
College is a waste of time - bry
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/03/stephens.college/
======
markbao
> _That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals
> to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my
> peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in
> the real world. Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects
> and our own organizations. Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced
> in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in
> improving the human condition._

Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If
you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to
prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the
students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a
year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent
guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible
results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.)

He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say
that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking,
complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) =
64% of college students _do_ show an improvement.

I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people
(edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a
heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.

Your thoughts are welcome.

~~~
kenjackson
_I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people, so
that there is a big confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of
everyone else._

Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't
think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks
what they're doing is the right thing.

And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from
education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could
have won the Vietnam War in just a few years.

19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new
phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.

~~~
fecklessyouth
I also have trouble accepting statements about college from someone who
attended one for less than a year. I don't think there is a set-in-stone
college experience, and it seems from his article that his experience differed
sharply from mine.

(The differences between good and bad colleges are, of course, usually missing
from these sorts of discussions...I have difficulty taking seriously anyone
who can critique or discuss "college" as if it were one monolithic program.)

~~~
flomincucci
+1 to that.

College is not to teach you "how to be successful" or "become a better coder".
In this case, it's about giving you the tools to learn to think. (...I think
this doesn't apply for med school, though)

~~~
xcallemjudasx
There's also the huge network of people you meet that help you later in your
career. I've lost track of the number of people I know who have been given job
offers from old friends/fraternity brothers/faculty they kept in touch with.

I have my current job because of an alumni from my school. There's a lot more
to the college experience than just the diploma.

------
blhack
He's missing the point.

College isn't entirely about learning things in the classroom, it's four years
where young, hopefully creative people get to have almost nothing to do but
think and create. The overwhelming majority of people in the world don't get
to work in cool offices, on cool problems, with cool co-workers who want to
solve difficult problems with them. The majority of us spend our days under
fluorescent lights working on mundane business-intelligence type things. Not
to say that creativity cannot be found in anything, but sitting in my dorm
hacking until all hours of the morning because I didn't _really_ have to go to
class is certainly more conducive to creativity than working an 8:00-6:00 and
going to bed at 10:00 because I have to be up in the morning.

While college might not really offer much in the way of knowledge acquisition
(at least until grad school), it _would_ does offer the time to work on things
you're passionate about, and network with other people of similar
inclinations.

I dropped out of college when I was 19, and it was one of the dumbest things
I've ever done. For somebody who is already a member of the silicon valley
set, this might be good advice, for everybody else this train of thought is
parasitic.

(I'm not saying that networking and hacking and soforth isn't possible when
you're working a "real" job [hell, I spend almost every waking second I'm not
spending at my job hacking and writing and networking], I'm just saying that
college is a better environment for it)

~~~
jerf
What on Earth college are you talking about? "Almost nothing to do but think
and create?" This isn't a commune, it's a school. There's coursework and
homework and studying and some extracurricular activities, and once you're
done with all that I suppose you can "think and create", but nowhere and nohow
is that the goal or reality of college, except _maybe_ a visual arts college.

If your college left you with nothing but "time to think and create", dropping
out was absolutely the right choice! The entire point (until PhD studies) is
that you should be learning and doing things according to some curriculum; if
you're not there for the curriculum, what are you doing there at all?

~~~
tybris
University exposed me to a broad array of topics in my field. It allowed me to
explore my interests and specialize in a particular area. It gave me the
opportunity to hack, tinker, discuss with my peers, get to know the
literature, gain discipline and control over my life, build a basic network,
learn the craft from professors, learn to write, find information, think about
how to build a business, design systems in my mind, etc. All without the
distractions of a job.

------
gtaylor
Blanket statements like this are foolish. My own college experience had a lot
of regurgitation, but whether you make productive use out of your time there
is completely within your hands. I was able to do challenging, hands-on
research, make connections that lead to my last two jobs, and build a solid
resume.

However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare
minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.

------
wccrawford
I think he's got a lot of good points.

"conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content,
rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software
development and literature.

"competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that
graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no
matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better.
I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have
their own problems.)

"regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for
learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.

"theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to
get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for
months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job.

I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor
the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a
tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can
work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a
tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless.

Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it
mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of
it.

~~~
kenjackson
_I've only ever been in 1 group-project class._

When I was in college group projects were extremely common. As were group-
projects for clubs. The SW engineering sequence was all group based. The
compiler sequence was group project based. OS was group project based. And
architecture was group project based.

 _It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just
memorization._

Is it really? Most of my tests were open book or take home. You'd think that
this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization.

~~~
ryanisinallofus
"You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization."

Particularly math classes. Memorization was almost meaningless and tests could
be open book for all the prof cared.

------
synnik
This isn't the first anti-college discussion to come up recently... not even
the first in the last 24 hours.

What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their
students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into
these arguments that all higher education is worthless.

This isn't good logic, much less good advice.

~~~
smokeyj
You're missing the point. It's time to challenge the traditional education
business model. This is the digital age where information is cheap -- and
college Institutions have no incentive to capitalize on this. They don't want
to drive down their costs, why would they? Education should be like any other
service and made available to _anyone_ who wants it. Not to the richest kid.
Not the kid with the highest GPA. Anyone.

No one is arguing specialized education is bad, but there are much more
efficient ways of getting there.

~~~
adestefan
But college isn't about information gathering. And the Internet doesn't make
eduction available to anyone. Public libraries make information available to
anyone.

~~~
smokeyj
I agree that information isn't education. I disagree that the internet doesn't
make education available -- you have to know where to find it.

Now that you told me what college isn't about, what _is_ it about? And why
must it be threatened by a modern business model?

------
crs
At the end of the day, College is what you make of it. No one can force you to
really get involved, participate in team projects etc. You have to have the
internal drive to make the most of your opportunity.

It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to
school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he
graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in
anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is
getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal.
Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline
assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".

~~~
dsmithn
In my case he perfectly describes most of my lower division courses.
Memorization, no group work, theory. The problem is he's making assumptions
about an entire degree based on at most a year of education. At a liberal arts
college.

Once you get past the prerequisites and basic classwork, it's a world of
difference. I feel bad for the people who will be missing out on some truly
great educational experiences because this kid couldn't stick it out for more
than a few semesters. Few people will have his success rate right out of high
school.

------
hwang89
Hmm... a 19-year old dissing college. This sounds like that little kid in the
movie commercial who argues Lebron > Jordan. You weren't _there_ , man.

------
ryanisinallofus
"Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim..."

Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved
constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would
even have accepted this as actual work.

College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which
made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I
previously thought useless.

The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable
debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically
speaking) serfdom.

------
enthalpyx
"We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or
corporate institutions." -- says the guy writing for .... CNN.com

------
zitterbewegung
Looks like a PR stunt to promote his company. Also, to promote whatever Peter
Theil is doing.

~~~
noarchy
It may be shameless promotion, but the fact is, he managed to get a platform
(CNN) on which to do it. One could argue that he's off to a good start.

~~~
zitterbewegung
I agree with you on that point but the article seems like fluff in IMHO. That
is the point I was trying to make.

------
rythie
College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many
entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the
expensive US system)

Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not
easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good
salary. Going to college gets you on that track.

~~~
jseliger
"College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many
entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the
expensive US system)"

This isn't really true. Universities got started in the Middle Ages to a)
collect what knowledge existed, especially from Greek and Roman sources and b)
to a lesser extent, train religious authorities and theologians. In the U.S.,
universities got going to basically create gentlemen, and later to create
scholars and researchers (Menand goes over a lot of this in his book _The
Marketplace of Ideas_ : [http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-
academy-louis...](http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-
louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-
university/)).

Today, a lot of colleges and college majors focus on creating employees, but
that's a relatively recent shift that only began taking place on a large scale
circa 1980, as far as I can tell. That's when the number of business majors,
relative to the liberal arts and sciences, really takes off in the U.S. I
don't know enough about the European situation to comment on it.

------
auganov
Just don't get too carried away in the whole "college is useless" craze.
People that don't need college probably don't need anyone to tell them that.
They are already doing that. Probably the result of all those anti-college
campaigns will mostly be providing an excuse to ones looking for a silly one.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe
is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly
talking about the short term effect. In the mid-long run I'm sure we're
looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.

------
bluekeybox
> He says college rewards conformity and competition, not collaboration,
> theory

Wow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes
perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't
know how to teamwork and learn from others.

I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach
to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others
can be counterproductive, in my opinion.

------
gte910h
I did plenty of group work at Georgia Tech. Built several working robots in
teams, a video game, a bus monitoring device, and various other software
projects.

I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to
evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.

