My College Degree Was the Worst Investment You Ever Made
Six ways my education failed you (and me)
Today, in honor of the news of the Department of Education’s timely demise, I reflect on what good my college education did me.
Now that my days of listening to lectures and studying for exams are definitively over, I can finally say out loud what I’ve been thinking quietly for years:
I have never written a “five-paragraph essay” outside of the classroom.
Nobody at work has ever asked me to “cite my sources using MLA format.”
I have, in fact, always had access to a calculator when I needed one.
Writing in the third person is very weird and unnatural, and nobody does this unless they’re submitting a paper for a grade.
Never have I ever had to solve a polynomial equation by hand in business.
Actually, the simple fact that I can’t even remember what a polynomial equation is and how it differs from a quadratic equation (or if it even does) is proof that so much of this nonsense didn’t matter. (I just did a quick online search to check, but — hold on, I don’t care anymore. Never mind.)
For most of my life, school was a frustrating and pointless exercise and a massive waste of time. Here are six reasons why (there are surely more, but I stopped counting):
I was taught to do things a certain way; it turns out that nobody actually does those things that way.
I was told I would “need to know this someday;” it turns out that I didn't actually need to know almost any of that shit.
I was warned that I’d “never be able to support myself without a college degree;” it turns out that I could support a family of seven without one.
I was promised that getting good grades mattered; it turns out grades don’t matter at all unless you want to… go to even more school after school is done (and who wants that?!)
I was encouraged to “do it the right way—don’t use shortcuts;” it turns out that everybody in the workforce spends all day, every day, using shortcuts so they don’t have to do things the “right way.”
I was required to type a minimum number of words when writing papers; it turns out that when you write papers in the real world, people say: “Use fewer words.”
You see what I mean? Schools are doing a horrible job of training people for real life. We spend anywhere from 12 to 16 years learning “how to do things,” and it actually turns out that you have to spend the rest of your adult life unlearning the things you learned in school.
Why do we do this?
I’ve seen this first-hand many times with recent college grads in my own company: sometimes young people with a fresh new degree will send me an email saying something insane like:
“Dear Mr. Stauffer, I am extremely impressed at what you’re doing at Lieder Digital. I would like to apply to work for your firm in a part-time or full-time capacity…”
Blah blah blah… I’ve already lost interest. Also, you should see their overblown and overstuffed résumés: it’s very clear they’re trying to follow all the ridiculous nonsense their college professors told them. (To be clear: I don’t blame them—I blame their teachers).
I laugh at these bizarrely stiff emails. I’m not a jerk about it, though: I’ll actually email them back and say, “Hey, man, thanks for getting in touch… wanna talk like a real person? Let’s meet for coffee.”
There’s so much fluff in a typical American college education that it’s like trying to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. It takes 1,000 licks to actually get to the good stuff.
More examples:
Math
Most of the math I learned was pointless. The math I actually use today on a daily basis was barely covered in class. I can remember “Y = mx + b,” but I can’t remember what on earth it does or when I’d want to use it.
As a business owner, I need to understand things like profit margins, markup, break-even analyses, forecasting, and a lot of other things that require math that were never taught or were covered so minimally and so quickly that I don’t even remember them.
(Also, if we students had been taught about compound interest in a way we could actually grasp, maybe we wouldn’t have such a crisis in our country with credit card debt?)
Reading
Most of the reading I was assigned was just dumb (The Little, Brown Reader — barf), or I just couldn’t understand it (Beowulf at age 18? WTF?) The stuff I read now is far more interesting and helps me and inspires me because I chose it.
Today, when I occasionally spot books I had to read in college on my bookshelf, they stand out so clearly that I think: “Wow, this is obviously something I had to read for school,” and then throw them away.
The most important books I’ve read as an entrepreneur are written by people who often didn’t even go to college in the first place, or if they did, their single most helpful advice is: “Forget what you learned in college. Here’s what you actually need to know.”
Writing
The writers I was told to admire were actually pretty bad, or worse, boring. After school, I found a whole world of much better writers that my teachers never told me about, and I’m still angry that they let me complete their classes without introducing me to them.
And I could say a lot about the dumb things they taught about how to write (as I mentioned, third-person nonsense, strange citation habits, bizarre double-spacing nobody uses in real life, neutering any attempts at being interesting with the printed word or writing with flair, etc.
Schools hate split infinitives, but we tend to casually use them all the time. They also say: “You can’t use Wikipedia as a resource” when every person on the planet uses Wikipedia as a resource every single day.
Philosophy
I took only one class in philosophy the entire time I went to school, yet that single class was probably more influential and important than all the other classes from all the other subjects I took in the span of two decades.
Finally, by the time I got to take classes that actually had something to do with my career, it was already way, way too late. When I took “Scriptwriting for Video,” for example, it was helpful, but I had already been writing scripts for videos for at least 15 years.
It was like closing the barn door after the horse had bolted, and I often thought: Wow, I sure could have used this information… about a dozen years ago.
