Hate College? Here’s A List Of Alternatives
“College isn’t for everyone” — Too Many People To Credit
I’m one of those people. I firmly hold the belief that college is not meant for everyone; in fact, I don’t personally see a lot of intrinsic value from college for most everyone. With millennials being the most educated generation in history and also the most underpaid, it seems like the statistics agree with me on this one. The proportionate price of college has increased dramatically, even when considering inflation of the US dollar. A college degree is becoming less impressive and more a “norm” in modern society. It’s also been proven that college has become easier than it was in previous years.
I Despised College
Nothing felt worse than college to me. I remember going through all of highschool looking at college as the bastion of knowledge where I’d go to learn the things that truly mattered in my life. To say I was disappointed by college would be the largest understatement of my life. My hopes were utterly demolished, shattered, and ruined by what college had to offer. It could not have been any worse.
I went to college to learn new things that would help me to become a better software engineer. What I learned instead were the exact same things I learned in high school for the first two years which was swiftly followed by programming classes that never passed what I learned as a 12-year-old just getting into JavaScript.
We began our Intro to Visual Basic course by writing a simple “Hello, World” program like all great intro to programming courses do. The issue is not that it started in that way but rather that the final thing we covered in a three-month class were while loops. There’s no bigger let down than to waste three months learning absolutely nothing. It was around this time that I decided to begin looking into alternatives; that’s where Lambda School came into play.
Don’t take what I’m saying as a way of discouraging you from attending college if that’s what you planned on doing. You should still do that if it’s something you believe you’ll enjoy and will help you with your future.
College Alternatives
If you don’t want to go to college there are a lot of alternatives that can still yield great success in your life! A lot of people, including me, held the view that the only option post high school that was truly viable was college. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. In fact, the argument could be made that college is the least viable choice for most people after graduating high school, but that’s another post in itself. Let’s quickly talk about the college alternatives…
Self-Teaching
Something that’s very underrated by potential employees and employers alike. According to Hal Elrod, writer of The Miracle Morning, you can get the equivalent of a college education by listening to audio books in your car by turning your vehicle into “college on wheels”.
Beyond audio books, you can also learn everything from A to Z on how to become an accountant, software engineer, writer, coach, roboticist, teacher, or pretty much anything else online through free sources like YouTube. YouTube can be a brilliant tool for learning as well as a wonderful medium for watching horrifying snake bites and car crashes!
Self-teaching was what landed me my first software engineering job at Font Awesome when I was 18. I began at age 12 with JavaScript. At age 15 I picked up Ruby with a fun little book called Learning to Program by Chris Pine. I then learned Rails, the framework for Ruby. Self-teaching is not something to look down upon. It’s a potential future for education without spending copious amounts of money for no reason.
Trade School
A great option for someone who wants to spend a few months getting up to date on a trade skill then going to work instead of spending four years at a university. It’s a great alternative that has some pretty great options.
A perfect example of this would be someone who goes to school for welding then goes on to work for a company to weld. This person then goes on to open their own welding business that grows and makes them a lot of money annually and even allows them to retire young.
Consider this, a welder makes roughly $40 an hour as a new welder while a teacher only makes about $18 an hour when just starting. These numbers are derived from the teacher’s base salary of $35,000 for a first-year teacher and $60,000 for a first-year welder.
Online College
This is technical college but it’s an alternate form of college so…it counts! Online college is becoming more and more accepted and it’s for good reason. For me, online college removes one of my least favorites aspects of college which is getting up super early to go to a class and sit next to a bunch of strangers. I don’t like waking up early (before seven). I don’t like loud strangers…quiet ones I don’t mind, my classes always had a few loud ones that drove me up a wall.
Online college is usually more challenging, relevant, and expensive than traditional colleges around your area. This is subjective, of course, but it’s still pretty relevant to most people. Here’s my personal example, there are two four year universities around me where I live. One has a tuition of about $7,000 a year while the other has about $8,500. They’re both D2 schools that I’ve attended. When I looked into attending Full Sail University as a Game Developer, it was $60,000 for the whole shebang. If I went to one of the other universities, it would have only come out to around $30,000 instead.
