I got a bachelors and masters degree in engineering. I needed at least the bachelors degree for licensure.

I use it every day at work.

Wanted to go to a trade school for welding when I was a teenager. Mother said no, because “you’re going to college”

I kept asking for help figuring out college stuff, mother kept saying “I’ll help you tomorrow/next week when I have time” (she was technically a substitute teacher but usually worked 1 day/wk)

Graduation came and went and I had no money saved up, no colleges looked at beyond what my limited googling skills could come up with, and absolutely no help from my parents with anything.

Good news though, since my parents collectively made enough money, I didn’t qualify for financial aid of any kind! Did I say good news? I meant bad.

And of course my parents lived paycheck to paycheck and we got EBT or medicaid for most of my childhood.

Now instead of an education or a trade that’s in demand, I have depression and a shitty 15/hr job that is destroying my joints.

Ain’t life grand?

Got most the way through an environmental science degree, then learned the job market was mostly helping oil companies dodge regulations.

Father got cancer so I had to return and help out, asked the bursars what can I get with the credits I’d accumulated, took a “university studies” bachelor.

Returned to school online in 22’ for a degree in software. About half way through the degree the layoffs started. Cut my losses and dropped out.

~43k usd debt for both programs as of now after paying some down over the last 8ish years.

I enjoyed being exposed to new ideas, information, ways of thinking etc. probably could have found those things without the price tag.

I went to university in my home country in Europe. At first, I just wanted to pursue my passion, which was the Japanese language. I had no future plans whatsoever. While writing the thesis for my bachelor’s degree, I was asked to help out the university staff with teaching some seminars. That in turn made me realize that I love working with people, that I love teaching and that becoming a Japanese teacher would simply give me the best of both worlds. That realization led me to applying for a university in Japan, where I did my master’s degree in education. Also because the prefect at the university in my country told me that a degree in education from Japan would make me eligible for a full time contract as a Japanese teacher. After returning to my country, I learned that my government had implemented a policy that made it impossible for me to get hired as an adjunct (a teacher that only teaches and whose contract doesn’t require them to produce a certain amount of papers per year). I had no intentions of becoming a researcher, even part time, so I gave up on becoming a Japanese teacher.

Looking back at my choices, even though I do something completely unrelated today (probation officer and case worker), I regret nothing. Going to college connected me with the world. It made me academically smarter, emotionally more intelligent and it opened up my eyes to my ignorance and made me humble.

I didn’t. My country focuses more on apprenticeships than higher education, and I wasn’t the type to be really ambitious. So I never really explored my options and just went with the flow.

I got a degree in STEM that hasn’t been useful to me. Turns out the sorts of jobs I got it for don’t really exist anymore/around me, and where they do, they pull from other more traditional graduate and post-graduate pools. At this point it’s been long enough since I got it without working a role related to my field that it’d be pretty hard to get hired into even if the labor market wasn’t falling apart. So I switched gears and applied my breadth of knowledge to a different goal, and that’s a work in progress. Time will tell if it’s successful.

But I started when I was in my mid 20s, and it was a very good time of my life, even with a lot of negative life events in that time. If I could be a professional student, I would have loved to.

However, I tried to pursue a masters through online courses, but I wasn’t really excited about the specificity of it (I’m more of a generalist), and I wasn’t in the right mental state to do it properly, so I withdrew. So who knows if professional student would have really worked for me or not.

I did some community college, took all the “required” classes although every fiber of my being was angry & restless about it, intuitively knowing it was a waste of precious time, energy, money, resources,

even doing what was “required,” I felt like I was fucking around when I should’ve been out in the real world living my life because I’ve got SO MUCH LIFE IN ME and college sucks out the life force.

But I still needed money to survive because you can’t survive without money, so I spent a couple years in two vocational schools and now I am working in those fields.

Vocational schools are a fast track to employment. Employment needed to pay off the educational loans 🤦🏼‍♀️

I started because my parents made me. I stayed because mechanical engineering is pretty cool. I’ve had some very cool jobs in robotics and aerospace, currently going back to school part-time to study electrical engineering. After being in the industry for 10-ish years I realized I’m more interested in EE.

I did a year of literature when I didn’t know what to do in my life. I always liked computers so after that I applied to a computer science school. There I had a lot of fun and met a lot of people, some I still have in my life, learned some useful mindsets. Before I managed to get an actual degree I started working. From NOC engineer to software developer where I happily stayed. Did I need my higher education? Probably not, but I think it gave me another perspective and friends and many fun memories.

At the time I went to college, I planned to become a librarian. 2008 happened when I was graduating and looking at getting into a library so I could qualify for a scholarship on my master’s, and things didn’t work out. I’m now in marketing. I don’t know if I’m using anything from college or not anymore, because it’s been 15 years and it’s just a blur.

I had a career plan to make college worth the money and time. The economy fell apart just in time for that to be impossible. I was struggling until about 2017, when I briefly got into private education.

I studied philosophy and history of art as a double major for undergraduate. Doing a humanities degree was the right decision at the time for me. Should mention that I didn’t have to pay tuition fees as a Scottish person in Scotland.

During that degree I ended up getting interested in Linux since I enjoyed seeing a practical example of altruism in the real world. Laterally I did a masters in Computing at a former polytechnic uni and have been working as a programmer ever since. Analytic philosophy actually maps onto coding really nicely since they are both ultimately concerned with discrete mathematics. I did have to take on a student loan for that degree but it didn’t take me long to pay it off. It wasn’t computer science since I didn’t have the prerequisite STEM undergraduate degree but it focused on practical aspects of computing like developing desktop applications with Java, webdev with C# and JS, databases with SQL and introduction to operating systems.

It also helped that in my advanced logic classes in philosophy I’d studied the Church Turing thesis, which is just about the most fundamental concept in Comp.Sci.

Yes and it was totally worth it. Got a number of jobs in my career that I would not have without the degree.

I did: Got a free ride pretty much so why not? I ended up getting multiple degrees in part just because they sounded interesting (I was also working 1-4 jobs depending on the time though, so some of it was part time).

I have not ruled out going back sometime in the future if the opportunity presents itself.

I went to a European University of Applied Sciences for a bachelor’s in business administration. I relocated to a new country at 18, and it was one of 3 degrees offered in my area in English at the time. At the start, I was completely uninterested in business. I was mostly there to add structure to my days and to qualify for student benefits. Zero long-term plan. It ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made. I quickly learned to recognize projects where I could apply my existing interests and talents, so working was actually fun. I also gained the skills to breeze by tasks that weren’t enjoyable. Because it was a UAS, I got what felt like years of working experience under my belt before I graduated, which was invaluable as a young person without parents to groom me towards professional life.

I got a two year English degree and now work in tech. It was primarily focused on creative writing, which doesn’t help much in my field.