So after the brief hiatus to talk about the powerful Black Lives Matter speech, I have returned to my It is Dead saga. As I watch the rain fall outside my dorm, my mind trails off to a place of deep thought (which is probably not the safest thing for me to do) and in doing so a moment of realization creeps into my head.

What the heck am I doing here?

Not just I; we. We are a bunch of students that had absolutely no clue what we wanted to be before we came to college and that thought stays the same for most of us after the graduation ceremony is over. The only difference is that we have accumulated a ton of debt that won’t be paid off until we retire. Oh, and our brains are completely scrambled from the stress that is “the college experience”. All of this happens, and most of us leave as penniless as we entered. Is college really worth all of this? Some people (including me) are beginning to have their doubts.

Here are some reasons why education is dead (or at least dying):

• You don’t need it to be famous: I’m sure we’ve heard this one before, but I feel the need to mention it again. Some of the most famous people in history made their way to fame without a college degree (some of them didn’t even have a high school diploma). Einstein, Bill Gates, Jim Carrey, and a ton of other well-known people have made their mark in the world without the need of a degree. In fact, it seems like the less education you have, the more success you have the chance to obtain.
• There’s more job opportunities in “lower class” jobs: Think on this: a guy with no degree hunts for a job and finds one doing, I don’t know, garbage disposal work, or driving trucks across America, or flipping burgers at McDonalds, or (God forbid) working in the retail department. All of these jobs (and a whole lot more, I guarantee you that) are in medium to high demand almost everywhere in the United States, and only require some on-the-job experience in conjunction with your high school diploma or GED. They may not all be pleasant, but at least they are jobs.
• They make bank: They don’t pay much of anything, you might counter. That may be true for some jobs (like McDonalds) but it’s certainly not for others. For example, a garbage man makes an average salary of $33,000 – that’s more than the average person makes coming out of college with a Bachelor’s degree. Those who drive trucks make even more, raking in an average of $51,000 a year. That’s pretty close to the average salary that a professor with a Master’s degree makes, without all of the hard work that takes to get the degree.
• Jobs for us are scarce: If you find it insulting that those without a degree have more job opportunities, you should be more offended by the fact that higher education offers less opportunities. The job market surrounding Higher Ed is full of competition, and fewer of us are able to land a job every year (The lack of positions in general doesn’t help much). Nowadays, about 50% of those who graduate with a Bachelor’s degree are unemployed or underemployed – meaning that they don’t even get to use the degrees they worked four years to obtain. We can only assume that the percentage grows for those with a Master’s or a Doctorate degree when you factor in things such as a more competitive job market and overqualification.

It seems there are more benefits for degree-less individuals than we think. Before you think about quitting college, though, keep this in mind. In the years that you have attended college, you have gone through an amazing journey full of incredible things that you just couldn’t get without the four-year college struggle. New friends, new experiences, and a new outlook on life are just a couple of the things that are worth more than any paycheck could give you. Looking at it like that, I guess you could say there is something good about college after all.

But it would be nice if it filled up my pockets.