Excellent advice David and this is exactly what I’m going to be preaching to my kids when they get older. When I worked in higher education I was completely astonished at how much scholarship money went unclaimed each year. For example I worked in the continuing and professional education college and we had hundreds of thousands of dollars just sitting in an account for scholarships that was never used. The application requirement was to write a 250 word summary on how you would use the scholarship and how it would help you. Definitely didn’t seem like too big of a time commitment.

You can actually increase your pay by applying to a lot of scholarships. That’s one of my biggest regrets when I was in college.

I believe in furthering one’s education. You don’t have to go to college to do this. Do you know how many college graduates I know that have never read a book once they leave school? That’s so sad.

And….just because something is being taught in college doesn’t mean its correct information. You can get a 4 year degree in theology and come out not knowing God. You can get a degree in med school and still not know very little about health (I’ve met many doctors where i had more knowledge on health than they did).

There is also a liberal agenda at most schools.

A major reformation is coming in the area of education. It will look radically different in 15-20 years.

Hey Joel,

I’m with you. College isn’t for everyone. There’s a long list of very successful people who never earned a college degree. And today, we are blessed with a multitude of ways to continue our education without taking the traditional 4-year college route. In researching this blog feature I discovered some interesting statistics that were somewhat surprising to me:

Nearly 40% of high school graduates will never attend college.

The United States has the worst college dropout rate (40%) of any developed country. Only 60% of people who start college will finish.

Only about 30% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree and only 13% have a master’s or doctorate degree.

Everyone learns differently. It will certainly be interesting to see what the concept of college looks like when my 5-year-old and 1-year-old sons are of age.

I never went to college, but that was a bit more common in Australia when I was growing up. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few decades. I don’t have kids (yet) but if/when I do I’ll probably encourage them to continue education in the areas they are interested in, regardless of whether it’s a lucrative career path or not.

You are 100% right Angie! I will say, that even though I had the financial burden removed to attend college for my master’s I still spent an entire year deciding if I could do it for two reasons: 1) the time commitment; and 2) is it worth it? What would the value of my degree be in the job marketplace? In the end I decided that I would have more regret not at least trying.

And more to your point Angie, in researching all this ,some of the statistics that I found most interesting were that 41% of recent college graduates work in job not requiring a degree; and that only 27% of college grads actually work a field related to their major.