"How are-how are you? It's good to see you. You look great. How long's it been? Ten years? How long has it been?"
"Since you stood me up on prom night and vanished without a word?"
"Yeah, ten years I think."
-Grosse Pointe Blank

Ten years ago I was 19 and I had just dropped out of college for the third time. I was living at home with my parents and I knew, without a doubt, that I wanted a career in IT and that I didn't need a degree to get there. The minute I got the lowest entry-level job in a computer department I could get, I stopped going to class. Conveniently, the job was on campus so I didn't have to have the "I'm dropping out of school for the third time in less than two years" talk with my parents right away. That came later.

Now I'm 29. I've just declared a leave of absence from school for the fall quarter. I'm staying with a friend until I can move back to LA and I'm sure that I want to be a writer. I hate to say it, but not much has changed in ten years. Although this time I was honest with my parents, but then, when I was 19 I didn't have a blog that they may or may not read.

I constantly go back and forth on how valuable a college degree really is. I was right about not needing a degree to work in IT. The thing I was wrong about was the IT field. The technology was cool but the environment sucked. Business casual every day, my three weeks of vacation a year. Monday morning meetings to discuss the strategic goals of the organization. It's no wonder that the Morlocks come back and eat the Eloi. Towards the end of my time working in an office I would have gladly carved the heart out of almost every person in the building with a spoon, just to express how much I hated sitting behind a desk eight to ten hours a day.

When I say "College Degree", I'm not talking about an education. Education is important but you can get educated a lot of places. College just conveniently packages a lot of related material together and calls it a major.

And I'm not talking about the experience of going to college. Where else can you play at life for four years and it doesn't count? As long as you don't get pregnant or wind up doing 3 to 5 for manslaughter on a DUI hit and run, there's no other time when it's assumed that you're going to drink too much, act irresponsible, experiment with drugs and do as little work as possible to get by and people are going to be perfectly alright with it. Oh and you still get summers off. At 20 it's cool. If you're still doing it at 30, you're "that guy" and I assume that if you're still doing it at 40 you're homeless.

But how valuable is the degree? I'm probably only one or two quarters short of graduating. The problem is that my degree is going to be in political science. It's a field I'm interested in but one that I doubt I'll be seeking employment in anytime soon. And it's a field that I really don't want to take any more classes in. So now I have to suck it up and finish because otherwise I don't have anything to show after four years and a sickening amount of debt (yes, I know that's a sunk cost fallacy). My only other option is to write off the four years, the debt and everything else.

I wish I could say what I was going to do but I honestly have no idea.

Posted by Ben Corman at 6:26 PM

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