Is college worth it?

It seems that a lot of people get really confused

about this question and I see it come up

over and over again and they're just wondering

"I don't know, should I go? Should I go college?

Is it good? Is it going to be worth it?

Maybe I should just not go college." And few things in life

are really 50-50 equivalent decisions.

It's not like 49% - 51%

in one direction or another. The actual answer

is going to be very clear. It's going to be like

200% yeah you probably should have gone to college.

If you had the ability to travel back and forth in time

You would probably be able to see that one path led you

clearly way higher than another path.

And so what I'm trying to say is that, likely, a lot of people are just

coming up with excuses to avoid a difficult decision.

Like if you're just trying to run away from college, if you just don't want to apply,

you don't want to put in the work then, that's not really a great decision.

A lot of people like to reference Mark Zuckerberg

or Bill Gates who dropped out of college but in reality these people

they got into Harvard, they went through all the work.

They weren't really running away from college. They had gotten in

and then they were going on to something higher than that.

Now, the diploma is a very interesting thing

to think about and one thing that we can relate it to

is the Youtube silver creator award.

This is very much like a diploma and we're going to unbox this for you

just so that you can understand

why this might be interesting for you.

Now a lot of you guys like to make fun

but this is where I actually have a multitool

which I can use to open this package. And I

will have a link for this in the description below

It is a Leatherman charged tool titanium

I received this actually from

Google as well. You can see actually

It's very cool. It has a Youtube logo on there.

If you want one, you wanna go apply to Youtube and go work there

then you can pick one of these too.

Now the funny thing is when I worked at Youtube everyone

would call each other Youtubers but

they weren't Youtubers.

They were just engineers. THIS (the silver button) means that you are a Youtuber. So, as I was saying,

the diploma is one way you can use to prove

what you know. You know, you don't necessarily need to point people to

a bunch of random of projects and things that you may have done

and then people have to wonder: "Was this real? Are you just lying?

How can I validate any of this? Was this really

what I think it is? Or was it something less?"

You know, the diploma is just going to be a very easy way to just prove your accomplishments.

It is one of your easiest and fastest ticket into a company.

So my question is: what else are you going to do with your time?

Right? Like... yeah you can go off and you can create a bunch

of your own little web projects and little web applications and maybe

some of them will succeed, some of them

won't succeed. Even if one of them do succeed, if it

doesn't generate significant revenue or if it doesn't provide for you the sufficient technical background to

land a full time job after that

then that's going to be a short term lived thing.

And so what I'm really saying is I think that in my eyes

a college degree is just a really fun and easy path

into getting something that may help you get a job.

Right? Like

There's a bunch of different ways to land your first job.

Most of them are going to be very difficult. You got to really hustle.

You gotta do a bunch of stuff. You gotta work on some ideas.

And then, here, one of the key components into

landing a job like say getting a degree,

there's a very clear and easy simple path. And

what's better is it's usually a pretty fun path. Like

College is generally a time that is a little bit funnier than other times in your life

You are gonna want to come by and take a look at what I'm doing here because this is getting interesting.

Let's unbox this here.

Ow that's nice. It's a nice little letter.

The Youtube Silver award presented to...

TechLead. So this is my diploma. And by the way

Thanks to all the subscribers that made this happen. I like

how it's a mirror so you can actually see yourself in the logo.

So with this if I ever wanted to apply for a job to be like a Youtuber

then all I have to do is to show the employer this

and they might hire me to be like their official Youtuber or something like that.

And this is instant validation.

You know it's funny that there's been a trend towards people bashing on education

and people saying like you know, "college is useless", "it costs a bunch".

But it's funny that when I look around at the office, it's like everyone's got degrees.

If you actually take a look at what they are doing

and not just listen to what they're telling you, you'll see that

a lot of people in this day and age are still looking for your

education on your resume and they still want to know where you went to school,

what your major was. And it's unfortunate that that's

what this world is like right now, but that's just the way it is.

All you need to do is go on LinkedIn, find some company that you maybe interesting in

and check the people who work there.

What sort of educational background these people have?

About a year ago I checked out the educational backgrounds of all the senior leadership.

People who are directors, vice presidents, senior management.

And if you take a look at the educational background of all of them

I was surprised to find, was pretty serious education like,

really good schools, they had serious degrees.

