Alain Guillot

Life, Leadership, and Money Matters

Going to college was a waste of my money and time

I wish I had never gone to college

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When I went to college, I had one objective only. To get a student visa to get into Canada.

I was born in Colombia and I wanted to go to a country with better economic opportunities, so I chose Canada. After evaluating all my options, I decided that the student visa route was the best option for me.

I went to college, I passed all my classes, I got my degree, and that was that.

The huge opportunity cost of going to college

I was never able to get any economic value from my degree, I never felt more educated than the person next to me due to my degree. Instead, what I feel every day of my life, was a big opportunity cost of my time and money. I could had been flipping burgers at McDonalds for four years and I would have obtained better value for my time and I would be better off economically. Instead of spending thousands of dollars in a useless education, I could have started contributing to my savings account five years earlier.

I didn’t learn anything in college. I learned how to pass exams and that was that. There was no point in being there. Most of the textbooks were full of outdated information or we were just doing busywork.

I feel that I wasted five years of my life going to College. It was not a complete waste because it provided me with a path to become a Canadian citizen, but as far as educational value, there was nothing there.

I studied finance and I wasn’t able to get the job that I wanted because of my Spanish accent. I live in the province of Quebec, and I found the Quebec employers to be racist. If you don’t speak perfect French with a Quebec accent, they simply don’t want you in their labor force.

I was forced to go into entrepreneurship

During my college years, dancing was one of my hobbies so I decided to open dance school. I rented some dance studio space by the hour, I bought some advertising in the local newspaper and I started teaching. My dance school became a success and it provided me with many years of steady income.

Later on I thought myself how to invest in Real State and I was able to accumulate a significant capital from borrowing money from friends, buying property and later on renting them or selling them.

I also taught myself how to trade in the stock market and for the past 12 years, my return have beat the returns of the Canadian Pension Plan and the Quebec Pension Plan.

After 20 years in the labor force, I was able to retire and up to this moment, I think that all the education I received in college was useless. My biggest education sources have been blogs, and YouTube.

A push back I often get from my friends is that I have the ability to sit down and teach myself something new, while most people struggle to have that discipline. I accept that… Maybe that’s something we should learn at school, how to sit down and do something that no one told us to do.

Who needs and who doesn’t need a college degree

Except for a few selected careers such as medicine and engineering, going to school is completely unnecessary. I see all these people studying careers with no employment future, and getting into huge debt for the privilege. I mean, if you like Gender Studies, philosophy, art history, anthropology, just borrow a book from the library and read it during the week end, and find a philosophy group on Meetup an talk about philosophy during the weekend.

Nowadays you can learn practically anything from the internet. There are hundreds of free college classes and there are hundreds of businesses that don’t require a college education.

For me, college was a waste of my time and money. I think you should consider your options and decide if college it the right thing for you.

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