~~~
flomincucci
I agree with this. Here, I do PLENTY of group work. Business plans, software,
use cases, etc.... EVERYTHING is made in group.

------
ctdonath
College shows you can take on a very large multi-year project and finish it.
Not a trivial point.

------
bmac27
While I agree strongly with most of the author's thesis, the zero sum aspect
to this debate is tiresome. And I say this as a dropout myself.

Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based
on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping
out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one.

Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different
set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants
on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments.

Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held
in equal regard.

------
ChiperSoft
His statements are absolutely true... about a handful of fields people go to
school for:

Computer Sciences, absolutely. Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure.
Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it. Biology &
Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study

None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on
the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught
in a formal setting.

Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to
think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming
and web development.

~~~
ajdecon
I'd leave chemistry off the list: lab work is essential, and very few
individuals have the money or the permits to obtain the chemicals you work
with in a chem-majors class. I don't know biology well enough to talk, but I
suspect that molecular bio at least suffers from the same problems as chem.
And you can self-teach physics theory, but experimental physics can require
some very specialized and expensive equipment. Not to mention the
opportunities to work in research labs, which is where I did most of my
education...

~~~
ChiperSoft
You're right, I should have said "a lot of study, and somebody willing to let
you play in their lab."

------
gruseom
It just occurred to me that the anti-college backlash follows inevitably from
the decline of the classical liberal arts education. Since "education" is now,
in our society's view, nothing more than job training, why bother with it at
all? Just skip it and go straight to the job, or start your own business. No
"education" required.

Education as civilizing self-development is something other than schooling and
training, but our institutions have abandoned that, if they ever provided it
in the first place. I think they did use to, but only for a tiny elite.

------
bry
Not sure I agree, but I submitted this article because I'm interested in the
inevitable discussion to follow.

------
dreamdu5t
Everybody, jump on the "education is a bubble and a waste" bandwagon!

~~~
nkassis
I was going to say the same thing, there real issues with college and
education but the whole debate right now is starting to feel like a lot of
sensationalism.

I went to college and did Mathematics. Why? Cause it looked cool. Was I good
at it? Not really I had a hard time with many of my classes but I enjoyed the
material. It was interesting even if useless. It's all about what you want to
get out of college. I wanted to learn something interesting. The best part is
it wasn't useless at all in the end. Nobody really cares about what your
degree is in except for some specific jobs and get it cheap (that even goes
for Ivy schools, they are now cheaper than many private sub Ivy schools due to
Financial aid).

~~~
dreamdu5t
Exactly. I get the feeling people are looking at the success of education in
financial terms, when the issue is bigger than that.

If someone spends $100,000 on school and they don't make that after
graduating, people label it as a failure.

College's worth shouldn't be evaluated in a purely financial context.

------
bhangi
It is useful to distinguish between two issues -- the usefulness of a college
education and the cost of said education. The costs of a college education in
the US today are completely unjustifiable IMHO and I agree with those who say
that there surely must be better use for your money. On the other hand, it
seems that dismissing college education itself qua education is a bit like
throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's leave aside the question of
whether a college education improves your critical thinking -- I claim that a
good college education _properly_ trains you in the fundamentals that you need
to master before going on to doing greater things. The obvious caveat is that
there are a whole bunch of vocations for which such training has little or no
value -- I get that. But do we really want to create a society where a whole
generation has little or no training to invent, for example, the next
breakthrough transistor technology?

------
larryfreeman
I think that the college system is terribly broken.

In my view, college is broken in 3 ways:

1\. It is too expensive -- this severely limits talented people from going to
college

Hopefully, online, free college lectures will go a long way to remedy this
situation.

2\. Brilliant PhDs are not able to find jobs in their area

This is not about money but about the ability to do research and about the
ability for these people to contribute in their chosen fields.

3\. The Wrong People are going to college

People are going to college because they don't know what else to do and
because everyone tells them it's what you should do.

College should be optional for jobs. Some of the most brilliant engineers that
I have worked with are self-taught without a college degree.

