Drawbacks to Pursuing Career Prep or Self-Improvement in College

None of our reasons for college are perfect, so let’s dig into their weaknesses.

Drawbacks to Pursuing Career Prep

Unless you’ve got a trust fund to fall back upon, you’re going to need to make money to survive in this world. For that reason, spending your college days preparing for your future career can seem like a smart choice. There are two big drawbacks, though:

Too Little, Too Early

If your high school experience was like mine, your studies focused on a narrow range of core subjects (math, chemistry, English, a foreign language, etc.). Most adults don’t end up working in fields related to these core subjects; even if they did, the entry-level ideas you learned in high school aren’t all that similar to what would be needed for a paying job. The only people making a living thinking about basic algebra are math teachers, and their job doesn’t seem enviable to me.

So, the risk is that career prep could require you to commit to a career path before you’ve explored most of the options available to you. In short, you’ve seen too little and so you may be committing too early.

This is especially risky since career prep often involves non-transferable skills and credentials; if you decide you’d like to try something else later, you may face a steep penalty (which we called the education-occupation mismatch penalty in the Earning appendix). This situation reminds me of a classic quote (often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln): “Give me four hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first three sharpening the axe.” If we apply the same logic to your four years of college, make sure you spend some time sharpening your axe and choosing a tree before you spend too much time hacking away.

One more thing: If you rely on the advice of others when selecting a career path, be aware that they may not know much more about it than you do. While your parents might be eager to tell you about the fast-growing career they heard about on the news, they probably don’t have a good sense of what employers in those fields are actually looking for when hiring. And, honestly, your professors may not know either. There’s a substantial disconnect between what’s expected to be taught in the classroom and what’s needed for a job, and professors tend to teach to the former rather than the latter. Thus, taking career advice from people who don’t have boots-on-the-ground experience poses a serious risk: You don’t want to spend your time diligently checking boxes only to find out you were working from the wrong checklist.

Remedy

Here’s how to reduce your risk: Try to get direct work experience in a relevant job while you’re still in college. This usually involves an internship, but it could also be volunteering, side projects, etc. The beauty of getting relevant work experience is threefold: (i) you get a chance to see if the job is a good fit for you, (ii) you can directly ask hiring managers what they’re looking for when they hire, and (iii) the work experience will help you get a job after graduating.

Of course, you probably won’t be able to get relevant work experience until after you’ve already chosen a major and invested a year or more into it. If you’d like to minimize your risk in the meantime, choose a path that involves building competence rather than acquiring narrowly-applicable credentials. As long as you pay attention and make attempts to test out your decision before graduating, you should be OK.

Intentions Aren’t Enough

We’ll cover this in more depth later, but it’s worth including it here: Only 68% of students enrolling at four-year colleges attain a degree within six years. This is particularly bad news if you’re pursuing career prep, since most of the benefits of career prep (credentials, the higher salary of a gated career, etc.) come only if you reach graduation day. Having good intentions is, unfortunately, not enough; you need to graduate if you want the full benefits of career prep.

Remedy

The optimal solution would be to increase your chance of graduating. That’s outside the scope of this website, so I’ll leave you to learn how to do that on your own. Besides that, you could also try to pick a major that prioritizes competence over credentials. If you make it halfway through college, you won’t have the degree but you will have the skills you picked up along the way. If you pick a major that builds transferable skillsets, you may be able to leverage those skills to build a career even if you fail to graduate.

In Closing . . .

The risks are many, but they’re surmountable with proper planning. You can use internships and work experience to confirm your interest in and qualification for your target career, and you can try to aim for careers that involve more skill-building and less credential acquisition. It pays to be prepared.

Drawbacks to Pursuing Self-Improvement

While self-improvement sounds inarguable in theory (who could argue with trying to improve yourself?), it has drawbacks in practice.

What About Your Career?

The first drawback is obvious: How will you get a good job after graduating? In today’s economy, it can feel like employers want you to have a comprehensive set of skills before you can get even an entry-level job. The catch-22 is that the more skills employers demand for entry-level jobs, the harder it becomes for people to break into the field and build the skills employers want. Ideally, employers would hire based on potential, knowing their investment in training would be repaid with years of service. In reality, employers want to be able to skip that step and hire qualified people at entry-level wages. What all this means is that it can be hard to get your first job after graduating if you focus on self-improvement.

Remedy

Your long-term bet on improving yourself will take years to come to fruition, so it falls upon you to get your career airborne without much help at first. This can mean any multitude of things: Maybe you train yourself in a valuable skillset on the side, or maybe you aim to get an entry-level job in a big company so you can leverage the insider-advantage to pursue a more prestigious job. No matter how you do it, though, it’ll be hard at first. Work experience and valued skills can make it easier, but it’ll still never be as easy as it would have been if you had pursued career prep. Remember, self-improvement is a bet on the long-term value of yourself over short-term career benefits.

Cheaper Ways to Improve Yourself

Whereas credentials can only be obtained by jumping through the right hoops, self-improvement seems like it ought to be achievable with a library card and an internet connection. After all, you can buy the textbooks for a fraction of tuition, and you can find free lectures on almost any topic. What’s the point of paying for a degree when you can pursue self-improvement by studying on your own? And how can you assess whether what you’re learning is worth the cost?

Remedy

The solution should sound familiar by now: Work hard at challenging subjects that interest you. If you’re after self-improvement, that’s the best way to maximize the value you get from college. As for comparing college with self-study, there aren’t any guarantees for which is better. While college has a lot of good stuff going for it, nothing is stopping you from mimicking what it offers in other ways: you could dedicate yourself to independent study, find mentors to guide you, join independent study groups, etc. The reality, though, is college can provide all of this without the need to set it up on your own. It’s a turn-key solution, which gives you time to do what really matters: Work hard at worthwhile things and improve yourself in the process. It’s up to you to determine if that opportunity is worth the cost of time and money.

In Closing . . .

Choosing to pursue self-improvement in college is a calculated risk. You trade short-term job security for a long-term bet on yourself. You can mitigate the risks by working hard and by spending some time preparing for the requirements of job applications (e.g., skills, work experience), but you’ll likely still have a bumpy ride when entering the workforce. With all that said, I believe pursuing self-improvement in college can be a good choice as long as you work to maximize what you get out of it.