If you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or anything outside the humanities field, chances are you’ll benefit from a college degree. But woe to you whose heart is set on becoming an author, a musician, a visual artist, or any pursuit whose area of study depends on an arbitrary grading system or how much your teacher likes you. Learning from an author/painter/musician who hasn’t been dead for a hundred years is worth little in the art world. The collegiate Ivory Tower is run by aging professors with one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel, dusty, out-of-touch curators of the past and defenders of tradition harboring a disdain for all things new, all things trending and popular, tenured wizards of academia who will teach you to love everything the business world would have us forget. Which is why, depending on your field, college might just be a huge waste of time and money.
The Art of Storytelling 
As a fine arts major who attended a liberal arts college, I don’t disagree – if you are expecting college to land you a job and make you money.
But as a world-traveller, frequent museum-goer, and a nudist, my arts degree and exposure to the humanities were pivotal in opening me to worldly experiences and my life is much better for that. Sure I could have majored in something “marketable” but I truly believe my life would not be as rewarding as it has been.
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I agree there is considerable value in learning for the sake of learning, and I wouldn’t be an author if I only cared about money. But what ticks me off is that there *is* money to be made in the arts; people do it daily. JK Rowling is a billionaire. Brandon Sanderson makes ten million dollars a year. How these authors managed to follow their dreams and make a living doing it is something I am still figuring out, and I can’t help but wonder why the college I attended couldn’t have at least set me on the path to financial freedom. I cherish self-learning, but it would have been nice to have shed the past two decades working a job I loathed.
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