You don't need college to be educated and you don't need a college degree to
make lots of money.

College is the entry point to the academic community which should be regularly
enriched by the world's best talent.

For many people, it is the ritual, the sports, the experience, and the
opportunity to explore ideas for the first time that makes college so
worthwhile.

------
chamakits
Although he makes some valid points, it seems a bit foolish to me that a 19
year old, who has barely been in college to just flat out deny it's
usefulness. I recently graduated, and though there are a lot of things I would
change about college, I don't regret going there.

I made great connections, made life long friends, and (most importantly)
learned a lot. Most of what I learned was because of my own efforts, however,
that seed of curiosity that pushed me to learn was usually thanks to something
mentioned in a class, or because of a conversation with a professor, or
because of me going the extra mile in my projects, or because of the research
I had looked to work on.

Overall, I'm not saying that you need college to succeed, and I'm not saying
that there isn't alot to criticize about college. However, before you knock it
down, try it out. You may not regret it.

------
fecklessyouth
This article merely proves the point that Thiel's coverage on HN has pounded
into the ground: smart, driven kids interested in entrepreneurship don't need
college.

What seems to be missing from these kinds of discussions is a focus on what
kinds of college programs we should be emulating.

------
atacrawl
_I left college two months ago because it rewards [...] competition rather
than collaboration_

Let me get this straight -- the whole premise of the Thiel Fellowship seems to
be to get bright kids out of the doldrums of higher education and into the
real world where they can start competitive businesses, and yet this kid says
he doesn't like college because it rewards competition?!

And, I don't really agree with that premise in the first place. If anything,
college rewards the appearance of collaboration -- when I was college, I ended
up in numerous group projects where at least one person was completely
worthless and contributed nothing besides their name on the written report's
cover page.

------
Killah911
Where I grew up, entreprenuership without a college degree meant being on the
other side of the law. Without my Ivy League degree I'm afraid, most of the
people I know now would be clamoring about ending my food stamp benefits.
College was often boring, and I sucked at Technical Writing, but I'd never
have the opportunities if I "unColleged" myself. Maybe if I grew up in the
same neighborhood as I live in now, I'd think like him too. For many kids
growing up in the inner cities, places where "local VCs" will litterally take
your knee caps, college is a much wiser choice.

------
duopixel
The article—appropriately, perhaps—reads like a high school essay from a smart
student. Grammatically correct, logical, structured but stiff.

I guess the biggest thing that college gave me wasn't knowledge, it was a
firing range where I could practice shooting without actually harming anyone.
If I think of myself when I was 18-20, if I was actually put into a position
of responsibility my net contribution would be negative.

There are certainly exceptions, but the net value of an unexperienced 18 year
old is negative. He costs more to the company (in mentoring and mistakes) than
the value he provides.

------
euroclydon
I'm officially calling the nocollege movement a bubble and a direct byproduct
of the tech bubble. Tech is hot and for some sound reasons, no doubt, but
there aren't enough fundamentals to justify the same folks who used to think
higher education was the ticket to prosperity now thinking it's starting a
software business straight out of school.

If I were graduating high school this year, I'd go counter cyclical and get
the PhD, hoping to land the comfortable government job and ride out the
depression there.

------
goldmab
The author is 19 years old, so I'm guessing he dropped out pretty early. I
don't think he was actually in college long enough to even know that it was a
waste of time for him.

I loved college, especially a lot of the stuff that happened well after I
turned 19. I feel really lucky that college forced me to learn so much stuff.
Otherwise my mind would have gotten stuck in a narrower path.

------
Mc_Big_G
I've never heard of anyone learning thermodynamics/static/mechanical
design/fluid dynamics/heat transfer/etc from a group of people gathering to
discuss, challenge and support each other (other than in a school).

Technological advancement has a lot to do with "improving the human condition"
and the majority of significant advances come from those who have been through
higher education.

------
rick888
College is more than learning the material, it's also about learning about
yourself. Most of the time, it's your first taste of freedom and it's one of
the only times where you aren't really a kid anymore and you aren't stuck
working in a 9-5.

You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not
that easy.

