Some years ago I dropped a cool $20k on a bachelor’s in Information Tech. At the time I thought I was going to go work for someone and that’s why I got it. Sometimes it feels nice to be able to say I is a college graduate, but most of the time I cringe at the $200 that is taken out of my checking account every month since I’m still paying for that degree.
I’m fairly certain that I would not have gotten that degree if I knew then what I know now; that I would not be working for someone. Oh and here’s the other thing. When interviewing and then getting the various IT jobs I had, no one asked to see my degree. Not even once. They all just assumed it was true when I said I had the degree.
Lastly I didn’t learn anything at my school. Everything I know I learned on my own, from the Internet and from reading books by myself.
Of course for some going off to college and getting the whole college experience is nice. I did that my first year at a different school and had a great time – too great a time. If you are going to a school like that and it is being paid for then by all means go and live the college lifestyle.
But some others may consider doing the following:
Pick a school where you would like to get educated. In my case I picked the Art Institute because they have a digital video program. I imagine its about $20k and I’m not about to spend that. So I go to their website and ah what have we here, its the curriculum for the program. So I printed this out and drove over to the school and walk in the bookstore. I ask the clerk to see the book list and lo and behold its sitting at the end of the counter. All the books that have to do with video are labeled VID in the book list and all the ISBN numbers are listed for each class. So I just copy all the ISBN #’s by each course title and leave. Then I go to textbooks.com or amazon and start plugging in the ISBN numbers.
After doing this I was pretty surprised to see this particular curriculum had almost nothing on cinematography. In fact of all the some 20 or so books listed for VID I only bought 3. The rest looked pretty useless to me. **Update – this is just a two year program which explains the lack of comprehensive videography classes**
So this could be done for just about any school I would imagine – Emory, even Harvard. Sure some book lists may be harder to come by, but with a little work and investigation I’m sure it could be done.
For example if you can’t get a book list from a book store you could contact a student and say “hey, I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you get me the entire book list for the bachelor’s of finance program”. I’m sure many students would have little problem doing just a little work for that much money. With a little more work I bet you could even get a recording of many of the lectures at some of the big schools.
