Where is the "I went for 4 years only to realize I made a mistake, went too early, dropped out to work for a few years before giving it another shot" option?

^Right there.

Yes, I too am a college dropout. I'll finish it when I'm a senior and tuition's free.. probably not

start. stop. start. stop. Got as close as lots of scholarships to practically pay for a medical degree, then said, "fuck it." That's me.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Degree in International Relations that has been completely useless - except for the fact that I'm living internationally. Probably could have skipped school to do that.

The skew is showing with only ten votes cast.

I think that those of us who've been through the ringer are too quick to discount the impact of the time we spent in school. At what other stage in life does one spend four (plus) years solely to develop critical thinking skills?

I've got a question which is semi-related to the topic at hand: what's the deal with the terms college and university being seemingly interchangeable in the states? In Canada, college and university are two different things (college is generally a one or two year program in which you learn a trade, whereas university is a three or four year deal in which you learn something a bit more abstract (ie. political science, english, physics, etc.). Is this not the case in the U.S.?

I'm in university, starting my bachelor year after this summer. Will most likely continue two more years to get a master in Information Studies.

fuck school.
anyway i don't wear a collar.

I imagine Mink would wear this collar.

For the first time in my life, I got to check the "graduate" box. Totally worth all the money and time spent. Do I get the cash and prizes now?

BTW, I'm with Farhad. Took my eight years to get it done, "and that has made all the difference".

I graduated from "Urban Development technology"
... we found out halfway through no urban developers user the technology we were being trained on...

now I work online

I'm the second high school student to vote. Yay!

Well, according to the online IQ test I just have begun, I'm a white female born on February 4th, 1940. More on this when I'm done.

associates degree in electronics from univ. alaska
I aspire to build the first space station for sheep.

Crap, only 145, guess I'm still blue collar.

>> ^deathcow:
I aspire to build the first space station for sheep.


Competition eh? I'd better hurry up and finish mine then.

Divide and conquote, Rasch187. I am working on the Lambspin Grazing Laboratory.

I see.... so, not interested in those of us who went to college/university for the learning but didn't bother with getting an actual degree or graduating?

^What the hell would be the point of that?

I went to college twice, failing both times, with different majors every semester. I was a recombinant geneticist, then a philosopher, then a political scientist, then a historian. Now I'm a Wal-Mart employee who brings books about Russian history and Nietzsche to read while my co-workers watch Judge Judy.

...MG, you don't happen to have your rifle handy, do you?

Short answer - Canadian universities are WAY younger than those in the States, so we adopted the 'classic' European terminology. I mean, U of T was founded in 1827 (yeah, guess where I graduated from), and there may be some older universities in Canada (I don't know which), but probably not as old as, say, Harvard.

>> ^Sarzy:
I've got a question which is semi-related to the topic at hand: what's the deal with the terms college and university being seemingly interchangeable in the states? In Canada, college and university are two different things (college is generally a one or two year program in which you learn a trade, whereas university is a three or four year deal in which you learn something a bit more abstract (ie. political science, english, physics, etc.). Is this not the case in the U.S.?


Yeah, American terminology like that bothers me - where's the UNIVERSITY GRAD option???

Anyway, enough people were annoyed by this like us to make a small essay on the topic - the Canadian system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#Canada

And here's the bit about Amerika
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#The_origin_of_the_U.S._usage

The founders of the first institutions of higher education in the United States were graduates of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. The small institutions they founded would not have seemed to them like universities — they were tiny and did not offer the higher degrees in medicine and theology. Furthermore, they were not composed of several small colleges. Instead, the new institutions felt like the Oxford and Cambridge colleges they were used to — small communities, housing and feeding their students, with instruction from residential tutors (as in the United Kingdom, described above). When the first students came to be graduated, these "colleges" assumed the right to confer degrees upon them, usually with authority -- for example, the College of William and Mary has a Royal Charter from the British monarchy allowing it to confer degrees while Dartmouth College has a charter permitting it to award degrees "as are usually granted in either of the universities, or any other college in our realm of Great Britain."

Contrast this with Europe, where only universities could grant degrees. The leaders of Harvard College (which granted America's first degrees in 1642) might have thought of their college as the first of many residential colleges which would grow up into a New Cambridge university. However, over time, few new colleges were founded there, and Harvard grew and added higher faculties. Eventually, it changed its title to university, but the term "college" had stuck and "colleges" have arisen across the United States.

Eventually, several prominent colleges/universities were started to train Christian ministers. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown all started to train preachers in the subjects of Bible and theology. However, now these universities teach theology as a more academic than ministerial discipline.

With the rise of Christian education, renowned seminaries and Bible colleges have continued the original purpose of these universities. Criswell College and Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas; Southern Seminary in Louisville; Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois; and Wheaton College and Graduate School in Wheaton, Illinois are just a few of the institutions that have influenced higher education in Theology in Philosophy to this day.

In U.S. usage, the word "college" embodies not only a particular type of school, but has historically been used to refer to the general concept of higher education when it is not necessary to specify a school, as in "going to college" or "college savings accounts" offered by banks. "University" is sometimes used in such contexts by Americans who wish to avoid ambiguity, for example in the context of Internet message boards where the reader hail from a different English speaking country.

changed course at both a-level and degree level then quit a phd.

I'm in university but i did server in the military so I'm kinda used to the more blue collar mentality if there is such a thing. More practical over the theoretical.

dropped out of high school in the 9th grade.

i don't wear collars.

I also am a University dropout. I'm with smibbo, went to learn things, learned um, got the hell out of there. If my parents had had the sense not to pay for the whole thing I would not have gone in the first place. As for the white/blue collar issue, I do both, I'm a computer geek for cash when I can get it otherwise I work construction. Where is my pigeonhole?

Despite no higher education, I'm still a white-collar.