What They Don't Tell You About College

I knew people in college who
acted like Belushi's college
student. They are now engineers.
God help our infrastructure.

My cousins and I are unusually tight. Part of the reason for that is I was a live-in nanny and babysitter for them when they were toddlers. Now, when they need some guidance, they give me a call. I'm honored and shocked that they would want to talk to a 34-year-old about anything. But they do.

The one common theme among these teenage crises is college. Three of my five cousins are of college age (I don't know how that happened). All three cousins have called me for advice. All three have cried about going to college. It kills me because I can relate to all three of them.

The details have been different for each of them, but it boils down to this: People lie to you about college. They don't mean to do it. They just say things that you hear over and over again. And that's why our phone calls spend a great deal of time debunking popular college theories.

1. It's the most important decision you'll ever make.
This isn't untrue, it's simply an incomplete thought. Choosing a college is the most important decision you'll ever make ... but you can't possibly anticipate what makes it so important. You can look at various criteria, evaluate the quality of the education, but you'll never exactly know exactly why it's important. The teachers you meet, the friends you'll make, the things that will happen at your college are more important than anything they can put in a US World Report rankings system.

You can't possibly know what's going to happen. While choosing a college, don't add additional stress to your decision by trying to figure out which one leads to the best job prospects unless you're choosing between Harvard and Salt Lake Community College, a choice I'm confident nobody has ever had to make.

2. It's the best four years of your life.
Hogwash. Baloney.

Let's be honest about our college years. You're going to be living in squalor. When you're in the dorms, your fellow classmates are pigs. You couldn't pay me to shower in a dorm shower. It's disgusting. Then you move out of the dorms and into a slum. Slumlords still exist; they run college housing.

I shared a house with five friends for a year in Dinkytown, a student-housing neighborhood next to the University of Minnesota. My room on the second floor didn't get any heat. All my friends' rooms had heat, but not mine. I called the landlord out. We looked at the problem. Then he declined to do anything about it. The temperature in my room dropped into the 40s on multiple occasions.

Glamorous, right? Just like they show in the movies!

3. Rankings matter.
We love ranking things. I did it professionally, ranking NFL teams from week to week in The Salt Lake Tribune.

TW and I both were hiring managers. If you went to Columbia, we might be more inclined to give you a job interview, but I couldn't tell you the difference between Ole Miss, Michigan and Maine, nor would I elevate one school's education above the other. It simply doesn't really matter how good a school claims to be, in terms of getting job interviews. True, you might get a better education at a better-ranked school, but there's no guarantees.

4. It's the best four years of your life, Pt. II.
Undoubtably there are people who strongly enjoy their college years. It seems to be the ones who are more into the social scene. My friends who went to small colleges, like Luther College in Iowa (!), seemed to enjoy college. Members of the Greek system also seemed to have more fun in college than I did.

But does that really get you ready for real life? A few months after graduation, I was on the phone with someone I graduated from college with. She was a sorority girl and asked me, "Don't you think life is kind of boring now that we're out of school? It just seems so boring."

Uh, no. I worked a minimum of 30 hours a week while I was in college. I painted soccer fields. I covered games for the school paper. I worked as an intern for a baseball team. And I graduated in four years.

When I graduated, real life was a relief. My God, I have time to do laundry. My God, I don't have to drink Busch Lite. I lost 10 pounds simply because I stopped ordering $5 pizzas and had time to go for bike rides.

Obviously, TW and I got to make a college decision a second time. We knew it was going to suck, but we also knew what to do: Find a school that's someplace you love. That's what really matters. Love where you are. It's not about having the best time of your life; it's about making the best out of a bad situation.