Like many millennials, I didn’t land a job immediately after finishing school. I found myself unemployed and buried in student loan debt. I was frustrated by how difficult it was to find a job (despite attending a graduate school that boasted a high job placement rate). I quickly realized that most of what I had been told – by my parents, by teachers, by advisors – was inaccurate or incomplete. Advisors are essentially salespeople who try to sell (often useless) degrees. My parents, though well-intentioned, had no idea how much my student loans would add up or how difficult it would be to find a job.
So much of what students are told about college is not accurate. To help others avoid the same mistakes I did, here are seven things I wish someone had told me before I started college.
1. Any degree is not better than no degree. All majors are not created equal. (Translation: Don’t get a liberal arts degree.)
2. For entry level jobs, work experience matters a lot more than your overpriced degree…but that experience will be difficult to get when you have no experience. This catch-22 will frustrate you to no end.
3. Interviewing skills are crucial to landing a decent job. You can be the smartest, most qualified candidate with the most expensive degree, but if you don’t know how to interview, you probably won’t get the job.
4. That $300 brand new textbook you just bought? You’re going to need it for one paragraph in chapter three. Buy all of your textbooks used. Better yet, buy them on eBay and resell them when the semester ends (do not sell them back to the bookstore – they’ll give you $5 for a $200 book). You could also try sharing a textbook with a friend if you know you’re not going to use it that often.
5. Don’t listen to your parents’ financial advice. College was affordable when they went to school, and most of them don’t understand what job searching is like in the current economy.
6. Your student loans will not be worth it. Minimize them as much as possible. Try to get scholarships, work more, live at home, go to community college…do whatever you can to limit the amount you take out in loans.
7. Do NOT use student loans to pay for a dorm or apartment. You will regret it. Yeah, living with your parents during college sucks. You know what sucks even more? Living with your parents when you’re 26, married, and buried in debt.
Want more? Check out 7 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Grad School.
Very helpful, our son will be entering his senior year of high school. He is strongly leaning towards junior college for the first year or two and living at home. I will be forwarding him this article. Thanks.
Thanks for reading! I’m glad to hear he’s leaning toward junior college! I wish I had done that. It would’ve saved me tens of thousands of dollars.
Ughhh so many good points! I am actually one of the few people I know who majored in Liberal Arts and ended up with a solid job that pays well. I never bought my textbooks which could sometimes come back to bite me but usually I found that I didn’t really need them. My senior year in college was when Facebook actually was used for studying or getting notes and I found it very helpful at the time. My biggest regret is #7 – Even though I worked it wasn’t enough to cover my rent so I used my loans to pay for my rent so my loans that I am now paying off is partially made up from old living expenses…not smart. Like your site! xx, Beth
Thanks, Beth! I know so many people who majored in liberal arts and ended up working in retail or temp office jobs that paid $10/hour. That’s definitely not enough when you’re buried in debt. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t major in psychology, I would do the first two years at a community college, and I would live with my parents the entire time instead of using loans to pay for rent.
Thank you for the comment. I agree that virtual education would be an excellent way to reduce tuition costs for students. I hope we start to see more of that in the future.
There is a lot of talk about moving the cost around but no real effort is made to actually lower the cost of college. What about hacking college with CLEP. Groups like Avatar Virtual Learning are pushing that to get students to replace large portions of the tuition costs using College Level Examination Programs (CLEP). They are even running a campaign for it at Indiegogo, http://www.igg.me/at/AvatarLearning