Zwielicht
Elite Member
- Aug 31, 2013
- 21,128
- 40,601
The education they received prior to their success is often irrelevant. You're giving universities credit for something they didn't create. This is something estranged relatives do when one of their family members becomes successful ("I helped raise him", "I taught him that", "I'm the reason he's like that", are all common statements made by them). If you want to meet people for networking, then go to group meetups (in person) and chat with people online. Find out where people who work in your field congregate or bring them together by creating your own group.
Do you want to expand the way you think? Try one of these cheaper and much more viable alternatives:
- Travel
- Study another culture
- Learn a foreign language (Already know one? Learn another one)
- Talk to people who have an opinion that conflicts with your own and consider why they think the way they do (which is something you can do on this thread)
- Study a new subject
- Learn to play an instrument
- Learn how to do something you normally wouldn't talk an interest in (glass blowing, wood engraving, metalworking, circuitry, cobbling, etcetera)
- Improve your current skills.
When I mentioned the advertisements, I was speaking more about branding. For example, I have a 17 year old sister who didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. She looked into many different career choices, but then one day she told me that she wants to go to college and started speaking about how great colleges were. When I asked her why she suddenly wanted to go, she told me, "I don't know, I just felt like it was a sign that I should go. I kept seeing all of these advertisements on Facebook and I took it as a sign that I should go". This is all a part of marketing. Colleges target people during times of desperation so that they can increase their enrolment rates. Instead of me typing out what I've said many times before, here are some of my quotes from older threads on this forum:
You mean accreditation. It's because too many people are pushed to go to college without a purpose (or the purpose is just to "make more money"). At one point in time, college degrees were meant to create well-rounded citizens (their original purpose) and help people get into careers which did require a college degree (jobs like psychology and teaching positions). Over time, once employers started using college degrees after Griggs v Duke Power, colleges essentially became trade schools with the promise of "Getting educated and making more money". This was also thanks to the marketing efforts, something we should all be familiar with here, put forth by the colleges to attract more students. This worked out fantastically during a time when employers needed a new way of testing their job applicants, so job applicants began pushing people toward college so that they could have a way to determine their skill level.
During the Great Recession (2007-2009), colleges began marketing themselves more aggressively by falsely promising a ticket to the good life. Because the general public was so desperate, this caused college enrolment to spike more than it ever had in previous recessions. Think of college like Hitler and the general public as Germany, except Hitler managed to get Germany out of the recession by launching a vast program of the construction of highways (right before he started his concentration camps, although this is beside the point), whereas colleges just managed to increase debt to previously unfathomable levels. Either way, both of them used the public's desperation to gain power.
There's a lot more to the history of how the obsession with college began and it's all quite interesting, so I always encourage people to look into it more. Also, before someone turns this into a a "Hitler killed millions of people" topic:
Here's a link where I describe how the current education system works:
​http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blackhat-lounge/709924-current-education-system.html
In case you're wondering why there are so many iconoclastic posts where I speak about college, it's because these are all arguments I have with people each and every time I go out somewhere. It always starts off with the same questions:
- So what college are you going to (people naturally assume someone who looks younger than they are is automatically going to college)?
- Why aren't you in college
- But why?
- Have you ever considered going to college?
And then it's followed by that silly concerned facial expression everyone makes after I tell them why I didn't go (I don't see why I need to explain myself, I don't ask them why they are in college and look at them like they're stupid when they give me a lame excuse for attending). They usually don't comprehend what I tell them (which is the same thing I'm telling you), proceed to think of me as an iconclast, and then they tell me I'm wrong because, "if college isn't the answer, then why do so many people go?". More recently, I've revised my argument tactics and have managed to convince some people that they are using college as a crutch to avoid opportunities that require more work.
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I would highly appreciate to see your further thoughts and ideas. Thank you!
