On College: or how to blow $500

I’ve spent some time thinking, and I think I’ve come to the realization why I’m demotivated with taking a CCNA course.  I have been taking the course since August, and now we’re four chapters in.  I have no desire or motivation to learn what should be an interesting subject to me, and it’s not the material.  It’s the thought that I’m spending time and money and I have to teach myself. 

I’ve tried self-teaching the CCNA material before.  There’s just a lot of it and I wasn’t making the grounds I thought I should be. I wasn’t learning things and retaining them properly to pass the test.  So I decided to take a class at Amarillo College.  And now, I’m doing the exact same thing.  It’s the exact same self-teaching I was doing before, except this time I’m paying more for it.  Instead of buying a $50 book, I’m taking a $500 class. 

What did I expect?  A teacher that would spend the time teaching instead of speeding through slides with disorganized manner.  An actual education, perhaps? 

I guess that’s the big fallacy of college, and I’d completely forgotten it.  You don’t go to college and get taught.  You go to college and find out you are spending large amounts of money to someone else so you can read a book and teach yourself.  I’m fairly convinced you could do the whole thing with networking and a few considerably less money.  You’d get the same effect. 

Yes, I have a college degree.  I think it was an absolute waste of money. 

I think college goes back to the OODA loop, at least from the student perspective.  For the student, college solves a problem that no longer exists.  The faculty and simply there to make a buck and keep the meat grinder rolling.  

With that, I’m going to broadly disqualify most of the science, technology, engineering, math, and accounting.  Those problems still exist.  But the method of teaching just sucks.