I wanted to write a long comment but decided I didn’t have the energy. So here’s the gist of it. I also apologise for the lack of humor.
Dropping out is sometimes the right thing to do. Degrees are hard and may not fit every person at every particular time in their life. I do not mean this judgementally—sometimes the harms to yourself will outweigh the good, and it’s good to have the support to quit. Taking a semester off is also an option (which I used).
But...
A university degree is neither for prestige nor for learning “the basics”. The basics of any specific thing are what you’ll learn in your first months on the job, and you don’t need a degree for that. What a degree does is give you a much broader basis in some area. This should allow you, later in life, to pursue a wider variety of projects, to understand context, to have better judgement, and to be more versatile. In other words, a degree may not be a prerequisite for any specific job, but it gives you a much larger space of possibilities over the longer term.
I wanted to write a long comment but decided I didn’t have the energy. So here’s the gist of it. I also apologise for the lack of humor.
Dropping out is sometimes the right thing to do. Degrees are hard and may not fit every person at every particular time in their life. I do not mean this judgementally—sometimes the harms to yourself will outweigh the good, and it’s good to have the support to quit. Taking a semester off is also an option (which I used).
But...
A university degree is neither for prestige nor for learning “the basics”. The basics of any specific thing are what you’ll learn in your first months on the job, and you don’t need a degree for that. What a degree does is give you a much broader basis in some area. This should allow you, later in life, to pursue a wider variety of projects, to understand context, to have better judgement, and to be more versatile. In other words, a degree may not be a prerequisite for any specific job, but it gives you a much larger space of possibilities over the longer term.