Simon Sinek responds to whether college is a waste of time: he argues no. While much of college coursework may not be directly needed later, college provides crucial non-academic benefits — independence (first time leaving home, doing laundry, budgeting), social skills and interaction, exposure to debate and disagreement, and forming arguments. He advises choosing classes for the quality of professors rather than ease or subject matter.
Chapters
Is college a waste of time in today's world? Asks Matthew. No, it's not. I know there's a whole movement against college. And one of the reasons there's a movement against college comes from people who've done extremely well either while they were in college and dropped out. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg. Or had good fortune and didn't need the college. And so they stand up and say, you don't need college. I didn't need college. Well, that's true. Some people don't need it. But there's more to college than simply the subjects that we learn. Do we need the subjects in college? Not really. Most of the stuff we'll study in college we won't need in future, in our future, and it won't help us be successful. But we're learning more than that in school. We're learning how to interact with other people. For many of us, it's the first time we've left home. We're learning to fend for ourselves, do our own laundry, get a job, provide for ourselves, budget our money. That's a new one for many people. They're living in dorms, they're learning to interact, they're learning independence, they're learning self reliance. It's also the first time in a classroom where your professors will expect you to disagree. In high school, largely you do as you're told, you take the test, and that's it. In college, it's about discussion and it's about disagreement and sometimes there are no right answers. So one of the things you'll learn is how to disagree, how to form an argument. There is so much more that you learn in college that will help you in the the rest of your life that have nothing to do with the subjects that you're going to learn. In other words, choose your classes based on the quality of your professors, not based on how easy the classes are or sometimes even just what the subject is. Yes, college still has value in our lives.
