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I'm in a similar bucket to the OP here. In my experience, everyone who went to college encourages me to go to college. However, everyone who didn't also encoura

I'm in a similar bucket to the OP here. In my experience, everyone who went to college encourages me to go to college. However, everyone who didn't also encourages me to go to college: people who took an extra 4 or 10 years to finish their degrees encourage me to go to college; very successful college dropouts encourage their mentees to go to college. I think what it boils down to is that college is a universally accepted "good idea", and if you are deciding not to go that route, it's something that you have to tackle on an individual level.

Mz 16y ago
FWIW: My sons were (and still are) adamant they are not going to college. Their father and my sister and probably a few other people tried to talk them into going. I respected their decision and my position was "I dropped out and went back later and their dad didn't go until he was older, so it makes perfect sense to me for them to not go now. Like both of their parents, they can go later if they so desire." Not everyone is a hypocrite. I just have first-hand experience with trying to decide a course of action based on all the things you don't like. It doesn't work very well. If someone has no idea what they want to do, there are worse ways to "waste" their time than pissing it away on college classes. And they are highly unlikely to be happier with that outcome. If you do know clearly what you want to do, that's different -- and I think that is part of what was different about people like Bill Gates and Madonna. They didn't drop out of college out of dislike of school. They dropped out because they were intently pursuing other goals and college was a hindrance to those goals.