This is the future that concerns me | Page 3 | General Homesteading Discussion | Forums

I dropped out of HS at 17. There was just nothing there for me, my school was a freaking war zone, and I had no real interest in college. I just wanted to work and live and pursue things I found interesting. Eventually fell into printing as a trade and I was happy enough.

I think its insane to ask a 17 year old what they want to do with their life and then have them take on a crushing debt load to pursue a piece of paper many will never use.

Around 24 I finally figured out that I wanted to be a Parks Officer and set about figuring out what that took. Because I was a dropout it took a little bit to get into school (thats another story, but the short version is that I simply lied about being a HS grad and got in. When I got caught, it was because I was a 4.0 student and The school was trying to give me grant money and the fact that I had no transcripts became a problem.... They decided it would be wrong to boot a national honor student. I got lucky). But the point is that I was a little older than my class mates, had worked for a living and understood the value of a dollar, and was there for a specific reason. So many of my classmates were either delusional about their future or just in school so the folks would keep paying the bills. I treated colege like it was a job. I had worked and saved and had everything budgeted about down to the penny, and I worked while a full time student. After college & academy, I only had about 3K in loans (paid off years ago) and less than $200 to my name, lol. There were times as I was just starting out that the $75/mo loan payment was a real hardship & I cant imagine having a loan payment as big as a rent payment every month, for years! Crushing. I am one of the few people that has actually used my degree, in many different situations, and being relatively debt free allowed me to have a freedom that debt just doesn't allow.

I would advise ANY young person that if they want to go to college, great, but wait a year or two. work, travel, experiance the world a little bit. Park Service law enforcement & SAR led me to paramedicine eventually, its strange where life takes you. None of this would have really been possible if I had done the traditional route. I'd probably be a pissed off broken high school history teacher in a city somewhere, fat & unhappy, just trying to make ends meet. I buried my mom with her never paying a cent on her student loans, turns out that masters in art wasn't really a revenue generator after all.