3 Things You Learn in College That You Absolutely Need To Unlearn

They don’t teach self-awareness in school.

“Go to college,” they said. “It will be fun,” they said.

So you did. You were told that everyone has to go to college, and this is how you become successful and get ahead in life.

You were told college is the tool of social mobility, allowing people to elevate themselves out of poverty and provide a pathway to an upscale social status and a well-paying career.

What nobody told you, however, is that instead of elevating you, going to college will keep you indebted for a good part of your life, sucking on your income like a leech. On average, a college student is expected to graduate with $33,000 worth of debt and get an entry-level job with a starting annual salary of $51,000.

What nobody told you is that for many people out there, college is a waste of time.

And of course, they wouldn’t want to tell you that, because how else are these massive, bloated educational institutions, only kept afloat by the $1.6 trillion loads of student loan debt, going to function?

The COVID pandemic has revealed just how broken this whole system is, with some colleges shutting down permanently amid quarantine restrictions.

College is not about learning or education anymore — college is a business.

People used to go to college to gain valuable knowledge, be part of academia, and research. Now it’s a production line mass-producing graduates stuffed with mostly useless information that can’t be applied to the real world. To compensate for that, these graduates are endorsed with a fancy piece of paper to be framed and put on the wall to make them feel accomplished and their parents feel proud.

I will qualify this statement by saying that there are certain occupations where advanced training is required, such as medical and scientific professions. However, most jobs out there really can be done by almost anyone with some on-the-job training.

However, the crazy thing is, your college education won’t even prepare you for a job. Regardless of how prestigious your education is, not only you won’t even get hired for an entry-level role without having at least one internship under your belt, but for the most part, everything you need to know to perform your job functions you will be taught on the job.

Moreover, we live in the age of the Internet, and literally, any subject now can be studied online via platforms such as Coursera, Udemy, or various YouTube channels. You can learn anything you want at any time. In this new online economy, you can make your own living without having a college degree — all you need is persistence and a little bit of resourcefulness.

Knowing all this, tell me how getting $50,000–200,000 in student debt is even remotely worth it?

By the way, the “everyone goes to college” mantra is also a myth. In reality, only 35% of US adults age 25 and over have a bachelor’s degree. 61% have some college experience, but no degree. What gives?

Myself, I went to a top school and graduated with a degree in Mathematics and Economics. Just like everyone else, I went because I have been told my entire life that this is the path to success and it’s kind of a given. I have been told that everyone goes to college, and even considering not attending college was completely unthinkable. I loved writing but chose a major based on how successful it can help me become. Successful, of course, in the eyes of society, not my own.

And I did achieve conventional success, in the form of a cushy corporate job that pays the bills. The job I am now trying to escape.

However, almost nothing I learned during my 4+ years of schooling was in any way useful in my place of employment. All the skills I gained and the promotions I received were solely due to my intellectual curiosity and capacity to be taught. I was adaptable, and I was teachable.

Nevertheless, there are a few things you do learn in college — things that you should be trying to unlearn.

1. You Learn To Check Boxes

It starts with your college application.

What is your socio-economic background? Who are your parents? What classes did you take before? How many credits did you complete? Did you volunteer? Did you get any awards? Were you engaged in your community? Do you have work experience? Are you an Honors student? What did you do for your extracurricular activities? Did you get good grades? What are your SAT scores?

And of course, there are the perennial essays where you are supposed to tell the admissions committee a very compelling story of a challenge you have faced and successfully overcome.

You have to be this genius teenager with top-notch grade book and standardized scores in the 90th percentile, who is also oriented at making a social impact and being involved in extracurricular activities. Check.

Hopefully, you are deemed acceptable, and they take you in. Is it finally time for you to start taking the classes you really want? Hold your horses — it’s time for general education. Nobody cares if you have a specific goal — go ahead and take a bunch of useless classes to check the boxes of some checklist imposed on you by the state and school officials.

One of the classes I had to take for my general education requirement was Communications. In this class, the instructor split us into two groups and made us debate on what’s the right way to put up a roll of toilet paper on the toilet paper holder. Depending on which group you were in, you had to argue whether it’s most convenient to pull the paper from the front or from behind the roll. Yes, I paid money for this class.

Of course, the real reason they make you take all these classes is so you stay for 4 years and pay for as many classes as possible.

And it doesn’t end with your Bachelor’s. For advanced programs like MBAs, job placement rates are crucial for their brands and need to be as close to 100% as possible. For that reason, top MBA programs very carefully select students for admission and assess candidates based on how employable they are. If they admit someone who may have trouble getting a job upon graduation (say, they are trying to make a challenging career pivot), this person will bring the employment rate statistics down. They don’t want you if you are a liability.

