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The new academic year is about to start. Freshmen line up at the university doors ready for the ‘next step’ while returning students sneak in through the back, just a bit late for the first lecture of the year. They all have the same goal: to walk out with a di-ploma. But why? Do we really need higher education in order to be successful in our professional life?

All over the internet there are firm believers who state that you don’t have to go to college to be a success. You will find lists such as ‘The Worlds Most Successful Dropouts’ with names such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Virgin CEO Richard Branson and Apple genius Steve Jobs - today’s most successful en-trepreneurs. It might just be true that students would be better off dropping out of school. You can simply invest the money spent on college in that one unique idea or take those four years and travel, work, play, and spend time with interesting people talking about

important things. Shouldn’t it be your choice to decide what’s important, not that of a professor or examination board? Even if you do decide to study for a while, you don’t have to graduate to be a success. But is this really true, or is the ‘brilliant drop-out’ a popular myth we like to hold onto? Steve Jobs once said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped in dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary”. Inspirational words, but we can’t all be Steve Jobs. What about the not so fa-mous dropouts? What happens when the mon-strous machine you’re building in your parents’ garage doesn’t work? Well, in that case, it is the taxpayer that is left to pick up the pieces. A former school teacher and currently the education correspondent for National Public Radio, Claudio Sanchez argues that dropouts are a high fiscal burden. A report from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) shows that in 2002, from the 1.1 million full-time students who start-ed their Bachelor studies in the US, 493,000 did not graduate within six years. These dropouts cost the nation $4.5 billion in lost earnings and income taxes. “Taxpayers have paid billions of dollars in subsidies to support these students as they pursue degrees they will never earn, and as a nation, we incur billions in lost earnings and lost income taxes each year,” said Mark Schnei-der, a vice president at AIR and co-author of the report.

At the same time, critics agree that dropouts can also save the state a lot of money. Having too many students pushed to finish their studies, by social pressure or just by their parents, brings a financial burden as well. According to Robert Lerman, a leading expert on how education and employment can affect economic well-being, we should question promoting college for all. He ex-plains that high dropout rates can easily be used to argue that less prepared and less motivated students are better off not going to college. “Get-

ting them to go to a second year might waste even more money,” Lerman said. Moreover, graduates often leave college with a great amount of debt as a result of loans. The New York Times esti-mated the average debt of a college graduate at roughly €24,000. Even so, besides the question if whether dropouts are a burden for tax payers, the finan-cial burden of dropping out of college will most surely be felt by dropouts themselves. Sanchez states that dropouts will end up earning $1 mil-lion less over their lifetime than a college gradu-ate. According to the AIR report, students who did not graduate within six years already missed out on approximately $3.8 billion in potential earnings for 2010. This could have generated around $566 million in tax revenue in a nation facing a massive revenue shortfall in 2011. Fur-thermore, according to the Bureau of Labor Sta-tistics of the U.S. Department of Labour college dropouts contribute to the rising unemployment rate. They state that the unemployment rate un-der college dropouts exceeds 9 percent against a small 4 percent under college graduates.

In the end, dropping out of college can create major opportunities but can also cause huge losses. Graduates are more likely to earn more than dropouts. Also, college can give you the opportunity to study what you find interesting or important, while a diploma might make you more credible. Dropouts, on the other hand, are more flexible in building their own distinc-tive knowledge base through experience and are therefore more likely to pursue their unique idea and become the next Zuckerberg, Jobs or Bran-son. Either way, you will never be entirely sure at the beginning. Each route has its unique benefits and downsides. The most important thing is to determine what will work best for you.

WORDS BY GERDINE TIEMENS

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