“Should I go to college?” In the world of student loans, it’s easy to say college is antiquated. In this post, I’ll go through:

• The financial aspect of going to college
• What majors you should choose
• And discuss in depth the “intangibles” of going to college, like ‘what if this doesn’t make me happy?’

Think Of Going To College As An Investment, But Not All Investments Are Created Equal

If you are going to go to college, you need to think about the money.

What’s your ROI on tuition? And what’s the lifetime value of the career path you’ll choose? You can find these things out easily by looking at:

1. The tuition of the universities you’re considering.
2. The average pay of the people in the field you’re considering.

Here’s an example. If you go into an engineering degree and it’ll cost you $100K over 4 years. It’ll land you a job where in 20 years you’ll get $1.5MM after tax. That’s an IRR of 35%. This is an extremely good return on investment.

Now suppose you get a degree in art history for $100K over 4 years. You don’t understand what jobs you could possibly get with it. Ergo, you should have your work be marked as ‘minimum wage’ to be conservative (this is realistic, if minimum wage jobs would even hire you with an art history degree).

Here’s the kicker: you would gotten a minimum wage job with or without your art degree, so your IRR is actually -100% and you’ve just burned 100K.

It’s even worse than that actually because that’s also 4 years of your life gone. Those 4 years could have literally been better doing anything else and presents a huge opportunity cost (assuming you live to 100, that’s 4% of your life).

Picking the wrong degree to go into is like paying $100K to go to prison for 4 years. It’s not a good deal.

So what careers should you choose that’ll net a high IRR? It’s the ones that you’d suspect: engineering, doctors, lawyers, etc. Refer to my post regarding the best career in the world if you have no direction for ideas on what majors you should pursue.

Should I Go To College If I Don’t Know What I Want To Do?

You might run through a bunch of calculations and see that a few occupations are worth your time in terms of IRR.

But you’re not “feeling it” – you don’t like them or hate them. You just don’t know what to do. And it’s OK, if you’re applying to college you’re around 18 years old and you shouldn’t know what you want to do for the rest of your life. It’s physically impossible because you can’t predict the future.

And if you were that good at predicting the future, you can just put $1000 into call options on the next stock that’ll 500X and you’ll never have money problems again.

That said, you should only not pick one of these lucrative majors if: 1) you hate all of it. Not dislike, but hate. AND 2) you have a better alternative that’ll net you a sufficient amount of money that you’ll be happy with.

You Think You’ll Hate Those Jobs

Hating something you’ve never done is impossible. You can only “think” you’ll hate the job. Hence, this section.

Some folks’ threshold for not going to college is just “I think I might dislike it ergo I am not going to do it despite a high IRR.” I disagree with this sentiment wholeheartedly.

The reasoning behind not attending college for a degree you think you dislike is because you don’t want to live an unhappy life. I get that. Nobody wants to be miserable for the rest of their lives.

But nobody says you need to commit to that degree forever – it’s merely a backup plan until you figure out what you want to do that’ll both: 1) make you happy, and 2) be very lucrative. Once you find it, you can transition out of the thing you don’t want to do.

Fact is, statistically speaking some careers just yield very good returns with a college degree. And nobody’s preventing you from exploring and tasting different things while studying something you’re not excited about (but would serve as a fine backup plan financially).

The opportunity cost is not that big if you have to both:

1. Juggle studying for your lucrative degree and
2. Explore what other things you might want to do while at college.

Because you can explore other career paths while going down one, I don’t buy the excuse of “if I choose something I don’t want to do, I’ll be miserable forever.”

Thus, the only reason why pursuing a high-IRR degree that you’re not excited about will “make you unhappy for the rest of your life” is if you’re too lazy to try out other things while you’re in college. In that case, don’t go to college at all then (or do anything) since lazy people are doomed to begin with.

