One of the more painful consequences
of imbibing regular doses of Cold Hard Truth is that you find yourself
actively questioning everything you were taught when growing up by those
you love the most. As you get older and (hopefully) wiser, and as you
continue down that endless and often lonely road of self-improvement, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself rejecting what you once thought were gospel truths.

For Asians, there are very few sacred cows more highly venerated than that of the college education. In my opinion, there is no sacred
cow that more thoroughly deserves to be turned into hamburger. Almost
from the time you’re old enough to understand the idea of education,
Asian children are indoctrinated into thinking that more education is
always and everywhere a Good Thing. Indeed, if you’re Asian and you’re
reading this, then what I’m about to write is going to sound as if your
dad is speaking to you through this blog:

• From the time you’re old enough to read, the virtues
  of hard work and focusing on your studies are dinned into you (this, by
  the way, actually is a good thing)
• Any grade less than a B (or a B- in case your parents really like you) is cause for parental heart palpitations
• If, heaven forbid, you should ever find
  yourself called into the principal’s office for any reason, it’s treated
  as a Very Serious Matter requiring the entire family to sit down and
  hash it all out to make it clear that what you’ve done is Totally and
  Completely Unacceptable
• Girls? What the hell are girls for anyway??? They get in the way of your college admissions essays!
• What do you mean, you want to go outside and play?! You’ve got a test to study for!
• If you don’t get into at least one Ivy League/top 10 university, you’ve wasted 12 years of hard education!
• “Fun” is what you have AFTER you’ve completed your
  studies! And after you’ve gotten married and raised kids! And after
  you’ve spent your best years working in a good respectable stable job!
  (Uh, come to think of it… what is this “fun”???)

For the sake of keeping a good conscience I should point out that, to my immense relief, my parents never quite went
as far as all that when I was growing up. What I have written above,
however, is merely stereotyped and somewhat exaggerated behaviour on the
part of Asian parents- not for nothing, after all, did Amy Chua write
her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
There can be no question that education is valued extremely highly
among Asians, particularly of Indian or Chinese extraction, because for
hundreds- if not thousands- of years, it has been seen as the key to a
better life and higher social status.

That is no longer the case.

If
colleges today were what they once were intended to be- repositories of
learning, hallowed halls of training for a very select few who had the
wit and the will to do great things, engines of innovation, that sort of
thing- then going to university would indeed be a good decision.
However, anyone who has spent more than a week on the campus of a modern
university will know full well that, in large part, universities are no
longer about teaching people, about exploring the mysteries of God’s
creation, or about training people to think rigourously.

When I was about 14 years old, I read a book by a chap named Peregrine White called The Idea Factory: Learning How to Think at MIT. That
book was my glimpse into what I thought a university education is
supposed to be. I thought that going to university would be teach me how to think–
how to solve problems, how to understand the world around me, how to be
the best I could be at whatever I eventually did. In fact, when I
actually went to university, I quickly came to realise that much of what
I was being taught either didn’t make much sense in the modern world,
or was flat-out wrong.
And all the time, I had to deal with the constant steady drumbeat of
leftist indoctrination that has become so prevalent on modern university
campuses.

Modern universities do not exist to teach you how to think. They exist to teach you what to think.

I
will readily admit that there are exceptions. If you study a hard
science, or a true art like mathematics, or engineering, then chances
are that you’re going to be way too busy to deal with the sort of
pseudo-intellectual garbage that passes for leftist cant on a university
campus these days. Classic example: during my Master’s program we would
often have to take classes in the university’s School of Social Work.
(Yes, I am sorry to say that the university had such a thing. Along with
a School of Public Policy. There were- are– a lot of things
wrong with that place.) Walking into that building was like entering the
Twilight Zone, where normal things don’t happen very often. You would
walk in and see posters lionising Hugo Chavez and calling for “action
rallies” or “solidarity marches”. (Isn’t the latter a euphemism for a
painful bowel movement?) We would get there, go for the lecture we
needed to attend, and then GTFO as fast as we possibly could to the
relative safety of the computer lab or the Mathematics department.

The
reality confronting the modern young man is that university is going to
be, by and large, a giant waste of your time and money. You will get a
far better education simply through constant and dedicated reading. Over
his lifetime, my father’s uncle amassed a truly awesome collection of
books and textbooks, which for decades were housed in the upper floor of
my grandparents’ house back in the old country. As my father remarked
the last time we were there, a man could get a truly phenomenal
education from simply reading through that entire collection. The same
is true of my parents’ house- it is filthy with books. A modern
man could easily achieve the same effect by simply reading through his
local library. In my case, my lifelong love of good books has translated
very well into e-books; I actually read probably twenty times more
e-books than I do regular paperbacks or hardcovers these days. Never
before has more knowledge been available for a lower cost than in the
modern day.

With
all of the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years’ worth of human
experience and understanding just a mouse-click away, is dropping 60K or
more on a year’s tuition and room and board really worthwhile if you’re
studying anything other than a hard science?

I will concede that there are certain disciplines where, if you want to progress, the only choice is university.
If you love mathematics, or the sciences, or computer programming, then
yes, university is (probably) for you- and you’ve got the added benefit
of studying a subject which translates into actual, real-world skill
and monetary reward. That route has certainly worked out very well for
me personally; I studied Mathematics & Economics as an
undergraduate and Mathematical Finance as a postgraduate, and on the
whole things worked out all right. (Unfortunately, I’ve had to spend the
last 10 years unlearning everything I learned about economics, but oh
well, c’est la vie.)

If,
however, your aim is to study history, or economics, or (God help you)
English literature, and then… find a job of some sort, well, I’ve got
bad news for you: that sort of wishy-washy thinking is a luxury that
neither you nor the rest of society can afford any longer. Most of what
you will be taught will be wrong anyway, so why bother?

One
of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn is that there is no
classroom substitute for hard-earned, real-world experience. There is no
faster way to learn how inadequate your education has really been other
than getting out there and trying to make something of yourself. If you
try to delay that time of reckoning by instead wasting four years- or
five, or six- in university, then all you’re doing is depriving yourself
of the kind of hard-earned common sense that could save you from years
or even decades of pain and suffering later in life. University
will not teach you anything these days except for an inflated sense of
self-importance.

If
you are in high school right now (unlikely if you’re reading this blog)
and you’re thinking of going to university, think hard about the
alternatives. Go to a trade school and pick up real work experience.
Start your own business doing what you want. Learn how to write
computer code. Hone your writing skills as a blogger. Read as much as
you possibly can. But whatever you do, for heaven’s sake, don’t delude
yourself into thinking that you “deserve” to go to university. You
don’t, because your motives for going there are wrong.

If
you’re already in university, think very hard about your choices
afterwards. The (mis)education that you receive will potentially blind
you to the alternatives available to you in life. If you live and study
in New York, for instance, you would be forgiven for thinking that the
ONLY possible careers are in finance and banking. This is simply not
true; in fact most of the kids who graduate and go into finance quickly
realise how much they hate it and end up leaving after a few years, from
my experience.

The bottom line is that university is an investment. It is not a right. You should go to university for the right reasons- and make no mistake, most of the “reasons” that young people have for going to most universities these days are simply wrong.
Think about the alternatives first, so that you don’t find yourself ten
years down the line drowning in debt that you cannot default upon, with
a piece of paper that is worth less than the value of the ink on it.