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I am not a fan of the higher education business model. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the American public. First, in order to get its flagship credential—the vaunted bachelor’s degree—you have to spend two-thirds of your time studying material that has nothing to do with your major. Second, it’s entirely possible to get a bachelor’s degree and still have no skills that any employer values.
But here’s the rub. The bachelor degree is a scam with benefits. In order to be employed in certain professions, take certain licensing exams, or attend graduate school, you need a bachelor’s degree. And, sadly, because so many employers now use a bachelor’s degree as a screening device, you very often need a bachelor’s degree just to get an interview with a potential employer. So until there’s a more sane way of certifying that people have certain skills and knowledge, I can’t in good conscience advise a young person to forego a bachelor’s degree. Foregoing a bachelor’s degree will limit a young person’s opportunities.
Bottom line: A bachelor’s degree is a worthwhile pursuit, but only if you pursue it mindfully. Pursue a bachelor’s degree willy-nilly and the college-industrial complex will savage your wallet with all sorts of avoidable costs. So if you’re a young person, your job is to make it through the college scam with the least amount of financial pain as possible. Here are two ways to accomplish that.
Avoid Student Loan Debt Like the Plague
Way back in 2015, I wrote a post on the degree requirements for a computer major at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It turns out, of the forty courses required for a bachelor’s degree, only sixteen pertained to computers. This means that twenty-four courses were utterly superfluous. Now a question. If paying cash for twenty-four superfluous courses is a waste of money, what is paying for twenty-four superfluous courses with debt? A super waste of money. Instead of paying x for knowledge you don’t need and won’t remember, you wind up paying 2x or 3x.
Using debt to pay for a bachelor’s degree only compounds the college scam. So if you value your wallet and your dignity, avoid student loan debt at all costs. Here’s how to pull that off.
- Go to a local college, preferably one that is operated by the state.
- Live with your parents. Free room and board is a great college hack.
- Get at least a part-time job.
- Cash-flow tuition, fees, and books with your income and any help your parents are able to provide. If you can’t afford to go college full-time with this financing plan, go part-time.
- Eff the college experience. You don’t need to live in a dorm hundreds of miles away from home in order to attend a college football game, perform the walk of shame, or get blotto.
Don’t Assume a Bachelor’s Degree Equals Skills that Anyone Is Willing to Pay For
I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in public administration. This equates to 19 years of formal education if you include kindergarten. And you know what all those years of lectures, required readings, and studying got me, besides two pieces of paper? Absolutely nothing. When I began my journalism studies, I was a construction inspector for a rinky-dink municipality. When I received my MPA some eight years later, I was still a construction inspector for a rinky-dink municipality. Now, granted, I didn’t receive my degrees from Ivy League schools. Long Island University and Baruch College don’t have the same cachet as Columbia and Harvard. But the fact remains, I still had no worthwhile skills from an employer’s perspective. Oh, sure, I could construct a perfectly competent sentence. And if you wanted to discuss the impact of James Q. Wilson’s Broken Windows Theory on crime abatement, I was your man. But if you needed someone to audit a company’s books, design a house, or set up a computer network, you’d have to look elsewhere.
Caveat emptor, groovy freedomist. Never assume that a bachelor’s degree is going to provide you with concrete skills (i.e., skills some employer wants and is willing to pay handsomely for).
So how do you leave college with concrete skills? For starters, don’t study a hobby-related major such as sociology, gender studies, journalism, or history. No one’s going to pay you a middle-class salary just because you know the intersectionality of income inequality and third-wave African-American lesbianism. Go to college and study a trade-related major—nursing, accounting, computers, engineering, etc. But even here you have to be careful. There’s no guarantee that the ivory tower’s understanding of concrete skills is synonymous with the real world’s understanding of concrete skills. In order to leave college with concrete skills, you have to do two things. You have to discover what concrete skills are valued by the real-life practitioners of your dream job or profession, and then you have to learn those concrete skills. Here’s an example of what I mean.
Suppose for a moment that you decide to major in computers or business in college and you have a fascination with data. You want to be a data analyst one day. Go to Google and enter the following:
10 things every data analyst should know
Next, go through the results and click on a handful of links that have “data analyst” in the title. Then make note of the concrete skills described. You should see a pattern. Here, for instance, are the first five links I came across with “data analyst” in the title.
8 Key Skills Needed To Work As A Data Analyst
5 Essential Skills Every Big Data Analyst Should Have
Ultimate Skills Checklist For Your First Data Analyst Job
Tips For Becoming A Data Analyst
3 Paths To Your First Data Analyst Job
And here are the concrete skills described. The concrete skills that came up at least twice are highlighted in red.
| Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3 | Link 4 | Link 5 (The Starting from Zero Path) |
| Learn a scripting language and a statistical language | Learn a programming language such as Python | Learn Python and R | Be curious | Learn Python or R |
| Learn Adobe and Google Analytics | Learn quantitative skills such as multivariate calculus and linear algebra | Learn descriptive and inferential statistics | Think of everything as a dependent or independent variable | Learn descriptive and inferential statistics |
| Learn campaign management | Learn Excel and SQL | Learn multivariate calculus and linear algebra | Understand the difference between continuous and discrete variables | Learn multivariate calculus and linear algebra |
| Learn data visualization software | Understand the business your analyzing | Understand the basics of machine learning | Be a team player | Understand machine learning |
| Develop a creative mind | Become adept at interpreting data | Learn SQL | Train your skeptical muscles | Learn SQL and mySQL |
| Know advanced Excel skills | Learn data visualization | Be detail oriented | Learn data visualization | |
| Know SQL | Learn data intuition | Cherish precision | Learn data intuition | |
| Be a good team player | Remember that best practices aren’t always common practices | |||
| Meet expectations | ||||
| Put yourself in other people’s shoes |
From the highlighted concrete skills, it doesn’t take a genius to see what concrete skills are deemed critical to real-life data analysts.
Python
R
SQL
Excel
Multivariate calculus
Linear algebra
Descriptive statistics
Inferential statistics
Machine learning
Data visualization
Data intuition
Now, once you know what concrete skills are valued by your dream job or profession, your job is to have a strong foundation in these skills before you get a vaunted bachelor’s degree. Happily, your college should be a big help in this regard. Any college worth its salt should have algebra, calculus, statistics, programming (Python), and database (SQL) courses.
But remember, you don’t take one course in something and know it forever. I took two calculus courses in college and did rather well in them. Yet today, nearly forty years later, I couldn’t solve a differential equation if my life depended on it. So these skills must be honed every day. The good news is that the resources needed to learn these skills are mostly free (Python and SQL Server Developer can both be downloaded for free). You just got to carve out an hour or two everyday for these extracurricular activities, so to speak.
Where would you be if you followed my Groovy guide to doing college right? Hmmm…let’s see. You’d be debt free. You’d have a piece of paper that entitled you to more interviews than the dudes and dudettes without a piece of paper. And you’d have the concrete skills that employers in your desired field are looking for. Something tells me you’d be better off than most of your peers.
Final Thoughts
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Are my two ways of mitigating the college scam something young people and their parents should consider? Or are my two ways of mitigating the college scam a bunch of alt-FI* bullcrap? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. And have a glorious weekend. Peace.
* Not really sure what the definition of alt-financial independence is. It’s a takeoff on the alt-left, alt-right monikers from the political realm. All I know is that I don’t have the same degree of reverence for higher education that most personal finance bloggers have. So that makes me “alt” in at least one regard. I got to think about this. Perhaps I can formulate a cogent definition of alt-FI in the future. The plot thickens.
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