Getting Educated, The Reality
I promote the idea of getting “educated” and “learning”. If you are not learning in my mind, you are not progressing.
The problem is that people tie getting a degree with being educated and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Going to college or university is definitely not your answer to success although these expensive institutions market themselves as this way.
Education can be expensive, time consuming and offer you FEW opportunities!
In fact, in my opinion you will be worse off if you get an education through a college or university because of the expenses associated with going to school and the jobs that are available to people coming out of school. There is also a considerable amount of time it takes to dedicate to school, 4 years in most cases with very little of the knowledge you obtain being applied knowledge.Education costs have ran the world economies (in particular the USA) into a debt that I am unsure will ever be properly dealt with. You know why? An average education has gone up nearly 500% in the last 10 years, and it is inflating faster than ever each and every year.
If you go to school to get a degree, it will more than likely become nothing more than a piece of paper hanging from your office wall. What you will come out with is a debt that you won't be paying off for 25 YEARS. Think it is time to reconsider?
Let's look at a typical education.
You go to school for 4 years. You spend the next year trying to get a job. You are $80,000 in debt after all of your school expenses and by year 5, the average "student" does not have a JOB. $0 in income.Say that you do get a job of $50,000, a decent paying entry level job. If you are like most, you can pay back a maximum of about $4,000 per year to your student loans. It will be another 25 years before you are out of debt.
But don't worry, you have your mediocre $50,000 job that will barely pay the bills and will hardly support a family.
Don't forget, conventional education prices only continue to go up. According to inflationdata.com, since 1985 college tuition prices have gone up an astounding 498.49% will normal consumer inflation (food/gas/clothing) during the same period was only 114%.
This is a REALITY folks...there is nothing hypothetical about this and all you have to do is look around you and see the TRILLION dollars people are in debt to the government over their student loans. The bubble is about to pop.
Universities and Colleges continue to increase their prices, their quality of education and instructors continues to go down.
The opportunities coming out of the school with your "manufactured" degree only becomes worse and worse. I could hit you with some more bad statistics, but instead I am going to "show you the light" of what can be accomplished and what can be with very little investment.
Let's compare this to the education you get here at Wealthy Affiliate.
We are currently offering you a FULL Premium membership for $299 per year. You can purchase up to 4 years at once and this will give you access to the most powerful platform (educational, tool & support wise) for entrepreneurs anywhere in the world.
You could get 4 years education at Wealthy Affiliate for less then the price of 1 month in college. $1196.
No additional expenses...Wealthy Affiliate Premium is an all-inclusive, everything-is-included sort of community. This includes everything you need to get a business up and running. All the training, all the experts coaching, all the tools...and you can do so from wherever you have access to an Internet connection. And no sitting in traffic on your way to school.
===> Join WA Premium for the LOWEST it has EVER BEEN! (only a few hours left!)
Each and every week premium members get access to LIVE video training (hosted by Jay) on a current topic related to Internet business with an interactive question and answer period. These rock (premium members know what I am talking about).
AND, you are going to be "taking action" on what you learn as it is happening. You do not have to wait 4 years before you ever get a chance to use what you have learned. You can start using and implementing the information that you learn NOW. You will be able to achieve ongoing success as you go through training and as you gain more experience.
Frankly, return on investment at Wealthy Affiliate is higher than any institutionalized source ANYWHERE.
If you want a real-time, real action education, with real help from experts from all over the world, WA is the only source you need to achieve personal and financial success!
You can either be conventional (and spend $50,000+ and 4 years of your time on a piece of paper), or you can get with the times and spend $299 per year for an education that will lead to your inevitable success.
This offer is ending soon. It ends Monday, November 26th at MIDNIGHT EST
Recent Comments
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It is sad millions of high school students are being brainwashed into believing college education is the way to go. This is right... They teach folks how to be well-rounded employees and professionals in already over-saturated markets. This has been my take on all this right along. Very few want to listen to me. Even more want to take issue with me and call me trouble-maker.
