It’s pretty customary to give younger friends and family members little tidbits of advice when they graduate highschool. You got tidbits at your graduation party, or questions thinly veiled as advice. “Where are you going to college?” means “You have to go to college.” Or “You should use some of the money you’re getting from this party to start a retirement account. You’ll thank yourself if you start now.” Or “I want to say one word to you. Just one word: Plastics.” The advice I have to give is fairly unpopular around the older crowd, so I make sure no one else is around when I dish it out to the guest of honor. “Don’t go to college. Unless someone else is going to pay for it, don’t go to college.”
Kayla has a very good handle on our finances, as I’m sure you’ve realized by now. We’re doing better than most of our peers, at least the ones I have engaged with directly, and I feel overwhelmed with student debt. We don’t like to give out exact numbers when it comes to our finances, so to use a comparison, we owe more money on our education than we do on our house. We bought a house so that we could have a place to hide from the rain and shit in peace. It is the largest investment our forebearers made in their lives, one of the most basic necessities of life, and it was less expensive than some pieces of PAPER signed by some old white dudes (mostly).
Below is a graphical representation of the amount of money we have spent in various categories in 2017. This accounts for every last penny that has gone out of our lives, and the pretty purple segments represent our student loans.
January is an anomaly. We had a few large non-loan related expenses in January that shifted the numbers. Every other month this year student loans are our biggest expense, and it was, with the exception of March, over 25% of our budget each of those months. In March, Kayla bought flooring for the whole house, because we’re in the middle of a pretty major remodel, which is why that one slipped just under 25%.
We pay more than the minimum on our loans every month, because we refuse to be indebted for the rest of our lives. It’s this giant monster that’s looming over all of us, and I feel stifled by it, like I don’t own my own life; some faceless, unbeatable, overpowering entity does. Fuck that, quite frankly. Every spare chunk of change we have goes to feeding that monster, getting us out from under its watchful gaze, able to live life on our own terms.
“Ah, but you can’t put a price on education!” they say. I learned some fancy words, which could have been found at dictionary.com. I was introduced to some helpful concepts and literature pertaining to my field of interest, but all of that was available at my local library. It was all bundled up in some easy to access packaging, that’s fair, but packaging shouldn’t cost more than my house. Also fair, I wouldn’t have gotten the job I have without my degree, but that’s a fault of my employer, because the bulk of the knowledge I use at work, I got at work. Kayla got her job because of the minor she has, but, “a monkey could do my job!” so says she. If you can read and look at pictures you can do Kayla’s job, and I’m pretty sure we could all do that before high school graduation. Based on my experience, and the experiences of those around me, post-secondary education is just a big stupid game, and the only way to win is not to play.
The next time you’re making a hiring decision, consider the person that was smart enough not to fall in the same trap I did, or the single parent that was too busy to fall into that trap. Next time you find out your Applebees server is about to finish highschool ask the kid, “What is important to you?” instead of, “What schools are you looking at?” And the next time you have to write something wise or clever in a graduation card consider, “Don’t go to college” because an entire generation of people that lose >25% of their paycheck every month isn’t good for anyone.
tl;dr- college is an unreasonable financial burden that should be avoided if possible, for the benefit of both micro and macroeconomics.