Why a non-professional college degree is worthless

I often look at my university education and think of what a useless load of crap it is. I have a PhD in neuroscience, which has no practical application to anything much. It's certainly not an industry, or something that produces a marketable product, or makes money, or produces anything that's needed, wanted, or popular.

This can be said of much of university education. Other than professional courses such as engineering, medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, computer science, teaching, and so on, a university education merely serves as a signal to employers. The content of your non-professional university education, no matter how worthless and irrelevant it may be, is not important. The important thing is the signal it sends. The signal is that you contain the trinity of characteristics that employers hope will make you a successful employee: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. This is why employers seek employees with a university education, because the drudgery to obtain educational success is the same drudgery required for job success. An intelligent employee will learn their job fast, a conscientious employee will labor until the job is done right, and a conformist employee obeys superiors and works well with team members.

This is why most university graduates all appear to come from the same mold - they dress the same, talk the same, think the same, and act the same - because they're conformists.

Me, I fucking hated university life, and I still hate it today with a passion. I lived with my parents in my home town and hung out with my old high school friends while I was at university. So for me, going to university was not some amazing, liberating, enlightening, partying, growth experience that helped me develop as a person. Instead, it was what held me back in life, for many years. In fact, the more I've distanced myself from university life, the better my life has become. My overall opinion of college/university is that it's just high school with more partying and binge drinking, and a degree is just a piece of paper that says you belong to the middle class.

What's my point here? Well I guess the first thing is that I'm not your typical college degree conformist type of person. I don't share the characteristics of the typical straight-from-the-mold university grad employee - the standard vertical pin-striped shirt, the pants, the shiny shoes, the same haircut that my mother gave me when I was eight years old, the dopey grin of self-satisfaction, the carefully considered speech so as not to make waves, the spindly musculature, the pallid face, the subservient attitude. Does a college education reliably signal intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity? Based on my example we can only say "maybe" at best. Does it give people useful skills for the real world? Almost definitely not.

And on that note, here are some of the world's most successful people telling us why a non-professional college degree is worthless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8QY0NDWqzk

That's all for now.  Don't forget to subscribe to my blog using the box at the top right of this page.

-Dave Bad Person



More reading on this topic

If you want to read another thread about my shitty university experiences, check this out:
https://boredofstudies.org/threads/the-australian-national-university-anu-is-a-terrible-university-and-will-ruin-your-future.387681/
https://www.badperson.net/2019/11/the-australian-national-university-anu.html


You can also find books that cover this topic more thoroughly at these links:
www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652
www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation/dp/0735224897
www.amazon.com/Cracks-Ivory-Tower-Higher-Education/dp/0190846283

Here's my blog post about how academics have become detached from the reality of what society needs from them.
https://www.badperson.net/2020/02/academics-have-become-detached-from-reality.html

Here's another one of my blog posts about how scientists lie about the goals and utility of their research so they can make themselves and their work seem more important.
https://www.badperson.net/2020/02/how-scientists-lie-about-the-goals-and-utility-of-their-research.html

Here's my parody of the media release by the President of the Australian Academy of Science regarding the recent mega-fires in Australia.
https://www.badperson.net/2020/01/a-message-from-president-of-australian.html