While it is as expensive as going to a D1 school like Missouri University or The University of Iowa, what you learn is more to the point. Instead of going through two years of pointless Gen Eds you are dropped into your degree field classes instantly which is a huge benefit. You also go to class online from your own home. As you can imagine, this gives online college a huge benefit over traditional college, at least to me it does.
Lambda School
Ah, Lambda School, the best education program I’ve ever learned about. Lambda School is a unique alternative to college as it’s only for people looking to become computer scientists or software developers of some kind. Lambda School is a form of expiated college. It’s a school where you get your degree in nine months as opposed to four years. It also fits in with college very well and is a great way to finish up college in my experiences and in the experiences of so many people nation wide!
They offer multiple different courses like Full Stack Web Development, iOS and Android Development, and even Data Analysis. It’s created by Austen Alred, a software engineer who used to live out of his car and have an office from the back of the hatchback. He decided that he wanted to give people like him a chance, people who didn’t have a lot of money for college but without going in debt and so he created Lambda School for aspiring computer scientists.
A school where you didn’t pay anything upfront unless you chose to, but rather paid back the institution only if you got a job that paid $50,000 or more within the next two years…otherwise you pay nothing. This is a school that accepts around 1,000 people per class and is about as prestigious as MIT, Stanford, and Harvard as it would seem in the technology world. It’s so highly respected that everyone I’ve talked to knows about it and tells me that it’s the best possible move for aspiring computer scientists and software engineers.
If you get a job within two years of graduating from the nine-month Lambda School full-time course and get a job making $50,000 or over, you’ll be expected to pay a total of 17% of your income over the next two years then you’re done! That said, if you don’t get a job paying over $50,000 for two years then your education is FREE! Lambda School sees its students as an investment so they expect you to make the $50,000 and pay them back that 17%. The maximum you can pay to Lambda School, assuming you get a great job paying upwards of $150,000 is only a max of $30,000 or $15,000 per year. This means that you’re going to be paying about what a college education from a smaller university would cost while getting an education that will actually make a difference in your future!
I can’t sing enough praises for Lambda School right now as it’s the best educational program I’ve heard of and trust me, I’ve been looking for good alternatives to college.
I’ve Been Accepted
As of March 13, 2019 I’ve been accepted to Lambda School under their Full Stack Web Developer Program. I begin my classes as of April 22nd at 10 am! I’m very excited about this new experience in my life and for the first time in my life, I’m excited for school.
Before you know if you’ve been accepted into Lambda School or not, you take the precourse at your own pace. This is a series of videos which are followed by worksheets and quizzes to prepare you for the full course if you get accepted.
To give you an idea, the precourse for Lambda School covers everything I’ve learned in school about software development but instead of taking a year to do so, it takes less than one week as long as you do a few lessons a day. It’s crazy to see how disconnected universities are from what they should be teaching their students to actually prepare them for the real world. I’ve worked as a software engineer and what I learned as a student at university is nothing compared to what I’ve already learned in the precourse to Lambda School.
While the next nine months of my life will be extremely busy, it will also be a lot of fun And I should learn far more than I ever did in college.
I will be learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the first week which will she followed by a lot of in depth learning on those same languages while also learning about Dev Ops, Node.js, Sails.js, and much more!
It will break down into more projects and tasks that are more complex as time goes by until finally having the ability to build a website from start to finish, manage it, make changes as needed, as well as scale the website to whatever size I need to.
While the next nine months may be stressful and a lot to handle, they will also be nine of the most useful months of my life where I’ll learn from the best teachers around in the best manor around. I’m very thankful for Lambda School giving me this chance to learn through their program and I am very excited to start. Over the next nine months, I plan to post multiple posts about the school, my life, and whatever else seems interesting to me and any of my listeners or readers!
