Why I Generally Tell People to Go to College

I'm writing this because I saw a post below saying it's better to just graduate high school early and get into the workforce than go to a mediocre college.

If Korea were a society like the Nordic countries where prejudice based on education level is much weaker, then things would be different. But speaking honestly based on the current reality in Korea, 2-4 years in your 20s is a short period in the grand scheme of a person's life, but whether or not you go to college during that time largely determines the 'education label' you'll carry almost your whole life. It's a structure that way. Tuition and living expenses are definitely not a small cost, but in Korean society, instead of saving that money, people often have to bear the label of 'high school graduate'.

Even if you make up reasons like, 'I didn't go because I didn't think it was necessary,' many people will assume there's something wrong just because you're a high school graduate. When asked, 'Which college did you go to?', it's hard to just say, 'I'm a high school graduate' and leave it at that, and you often find yourself having to explain why you made that choice.

Just 'peeking' at society through elementary, middle, and high school doesn't give you a deep understanding of how society works or what choices will lead to what outcomes for you. When you become an adult and look back, it's easy to say, 'I should have done this or that back then.' But most young people lack the experience, information, and insight to make the decision 'I won't go to college' at around age 20. Yet, if you make such a hard-to-reverse decision too early, you'll live your whole life asking, 'Would my life have been different if I had gone to college?'

Korea's job market still tends to split choices based on education level and alma mater. It's not that college grads can't do manual labor, or that high school grads can't do office jobs, but in reality, the range of career paths for high school graduates noticeably narrows, and the number of available options decreases. In this process, many people carry a certain degree of inferiority complex about their school background for life.

The argument that you can just 'start working in a factory or learn a trade as soon as possible' also comes up often, but not all high school graduates prefer manual labor. Whether you're a high school grad or a college grad, you want to work in a cool office when it's hot and a warm office when it's cold, and the desire for a less physically demanding and stable environment isn't that different. Likewise, while it might be a prejudice to assume college grads are always better workers, it's another prejudice to assume high school grads are automatically more diligent or physically superior.

20 years ago, a large company was hiring for field positions at a construction site in a rural area (work that was essentially 'manual labor'), and they set the minimum qualification as 'college student or higher.' Even though the salary was quite high for the time, there were almost no applicants with construction/civil engineering majors, so they hired college graduates with no relevant majors and put them on site. This shows that even for jobs that aren't closely related to one's major, and even for work that's close to manual labor, the inertia of 'if we're going to hire someone anyway, we'll look at college grads first' is still strongly present in Korean society.