College is a scam

Why let others judge you? Why not define yourself?

Another anti-college screed. I agree with all of it:

We may have been fooled by one of our generation’s biggest scams. In fact, not only do we blindly accept it, but most of us will be working our way out of debt for a decade because of it. It’s a system that penalizes creativity, scatters our focus thinly between unrelated errands and unashamedly conditions us to believe that a few people can tell us how smart we are.

The scam I’m talking about is college. On the surface, college inhales untrained minds and churns out well-respected mid-level managers, galvanized by proud relatives and anticipative parents looking to reshape adequate parenting into something employable. The stuff of dreams. But the reality is that college might be a waste of time and energy. And what’s worse is that we idealize this experience as the final frontier for a better, happier, more creative life.

Rest assured I absolutely love Notre Dame. I love my curriculum, I enjoy my major and I adore my professors. But I absolutely hate, abhor and despise school.

For the past four years of our lives, we’ve lived in a system where genuine learning takes a back seat and most of our energies are spent figuring out what efforts yield the best grades. We spend each weekday traveling to multiple classes, sitting in lectures, reading unrelated textbooks and then we complete assignments and prepare for exams in scattered bursts. Students can barely remember what last month’s tests were on, but can accurately tell you what words teachers circle when awarding A’s or if exams are built around practice tests for courses taken two semesters ago. Somewhere in between, we sleep, eat, make friends, do resume-boosting extracurriculars, figure out who we are and try to have fun. Instead of a four-year experience where we master our majors, what we get is 48 months of moderately-managed cramming split between heavy drinking and applying for stepping-stone internships. College isn’t so much a learning environment as it is a highly-fragmented to-do list.