I just finished watching T.K. Coleman’s first video in his new video series “T.K’s Tour of Bad Arguments for College.” Considering I have gone to college, and now I am a participant in the Praxis Program, which is traditionally an alternative to college, I have a unique perspective on both sides of the issues he talks about.

In this video, T.K tackles an argument made by a professor that alternatives such as apprenticeship programs and trade schools teach how to get things done, but not how to think critically about why. The professor making the argument concludes that people coming out of these college alternatives become “well-paid drones.” T.K. responds with the argument that while the philosophical and theoretical musings you learn while in college may be important, they have no impact on the real world. Due to this lack of real impact and risk, you don’t actually gain any of the experience needed to actually employ the knowledge you have gained.

This has been my exact experience. I graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration, but when I went to interview, many if not all jobs wanted to see more than a college degree and a few internships. I learned a lot of valuable things while I was in college, but I didn’t really learn how to employ them in the real world. In T.K.’s words I “had no skin in the game.”

This is not the case for every one of course. I have many peers on both sides of this problem. Some of them graduated and got jobs through connections or other routes, but many are currently experiencing what I found to be the case over the course of my senior year. I would also like to note that this is the case for anything where the most important thing is real experience in the field, namely jobs in the business field or others like it. Jobs in engineering, the sciences, the arts (performing or otherwise), and other academically centered fields absolutely require the educational experience that you get in college, but could definitely be substituted for similar alternatives if those alternatives address the needs of employers in the way that Praxis does.

In response to the claim from the professor that people who participate in alternative programs to college miss out on the philosophical discussions and late night talks with peers, I disagree. I have had that experience with Praxis, sometimes even more so than I did in college. Being surrounded by a group of like-minded individuals with similar energy and ambition leads to great conversations. Some of these conversations that I have had with my Praxis class (shout out to the July Tribe) have gone late into the night and provided fantastic philosophical insights into why we do what we do.

Overall, I think that T.K has taken an argument against alternatives to college and shown that it truly is a bad argument. I can corroborate this with my experiences in both college and as a Praxis participant. This is not to say that I don’t value the experiences I had and that my college does not do its job, I love Skidmore and the experience it gave me. However, when it comes to arguments for college and against alternatives, the one T.K. presented in his video doesn’t have a leg to stand on. I am sure, if you looked, you could find many people like me who agree.