This sounds very negative and degenerate, but please hear me out. These are the words I wish I heard 7 years ago. When faced with a decision, many times our gut instinct is to go with the decision that’s popular and agreeable. Many times we have prejudice ; we have an unshakeable ideal in something, and whenever a cold hard fact challenges our hypothesis, we automatically reject it to protect our views. We saw this with Brexit. People refused to believe Britain would split, so any contrary information was automatically rejected. If 1000 people tell you that X is true, but you see with your own eyes that X has never worked for you, then X may very well be false (at least for you). Here, the ideal is that college is always synonymou with progress and quitting make you a failure.
Sometimes when the morale that works for most people doesn’t work for you, you have to make a decision for yourself and not other people. If everyone tells you to stick through it and not be a quitter, but you apparently see that college is not providing what you need, don’t stay just so you can be righteous, brave and triumphant. If your college experience is miserable and is not taking you in a positive direction, quit for the time being. Return again if and when you have a good game plan, but every semester and dollar you spend propping up an unsustainable regimen is wasted. If you hate your major and realize it won’t help you in life, it’s not too late to change the program. No, in that case, you wouldn’t be spending an extra year. You would be saving yourself 2 years of agony, actually.
In my case, I started college at 19 despite not being ready for it at all. I had many issues: severe depression, Aspergers, mood disorder, other co-morbidities, a lack of social skills, a sheltered childhood, a lack of real-world experience, little work experience, a delay in emotional maturity, a difficulty in large social atmospheres. Anyone with all of this in mind would never suggest such a profile to go to college. They would rightly suggest that this person seek psychological help, get a simple job for a while and live life a bit, and then go to college at a later age when they can handle it.
But the vast majority of people in my social circle told me that I should continue college and never give up. I tallied it. 20 of my friends/family told me to keep going and only 1 told me quit. It seems like a slanted scale, but the person who told me to quit was my girlfriend at the time who had a better understanding of who I was and what my needs were than all the others. But why did the other 20 tell me to stay? (1) It reflected a good attitude of optimism, (2) They didn’t see the many invisible issues I had, (3) They assumed that because I was smart, college would automatically be good for me, (4) They were thinking of what advice they would’ve wanted in their situation, (5) They didn’t want to be responsible if I dropped out and regretted it. None of these reasons actually supported the notion that me remaining in college was a good idea for me personally.
I got help, I worked on myself over the years, I re-enrolled in college, and I’m doing much better. But I wanted to share this writeup in hopes of helping someone else. I see a lot of posts here about regretted majors and so on, and no matter how radical or how shameful a decision may seem on the surface, if changing course is best for your health and success, you should do it.