“I have $20,000 in debt, I’m 3 years into college, I’ve switched my major 4 times, and I don’t want to go into my degree field anymore.”

How many times have you heard this?

I’ve heard it more times than I can show with all my fingers, and at this point, my question is no longer “what do you want to do after college,” it’s “why are you going to college to do it?”

For many years, college seemed to serve a purpose. To educate students and showcase to future employers that you were roughly “as good as other people who had also gotten a degree”

An unpopular opinion: the degree is dead.

It doesn’t mean anything.

There are now dozens of more efficient ways to get both an education and showcase to employers that you are a value creator. Ways that don’t require monetary debt. But even more importantly, don’t require such a huge opportunity cost. (Here are a few examples.)

The average student is spending 4 — or more — years of their life at an institution that takes much and offers very little in return.

A Ronald Reagan joke comes to mind here: “There is more knowledge in colleges than almost anywhere else in the world. Think about it, the freshmen come in with so much knowledge, and the seniors with so little”

After college, you are shot out with no more real-world experience than you came with, debt, a piece of paper saying you learned, and often times, the exact same uncertainty of what you want to do as you had when graduating high school.

“Learning is the process of doing what you don’t know how to do, while you don’t know how to do it.” ~ Chalmers Brothers

What if we took this approach instead?

If we wanted to learn how to swim, would we spend 4 years in a classroom learning how to do it before we ever got in the water? Of course not. If we did, we might end up hating it when we actually did it, we probably wouldn’t be that great at it, and realistically, we would have forgotten 90 percent of what we learned. Contrast this to someone who decided they wanted to swim, looked up a couple videos and how to’s, then spent the next 4 years going to the pool every day.

Who’s going to be the better swimmer at the end of four years?

If you don’t know how to do something, simply go out and do it. There are so many resources now available for people who want to learn. The excuse of not knowing how doesn’t work anymore.

Your options are wide open. Will you spend the next four years of your life dreaming, or will you spend it creating?