<story><title>College was my biggest mistake (2012)</title><url>http://stevecorona.com/college-was-my-biggest-mistake/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stevencorona</author><text>Hey guys, author here- this is an older post that someone reposted. I get alot of hate for this post, so let me sum it up here:&lt;p&gt;College was my biggest mistake. Not your biggest mistake. I&apos;m not giving advice, just being honest about my experience. You have to &quot;pay to play&quot;. Who knows if I would have been able to bootstrap myself without a year of college. All I know is I can&apos;t imagine the ridiculous amount of debt I&apos;d be in if I finished.&lt;p&gt;It boils down to this: I wish that when I was 18 someone told me college wasn&apos;t the only option.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notlisted</author><text>What worked in (y)our field, would not work elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m the product of a Western-European system. Yearly tuition was like $2k. Your 44k would have covered 4 years in college including housing, food and ample beer.&lt;p&gt;IMHO, the real problem lies in the acceptance of the status quo in the American educational system and the unwillingness to let government play a role (through taxation, grants, etc). It&apos;s baffling to me that a first-world country like the USA doesn&apos;t want to invest in education. If you don&apos;t pay for the education, you&apos;ll pay for the unemployment benefits and/or lack of innovation.&lt;p&gt;I make a good living, but still I worry greatly about my daughter&apos;s future. Avg college tuition supposedly will reach 90k/yr by the time she&apos;s ready to attend, unless something is done about this madness.&lt;p&gt;Bill Gates has the right idea with his 10K BA challenge and I like what I see:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/opinion/my-valuable-cheap-college-degree.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/opinion/my-valuable-cheap-...&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335522/10000-degree-katrina-trinko&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335522/10000-degree-k...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>College was my biggest mistake (2012)</title><url>http://stevecorona.com/college-was-my-biggest-mistake/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stevencorona</author><text>Hey guys, author here- this is an older post that someone reposted. I get alot of hate for this post, so let me sum it up here:&lt;p&gt;College was my biggest mistake. Not your biggest mistake. I&apos;m not giving advice, just being honest about my experience. You have to &quot;pay to play&quot;. Who knows if I would have been able to bootstrap myself without a year of college. All I know is I can&apos;t imagine the ridiculous amount of debt I&apos;d be in if I finished.&lt;p&gt;It boils down to this: I wish that when I was 18 someone told me college wasn&apos;t the only option.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sliverstorm</author><text>On the bright side, now you know &lt;i&gt;definitively&lt;/i&gt; that it wasn&apos;t the right option for you. You won&apos;t spend the rest of your life wondering, &quot;what if I had gone to college instead...?&quot;&lt;p&gt;I am of the opinion that some mistakes are worth making.</text></comment>