Ask Lemmy

I did some community college, took all the "required" classes although every fiber of my being was angry & restless about it, intuitively knowing it was a waste of precious time, energy, money, resources,

even doing what was "required," I felt like I was fucking around when I should've been out in the real world living my life because I've got SO MUCH LIFE IN ME and college sucks out the life force.

But I still needed money to survive because you can't survive without money, so I spent a couple years in two vocational schools and now I am working in those fields.

Vocational schools are a fast track to employment. Employment needed to pay off the educational loans 🤦🏼‍♀️

I went to a European University of Applied Sciences for a bachelor's in business administration. I relocated to a new country at 18, and it was one of 3 degrees offered in my area in English at the time. At the start, I was completely uninterested in business. I was mostly there to add structure to my days and to qualify for student benefits. Zero long-term plan. It ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made. I quickly learned to recognize projects where I could apply my existing interests and talents, so working was actually fun. I also gained the skills to breeze by tasks that weren't enjoyable. Because it was a UAS, I got what felt like years of working experience under my belt before I graduated, which was invaluable as a young person without parents to groom me towards professional life.

I got a two year English degree and now work in tech. It was primarily focused on creative writing, which doesn't help much in my field.

Undergrad in History and International Relations, because I intended to become a diplomat. Realized an anxiety disorder was probably not going to make that a good career choice. Decided to go to nursing school, got an associates in "science" working on the pre-reqs and then decided to go to grad school for public health and epidemiology instead.

Honestly I love school, I don't regret any of it except that I was too nervous about quitting my job (I worked my way through to cover what grants and loans didn't) to do a term abroad. I should have taken the five weeks in Berlin.

Got most the way through an environmental science degree, then learned the job market was mostly helping oil companies dodge regulations.

Father got cancer so I had to return and help out, asked the bursars what can I get with the credits I’d accumulated, took a “university studies” bachelor.

Returned to school online in 22’ for a degree in software. About half way through the degree the layoffs started. Cut my losses and dropped out.

~43k usd debt for both programs as of now after paying some down over the last 8ish years.

I enjoyed being exposed to new ideas, information, ways of thinking etc. probably could have found those things without the price tag.

Graduated high school 12 years ago and never got any further education than that (college, trade school, apprenticeship, or whatever else). It's far too expensive to risk starting and realizing I hate doing what I wasted money on or that any job that would take the degree pays less than I currently make or just straight up doesn't exist (even if it did exist when I started education). My current job pays $50k in a small Midwest town which is fine for right now.

I got tired of working crappy jobs for >$10/hr, so I went and got a 2 year degree in IT. A few months after graduation, I got a job in my chosen field, and a couple years after that, I landed a position specifically related to my degree. While a college degree isn't necessary in every job/field, in my case, it's been the wisest decision and had the most profound impact in my life so far.

I wish I wasn't 17 when I had to make the decisions about it, and I wish I did many things differently. But ultimately yes I'm glad to have recieved a degree. 

Yeah, I wanted to go and learn more shit, didn't matter what (and my parents didn't care either), I just wanted to learn more. Eventually landed on biology and got a BS. I still wanted to learn more so I got a PhD in biology. I'm a postdoc now and still learning and discovering cool things.

Relative to my qualification i'm paid like shit and nothing about my position is permanent, so it's stressful. I love my job though, and don't regret my path through higher ed...except maybe that I'd like to have learned skills to be able to fix my own car.

I went to university (Australia). I struggled a lot but finally made it through with a Computer Science degree, just in time for AI to fuck everything up. Now I'm a year and a half post-degree and still unable to get a job.

As for why, I went because it was the "right" thing to do. My younger sister got a degree and a "real" job and was doing well. She's the golden child, and I guess I wanted that praise and love from my parents too. So I went to uni to get a degree too. But I'm still failing. Still worthless in their eyes.

I went and it's the biggest regret of my life.

It took me 4 years to find a job after leaving because half of my prospective employers thought I was overqualified, and the other half said that completing university was no guarantee that I'd handle "real work". My first (and current) job is only tangentially related to my field and doesn't require a degree. Or any training, to be honest.

7 years before I bought my house, it sold for exactly half of what I paid for it. If I swallowed my pride and got a shitty minimum wage job straight out of high school, I wouldn't have a student loan (where I live it's interest free, but there's a minimum weekly payment which is based on your wage), I would have been able to buy a house so much earlier, for so much less money, and I would have been paying off my mortgage for so much longer.

