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A guest lounges against the reception desk, quizzing me: “How did you get here? Are you paid? Do you have a degree in hospitality?” I have to let her down gently. At 19, without a degree, I am paid well to run a popular hostel. Last year, I made the best decision of my life: I dropped out of university.
After graduating from high school with a 95% average, attending university was never in doubt for me. They say a BA is the new high school, and hundreds of students flock to fill lecture halls every semester. More and more of them opt for “sensible” degrees such as business, but it doesn’t matter – less than 30% of US graduates find work in their fields, and the UK doesn’t fare much better.
There’s something missing from that picture, though: not only is it difficult to find work in certain fields; it’s difficult finding work full stop. The people I hire for unpaid internships invariably have degrees. One studied English, another political science and another statistics, and a fourth sought work experience before immersing herself in her doctorate. After a few months here, they return to bar and restaurant jobs that pay the student loan repayments.
Loans are probably the most persuasive reason to drop out of university. With slim prospects of well-paid work, loans are an effective prison, keeping the recent graduate from fully exploring their options. You can live on little money. I found work in hostels for my room and board, running pub crawls for cash.
I worked in bars, restaurants, proofreading, tourism and, once, in a strip club, as everything from cleaner to manager, but in some sense remaining my own boss. You can’t float around like that with debt.
University fits into a traditional route to success through hard work and intelligence but there are other paths. After all, even accounting for the minority of graduates working in their fields, careers today can encompass dozens of jobs in several industries. It’s easier than ever to move around. Networks are global, borders ever more transparent, and knowledge is free or cheap. New industries emerge and old ones die out each generation. Academia simply does not make sense as training for that kind of world.
That’s not to call university useless, but rather to suggest that it return to what it once was: education for the sake of knowledge. Universities could maintain a high standard, rather than churning through thousands of students; students could study what they wanted when and if they wanted. For everyone else, there’s a world of opportunity that begins perhaps with trades and ends only with your creativity.
Travelling, exploring, and working sounds like the classic gap year but it’s not. Don’t defer – leave or don’t go, because the issue here is the expectation that everyone will and should attend university. There are so many other options. Move, volunteer, work a random job or pursue the one you want, regardless of qualifications.
When I’m employing workers, their level of education is irrelevant. I look for a history of people skills, whether their experience was skilled or unskilled, paid or unpaid. Even that’s not carved in stone. The real necessities aren’t taught in university: flexibility, creativity, teamwork and enthusiasm. I can train people for the job but I can’t train personalities.
Arguably, university is excellent for networking – but again, this isn’t essential. I’ve never used a university contact since leaving. I’m often offered jobs now, in my field and beyond it, by people I’ve met along my way; I have friends in 15 countries and a plethora of industries. Maybe my next job will be breeding pigs in Poland, or teaching diving from a Caribbean cruise ship. Maybe I’ll publish my novel. I haven’t decided yet, but I know I’ll get where I want because I stand out.
I have something different and impressive: I dropped out of university.
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