I have some right now trying to push going back to school to learn a trade. Grrr! I have several trying to push me to go through government poverty programs teaching job skills. Failure to do this comes with sanctions. I've already been through it recently!
It is so sad watching gleaming-eyed students in their first day of college forming "unions," each of which follow behind the banner of their chosen industries, engineering, computer science, medicine, and so forth. I saw this occur in USF when I worked there in the food court - me, with an Associates in Arts degree, pushing around a rubbish bin.
Ten years later, 96% of all those students cheering and with a gleam in every eye, will be serving tables, washing dishes, struggling with exorbitant debt they have incurred. These schools continue to rape high school graduates year after year...a booming era for them!
The only stuff I see anywhere near valuable in schools that we can use is, economics, business law, accounting, tax law, that sort of thing, for folks who want to form corporations and go into big business and investing. However, there's NO NEED for degrees in these things! They can be learned outside of these institutions!
Never before than now can I see the plight of the middle class as these professionals struggle with never before seen personal debt because they are so financially illiterate!
Well said Daniel. Unfortunately many jobs and employers are old school in their way of thinking, a degree still does matter in many cases. It matters if you want to be employed by certain employers but it has never matter if you want to reach your own personal success.
We are a company that does not hire based on degrees and I know of many others that look at credentials, but make experience and "knowledge" (funny word isn't it) the primary reason for any hires.
I think this will evolve when people come to realization that degrees are meaningless for the most part, but it will really start making a difference when people with 4 years experience and knowledge developed on their own time start getting hired far before someone that has been in school for 4 years. This should be taking place now, but the real world is slow to adjust to things that make the most sense.
The training on WA for me has moved on in such a positive way that I cannot understand why anyone can't make a success of this.
In 2008 all you had was acres of text to read with some pictures but now we have video's that are very comprehensive for example;
You have no idea about Google Analytics, Building your first Wordpress Blog and adding the Plugins.
As for me I have had many failures mostly which were my own fault to some degree, this was by going off on a different tangent.
BUT going back through the Training opens up new avenues of thought and reminds me of what I must take to make some serious money.
I understand when a new person goes through the first part of training that it might as well be written in another language......lol
But do just that read the first part all the way through then take a break of a few hours then go through it again, slowly this time, make notes and apply what you have learned.
Plus the amount of help that is on here is amazing, no more waiting for PM's or replies on the Forum, just go to the Live Chat and there is nearly always someone that can help you.
For me WA has really evolved into something far better than I first imagined it would be.
the main cost in education (formal or informal) is time, and the best outcome depends upon your application of whatever you learn. Notably, what you learn is not (& never has been) necessarily what anyone thinks they might be teaching you. Thus, cost can also be related to your intelligent use of the experience others to enhance your relationships with them whether you each reach the same conclusions from education or not.
Many conversations do not necessarily add to your knowledge - in fact most merely reaffirm "general knowledge" or what many tend to refer to as "common sense".
True intelligence is the ability to take whatever is offered and make some practical use of it for yourself. If you gain something by a different approach than before acquiring that knowledge, you are said to have learned something. Often what you learn reaffirms your old habits, whether they are more generally applicable as useful or not. All that matters is what works for you. And subsequently, teh cost you are prepared to pay to find out...
Absolutely, talking about what you know does reaffirm general knowledge well the application of what you know leads to new knowledge and your real capabilities within any trade/niche/skill.
That is precisely the problem with most education, people don't apply what they learn or they don't get to apply what they learn. They are stuck within an institution the greatly benefits those that can memorize content and become generalists and does not typically have a medium for those people to apply knowledge.
You can read about building a house for 4 years but you can never actually learn how to build a house until you put on the tool belt and swing a hammer. Most people are going to school for 4 years without really been given a fair shot at the hammer, instead they only know how others swing it.
@Kyle I have been a member here for almost 4 years and I still can't do what has been suggested in many videos and "trainings". The experience of others in this space has not helped me understand what is lacking in my own equipment or knowledge to apply what is expected to make money here. I am even surprised you have so quickly responded to my post - previously even PM's have taken at least 24 hours for me to see the response...
but in commitment to my own learning I'm still hanging out to learn what I can despite the barriers the technology seems to present :?