In hindsight, my perspective is this: The actual cost of going to university isn't your student loans (which are still substantial, don't get me wrong) - it's time. Your degree has to make you so much more money than most people realise, because at a minimum you're starting your working life 3 years later than you normally would - that's 3 years you could have been working and saving, and 3 years of extra inflation to deal with.

I started because my parents made me. I stayed because mechanical engineering is pretty cool. I've had some very cool jobs in robotics and aerospace, currently going back to school part-time to study electrical engineering. After being in the industry for 10-ish years I realized I'm more interested in EE.

I did a year of literature when I didn’t know what to do in my life. I always liked computers so after that I applied to a computer science school. There I had a lot of fun and met a lot of people, some I still have in my life, learned some useful mindsets. Before I managed to get an actual degree I started working. From NOC engineer to software developer where I happily stayed. Did I need my higher education? Probably not, but I think it gave me another perspective and friends and many fun memories.

Wanted to go to a trade school for welding when I was a teenager. Mother said no, because "you're going to college"

I kept asking for help figuring out college stuff, mother kept saying "I'll help you tomorrow/next week when I have time" (she was technically a substitute teacher but usually worked 1 day/wk)

Graduation came and went and I had no money saved up, no colleges looked at beyond what my limited googling skills could come up with, and absolutely no help from my parents with anything.

Good news though, since my parents collectively made enough money, I didn't qualify for financial aid of any kind! Did I say good news? I meant bad.

And of course my parents lived paycheck to paycheck and we got EBT or medicaid for most of my childhood.

Now instead of an education or a trade that's in demand, I have depression and a shitty 15/hr job that is destroying my joints.

Ain't life grand?

I studied philosophy and history of art as a double major for undergraduate. Doing a humanities degree was the right decision at the time for me. Should mention that I didn't have to pay tuition fees as a Scottish person in Scotland.

During that degree I ended up getting interested in Linux since I enjoyed seeing a practical example of altruism in the real world. Laterally I did a masters in Computing at a former polytechnic uni and have been working as a programmer ever since. Analytic philosophy actually maps onto coding really nicely since they are both ultimately concerned with discrete mathematics. I did have to take on a student loan for that degree but it didn't take me long to pay it off. It wasn't computer science since I didn't have the prerequisite STEM undergraduate degree but it focused on practical aspects of computing like developing desktop applications with Java, webdev with C# and JS, databases with SQL and introduction to operating systems.

It also helped that in my advanced logic classes in philosophy I'd studied the Church Turing thesis, which is just about the most fundamental concept in Comp.Sci.

I did twice. First right after high school, and many years later, my work offered to pay for a master's program.

Now, I work at a college, so technically, I go to college every day and plan to until retirement.

I went to university in my home country in Europe. At first, I just wanted to pursue my passion, which was the Japanese language. I had no future plans whatsoever. While writing the thesis for my bachelor's degree, I was asked to help out the university staff with teaching some seminars. That in turn made me realize that I love working with people, that I love teaching and that becoming a Japanese teacher would simply give me the best of both worlds. That realization led me to applying for a university in Japan, where I did my master's degree in education. Also because the prefect at the university in my country told me that a degree in education from Japan would make me eligible for a full time contract as a Japanese teacher. After returning to my country, I learned that my government had implemented a policy that made it impossible for me to get hired as an adjunct (a teacher that only teaches and whose contract doesn't require them to produce a certain amount of papers per year). I had no intentions of becoming a researcher, even part time, so I gave up on becoming a Japanese teacher.

Looking back at my choices, even though I do something completely unrelated today (probation officer and case worker), I regret nothing. Going to college connected me with the world. It made me academically smarter, emotionally more intelligent and it opened up my eyes to my ignorance and made me humble.

I didn't. My country focuses more on apprenticeships than higher education, and I wasn't the type to be really ambitious. So I never really explored my options and just went with the flow.

I got a degree in STEM that hasn’t been useful to me. Turns out the sorts of jobs I got it for don’t really exist anymore/around me, and where they do, they pull from other more traditional graduate and post-graduate pools. At this point it’s been long enough since I got it without working a role related to my field that it’d be pretty hard to get hired into even if the labor market wasn’t falling apart. So I switched gears and applied my breadth of knowledge to a different goal, and that’s a work in progress. Time will tell if it’s successful.

