A freshman from the Kansas State University, Billy Wilson who got a 4.0 average for his first semester announced on social media that he's done with college and won't be back for another semester.
The viral Facebook post, shared more than 11,000 times and had over 8,000 comments shows a photo of Wilson with his middle finger sticking out to his former university.
The post contained explicit words which expressed reasons why the engineering freshman decided to drop out and start a business selling t-shirts. It also sparked a debate on the importance and impact of general education.
Billy Wilson claimed college is a scam and that university students are being dragged deep into debt for 4-year degrees that will never use. He criticized wasting 4 years for paycheck that doesn't grow as fast as inflation rates, taking instructions from teachers who's never practiced what they taught and buying hundreds of dollars worth of books to get information students will never use just to get a college diploma.
Wilson questioned the value general education courses don't teach students practical and more useful skills about filing their taxes and managing marriage.
The statement of this young man drew mixed reactions. Some agreed while others reject his arguments. Some also recognized his point like K-State senior Jason Kidd who wrote about it in The Collegian.
The Huffington Post reported that one woman commented that her finances improved after leaving nursing school and said that if the American dream is only a disillusion of living from paycheck to paycheck. Others called him a quitter and argued that certain professions required degrees.
Mathematics professor Andrew Bennett said that Wilson's change of preferences doesn't bother him, however the social media attention he is getting and being recognized as ha hero worries him a lot.
Prof. Bennett is concerned that Wilson's claims are misleading and incorrect. First off, engineers need degrees, they need to study mathematics and they need to keep their knowledge up-to-date even after college.
Also the claim that college is a scam is not supported by evidence. Saying that college is useless is a questionable since the student only had a single semester said Bennett. It wasn't enough for him to understand everything that the school is trying to accomplish and what the value of a degree is about.