You’re An 18-Year-Old Genius With Your Own Idea That’ll Change The Universe And Make You A Trillionaire

First, there are very rare cases of successful people who didn’t even start going to college. But if you have an idea you know you can execute and can be in that rarified group, go ahead and don’t attend. College, in that case, would be a waste of your time.

Keep in mind though that most successful people did at least start some college. You hear stories about Elon Musk and Bill Gates “dropping out of school.” This isn’t true. They took a leave of absence so if things didn’t work out, they can continue their education. Smart people understand the importance of having a backup plan and the financial tool that a college degree could be.

And sure, Bill Gates didn’t need to attend Harvard if he didn’t want to. He had the skills to execute and he saw the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of PCs. If you’re as talented (or more talented) than him, then you should not attend college even as a backup plan. This is semi-facetious as you’re very unlikely to be more skilled and/or hardworking than any billionaire.

As a reality check, how many months in a roll have you worked for 16 hours a day without stopping? 0? For Bill Gates, we’re talking nonstop work for an entire decade. Can you keep that up? I can’t.

But if you *are* just that talented and hardworking, and you have a vision you know you can execute on, then you should definitely just bypass the school thing and attack the opportunity with your skills/talent.

Just know that even with your skills, your probability of success with your idea is very low. You’ll need to be comfortable with the risk of failing and then ‘wasting’ a lot of time on a business that didn’t work.

And you’ll also need to be comfortable that if you do fail, then you’ll be a lot older than all your classmates if you do attend college later.

Of course, when an 18 year old has an idea they think will work, they’re thinking 100% success rate. That’s just not reality. That’s like saying jumping off a 32-story building will give you a 100% chance of survival. Even if you land the right way, a lot of luck is involved.

So…Should I Go To College Or Not?

This post might seem purely focused on the money only and neglects any regards to well-being.

This is false.

Financial well-being feeds into normal well-being. Most divorces are because of money problems. And I wouldn’t say divorces help your well-being, would you?

Money solves a ton of problems. If you don’t have time for X, money can solve it generally because you can hire it out.

Thus, as you grow older and have kids, money literally “buys” you more time to nurture your kids and family. Money lets you live a better quality of life. Money lets you focus full-time working on yourself.

No money = you have to focus on working on yourself and worry about putting food on the table.

Money satisfies all of Maslow’s hierarchy, except the “self-actualization” part. But even then, money gives you way more time to spend on self-actualization.

Working backwards, you should pick a college degree that’ll give you good financial results. The tradeoff is you might not like the work, but if you get the skills you might just love the work anyway because you’re so good at it. In fact, that’s the thesis of Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You – that passion comes after you’ve developed skills for it, not before.

Even if there’s a tradeoff of doing something you don’t love for money, you can always pursue something else in parallel. And even if your college career is over and you’ve not found something yet, just find a job in that lucrative career and start earning money

If you still hate it once you’ve started earning money, you can do your job and continue to pursue other interests. And if you think your work will take up all of your time, try converting your work to a 10-hour workweek as I’ve outlined in this blog previously.

The bad assumption of people advising people not going to college is this:

• You EITHER go to college and end up doing a bad job, OR you can find something you love that can make you money.

In reality, it’s not “OR” – it’s an “AND”:

• You go to college and make money doing something you might not enjoy at the beginning, AND you’re constantly searching for something you love that can make you money. Perhaps even more money. Perhaps a lot more money.

Likewise, there’s a very bad assumption which is just because you think you’d love doing something means you’d actually love doing it.

You might want to run a donut shop because you love donuts. But then you quickly realize you hate running a donut shop and want to do something else. You never know what you like/don’t like until you do it. So why not just go to college and do a high-IRR career to start, AND keep exploring what you like even more and keep improving your station from there?

The exception to this is if you’re actually a genius (if you need to ask, you’re not) and you have a clear roadmap of exactly how you’ll execute and win a billion dollars. Even then I’d still say just enroll in a college and take a leave of absence to work on your business. That move is strictly better than not attending in the first place and there’s almost no opportunity cost there.