------
Florin_Andrei
NPR disagrees:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2011/05/24/136612905/new...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2011/05/24/136612905/new-study-estimates-the-worth-of-college-majors)

------
erreon
Does the education system in the US need to be changed? Absolutely 100% agree
that it does. Do 18-19 year old people have the world figured out? Not by a
long shot, but they sure think they do.

------
dannylipsitz
I'm curious to see the success rate of entrepreneurs without college degrees
vs. those with degrees, however you might define success and over whatever
time horizon. What do you think?

------
gabaix
in 30 years, we'll be "remember the UnCollege movement? yeah, we really wanted
to change the world at that time".

definitely a good movement to demand for change in education, will it
revolutionize the system? probably not.

------
omouse
...says CNN which has hosts read Twitter status updates.

------
s00pcan
I'm not going to make any comments regarding the article, but this is a topic
I've been annoyed with for some time now. From 2000 to 2004 I spent a lot of
my time getting better at building websites, starting with learning HTML on my
own before taking a class on it at school in 2004. I excelled in the only
programming class available at my high school, easily keeping up with the
second year students. When I graduated I had several websites using PHP/MySQL
and was still building my skills every day. For my senior project I was asked
to show everyone my passion and demoed a website I had created with a content
management system and showed the code.

I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I got stuff done and everyone
around me thought I was really good at what I did. This was never something I
bragged about, I have always been completely aware of how little I understand
about everything.

Then I went to apply for college. I had wild dreams of just picking classes
that interested me and taking them, learning all sorts of complicated tools
and programming languages. Imagine my surprise when I instead was asked to
take basic math, english and other uninteresting refresher courses. I knew
what I wanted to do, but I didn't know what the program I wanted was called so
I ended up in a CIS program. I lost most of my passion for programming and
making websites at that time. I switched schools, got an internship that
turned into a job, but it's just a completely worthless experience for me.

I'm visiting in an advanced HTML class right now and they are going over
techniques I used EIGHT YEARS AGO. I used these skills in my high school HTML
class where no one else could. Worse, these skills they are teaching are now
outdated and trivial. The LAMP stack isn't hot and new anymore, and now I just
get annoyed when people get excited about being able to use it because it is
so basic and trivial to use.

It deeply saddens me that I've wasted my time at college; I could have instead
worked on personal projects for the past 6 years since starting and I would
have not wasted money on tuition, student loans and my time on worthless
classes like I'm still taking. When I bring up how little I've gotten out of
my education that I've paid tens of thousands of dollars for the response I
get is "You'll have a degree that you can show to future employers!" Sorry,
I'd rather have a portfolio of work than something that just shows I have had
minimal experience at trivial applications of a variety of subjects.

I used to be passionate on doing personal projects and all of the skills
necessary towards my goals in life, then I went to college and had all of that
ambition sucked out of me, replaced with worthless boring classes that wasted
my time. You're probably thinking "why not just work on these projects while
going to school/work for the past six years?" I could have, but those around
me made it seem like college and working were more important. The mindset
became "I'm going to college and working, what more do you want?" My parents
didn't realize that I will probably make every dollar for the rest of my life
using a computer. Instead, they just saw someone wasting their time on a
computer and berated me at every opportunity. I'm just now realizing that I
need to quit listening to those people and need to just work on whatever seems
valuable to me.

~~~
Volscio
This is why you go to grad schools to learn skills, and use college to study
the liberal arts, exploring all those dumb useless subjects that no one thinks
is worth studying anymore but in fact they teach you how to think critically,
be creative, and realize that the world isn't just coders, lawyers, doctors,
and businessmen.

I ended up skipping a lot of classes in college while daytrading, but I took
the most bizarre liberal arts classes I could find and did most of the reading
on my own time.

------
klbarry
I attend Baruch College in NYC, which is a city-funded school. My tuition is
<$6000 yearly, and I am extremely happy with my classes. Required courses for
the business school include business law, micro and macro economics, calculus,
statistics, accounting, and other highly useful courses. The school is in the
city, so I've found it very easy to get a marketing position at a start-up
while in school. I've gotten to meet and speak to the CFO of JP Morgan and
Tommy Hilfiger, and got his daughters input on an idea. Connections with
professors have been very useful, and often fascinating. The emphasis on
communication intensive courses has noticeably improved my skill.

I am extremely happy with my college experience, and would certainly recommend
it for the opportunity cost.

