Connor Boyack Explains Five Reasons Not to Send Your Kid to College in Today's Economy
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Connor Boyack Explains Five Reasons Not to Send Your Kid to College in Today's Economy
Connor Boyack challenges the conventional wisdom that college is necessary for success, arguing that the world has fundamentally changed from half a century ago. With college degrees costing tens of thousands of dollars and taking years to pay back, many young adults are being pushed onto a conveyor belt that no longer serves them well. Boyack examines why college has become prohibitively expensive, how universities have transformed into ideological echo chambers rather than centers of free inquiry, and why degrees no longer function as effective signals to employers. He presents alternatives including internships, apprenticeships, boot camps, and building portfolios that demonstrate real competence. While acknowledging that certain professions still require degrees, Boyack encourages parents to have eyes wide open about the true costs and benefits before committing their children to the traditional college path.
The first major concern with sending kids to college is the overwhelming financial burden. While community colleges and high school dual enrollment programs offer cheaper alternatives, obtaining a diploma from most universities has become an extremely costly proposition. From a return on investment perspective, parents and students need to calculate how much money must be spent to obtain a degree versus how long it will take to pay back that investment.
Many people spend decades trying to pay back school loans, and some are banking on future rounds of loan forgiveness rather than planning realistic repayment strategies. This is no way to structure finances or investments. For most professions, a degree is not actually necessary, making the massive debt burden even more questionable. The list of professions truly requiring a degree is very small.
Spending all that money to obtain a degree saddles young adults with debt for years to come, minimizing their earnings and investment potential to build wealth. The math simply doesn't add up for most people when comparing degree costs against average salaries in their chosen fields.
From Free Inquiry to Propaganda Centers
Colleges and universities originally served as institutions of free inquiry, challenging people through debate and open investigation of new, emerging, and controversial ideas. Today, that mission has largely reversed. Modern colleges have devolved into institutions of ideological infection where students are bombarded with agenda-driven content from clubs, teachers, and textbooks.
Countless students report feeling that their professors expected a correct answer, that disagreeing with their professor was not allowed, and that only one path of approved ideas existed. Students who tried to answer or argue differently were reprimanded by teachers and shunned by their peers. Across the country, speakers coming to college campuses are being protested and canceled simply because of the views they represent.
These institutions no longer serve the role of open inquiry and debate. Conservative parents especially should be concerned about sending their kids to these left-leaning, highly progressive institutions where students often turn out to be social justice warriors rather than academics and thoughtful individuals who critically think about the world around them. Sending a kid to college unprepared is like sending them into an ideological battlefield without a sword and shield.
The Meaningless Signal Problem
Decades ago, when far fewer people attended college, a college degree served as an effective signal to employers. It indicated that an individual was competent, could follow basic orders, and had a baseline level of knowledge. Employers could sift through resumes and focus on candidates with college degrees as a shortcut to finding qualified applicants.
However, the government and college industry have pushed the narrative that everyone should go to college. High schools now see their mission as preparing students to be college and career ready, creating a conveyor belt into a system that has become massively bloated and inefficient. When everyone is pushed into college on the expectation that everyone needs a degree, many people attend who shouldn't be there.
When everyone has a degree, that degree becomes meaningless. The signal loses its effectiveness when it no longer distinguishes top-level players from others. Companies are increasingly recognizing that degrees are no longer effective signals. Major companies across the country are dropping the requirement to have a college degree.
Google, for example, announced they would treat their own two-month certification course as equal to a four-year college degree. Spend two months in focused study rather than four years, at far less cost, and get your foot in the door at Google. Countless companies are treating other credentials as equal to four-year degrees or dropping the requirement entirely.
Creating Better Signals Through Portfolios
The question becomes: how can young adults create a signal to potential employers that demonstrates their worth without a college degree? There are countless other ways to create signals demonstrating competence, and the best way is through a portfolio.
Young people should find freelance clients to develop skills, work for free if necessary, and point to actual things they've done when approaching future employers. Showing fifteen completed projects for various clients demonstrates capability far better than a degree.
Even better is signaling something specific to a target company. For example, if someone wants a marketing job at a specific company, they should subscribe to that company's email newsletter, follow them on social media, and watch their YouTube videos. Then create a five-page document listing major opportunities for improvement and how they can help. Create sample memes, write a superior email newsletter, and film a simple YouTube video. Send that package to the marketing director showing hustle and company-specific knowledge.
Companies don't care whether applicants have a degree. They care whether candidates can do the work effectively. College degrees are no longer serving as effective signals. Young adults need to understand how to develop specific signals for their chosen career and industry. That's how they will succeed over time, rather than relying on an antiquated college degree that has become just noise.
The Wasted Years Problem
The years when children become young adults are when they can tolerate a significant amount of risk. They can work for free at places where they want to move up the ladder. They can travel and see the world. They can pursue eighteen different apprenticeships and internships to figure out what they really want to do, rather than sitting at a desk for four years assuming they'll be interested in a career they're spending time and money learning about.
