A tale as old as time. (Well for us millennials anyway) Attend college to get a great job after school; that’s how you make the big bucks. That is what hundreds of thousands of children have been told across the country. While there is certainly still some merit to this line of thought, the thousands of children who listened to their parents have saturated the market with their entry level degrees. Long gone are the days where anyone can get an accounting/marketing/psychology degree and afford a house with their first job out of college. Let’s explore some of your options.
I want to introduce this section with this stern statement: Education is going to be the best investment you make. Invest in yourself before making other investments. You don’t need formal schooling, but YOU need to be responsible for your own education. It doesn’t matter where you get your education but what does matter is that you get educated with a decent return on the investment. If you can get a decent education just from library books and YouTube, congratulations, you improved your skills without increasing your debt. That’s a pretty good return on the time invested.
Before you get your heart set on college, consider the return on your investment. A common theme we will be referring to in this book is the aversion of debt. Debt is awful and way too many Americans these days have more of it than they have savings. College tuition is the mother of all debts. Not all cases of debt are considered bad debt, but once it gets you a degree that doesn’t land you a decent paying job, it is certainly a negative in that case.
The school system doesn’t teach financial education because it is not in their best interest to do so. If everyone realizes that their degree simply represents the goal they achieved, they would realize that they can achieve the goals in different ways. Imagine a world where you bought a college textbook, studied and made notes on it, did all of the ‘end of chapter’ questions and utilized an online message board to ask your peers and superiors for advice and direction. In this perfect world, you would get roughly the same education as the college system provides but at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, at this time, employers can’t retain talent on their employee roster that recognizes that a degree doesn’t mean squat.
So, when does college make sense? In the humble opinion of this book’s author, Community College is worth it about 90% of the time when you want to get a desk job. The other 10%? Those are people who want to get into sales. Sales require people skills, psychology, and effort. You can get all of these skills on the job. In today’s day and age, trade school is also worth the money you put into it. If you can go to a trade high school, do so. In the modern day, anyone can go to college. The difference in high school is this: Do you want more AP/College credit classes? Or do you want a lifelong skill that will probably pay more in the medium-term horizon? I went to an average high school and got average grades. Today, if I want to learn to be an electrician/mechanic/chef etc., I am going to have to pay a fairly hefty sum of money for the privilege.
It’s possible that you’ve decided you don’t want to get into sales or enter a trade. You also don’t like your current job so, you’ve decided to get a formal education. Go. To. Community. College. Sure, community college isn’t glamorous. You’ll be commuting 2-5 days a week and it sure is easy to skip a few classes. It sounds a lot more fun to get a dorm and go to a prestigious college, right? Sure, if you want to live up to the stereotypes and take the easy/glamorous route. Remember that man who insulted you because of your age? He worked at the same job for ten years before he got promoted to manager. You can put up with community college for two years.
I had a good friend that went to community college for one semester. The only thing he got from his college experience was a smoking habit. Imagine if he paid $7,000 for that habit instead of only $2,4000? Some people think they want to go to college until it comes time to actually buckle down and work. What people don’t realize is that college is a job. Each class will be a four hour a week commitment, minimum. In class time will only be two of those hours. Sure, some people skate by when they just sit through class and spend fifteen minutes doing the homework the morning the day of class. For a subset of those people, maybe that is the only free time they have. That level of effort, however, results in being a C student. Sure, C’s get degrees, and that’s fine if you only need community college to advance the next step in your career. If you have the goal of eventually transferring to a four-year college, treat community college like the job it is.
Here are some of my study tips. I prefer physical books to eBooks. You may be different, but the methods can be adjusted to meet your needs. The first thing that I do is buy an old version of the textbook from thriftbooks.com. I never need to pay more than $20 for a version of the text that is one or two years old. Most of the information will be the same. I then ask the professor if there will be any questions that we will need to answer from the book. While the information in the textbook doesn’t change much from edition to edition, the questions at the end of the chapters can. If the professor tells me that we will be answering questions from the text, I will then rent the current version of the book from Chegg.com.
When the time comes to read the chapter, I crack open the old version of the textbook. With highlighter in hand, I read over the chapter from beginning to end. (I only take a break for particularly lengthy chapters.) You know your reading ability, so don’t take too many breaks. Every time I read a sentence and think to myself, “That’s useful, I don’t want to have to reread the whole chapter again just to find this nugget.” I highlight it. Some pages will have dozens of highlighted sentences, and that’s okay. You’ll quickly find out that textbooks can have pages and pages of ‘fluff’ that won’t be relevant to the class or your life. For example, my accounting books like to talk about “This IRS law comes from a landmark 1957 case where…….” I stop reading there and move on to the next sentence to see if it is worth highlighting. Your time is valuable. You should know (or ask for) the type of information that your teacher wants you to focus on for the test.
Once I’ve completed the required reading, I go back and take notes on my highlights. If I was super ambitious, I’d color coordinate. (Red meant a variable, blue meant a number and black was for words and symbols!) As time went by, I found the simply bolding words and italicizing examples was sufficient for me. While writing down the information by hand is generally going to be your best bet, typing the information should work fine. If you’re taking a lot of classes at once, I highly recommend investing in the “Dragon Speech Software” for your computer. You can fly through note-taking with any voice recording app. If that software is out of your price range, see if you can work with your cellphone’s dictation software. If you’re typing skills are top teir, you may be able to forgo speech software entirely.
Now that you’ve read the material and have your own set of notes, you can arrive to class prepared. Put the cellphone away and put your laptop into airplane mode if you can’t keep yourself from checking social media several times in a class. Listen intently to the teacher. If the teacher mentions something that you’ve already taken notes on, take the time to digest the information. If the teacher says something new or something that you didn’t highlight during your reading, add the notes to your outline. If you don’t understand something, ask the teacher questions and don’t get anxious. You’re paying for this class, so the only opinion that you should worry about is your own. If the class you are in is particularly quiet, ask teachers questions, even if you already know the answer. (Judge the situation, don’t waste your class’ time.) The teacher will appreciate that you are being involved in the class environment and will remember your cooperation during grading time. Don’t over-due it. Giving the teacher an intellectual question will boost the teacher’s confidence and allow them to produce a better classroom experience for everyone.
Use the tools that I’ve given you to help yourself excel in the classroom. By reading, highlighting, making an outline and asking questions, you’ve set yourself up for success. Be confident and assured in yourself. Know that you are better than what others believe and use this mindset to get your assignments done on time or earlier. Sure, you could binge HULU for the next three weeks and start your assignment hours before it is due. That’s what a majority of people would do. Are you like them? Or are you better? (Hint: If you’re reading this book in your free time, you’re better than them.)