And a good number of them had gone on to

secondary education where they got either like a MBA or Master's

or PhD in some field. It just made me really reconsider and think

maybe I should go off and get a MBA or something

because it seems like education is more important than I have personally imagined.

That's not to say it's not possible but it's just going to be uphill if you go that way.

And the best thing to do is really to just apply and see what you can get.

Right? Like. And I think that even goes for higher education.

Like for people who are thinking about getting a Master's program,

it may not be a bad idea just to apply around and see if you can get anything interesting.

And let me just get this out the way for everybody.

Hum... Yeah. College is stupid.

A lot of the parts of it are stupid. And you don't necessarily

need to be the one defending this and putting yourself

on the line just to make this statement.

You know. We all know it. Everybody knows it.

And education is being changed, is being reformed and people are starting to have other thoughts about what to do about it.

But you don't necessarily need to make it the hill upon which you will crucify yourself

in order to make that statement.

Like I remember there were some courses where the professor seemed completely disinterested in the students,

not interested in teaching. They had not passion for their work and they just randomly scribbled stuff on the board.

And they abused their power. And they didn't really care at all.

Homework assignments may be completely crazy.

with very little guidance from the professor.

You know, it could be just a bunch of busy work and grades may be assigned unfairly.

And then there might a bunch of stress involved.

Probably the funniest part about it was really, like, studying abroad.

And then, the overall social dynamics like just being in school.

It actually wasn't a very good time. And

I felt that probably in terms of technical education there were

like five courses that were useful and the rest

none of them really contributed that much to me

in a professional way.

But you know, I wouldn't say I was really in a hurry.

Like, that was a fun chapter of my life.

There's lot more to it than just, say, how much technical knowledge can you absorb out of this course

given a certain amount of money that you put in to the tuition.

It was a time that for me was a little bit fun, mostly stressful,

filled with lot of personal growth

where I could explore area that I may be interested in.

And it's time to do a bit of learning

because once you get out you found out

that you don't really learn much in the real world, like

most of the time you're busy working a job,

you know, you're not going to just sit down and spend a whole day

reading a textbook and then doing the homework problems out of it

like you might be pressured to do in college.

I heard an interesting story the other day about a tech executive

who, everyday when her child came home from school she would ask him

what risks did he take that day.

And he would ask her what risks did she take that day.

And I thought that was excellent.

It was training people to be risk takers. I might even go

a step further and ask a child: why did you learn

from your failures today? What did you learn from your mistakes?

Because, in my opinion, failure is something that

a lot of schools teach you to avoid and in the real world

failure is something that people need to learn to accept.

And in the act of learning from a mistake is something that will really benefit you in the future.

You making a mistake

usually isn't going to be the end of the world. And the cause

is in actuality sometimes not that big.

However, schools may teach you that if you make a mistake

on a test or something like that, it's the end of the world,

your grades are going to be permanently damaged and

it just teaches people to be completely failure adverse.

I've also seen people come out of relatively top universities

like UC Berkeley which was my school

and you might think that

they would have a job all lined up and that's not really the case.

I knew that many of them actually struggled in getting a job

and a number of them even just quit the major entirely and went into, say

bartending. College by no means

is a golden ticket to success and a lot of people would just

waste their educations using all the time to go drinking

and partying. And that's really not the right way to go about

things. The key to realize is that maybe college

is not going to be the key to success that it used to be but

at the same time, it's not completely useless and in fact

it may be very useful in helping you get your foot into the door.

Overall, though, I would say that the best thing you can probably do if you're curious about it

is think about:

What would make you say yes to, say,

the option of college? What institutions would be interesting for you?

And then just apply to those institutions

and see if you can gain anything interesting.

You know, if you can't then fine

you know, maybe just forget it. But give it a shot

and remember that there might a lot of other fun things to come out of it.

Like if you're only going there such that you can learn to get a job

I wouldn't say that that's really going to be quite worth it for you.

But if you're gonna go and you're excited about going

and you gonna go, like, and you wanna go meet people,

learn things, try networking, maybe learn a few other random topics,

you know, experience life in that location like,

you know, I went to UC San Diego for grad school

and I really wanted to go there because my brother and my sister were gonna be there,

I was going to be next to the beach. And yeah, overall,

that was kind of a fun time for me.

So, that'll do for me.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

If you like the video, give it a like and subscribe and I will see you next time.

Bye.