The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom

by Zachary Slayback

It’s not an anomaly — it’s part of how the system works.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them.

you are not your major.

Your major does not need to determine what you will do in your life.

Most people agree with this, but most people betray it in their speech and actions.

most people really don’t care about your major.

You don’t have to limit your career choices to things that people with a degree in your field usually go into.

Market yourself as more than a major.

If people are categorizing you according to your major alone, ignore them.

There’s so much more to be than just your major.

There’s a psychological trap that people put themselves into when they think in terms of these labels and what they can do with their lives.

Student loan debt averages out at $29,400 per student.[xv] 53.6% of all college graduates are underemployed or unemployed.[xvi]

The United States has more janitors with chemistry degrees than it has chemists.[xvii]

There are more than 50 universities and colleges in the United States that charge more than $60,000 per year.[xviii] And the average return on investmen...

You probably don’t remember all the things you wanted to do with your life while you were still in high school.

You feel misled. You felt like society led you to do something you weren’t entirely sure of, and now you are forced to pay the cost.

I can’t offer a one-size-fits-all way to seize control of your education, because that would mean you aren’t seizing control of it.

Build yourself up as if you were a product you’re trying to sell.

Going to college can only help you, not harm you.

lol

many professors treat their students as obstacles,

College doesn’t meet the romanticized ideal because it is exactly that: a romanticized ideal.

more and more evidence indicates that the traditional college lecture isn’t a good way of teaching people things they want to learn.[xx]

theory is only really engrained in people once it has been applied in practice,

classroom-based model for education is itself antithetical to meaningful learning.

Professors are primarily hired to research, not to teach.

Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, founded his first company with classmates who dropped out of UCLA with him.

look around at the number of people with college degrees working jobs that don’t require degrees

There are more janitors with chemistry degrees in the US today than there are chemists.[xxii]

Who cares about landing a corporate job that requires a BA to apply when you have 15 ideas for companies you want to launch?

oddly enough, rarely their failure)

actually dealing with the real world is even more likely to give you the confidence to tackle it.

The great thing about being young is that people expect you to screw up,

It’s going to be hard regardless, so why put it off?

The sexiness of the college social scene is the subject of hundreds of American comedies. It’s got an aura around it.

They can’t feel camaraderie with their coworkers because they don’t really choose their coworkers.

Much of the knowledge concentrated in universities has been dispersed.

being an academic professor is best served with a PhD (though, increasingly, as is being a Starbucks barista).

(my advice then is to do it as cheaply and quickly as possible

Sales can only be learned by joining a sales team,

The degree requirement is a barrier-to-entry for some fields, but getting one can also be a barrier-to-entry in others.

the best way to “find yourself,” just like the best way to get confidence in #4 above, is to actually go out into the world and try different things.

Here are 10 things you can do in 4 years that are more likely to help you find yourself than dabbling through courses at college and are probably all cumulatively cheaper than college:

The idea that you should do something because you have already devoted so many resources to doing so is called the sunk cost fallacy, and it permeates our thinking about college.

Don’t let yourself fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

Turn off the autopilot, take control, and go build something great.

For me, deschooling myself is a constant process.

The schooled mind is fragile.

The deschooled mind is antifragile. It benefits from the disorder of the world.

The deschooled mind is playful.

An employee who just sits around waiting for the next thing to do is an employee whose habits are hurting the team.