Acquiring a college degree can be very helpful in your professional career, since, it enables you to earn more money and unlock more opportunities. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) high school graduates earn about thirty thousand dollars per year, bachelor graduates earn an average of fifty thousand dollars per year whereas higher level graduates get about seventy thousand dollars per year. Considering these numbers, we can agree that the more time you spend at college studying the higher will be your annual salary (Loveless, 2018). But lately, the number of college dropouts has increased tremendously for numerous reasons, one of them is perceiving college as a waste of time. As reported by some researchers from Education Data, sixty-four per cent of students who attend public universities dropout, thirteen per cent of students who attend nonprofit private universities dropout and about twenty-three per cent of students who attend for-profit private universities quit college (College Dropout Rate, 2019). In this paper, I will bring up the topic of why students should dropout of college by mentioning three reasons, clarifying who should stay in college and who should dropout and summing up by pointing out some actions to do before quitting college and what subjects should be included in the curriculum.
As a business a student in a private university, I heard many persons of my entourage claiming that they could’ve get the same amount and quality of information for free from the internet by just typing “How to …?”. Quite frankly, many agrees even me on the fact that there is a lot of free courses that have a huge value and that can be useful in daily and professional life. To support my position, Udemy and Skillshare are one of the finest platforms for online learning. These platforms has a variety of courses that you can learn within a six month period such as Finance, Web development, Marketing, Design and many interesting ones (Udemy, 2019). To prove that these online platforms are effective, billionaire business man and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban acknowledged in an interview with Andy Serwer at Yahoo Finance that he uses online courses to keep up with the advancement of technologies and stay up to date in order to become a more clever investor by saying:” I’ve been on Amazon doing the Machine Learning tutorials, I’ve taken Python online classes, and I just started JavaScript neural networks” (Cuban, 2019).
Second reason, why you should drop out is that college became overpriced and a highly profitable market for businessmen. A four-year tuition fee cost went from one thousand eight hundred dollars to about thirty-one thousand dollars in 2015 for private schools. The cost of college tuition has doubled seventeen times in a short period of forty-four years, especially, starting in the 1990s tuition cost began to skyrocket for no transparent reasons. According to CNBC, this is what explains the gigantic amount of student debt which reached the 1.2 trillion-dollar mark in America. With this in mind, we expect the average annual income to double at the same rate as college tuition, however, it only doubled five times during the same period going from ten thousand dollars to just fifty-three thousand dollars including taxes (Schoen, 2015). By conducting a small survey on fifty families with medium income who enrolled their kids in private universities, the only motivations of sending their kids to private universities that were repeated were security as a number one reason, making good contacts and not missing the experience of being a college student which is a weak argument coming from a parent who pays his kid cost of education.
As mentioned in previous paragraphs, arguments were around cost and internet technology, however, I would like to be more convincing about my position. There is a more significant argument that I would like to talk about which is the way we are taught. Before going deep into this third argument let me point out something called advancement. For example, two hundred years ago cars switched from being made from wood and towed by a horse to being made from aluminum and powered by and electric motor, phones also changed from looking like a mailbox to the iPhone and other smart phones that we use today. Despite the technological development, education didn’t change too much. Maybe we are using touch boards, flipped classrooms and electronic documents but compared to other industries things didn’t change at all. To be clearer here’s some examples that will be familiar to you; two hundred years ago students use to sit next to each other in parallel rows with a professor standing on a platform to explain the course, now, students are sitting the same way as two centuries ago but instead of using a chalkboard we are using video projectors to display the slides and the professor is sitting in front of a laptop to explain the course. This image is identical to a factory during the industrial revolution in the 19th century. Workers use to sit next to each other in rows with a commander who shows them how work should be done and of course a one-hour lunch break. Accordingly, I would like to declare that colleges are training followers not leaders which as reported by “Crédit Suisse” explains the low number of millionaires that reached forty seven million compared to the world population which is 7.7 billion (Kersley & Hechler-Fayd’herbe, 2019). Add evidence 2 & 3.
After answering the question on why students should quit college, I expect many to support my point of view and many others to oppose this idea. For this reason, I will spell out who should quit and who should stay by enumerating some key qualities that every dropout should possess and certainly giving examples of some professions that require a degree. To begin with, if you are a college student or a high school graduate with no idea about your career path and you still undecided about what makes happy and what makes you shoot out of your bed every morning then the best decision to take is to go out and try different things in hope of finding your passion. More importantly, if you are attending a private school then be honest with your parents and stop wasting their money or your money for those who are responsible and have a strong work ethic. Which leads to my next key quality that is hard work and sales. If you have a great stamina that enables you to work eighty hours per week to achieve your life goals, then college in not for you. Also, in case if you have a great selling skill means that everything that falls between your hands you can identify a way of how to sell it then maybe starting a business or landing a sales position is better choice for you than college. Next quality is being good at making friends and networking. This quality is very crucial for long term success, since, it makes you more visible on the market which means you gain access to more interesting job opportunities or deals. Also, not only it allows you to see things from many perspectives, but it makes you discover new ways of doing things. Therefore, you can introduce these new methods to your working environment and as a result you impress your colleagues and competitors (Karrera, 2017). Before moving to next point which is who should stay at college, one last reason to dropout and it’s having a mentor which can be CEO of a successful company or an entrepreneur at his first stages because he can teach you a lot about discipline, competitiveness, solving problems and time management and not to mention the valuable feedback that he can provide you with especially when it comes to behavior, constructive ideas and of course guidance on promotion and tenure (Benefits of Having a Mentor, 2010).
Keeping what was said in the previous paragraph in mind, you can start questioning about occupations that are more challenging and demanding such as surgeons, doctors, engineers and lawyers. Indeed, these types of professions need to be taught in college for several years unlike business studies. For example, Doctor John is surgeon and in one hours he must accomplish a surgery on a sick person. Doctor John better know what he is doing otherwise things will not go so well. For this reason, the doctor has studied several years at medical school, knows about human anatomy and has degree because you can’t take an online course or watch a tutorial on YouTube that shows you how to make a surgery. Same principle goes for lawyers, since, they need to be knowledgeable about all the rules and laws as for engineers too, for the reason that their work needs a lot of precision and calculations. Moreover, if you have a clear vision about what you are going to do with your degree then stay in college and finish your studies. Not to mention, those who benefit from a full scholarship thanks to their physical abilities.