What have you done thus far? What have you accomplished in the last 4 years. If you stayed true to your principles as outlined above, you would have a lot of "applied" things to show as a result of your hard work.
If you don't, this is the exact reason you are not achieve success. Reading is useless. Watching videos is useless. Taking notes is useless. The things that will make the difference between success and failure is taking consistent action.
the actions consist of following a training through as far as I can in one sitting... flagging what I have completed within the WA model... trying to set up a website and finding access issues about being able to follow through... asking questions in PMs and by checking our Forums (but what is my problem really called - how do I know the language before I have experienced it?)... setting up a blog site... warding off Spam messages which have kept away the "friends" who don't appreciate I am learning how to protect myself in this virtual world... and then finding people I can meet face to face and get immediate answers to my questions, so I return and apply that to this and keep pushing myself along despite the lack of results here...
At the moment just doing another retake on what demands my attention, but gives me nothing I need... compared with what I have to pay for to follow someone else's path which is not really what I intend for myself... And still having too many mixed messages from different "mentors" to be clear in myself about what I thought I set out to achieve within my own value system...
I have achieved more on a free site in the past 6 weeks than I have here in the past 4 years... though I still haven't hooked up any payment system for myself with that yet...
It sounds like you are getting too many mixed messages. What I suggest you do is follow through the Getting Started course and take action on the tasks. This is all you need to get rolling in the right direction. Don't get distraction with "shiny" offers out there and don't succumb to the "gurus' that are teaching misinformation (yes, a lot of it is going around).
Instead, use what you have here right in front of you to achieve success. The training, the tools, the support and the community.
Get rolling here and don't look back:
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/online-entrepreneur-certification-getting-started-level-1
Thanks Shawn. We will continue to deliver more and more, it is our passion and our goal to continually improve upon the community here and evolve it in a way that everyone can benefit from!
I regrettably attended Kaplan University. What I really learned there is that predators lurk in the US education system. The classes were good, the teachers were good, but the recruiter was less than honest, and I was pretty much screwed. Unfortunately, I've read a lot of horror stories in which others were harmed a great deal more than I was.
Before Kaplan, I attended a different University which didn't practice the deliberate predation, but the quality wasn't there. I consider the time and money spent with them to be wasted. If only I could go back in time...
I used to work on my own business while in college wishing that the college would just end. The only reason that I did not drop out is that I did not want to be viewed as a quitter and because I wanted to have that piece of paper for the money I spent going to school (in case I had to ever fall back on it). Pathetic really. By year 4 you typically forget all of the "memorization" that you did in the first 3 years, deeming your knowledge useless.
If we have ever had a complaint as an employer it has been the lack of knowledge someone really has coming out of school in the sense of "applied" knowledge. We would much rather hire someone that grew up programming since they were 13 then hire someone with 6 years of University experience.
I absolutely agree with you Kyle. The thing is that right now Colleges and Universities still control the monopoly of handing out $50k certifications that you need LEGALLY to apply what you've learned as a doctor, lawyer, psychologist, among others. If doing heart surgery is your passion in life you have no other way but to sink into debt to get your special training and your piece of paper... and that should be different.
BUT, if a diploma is not a legal requirement for doing what you want to do, then you can get almost all the knowledge you need through the Internet. As long as you are determined about mastering what you want to master, lack of information is no longer an excuse.
I absolutely agree. I remember sitting through college thinking "all this stuff can be taught online much more efficiently". In fact, most of my profs had very little knowledge and in many cases, they could not "do" so they ending up teaching.
As you said, people are being forced into degree programs because they have to have degrees to get many jobs. This does not have anything to do with active knowledge, meaning that many programs you can essentially fake your way through.
If you self educate and you are actively educating yourself through applied knowledge, no education system can compete with you. I truly believe this.
I absolutely love what this guy did, getting an MIT education in computer science in one year (and taking no classes): http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/
But I agree with you Kyle that education comes in all forms, and Universities are not necessarily the best way of getting one any more...
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You are right