what I don’t get. K-12, most kids don’t like school. All of a sudden, everyone loooves school (when in my opinion, a whole host of major problems become introduced i.e. goes from free to crazy expensive)

I think it’s hard to overstate the value of something like climate. When it’s dark and cold, you feel bad. What it’s warm and sunny, you feel good. At least for me. So I envy friends of mind who got through high school with B’s and C’s, attended college at the beach, perhaps a much larger school with fewer demands and far more course availability (i.e. University of Miami).

Much of my negativity is due to more recent stress. My post-Yale years had a lot of challenges. That’s why I look back and wish I’d started sooner with getting employable skills, understanding companies etc.

13

@TS0104 Good point!

14

@Doncic42 Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. Now, while I think that likely most kids who go to Yale have a much more positive experience, it is good to have this alternative personal viewpoint for comparison. If nothing else, it is a cautionary tale about going to any place, especially highly competitive “elite” schools for the wrong reasons.

It is also a good counterweight for those kids who think that Yale or Harvard, or any colleges with a big name, is automatically everybody’s dream school because of it’s fame and prestige.

Yale is likely the perfect school for many kids, who will go there and will enjoy very minute, but I think that they usually are ones who go there for the right reasons, or are kids whose personalities and expectations from school fit Yale (or any other school).

Anyways, I hope your life got back on track since then.

On the topic of “I learned nothing in college”. Colleges do not provide a person with an education, they provide a person with the opportunity to gain an education. Anybody who comes into any college with a passive attitude towards education will be disappointed. Taking the courses required to get a degree, and passing them, will get you a degree. Taking the courses that will provide you with an education will provide you with an education. However, it is true that to get an education from a college, you must go to the right college. And for most kids, that college isn’t the most prestigious college that they know of.

15

@Doncic42 - about the panic attacks. I’ve suffered from these as well, and they were particularly bad during college. The solution I’ve found that works for me, and might for you as well, is the Buddhist cliche of “being one with universe”. This has nothing to do with knowledge, on the contrary, it’s more like feeling very, very small in a very large universe/multiverse. The next time you feel a panic attack coming on, try to get that “looking out on the Grand Canyon” feeling. You are insignificant, the people around you are as well and that’s just the nature of things. Try this and see how it works.

The trouble with being at a prestigious school is you tend to get an inflated self-image. This can mimic some types of mental illness, where the sufferer starts to think that the world revolves around them. The trick is to try to break out of that however you can.

16

@MWolf Thanks!

@damon30 Yep, I found Buddhism! : ) Thanks

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np. btw, that was Buddhism-by-analogy, not the actual religion :slight_smile:

18

A summary of all this is that my 5 years post-Yale had plenty of career challenges. I wish I’d dove straight into the workforce to bypass / get through that stuff, especially given the stresses, costs etc. of Yale.

19

But diving straight into the workforce probably wouldn’t have taken you very far without a college degree, as an above poster noted. The OP’s perception of the counterfactual here (working right after high school) doesn’t seem very realistic and in real life probably wouldn’t satisfied the OP either.

Edited to say that if you had never worked before in high school, then I agree that working can be useful.

20

@CheddarcheeseMN ok, ok. perhaps thats the right answer. jobs just won’t take you without a college degree. fair enough.