I did try to take some fun and interesting courses in the early days, but they wouldn’t even let me because of stupid rules about “prerequisites.” Right after I got married and became old enough to drink, I wanted to take “Wine Appreciation,” but I found out I’d have to take an entire semester of “Food Safety and Sanitation” first.
What? Why?!
NO FUN FOR YOU!
(On that note, colleges really hold a special contempt for non-majors in this regard. Want to take a course in Zookeeping? You can’t until you complete Public Speaking first. Why? Who knows? The entrance to exciting courses that would actually enrich your life is blocked by numerous nonsensical prerequisites that prevent you from doing anything that isn’t in your “approved career track.”)
And all of this is to say nothing at all about the teachers themselves.
Oh, wow, my teachers, let’s talk about them for a moment…
Some of my teachers were decent, but honestly, most were not.
Even the professors, sorry, lecturers—apparently, there’s a pedantic and arbitrary difference between these—who were good at their chosen field were often very bad at teaching.
The worst teacher I ever had was, funny enough, my very first writing teacher. I hated every miserable wasted minute of her class, and mostly, I was insulted because she committed the unforgivable sin: she made us students hate writing.
What good is being an English teacher if you make your students hate speaking, reading, or writing English?
When we were given the assignment to argue for or against a topic, I chose the topic “Why Teachers Unions Are Bad for Education,” and I even quoted Rod Paige, former secretary of the Department of Education, who called the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.”
(Hoo boy, you were a very bold young man, first-year-college-student Ron!)
I’m pretty sure I made her very angry with me with that paper, but I don’t care. She scribbled big red words all over it.
Too bad for her. I ignored her.
She made me feel like writing was a horrible, boring chore. Today, I write in spite of what Ms. Jones (yes, that was actually her name) tried—but failed—to teach us. She took all the fun out of it.
Thanks for nothing, Ms. Jones. I hope I’m doing a good job trying to put the fun back in.
The icing on the cake, though, was my final math teacher.
It took me THREE separate attempts to pass “College Algebra.” I withdrew the first time because I had a failing grade and couldn’t pass. So, (in a move that Gen Z would find amazingly ironic), I “took the W” and lost by withdrawing instead of failing.
The second time around, I got the exact same result: I couldn’t get my grades up high enough so I could either get an “F” or withdraw. “W: Ron.” Once again, I bailed before it was too late.
The third time, it was looking like I’d have to withdraw yet again—you’d think the school would be interested in helping someone who was clearly EXTREMELY challenged by the material, but I digress—until, at the last minute, I found an incredible hack that saved me.
I’ll call the woman who taught attempt #3 at College Algebra “Ms. Master’s + 36.”
That’s because she told us one day that the college (her employer) would pay her a higher salary as she advanced in her own education.
BUT—and this was a big but—it had a cap.
Weirdly, their pay scale wasn’t linear: she’d make more money with a master’s degree than if she had a bachelor’s degree, but her raises capped out at “master’s degree plus 36 credits.” Why? Who knew? Even she couldn’t explain it.
But the net result was that she was financially incentivized—get this—to enroll in a PhD program and work toward getting a doctorate in math, then drop out of school when she had a master’s degree plus 36 random credits toward an unfinished PhD.
DO YOU SEE THE MADNESS THAT THIS EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IS?
The only thing “high” in “higher education” is the dope-smoking hippies who grew up, cut their hair, put on tweed plaid blazers, and invented the tenure track so they could get free income for life regardless of their ability to actually teach people.
The only good thing they built was a system filled with Byzantine rules that created financial rewards for college professors to get half-degrees like this.
So here we were, aghast at how the woman who would never be “Ms. Math Professor, PhD” was even admitting to us that school was a scam.
She wasn’t going to be paid any more money for getting a PhD in math, so she wasn’t going to put a single minute toward doing so. She got just as far in her own education as it made financial sense to do so, then became a dropout.
I gotta hand it to her: she was a bad teacher, but by golly, that woman sure could do math when it mattered most.
…and seriously, what kind of message did that send us students that even our professor could see how dumb taking more college was?
Anyway, I finally passed this stupid math class on my third try, but only because Ms. Master’s + 36 had an arguably unethical cheat code that I took full advantage of.
It turned out Texas Instruments had some sort of rewards or rebate program for people who mailed in the UPCs that came with a brand new TI-83 calculator.
Remarkably, she told us that if any of us students were willing to give her our barcode when we bought this outrageously expensive graphing calculator, she’d reward us with a 5% bump on our total score at the end of the semester.
I didn’t think about this at all for most of the semester, as I couldn’t afford a new TI-83 on my $24,000 salary. But, when the semester was almost over, my grade for the class was stuck at a solid 68%, which meant I was going to fail again and have to take this EFFING class a fourth time.
That is until I remembered Ms. Master’s + 36’s immoral offer, and it instantly clicked: I could now solve the only math equation that actually mattered in my life and pass math forever.
I immediately ran out to Radio Shack, bought the insanely overpriced graphing calculator I’d never use again, and very, very carefully cut the extremely expensive barcode out of the cardboard insert.
