1. THE BIG ONE: It puts you in debt for decades.
I went to a state school and I’ll still be paying back my loans for about 15 years. Yeah, I spent 50 grand to learn that journalists these days need to use Flip cams and that there is a word called “jouissance” that only people between the ages of 19-22 try to work into conversation.

2. They keep asking you for even more money.
I graduated one year ago and already get regular emails asking for donations, presumably so that my school can expand on the giant new stadium that blocks the 4th street horizon of Bob Dylan fame.

3. You forget at least 70% of what you learned.
The amount you suffer while reading Derrida vs. the amount you ever think about anything he wrote post college is quite an extreme ratio.

4. WTF is a thesis?
Once I said something about how it would be funny to write a linguistics thesis about LOLcatz syntax and Katie Sisneros immediately responded, “It’s been done. It’s all been done.” So tell me this – if there are all these brilliant papers out there about the gender politics of 4chan, why the hell can’t I read them? Oh yeah, because thesi are long, academic papers that are totally inaccessible to mainstream audiences. Maybe they’ll wind up in a journal that some scholars who have no idea what a URL is will read while smoking cigars, but what good does that do for society? Instead, colleges should teach people to write in either Chuck Klosterman or New Yorker style about all their super new age topics of intense study.

5. It conditions all healthy routines out of you.
In high school, you get up at 6:30, shower, go to school, do a sport and then work at your town’s version of Baja Tortilla Grill. This doesn’t strike you as strange because it is the only thing you know. Then you get to college and your new daily schedule becomes waking up at 10, watching TV, biking to class, taking a nap, biking to another class, working four hours as a bartender and then drinking yourself to sleep. If your 50 grand is going to anything, it’s paying for four years of living that glorious routine.

6. College is an insular world that teaches you to talk like a crazy person.
Once I took a translation class, thinking I would have the opportunity to try out my skills translating foreign language texts into English. Nope, this was a theory class, meaning I had to listen to speeches about how “translators are like vampires, sucking the life out of a text and leaving it dead in the night.” Sorry world, let’s stop translating before libraries turn into Twilight sets.

7. Wikipedia exists now, and it’s a hell of a lot better at explaining the cycle of the moon than your professor who pauses five times a sentence to show the utter depth of his word choice.

8. Internships teach you skills in context.
Sitting in a class playing Angry Birds on your phone while thinking about “transmission modes of communication” teaches you a lot less about journalism than actually interning at a newspaper and writing real articles. (And getting in trouble the first time you break an ethical rule!) Best of all, internships are either free or they pay you.

9. Dorms are awful ships of misery that you can only survive by drinking a lot.
Don’t listen to people’s glamorous stories of dorm life being like the ultimate sleepaway camp. In reality, you live in a tiny room, the showers are full of barf, the food is overpriced and depressing and your roommate is probably a super religious zealot who prays for your drunk ass while you’re asleep.

10. Frat and sorority culture. Enough said.

–Becky Lang