Can I Succeed Without Going to College?

Can you really achieve success without a college degree? Join me as I address this pressing question head-on in the latest episode of the Christian Alpha podcast. Drawing from my multifaceted career as an attorney, author, and business owner, I offer my unique insights into the primary objectives of higher education—gaining knowledge, maturing into responsible adults, and setting the stage for financial success. Spoiler alert: While college can be invaluable, it's not the only way to reach these goals. Tune in to discover alternative paths to education, personal growth, and career success that don't necessarily involve a traditional university setting.

Discover how personal reading, self-directed learning, and real-world experiences can rival, or even surpass, the benefits of a college education. Whether you're on the fence about college, considering a trade, or just concerned about your future (financial and otherwise), this episode provides a blueprint for how you can achieve success on your own terms. Listen as I share stories and examples that challenge the conventional wisdom surrounding higher education, offering guidance and inspiration for anyone looking to forge their unique path in life.

Transcript

Troy: 0:09

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Christian Alpha podcast. My name is Troy, I am an attorney, an author, a business owner, a father and, most importantly, a Christian. Thank you for stopping by today. Today I want to talk about a question that comes up fairly frequently for me, either from clients or young men that I mentor, or just people that I engage in life, and that is can I be successful in life without a college degree, without attending college? And I think I have an interesting take on it, given my line of work, given the fact that I get to interact with many different people from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different experiences, and so I think I can provide a pretty interesting take on that. First of all, I'd say me personally, I believe there are three primary goals of college. Number one is to become educated, and that means to generally get a better understanding of the world around you, but also specifically to get a real good grounding and understanding of the line of work that you'll be doing for most of your life. Number two is to mature, and for men that means to go and really become a man um, learn about responsibility, learn about social connections, your, your civic responsibilities. Uh learn what it means to you know court date a woman. Uh be involved in deep relationships with with women. Um learn you know the, the social responsibilities that you have. Uh learn how to manage a heavy workload maybe get your foot, get your feet wet in the potential career that you'll have down the line. So all those things to me, point towards maturing as a man. There's a difference between a 16 year old and a 22 year old, and a lot of that happens for many people. A lot of that happens because of college. And then the third one, and the one that's most prominent in people's minds, I think, in today's society, is to lay the groundwork for future financial success through your career, through learning a trade, learning a skill, things like that. So I think a college can be very valuable, very useful, but I don't think that it's necessary for everyone and I certainly don't think it's necessary to become to accomplish all the goals that I just laid out.

Troy: 2:28

Let's talk about becoming educated. If you you know, you will know that throughout this podcast I speak heavily about reading books and I will tell you I've I'm very well educated and I've spent years in college and things like that, but I've I've learned far more, far, far more um about life and about the world around us through personal reading and personal study, and um that has far exceeded anything that I would have done in college. And you know there's also personal experience and you, you know you can learn from other people. I don't discount those areas either, and I've learned a great deal from each one of those areas, but just simply having a dedicated, aggressive approach to reading regularly has taught me far more in many more areas of life than simply going to college. And so I say all that to say if you want to become educated about the world around you, you absolutely can do that by developing your own consistent, diligent approach and being programmatic about it, being regimented about it and having goals in your learning. You absolutely can achieve that and in fact you can achieve it much more cheaply and much quicker, honestly, than someone who's on a standard college track. So that's not an issue.

Troy: 3:47

Can you mature without going to college? Of course you can. We've got many people the vast, not the vast but the majority of people still in our society do not obtain four-year college degrees, let alone master's or doctorate level degrees. And you got people that you know doctorate level degrees and you got people that you know. If you have an 18 year old who goes to the Marines for four years or even for a couple of years, I know from experience, you know that guy in the military who went in at 17 or 18 is coming out far more mature than the equivalent 20 year old in college, right? A person who walks out of high school and goes directly into a trade and starts a family, maybe even purchases a home in their early 20s, has learned a lot about maturity and becoming a quote unquote man has grown up a lot at the age of 20, 22, 23, 24, regardless of whether they've ever set foot on a university campus. There's so many components that go into growing someone up, so to speak, and and going through that maturation process that it absolutely can be done outside of college.

Troy: 4:54

And then about what? About laying the groundwork for financial success? Usually, when people ask me this question about college, this is more most what they're pointing towards and I will tell you absolutely unequivocally you can be successful without going to college, and I say that from experience, just dealing with many of the clients that I have who, many of them, do not have four-year degrees. Even fewer have higher level degrees, master's level, things like that, and I represent several million dollar businesses of people that either learned to trade very well or got experience in a field over time and then decided to go out on their own and just delivered phenomenal customer service, a phenomenal business service, and treated their customers very well, learned their trade or their craft or their service or their area extremely well, became very reputable, and that is a pathway to success, regardless of whether you set foot in the classroom or not, and many of the most successful entrepreneurs throughout time and in our present day either dropped out of college or never went in the first place, and so that remains.

Troy: 6:09

A viable pathway to financial success is what I just said Either getting your grounding and becoming exceptional as an employee and rising up the ranks of a company, or developing a certain set of skills that are very valuable and developing a business around that. Those have always been, and I believe will be for the foreseeable future, very solid pathways to financial success, if not wealth. Right, so absolutely, it can be done. Absolutely, you can achieve all the things that college is designed to provide without actually going to school. However, that said, it's not an easy path, right.

Troy: 6:53

If you're not going to college and you want to be financially successful, you want to, you know, have the level of expertise. Certainly, if you want to become educated, it's going to take some work on your part. It's going to take a lot of work, in fact, and you'll be swimming against the stream of typical society, so you'll be doing it alone and that's something you need to be prepared for to work really hard and to work kind of on an isolated path that many people don't take. You really need to be willing to outwork quote, unquote the competition relentlessly, and that's whether that's direct competition in your field, whether that's just general your age group and your peer group, many of whom will be going to college. You got to outwork those people you know day in and day out if you do want to be successful. And I also don't want to ignore I don't want to be irresponsible and ignore the trends in the economy, in, in technology, in society overall, which are heavily steering towards higher education.

Troy: 7:51

And one of the things that I left out when I said that I have many clients, or I know many people who have been very successful financially and otherwise without a college degree, is the fact that those are in certain fields. Those typically come in trades or in sales, or in those areas where you can still do very well without a college degree. But there are certain areas where you're not going to get rich without a college degree, right law being one of them. You can get wealthy in law, but not without a degree. The medical field, many sectors of health care, most sectors of finance not all, but most sectors of finance not all, but most are excluded or exclusive to higher education and very, very well-educated people. So I don't want to mislead you, and you shouldn't be misled as a person who's maybe considering this question. There are potential barriers there without a college degree, but I think those are for very select fields.

Troy: 8:43

I think that in general, it is still possible to be successful without a college degree. I think it can be done. You're just going to have to be self-motivated, be very courageous, have belief in yourself, obviously, have faith in God and work exceptionally, exceptionally hard, and it can be done. So, um, that's it for for today's podcast. If you um found any value in this or any value in the in the show at all, um be very grateful if you would subscribe or consider supporting us, and until the next time. We'll see you on the next episode. We'll see you next time.