I handed it to the last math teacher I would ever have and passed the class.
It actually worked: I literally bought myself the final 5%, which turned my failing-for-the-fourth-time-in-a-row grade of 68% into a barely-scraping-by-but-you-actually-made-it 73%.
(Hmm…. perhaps I did learn a lesson in that class after all: knowing what math mattered and what didn’t. Clearly, paying $130 for a worthless tchotchke I could only use once when I made $12/hour was an investment that weirdly made sense.)
But what DIDN’T MAKE SENSE was that all this nonsense was just par for the course, and I had to rack up $35,000 in student loans to make all this dumb shit happen so I could finally get a stupid piece of paper saying: “Ron Stauffer now has permission to get a job.”
…and we can thank the Department of Education for that. And I suppose I can thank you as well since you paid for it.
Well, okay, I’m exaggerating a bit.
I’m not saying that my entire education was a waste per se. I’m saying that college degrees today are like Taco Bell Chalupas: there’s only about 48% real meat in them. The rest is colorless, tasteless binders and fillers.
I was able to take some classes that were very valuable: developing film and making prints in a darkroom for black and white photography was absolutely fantastic, and the photojournalism classes on location in New Mexico, San Francisco, and Yosemite National Park were superb.
But there was so much drivel that was lame, boring, had no real purpose, and yet, was required. At one point, I had to fulfill a “diversity” course requirement I’d never even heard of before in order to graduate. I looked over the eligible courses, and they were totally unimpressive, except for one: “The History of Jazz.”
That turned out to be a very cool class, and I was glad I took it. But I should have been able to take it because it was a cool class and because I love Jazz, not because it checked some dumb “DEI” box on a faceless bureaucrat’s checklist.
(I really do love Jazz, by the way: I chose “Jazz” for my youngest son’s middle name).
A lot of folks far smarter than me have spilled much ink about that kind of DEI nonsense that has infiltrated American universities, so I won’t reiterate that here, but I will say that I did get to see a lot of that up close and first-hand.
Not only was “white men” always used as a dirty epithet in my classrooms (which, as a “white man,” I was just supposed to ignore?), I also had the unfortunate experience of going to college in the early 2000s and again in 2017. What did that mean?
It meant that while I was a community college student, I had to endure classes taught by angry, liberal, white women screeching about how much they hated George W. Bush, and while I was a university student, I had to endure classes taught by angry, liberal, white women screeching about how much they hated Donald Trump.
When I first went into the office of my faculty advisor at my very first “four-year university,” the woman behind the desk had a giant “Gender Unicorn” poster on her wall and a whiteboard that said, “What are your pronouns?”
I sadly watched as any hope of working with grown adults who actually cared about education completely vanished into the choking, acrid smokescreen of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
I tried to make the best of it: I finished college with a journalism degree, which in years past would’ve been considered worth something — “a noble profession,” they once called it.
But objective journalism today is as mythological as the Gender Unicorn: it isn’t real.
Journalists don’t even pretend to “act independently” anymore. It’s so hopelessly über-partisan that the field of journalism is actually one of the few industries in America that is even more left-leaning than college campuses.
Journalism was an industry based on a very simple premise: “to seek the truth and report it.” But what it has become in the 2020s is essentially a propaganda machine for the Democratic party, churning out nonstop free publicity for left-wing extremists.
“White man bad; Bush very bad; Trump extremely bad. Class dismissed.”
Even if you agree with this and think it’s good, you should agree that our tax dollars have no business subsidizing this. And yet, that’s exactly what has happened.
The Department of Education is almost single-handedly subsidizing the Student Loan Bubble that is doomed to burst someday, and yet, students like myself are burdened with crushing amounts of non-bankruptable student debt because we were told we had to go to college in order to get a job.
To be clear, the final points I want to leave you with are:
College is a scam.
The rules are entirely arbitrary, and students are often thought of last.
The entire “higher education” industry is designed for the advancement of unelected bureaucrats, consultants, and administrators, often at the expense of students.
Colleges can only get away with it because Higher Ed™ is a total monopoly.
The Department of Education has assisted, encouraged, and enabled all of this at taxpayer expense.
So, today, I celebrate the death of the DoE, whether that’s in one fell swoop or death by a thousand cuts.
I support any efforts to kill the Hydra by violently chopping and hacking at its many heads, even if it takes numerous death blows over several years. The creature must die.
(For the illiterate folks with worthless majors: I’m speaking figuratively here, not literally. I don’t support actually killing anything. I know this is hard for the students to understand who think their role is to rip down statues, violently attack people they disagree with, and light things on fire. Don’t do that.)
So, anyway, here we are now. I have a mountain of student debt brought to you by the Department of Education for a degree I didn’t actually need.
Was going to college a good choice? I don’t know, exactly.
I do know I’ll be paying down $35,000 in loans for the rest of my life.
If you’re an American taxpayer, you helped pay for it, too.
How do you feel?