Why University is Useless
Okay, before you jump down my throat and justify your degree’s to me, hear me out. I’m aware that specific jobs necessitate a piece of paper to perform. Doctor, Lawyer, Dentist, Engineer, blah blah.
If you’re doing one of those, good for you. They are well paying jobs, and you’d probably be too busy to read or respond to this article if you were.
So that leaves my target audience — The teachers, the social workers, the art students, the film and media, the human movement, the…. whatever shitty degree who’s title alone should send you running, because you know you won’t get anything out of it.
It is not worth your time.
I know there are some people living in delusion who will angrily fight to the death for me undermining their expensive piece of paper, but hear me out.
You spend so much time doing nothing. I repeat, you spend SO MUCH TIME DOING NOTHING. And you are rewarded for doing it. Socially especially. You can tell anyone at any time that you are studying and you’ll be met with a courteous nod, perhaps a smile and a warm reception.
Despite the fact you haven’t opened any of the textbooks, done no readings, haven’t gone to any lectures and will only attend the 3 tutorials that grant you a passing mark per subject.
Then you’ll do all of your assignments in two days, when your given weeks to complete them, barely scraping passes because the standards are so low that they’ll push anyone through the system to wring more money out of them. Never mind the fact that the quality of work would fail a year 11 classroom.
After years of bumming around on campus drinking coffees, browsing reddit and facebook you finally have a placement. Though it’s not a real placement, you don’t have to do any work. It’s an ‘’Observation’’. Which in my case was going to a school in the last 3 weeks of term full time to watch them watch movies and do colouring in. Worthwhile experience and I learned a lot.
Only to return to uni and pursue more meaningless subjects that are so theoretical they have no application to the real world. Paying no attention except to the rubric so you can serve up whatever slop will be accepted and allow you to slide along the conveyor belt of factory produced students. Utterly without skills or qualifications, except how to bullshit essays and pretend to look engaged in tutorials.
And if you’re like me you quit half way through your actual placement, because you put in no work at all and were found out when you tried to do teaching and discovered you hated it the entire time. It was just a nice little cubby hole to prolong your adolescence and prevent yourself from interacting with the real world. Insulated from those grotty 9–5 jobs, paying bills, becoming independent and contributing to society.
No, playing the role of stoner student was preferable. And universities love it too. No matter how disinterested you are, a dollar is a dollar.
I know the blame is squarely on myself, but as an unsure 18 year old following the heard this is the result of my actions. Kind of lame and I didn’t understand that I had any other choice. Which may seem ridiculous, but when you’ve been conditioned to look to authority to make all your life choices for you only to suddenly have autonomy at one specific moment after years without it, naturally you panic and do what everyone else is doing.
Only to continue doing the same thing slowly realising that it’s not for you, but being too pussy to do anything about it.
Maybe you are a passionate student for whom this article does nothing for. If that’s the case, then so be it. But based on my own experiences and interactions with students my age, both in and out of the education system, they too have similar experiences. Doing something they thought was the right thing, and slowly understanding that they hated doing it, only to continue to do it out of fear of change. Then completing it or dropping out, returning to the same place they were before and being no better for it.
Okay, so what’s the alternative?
I believe despite how cutting edge universities claim to be, they are behind the 8 ball. School is decades behind. They are trying to manufacture students for factory jobs that no longer exist. That’s why they make you sit in desks all day, because they wanted to get you used to screwing shit together on conveyor belts. Legit.
The self help industry is leagues beyond anything universities can teach you, if you immerse yourself in it. The world is only going to change, with the internet spearheading the future in ways we can’t comprehend. Aligning with people who are pioneering online marketplaces is the smartest thing you can do, instead of continuing cultural traditions of degrees that have no practical application.
Not to mention the psychological and spiritual benefits of mastering your own cognition and learning how your mind works, steering it in pragmatic directions rather than being force fed how to think feel and act by institutions. Brainwashing yourself with outdated ideas.
If you think I’m bullshitting, believe what you want to believe. But don’t complain when you graduate and get stuck in a job you hate, wondering why you didn’t do differently when the world is evolving faster than our current job sphere.