Check the box, fit the box. You learn to wait for external assessment and validation of your skills and virtues by some people who you have never seen before and who have never seen you. You learn to depend on their positive feedback about you to feel like you are worth something. You learn that in order to get acknowledgment and approval, you have to satisfy a bunch of bureaucratic requirements. This is how you learn to conform.

2. You Learn To Get By

To keep people applying and enrolling, colleges have to make sure that as many of their students as possible actually do graduate, which is why they have an army of counselors on staff to help you plan your classes and career research.

This is also why colleges have granted you The Curve, where each student’s score gets adjusted upward based on how the group as a whole performed. In other words, they have granted you grade inflation.

One modern study has found that across a wide range of schools, A’s represented 43% of all letter grades, which reflected a 28% increase since 1960 and a 12% increase since 1988. D’s and F’s comprised less than 10% of all letter grades on average.

I majored in Mathematics and Economics, and most of my classes were very hard, especially on the math side. However, to get a B on the test, you needed to score something like 50% — the magical curve would take care of you because most people couldn’t really score exceptionally high.

This goes again to show what a sham the education system has become. A study was conducted recently that suggested professors should curve all STEM courses around a B grade because women care more about good grades than men, and thus this policy would boost STEM enrollment among females.

What?

Are we now trying to encourage women to pursue careers in science because it’s easier to get a good grade? As a woman who majored in STEM, I find that mildly insulting. And the truth is, this isn’t a gender matter at all — grade inflation is meant to be a tool for boosting college enrollment in general, which, in turn, ensures that colleges continue receiving the income stream they so desperately depend on.

Oh well, too bad life doesn’t work that way. Nobody’s going to give you handouts just to make you feel better and lure you into a job by advertising how easy it is to perform it. And then we hear the employers complaining that college students are lacking soft skills.

“Adaptability, problem-solving, creativity, influence, drive, empathy and collaboration. What I’ve observed is that those things… aren’t being practiced by college graduates.” — Jim Link, Randstad North America

I wonder why?

3. You Learn To Keep Your Mouth Shut

As much as colleges like to encourage “diversity of thought” and “freedom of speech,” let’s be honest, it is only encouraged if the opinion you voice coincides with that of the majority — and your instructor.

I hold a firm belief that instructors should not express what they think about an issue, be it academic, political, or social, but instead ask students thought-provoking questions and guide the discussion to make people see and analyze both sides of any topic or circumstance. This is called critical thinking, which apparently, employers don’t see in college grads — see the point above.

In practice, often, the opposite happens — especially in liberal arts and social science classes, where, unlike in exact sciences, there often doesn’t exist a single right answer. In these classes, instructors often use their position to proclaim what they think, which not only leads to social proof bias but prevents students from developing critical and analytical thinking skills required in the real world.

It is the instructor’s job to properly moderate the discussion to allow everyone to feel included and comfortable speaking up. If the instructor fails to do that, this results in an unhealthy stigmatizing of individuals with a differentiated perspective. To make matters worse, occasionally, if you end up saying something that goes against your instructor's convictions, you may even get penalized for it with a bad grade.

I had the opportunity to have both types of instructors, and the quality of learning experience I received had a world of difference.

The most memorable class I had was English, with an instructor who always asked us students questions. We researched and wrote about different topics of socio-economic and political nature, and I can’t actually recall a single time when he expressed his own opinion on the matter. Instead, he asked us what we thought and why, and validated each and every response he got — notice, I didn’t say agreed with it, but validated as in acknowledged that such an opinion indeed has a right to exist, without providing a value judgment. At the end of the quarter, I walked out of that class, still not knowing where he stood on any of these issues we discussed in the classroom.

Conclusion: You Learn To Not Be Yourself

From having to carefully craft your college application, to learning how to embellish a resume without flat out lying about your background, to following the socially imposed rules of expressing yourself to comply and conform — throughout your college career, you face many situations where you have to create a positive and impactful image of yourself.

On the one hand, some of these experiences may actually be somewhat useful because they entail you learning the basics of marketing and personal branding.

However, on a more fundamental level, the message you internalize is that you are never good enough. You learn that conventional society is set up in a specific way, with a preference for certain skills and qualities. The personal attributes that do not fit in the socially acceptable narrative are penalized and discouraged.

Thus, you learn to check the boxes, to keep your mouth shut, and to put in just enough effort to get by only to realize at some point that this is not who you really are.

There is a reason why this whole system is set up in the way it is. It exists to promote obedience and shape you into a cog that will move on from its production line to take its place in the rigid, standardized machinery of society — burdened by the weight of social expectations and loads of student debt.

Seth Godin put it well in his book “The Icarus Deception”:

“We’ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power.