But I started when I was in my mid 20s, and it was a very good time of my life, even with a lot of negative life events in that time. If I could be a professional student, I would have loved to.

However, I tried to pursue a masters through online courses, but I wasn’t really excited about the specificity of it (I’m more of a generalist), and I wasn’t in the right mental state to do it properly, so I withdrew. So who knows if professional student would have really worked for me or not.

I didn't because I just wasn't interested at the time, and now with how far universities in my country have fallen in the last 14 years, I feel pretty vindicated in that decision.

Sort of...

I did get accepted, but FUCKING DEPRESSION DERAILED MY LIFE

FUUUUUUUUUUU

i withdrew...

mom got so disappointed in me...

Not even an "A"sian anymore...

fuck my life

now I'm just a puddle of "D"epression

now my older brother has something to make fun of me about... he got a degree and now I bet he feels so smug about it...

like, bro: shut the fuck up bitch ass dipshit, you caused me so much trauma

/end rant

No, I did not. I started college right out of high school, with a focus on architectural engineering, but dropped out after a single semester for a number of reasons. My parents needed me to work full time to help pay for the house (even though I was moved out and trying to pay for most things on my own already). I couldn't juggle all the responsibility that entailed between helping family, more than full time employment, and school. I had to cut one of those things out, but figured I would go back to school after things became balanced. While working a number of jobs from food service, manufacturing, security, and construction, I gained promotions and made some decent pay, so I just never picked the torch back up in 15 years. I gained some unique and diversified skills through my experiences, and now I work in a machine shop running manual and CNC lathes. It's the kind of applied science I imagined when I was initially interested in engineering, and it is low stress and I'm not struggling financially (mostly, ha). I'd still like to go to school, but not just to get ahead in my career or make more money. I really enjoy learning and I spend as much of my free time reading and trying to understand new concepts as my brain can handle, everything from geology to calculus to music theory to critical theory. I'm all over the place. Definitely not as good as a dedicated education, though.

Yes, I did. Did my Bachelor's and Master's in computer science in media. Studying is almost free in my country and having a relevant degree gives you much better job opportunities. So there's no real reason not to do it, unless you specifically want some non-academic job. And even then, spending a few years at college is a pretty good time and a valuable experience.

Nope dropped out of high school as a junior when i become homeless and had no way to get to school anymore.

Yes for electrical engineering. Got a job pretty easily at a job fair before graduating which ended up being something like 10% hardware 90% software. Eventually went to a biotech startup at about the same mix, and now in big tech building websites so 100% software.

I’d say the time at the startup was the most fulfilling, but the benefits I have now outweigh any downsides.

Yes and it was totally worth it. Got a number of jobs in my career that I would not have without the degree.

I did: Got a free ride pretty much so why not? I ended up getting multiple degrees in part just because they sounded interesting (I was also working 1-4 jobs depending on the time though, so some of it was part time).

I have not ruled out going back sometime in the future if the opportunity presents itself.

Yeah. It was ok. I didn't wanna go for something specific so I went for general stuff. I do wish id done mech engineering but I cant do math. My job now is engineering and I just fake it.

I didnt do any partying and dont have any friends from it since I was introvert and usually hate immature people, but if I did it again id probably try to talk to more people. Problem is I dont have a lot in common with normal college kids. Maybe 20 years before my time I would have.

Nope. Was never good with standardised tests

I live in the US. I went to college right after graduating high school and it was magical.

Yeah, twice. Once for music production, once more for electrical engineering. Both times, I went to college so I could be formally certified in the skill that was taught. I can learn stuff all on my own (this is basically what my PhD will be), but it's nice to be able to point to a transcript (and the implied appeal to authority of the University 😆) and have a body of projects to show that I can do the work. And for electrical engineering, you typically need at least a bachelor's degree to get entry-level work beyond an internship.

as a power plant operator, in my state a degree isn't needed, just licensing.

I have been warned time and time again that getting a PhD is actually bad for my job prospects compared to stopping at a masters degree. Which is definitely true for industry jobs, but my interests are exclusively in original research, and the PhD is fully funded, so 🤷.

I did but had no direction and left after 3 years. Children, marriage, and returned at age 35 for a 2-year healthcare degree. Glad i went back. Sometimes i wish I'd known at 17 that this would be my path but then I probably would have skipped the kids and marriage - the things i didn't know i wanted and the relationships that make my life rich and worthwhile.

I did and I became a better person because of it.