If you're going to college, stop now unless you actually know why you're going or what you want to do with your education.
My generation growing up was taught to just "do the right things." Listen to your parents. Get good grades. Go to high school. Go to college. Get a job. Simple. When I got to college, they told me something very curious: "Don't worry, you don't have to know what you want to do yet." This meant: Don't worry about the tens of thousands you're paying or racking up in loans. Don't worry about the even MORE important years of your life as assets that you're burning through. Don't worry that you'll have to convert this knowledge you're gaining into something economically useful to the rest of society. You're being granted the greatest gift known to the modern world: The ability to get higher education!
I don't blame the previous generation for teaching us these values (after all there is a high correlation with higher education and success in income and career), but as we've explored before this is not necessarily causation. It could be that people motivated to succeed in the workforce simply attend college more often and not that the attendance itself causes the success.
With the average private college charging $33,480 per year and public college charging betweeen $9,650 and $24,930 per year according to www.collegedata.com, it's safe to say an investment equal to some houses shouldn't be something that you "just should do." In 2014, www.careerbuilder.com found that only 49 percent of people that held college degrees were at jobs that required a degree (let alone a job that required their degree). This is leaving a lot of undergrads, upon completion of their degrees, staring back at the same job market that they dismissed four years younger and $120,000 richer. It's also led to a cultural sentiment that somehow jobs involving "trade skills" are not "cool" anymore.
As it turned out, I got a full scholarship to not-very-prestigious mid-western university and squandered it by not attending any classes in my first year because I was clueless and unmotivated and usually drinking and because anything free loses its value (obvious right? But this is for another discussion). However, I held several odd-jobs, moonlighted (and daylighted) as a musician and saved enough money to move to Las Vegas and turn my acquired math skillsets into a gambling career.
Once I started to think in a way that I needed to make my skills marketable and of economic value, I was much more efficient and profitable. I stopped believing simply that "I deserve because I learned," and realized that the 4-8 year extension of my adolescence (which seems all too popular nowadays) was fun but not useful for helping me cope with the real social and economic ecosystem.
If I can give you one moral it would be this: figure out early what you want to do and arm yourself with knowledge not only in your interest but also in monetizing your interest. Your parents or the system may tell you otherwise, but you do not deserve just because you're educated.