Thanks College!
This is an article that I wish I couldn’t relate to, but I can. Despite graduating with a decent GPA buffered by a much better in-major GPA, along with the prerequisite myriad of internships, this terrible job market has been to me what it has been to so many others.
The upside, thus far, has been plenty of time to play with and learn things that I didn’t quite have the time for in college. I’ve messed around a lot with IPTables, file system repair, moving from POP to IMAP server-side and client-side. Just today, I played around with FreeBSD, and the last time did that was probably shortly after downloading 4.0 via a 56k modem something like ten years ago. It’s fun (for me) and might just find usefulness in a job, when—and hopefully not if—I find one.
I’m having this same problem. In fact, I even feel the courses were inadequate and that I am not prepared for the jobs they “told me I would be able to get”.
I will go so far as to say that college was a poor decision and complete waste of time. I have learned more (and still am) on my own than I ever learned in college. In college, I learned to get by with whatever and skipping class since it was mostly all busy work. The programming was not done with real world examples. The graphic design teachers were not strict enough in their critiques. In some web design classes, I knew more than the professor. What a sad time I had, and now I’m $17,000 in debt because of it.
I feel the exact same way. I think there are very few departments in college truly worth attending college for: engineering, sciences, and, uh, that’s it. It’s not that I don’t believe educations outside those areas are worthless, but rather, they generally don’t give their students anything that cannot be attained outside of our ridiculously overpriced universities. History? Read a lot of books, that’s all you’re going to be doing anyway, and I had a roommate who was a history major to prove it. The same holds true for so many of the degrees that are handed out: lots of reading with little-to-no hands-on practical experience.
I started off in a computer engineering program, and it was difficult, to say the least, but it was worth it for someone who wants to pursue that as a career. I hated the material I was learning, and after two years, I switched to business (business information technology, to be more specific), which was nothing short of an absolute joke. I gained almost nothing through it, other than a piece of paper HR insists that I have before they’ll even talk to me.
And there really wasn’t much room to excel either. The averages in my classes were often in the high C/low B range, so average wasn’t truly average. Getting an A doesn’t mean nearly as much when the majority of students are achieving above-average grades.
Regardless, like you, I’ve learned far more in playing with Linux, UNIX, and all the software running on it in the past ten years than I ever learned in college.
I’d take it all back if I could. I should have stopped after a year or two into it.
I would take it all back as well. Really, the self-discipline I gained through taking two years of engineering classes was the most valuable thing I “earned” in college. And even that wasn’t worth the money spent on tuition. It’s one thing to be young and unemployed. It’s another to be young, unemployed, and in tons of debt because of college.
