There are several things, which have a fundamental impact on the quality of our life. Most of them are difficult to change. It is like a deck of cards that you get at the beginning of the game, and you have to play with them. Whether you are born during peaceful times or during war. In a free country or in a dictatorship. In a family that works or not. If you are born healthy or with a handicap. All of this will impact your future. But there is one card, which is very important and which you can change for another. Your education. Let’s take a look at why you shouldn’t play life with low cards.

In job interviews, I often meet applicants who began their college studies but didn’t finish them. The reasons vary, but the most common one is the loss of motivation. I understand them because studying at a college has two motivational traps:

1. The effect of the education comes only after years. The study is an investment into a remote future. This is a big difference from when you get a job and you get a salary at the end of the month. The effect on your life is immediate. Also, for this reason, it is much more tempting to get a job instead of studying.
2. An explanation of how you can use your knowledge in practice is often missing. In other words, often, the school forces you to learn things without telling you in advance where exactly you can use this knowledge. And without its application, learning is only a necessary evil that you have to suffer through. The fact is, that you will use most of your knowledge, and as we will discuss in a moment, the knowledge that you will never use in life, will be also, after all, useful in some way.

In both cases, it is mainly about motivation, i.e., what the purpose of starting college is and staying in it. In reality, college can give you much more than you think. Let’s take a look at what you can get through your studies. We begin with what is most frequently mentioned during your college studies:

1. Diploma and degree – yes, a degree is a great thing. It can open doors for you to some job interviews, and sometimes, it can help you get the job. But the fact is that once you cross the doorstep of employment, it is only up to you. Your degree will not write an email for you, it won’t call the client, and it won’t find a solution to the problem. A degree is a great thing to have, but it’s only a sticker that you endured to go somewhere for 5-6 years and you were able to complete the final exams. If you are not considering a career in academic circles, it is nowhere near as important as it might seem.
2. Knowledge – of course; that’s what’s it all about. Or not? It is true that the more you know, the better it is for you. All of the information you have is available to you in every subsequent second of your life. When solving problems, communicating, or thinking about what to make for dinner. The problem with knowledge is that it becomes obsolete (especially the closely specialized ones that you get at a college). And new knowledge arrives. This means that by leaving college, your acquisition of knowledge does not end one way or the other. Another fact is that knowledge is much more available today than it once was. Internet search engines and the newest AI simplify access to it, so keeping it in your head is not crucial anymore.
3. A few years of good life – I completely agree! College life is one of the best times of life. Why? For a simple reason. You’re an adult (at least age-wise), but you don’t have to solve adult problems yet. Accommodation, life partner, children, work, mortgage, etc. For now, you don’t have these problems. The magic is in the fact that the school is temporary, so you can move all of this for the time after school. And without feeling guilty about it.

At first glance, it might look like I’ve mentioned everything relevant, but in reality, we’re only scratching the surface. Let’s take a deep dive and look at the reasons why college is really worth it:

1. It will teach you to use your brain – I know what you’re going to say. “But we use our brains daily.“ Yes, this is true, but often it is as if you would drive a Ferrari at 20 mph. But you won’t unlock the full potential of what you have in your head just like that. Someone has to purposefully push you into a zone of discomfort. Force you to think even when using the autopilot is comfortable. And a college does all of this. Each subject is a world of its own, with its own terms and relations between them. Each subject will make you face problems you have to solve.
   In order to complete the subject successfully, you have to build a mental model and then search for solutions and answers within it. And you do this each day of the semester, time and again from scratch. When you finish college, your brain is trained to absorb and process new information and to look for solutions. It sees many different perspectives and approaches, and it can assess what works well. Simply put, you put your Ferrari into the second gear.
   One more note for this topic: during the first three years of my studies of information technologies, I had seven mathematical subjects. As I learned later on, the actual reason for this is not to teach us integrals and matrixes. The actual reason was that mathematics develops abstract thinking. And abstract thinking is necessary if you want to work in IT because there is nothing you can hold and often not even see; you have to simply imagine it. So, you can consider mathematics to be a training for abstract thinking and, thus, the brain.
2. Work with information – above, I have described that school will give you knowledge. Knowledge is facts that someone neatly prepares for you, and you learn them. But, as we already said, some knowledge is temporary, and it will be necessary to acquire new knowledge. At the same time, all of us swim (some drown) in an ocean of information that surrounds us today. So, one of the most important skills for the future is the skill to process information and pull knowledge out of it. This is something you will do at college time and time again, so you will be trained in it. If you are lucky, they will also force you to write various essays and papers. We will discuss the power of writing another time.
3. A horizon of possibilities – your horizon of possibilities is a list of everything that can happen to you (intentionally or unintentionally) in your life, or what you can do in life. A college substantially expands it. Both what you can do in your life and what life can do to you. Of course, it won’t teach you everything in detail, but it points out the limits of what is possible - whether knowledge, actions you can do, or the risks you face. The horizon of possibilities contains things you know about, even though you don’t have to know them in detail (in Rumsfeld’s matrix they are Known knowns and Known unknowns). Outside of the horizon are things you don’t know about and you could miss those you aren’t even aware of the most (Unknown unknowns). A college expands the horizon and narrows the blind spots on your map. Although you don’t control everything, at least you know that it exists, and you can deal with it when it is necessary.

As you can see, the main advantage of a college is that it will prepare you for the variability of problems, opportunities, and traps that await you in your life. These aren’t necessarily things you will get directly in school, but rather, they will prepare you to face what will come.

In conclusion, let’s say it the way it is. A college is the last educational stop before you jump into the working life. Where, by default, education will play a secondary role (if at all). So, it is the last chance to change a couple of cards you hold for better ones before the real game for money begins. It is, therefore, a shame to throw away this opportunity. If you know anyone who is hesitant to apply to a college, you can send him this article, and maybe it will help him understand the true benefits.