"If you want to get a stable, high paying job, you have to go to college."

"If you don't want to live on the streets, you have to go to college."

Sound familiar? We've all heard these before. From our parents, our teachers, and sometimes, even our friends. But let me tell you a fun fact. They're not necessarily correct.

Hear me out before you click away. I'm not saying that colleges should be banned and nobody should attend college, I'm saying that it's not for everyone. There are plenty of stable jobs that don't require a college degree, some of them pay even more than the ones that do require a college degree.

What are these jobs you may ask? If you're interested in being a computer programmer, you can be one without going to college (Careers). If you are an artsy person, you can be a musician or actor. We all know how much money some actors make, and most of them haven't even gone to college, like Tom Hanks, Michael Fassbender, or Anne Hathaway (Struggles & Success); or they have gone to college, but not acting or music ones, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (Rasmussen College), meaning, they pretty much wasted years of their lives doing something they would eventually give up on.

"College is the place you learn how to make connections and live on your own." Nope. There's plenty of irresponsible college graduates who still live with their parents. And if you want to make connections, in some cases you can do that in high school, or you can take a gap year if making connections in high school is impossible. Bonus: on that gap year you can do an easy job that is towards the career you are pursuing, and that would give you a lot more experience and would look better on a job application. In college, you have no work experience. You have to start from zero. And it's not even guaranteed to get a job the moment you get out of college. What are you going to do in the meantime?

Picture this: you're on your 8th year in college pursuing a 12 year medical PhD. You suddenly decide you don't want to be a doctor anymore, you want to be a lawyer. You just wasted 8 years of your life and tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars pursuing something meaningless to you. You can drop out, but that means you have to get in another college that has law programs, and to get a law degree you need 3 years in college depending on the degree you have chosen (LawyerEdu). You need to spend money again. And what if you change your mind again? If you do not pursue college, you can juggle easy jobs in the area of study you are interested in. If you change your area of study interest, you can easily quit and do jobs in another area. In that case, you don't necessarily start from zero, because you have accumulated years of experience from your previous jobs. Moreover, everything evolves and moves too fast for the school education to keep up with. Whereas if you're doing hand-on jobs, all it needs is to update your computer.

Furthermore, the average yearly tuition fee in the US range from $34,592 to $58,668 at a public medical school (Kaplan) and at least $50,000 at a private one (Kaplan). Multiply that with 8 or 12 years (Peterson's) (depending on the number of years you're attending college), and that's how much you have to have paid by the time the degree is handed to you, unless you're taking student loans, which is even worse as you have to pay an interest rate, which goes from 3 to 7 percent depending on the type and amount of loan you get (U.S. News). Once you leave college, as previously mentioned, you have no work experience, unless you've been doing a part-time job while being in college, which you most likely haven't, considering the extensive homework and assignments you have in college. If you're lucky enough to find a job the  moment you get out of college, you can expect a salary of about 50-100k (PayScale). Before you go all nuts say that that's enough, you have to keep in mind that you have paid $276,736-$704,016 during your 8-12 years in college, and even more if you have loans to pay. The same logic applies even to a low-paying job (college costs less, but salaries are also low).

I'm not saying you shouldn't go to college. I'm saying that college is not for everyone. However, if you want to be a doctor because you want to help people, go ahead, go to college, this essay is not for you. If you want to go to college because you've been told being a doctor is a stable, high-paying job, you're better off dropping out while it's not too late, or pursuing another career altogether.