The Fallacy of “At Least You’ll Have It Under Your Belt!”

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Young people should just go to college now. Even if they don’t know what they want to do after four years, at least they’ll have a degree under their belts!

In talking with parents, young people about to go to college, and (especially) teachers, I have heard some variation on this line time and time again. The logic behind this defense essentially goes like this:

Even if a young person graduates high school and has no clue what he wants to do with his life, he should go to college. Hopefully, he’ll figure out what he wants to do while he is there, but even if he doesn’t, it is still better that he goes and gets a degree in something rather than not go at all. He can then fall back on the degree.

In short, something is better than nothing, right? The degree will at least set him apart from other people and help him get going somewhere, right?

This may all be well and good as a defense for going to college without any kind of real plan if it weren’t for a few not-so-small flaws in the thinking.

It Assumes the Alternative Is Nothing

The base assumption here, “something is better than nothing,” is fundamentally flawed. Behind it is this idea that if a young person doesn’t go off to spend 4 years floating between classes, changing majors time and time again, occasionally drinking too much on the weekends (and in some cases, more-than-occasionally and then forgetting those weekends entirely), and then eventually being handed a degree for a major in basket weaving and a check for $35,000 in debt, that they will otherwise just spend their time in an empty room with saltine crackers and a glass of water for four years.

The assumption that “something is better than nothing” would be true if it weren’t for the fact that four years is a long time and you can do a lot in that time. Even if you spend that time “flipping burgers,” (which is a staple favorite reference for people trying to force college on the unsure young) at least you are getting experience of what it is like to work in a specific workplace. You could work a few different jobs, start a blog, write poetry, travel, learn a skill, go off the grid, and do so many things in four years’ time.

Take a moment as the reader and think about what you knew four years ago and what you know now. Now imagine if most of this time were spent with indecision and unclear social pressures tearing you in every different direction (maybe you don’t have to imagine — maybe you experienced this yourself).

Moreover, the young person who is sure they don’t want to spend some of the prime years of their life in the college setting can craft a unique plan of exploration for themselves. They can devote themselves to personal development, professional exploring, and can embrace the idea that they don’t have to be lining themselves up for a 9-to-5 career immediately after high school.

The idea that the alternative is nothing is clearly flawed, but it is also deeply ignorant of the way that the world works and most people learn. Even somebody who spends these years in the most stereotypically dead-end career choice is learning more than many students drifting through generic colleges. The young person who grabs these years by the horns and bends this time to their will will leave many years ahead of their peers at 22 or 23.

It Overlooks the Cost of College

In addition to merely assuming that the alternative to college is nothing, it also either extremely downplays or completely overlooks the cost of attending college. There are two immediate costs to attending college:

  • Opportunity Cost
  • Price Cost

Overlooking opportunity cost is essentially overlooking what other things could be done during four years in college. Just like imagining that the alternative to college is essentially doing nothing, ignoring opportunity costs erases the possibility from the minds of young people that, “hey, maybe I can do something really cool when I am nineteen!”

Many opportunities — like those to fly across the country solo or to start your own business — only come along every few years and have to be embraced when they float by, lest they be lost to ever thinking, “I wonder if I had done that.” For many people, the strength, will, and energy to accomplish these things is greatest between 17 and 25. After that, pressures like creating a family and getting on with professional life may begin to creep in. With the additional cost of student loans, these years get even more stressful, with young people now looking to pay off loans for more than a decade or two after they graduate college.

Price cost is exactly what it sounds like. A four year school experience costs anywhere from $40,000 to $260,000+, and while not everybody pays the full price tag, this is a hefty chunk of money.

The burden of college debt pushes young people to take higher-paying, but less-fulfilling jobs that they would have otherwise taken. So, taking a few years to be a poet while working some odd-jobs is off the table. Becoming an airline pilot becomes just a dream due to low entry-level pay. And don’t even think of going into commission-based fields!

But the costs of college wreak even greater havoc on the lives of individuals and families (without even getting into the horror stories of families being hunted by debt collectors after their graduated-children have tragically died).

Middle class families pride themselves on saving up enough money for their children to attend college (even though these savings plans end up backfiring and decreasing the total financial aid given by elite universities). They beam with pride when they tell their friends, “yes, Martha and I set aside $50,000 for Johnny to attend MSU!” Johnny, meanwhile, is drifting through courses and burning tens-of-thousands of dollars per semester on “finding himself.”

What if rather than wrapping up these savings funds with the promises and pretensions of college, parents just signed them over to their young-adult children at age 18 and told them they could do whatever they wanted with them?

Would some young people take it and blow it on a new car or equally-unfocused travel? Sure. Would some use it to go to college? Certainly. Some may even take it and use it as a seed-fund for a small venture or project they’ve been thinking of launching but lacked the resources to do so.

The important thing is that regardless of what they decided to do with the money, they would, for the first time in many of their lives, be trusted with responsibility. As with any responsibility, they may fail and suffer the consequences of their failure. They reap the benefits of their success and pay the costs of their failure. After 12 years of being pushed from classroom-to-classroom and being insulated from much of the responsibility of the real world, this would come as a trial-by-fire for many. The endpoint being that most young people would likely learn more from this experience and the responsibility entrusted with it than just being pushed through a university at their parents’ behest.

Would most parents ever do such a thing? It’s unlikely. They would face the ridicule of their friends, and the skepticism of their family. They may have to face the humiliation of Johnny blowing $50,000 stupidly with less to physically show than an MSU degree in ancient social critical psychology.

College: Worth The Cost?

“At least you’ll have a degree under your belt!” should rather be reframed as, “You’ll have a degree under your belt, but will have passed up four formative years of your life to engage in some of the most interesting opportunities you’ll ever have and you are now out of $50,000.” When framed this way, can so many people be as comfortable in saying that college is just something you do because it is better than nothing?

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