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get an amateur degree? You can get a professional degree in the Liberal Arts, right? Like ... like a professional Theoretical Sociologist? Nope! They mean the hard sciences again, or law, or medicine.

So very, very not you.

But I think we need to pause and clarify now: If those are the fields you want to go into, you absolutely should go to college and study incredibly hard. If an architect skips the wrong day - to play an ARG, listen to retro-grunge-pop, start a Libyan revolution, or whatever it is kids these days do for fun - and he makes a mistake in his job, my apartment building collapses. If, say, a philosophy major skips the wrong day, he might not know what kind of idealism Kant supports, and that freshman with the pink MacBook won't give him a handjob in the back of her Jetta later.

The stakes are different.

So I'm not saying college does not have a use, I'm just saying that if you're the type of kid who, at 18, hasn't quite formed a complete and detailed plan for the next sixty years of your life, then you're probably not majoring in Esoteric Quantum Engineering. You're taking a survey on Quentin Tarantino films and you won't even show up for that half the time.

Right around the time you catch yourself pirating cliff's notes for Pulp Fiction, you start to redefine the term "higher education."

But then, I never quite understood the professional degree kids who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives before they were even legally allowed to smoke. At 18, all I actually "knew" that I wanted to do was girls, bong rips, and handstands - and I never did get that handstand down. We live in a coddling society, and our culture is extending mental adolescence further and further into the late teens and even 20s. I, for example, didn't really feel like a grown, responsible adult male until any day now, hopefully. The kids that have a life-map at 18 were always somewhat rare to start with, and now they're a dying breed. But even the lost teenagers still have that drive. It kicks in the second they get out of high school, and it's propagated by one of the most pervasive PR campaigns ever: "Go to college. You're nothing without a college education. It doesn't matter what you want to do, or even if you know what that is at all. Go to college. College fixes everything."

And why would the government be so gung ho about it -- willing to offer you all that free money (hey, you don't have to pay it back until college is over, and that's a lifetime from now! That's basically not even