Many people find after graduation, after paying all that money and time for a degree, that they don't love that job. Then they do something else entirely and have wasted all that time. When young adults don't have many bills, can live at home a bit longer, or share housing with others to minimize expenses, they can embark on numerous adventures, including professional adventures, to experience life and figure out what they actually want.
Sitting in college for four years, learning from professors who often don't know their subject matters well and have been out of the profession for twenty years, becomes an impediment. Students often graduate and realize they don't really want to pursue that field. Better to expose children to as much of the world as possible through job shadowing, internships, and working for free at different places to experience different professions.
Young adults should try forty-three different things while they have time and can do it cheaply. This helps them better, more quickly, and more affordably find their path in life rather than predicting what it will be four years in the future when signing up for college to pursue a degree in an industry they may not love after all.
A World Full of Opportunities
The world today is vastly different from decades ago. There are trade schools, code camps, boot camps like Praxis that help young adults get jobs without college. There's online learning and entrepreneurial adventures. People can drive for Lyft and Uber or pursue countless other opportunities.
The traditional conveyor belt path of high school to college to job no longer reflects today's reality. Parents must be careful not to project their own experiences onto their children's lives and impose the expectation that they should go to college when the world is abundant and full of opportunities if we just open our eyes and hit the pause button on that conveyor belt.
There are so many opportunities to support young adults in figuring out what they want to do through job accelerators, career fairs, and internships. Remote work opportunities after COVID have expanded possibilities, allowing young people to work with companies all over the place. They can live on a beach in Costa Rica while holding a full-time job for a tech company or whatever they want to do.
Parents should be careful not to project their experience onto their kids and make them think they need to stay on a conveyor belt when the world is much different. We need to prepare children for that world, and the best way to do so is by allowing them to participate in it, experience it, and figure out what they want to do.
A Personal College Regret
Going to college was a regret for Connor Boyack himself. He didn't know any better and was part of the expectation that his parents and others placed on him. He followed the conveyor belt from high school to college, assuming that's what he had to do because everyone told him so.
When Boyack started his career as a web developer, he sat in class being taught by older professors about websites and computers. These professors had learned computers in earlier eras and were themselves trying to keep up with new technology. Meanwhile, Boyack sat in class behind his laptop doing freelance work for clients he was finding online.
Because of those client projects, he was incentivized to learn new things. Clients had expectations and wanted things done for their websites that he didn't know how to do. So he sat in class Googling and learning how to do these things to complete client projects while being taught by professors how to do things that were two months behind what he was already learning himself.
He started accelerating because he sat in class with the incentive to learn himself when he didn't really need that class. That thought never came to mind until after graduating college, when he looked back and questioned why he even needed that degree. His first full-time job out of college didn't care about his degree at all. They handed him a worksheet and asked if he could solve the problems. When he did, they said he was hired.
They wanted to know if he knew how to do the work and had the basic knowledge necessary. Knowledge is abundant on the internet. Anyone can learn all kinds of skills for free and acquire basic competency in numerous industries without a paper certificate, without tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and without four wasted years.
Skip College, But Keep Eyes Wide Open
While some professions make college important or necessary, the argument is not necessarily that everyone should skip college. It's that everyone needs to have eyes wide open about the experience. If someone must go for their chosen career or wants to go for various other reasons, that's fine, but they should understand it will cost a lot of money. They should understand they're spending, if not wasting, their highest risk, greatest reward years. They should understand they'll be subject to all kinds of propaganda and ideas and will just have to go through that. As long as they have eyes wide open, they'll do fine.
For most people, rather than going through it and sucking it up and toughing it out, they should just skip it entirely. There are so many opportunities to help young adults do that. Learning is amazing, and this message is not meant to suggest that higher education or more education is awful. Education is amazing. We should always be students in whatever career we choose.
Education looks so much different than it did centuries and decades ago. Generally speaking, people don't need to go to college to acquire knowledge. It's almost entirely free online for the taking, and there are so many opportunities for young people.
Parents should make sure they're not projecting their experience onto their kids. They should expose children to all the opportunities outside that conveyor belt and give them permission and support to explore the world, even if that's just taking a gap year to have some experiences and pursue adventures and internships before potentially returning to college with eyes wide open and better understanding.
Young adults may find they can earn great money without paying back school debt and immediately get into the job field. Four years later, they've worked their way up the management chain with raises and promotions, while their age peers who went to college are now starting at the bottom with tons of school debt to pay. Young adults who skip college can go further faster, unshackled from that debt and those four wasted years.
It's a different world, and parents need to understand that and support their kids in participating in that world. While we should love and support education, we shouldn't necessarily push kids down the conveyor belt of college because there are many reasons why that's a bad idea.
