However, some may regret certain aspects, such as too much debt, choice of college, choice of major, relative time spent while in college on academic versus social versus athletic versus pre-professional versus other activities, etc…
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My husband and I don’t regret going to college one bit. But we both regret choosing a practical major at the time that we were good at but never loved.
We wish we could go back and major in English and History instead - our true loves.
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No regrets on major; no regrets on grad school; no regrets on studying abroad; some regrets on moving farther and farther away from my family and countries of origin (blame it on the sea faring genes). It was hard raising children without my family’s support and even though I love the US, I don’t love love it. When my husband and I were deciding what to do next way back when, I turned down a great employment opportunity to give his native land a chance. And here we are more than twenty years later with me scheming to return to Europe when we can safely retire. But our children will probably want to stay here, and the pull from all directions remains in place. I have a love/hate relationship with emigration. I guess I’m too sentimental.
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Not many other choices, and, at 21 after military service, a person really just wants to get through your degree, so that they can start their life. Also, the way that undergrad is taught, it really is just another thing to get through, not an “experience” to help you develop as a person.
I actually do not like that - there is something pretty heavy and grim about the entire thing. That entire attitude of “we are not here to enjoy ourselves, but to work hard” is very common. Not only there, mind you, the entire country is afflicted with that. It’s better now, but back in the 1980s, the country was still transitioning away from much more socialist country, and, while socialism has a lot of great ideas, man, socialists have no idea what “fun” means.
I went to the school I could afford, which was a technically-oriented co-op school. My high school counselor, who was pretty useless, couldn’t understand why I wanted to go to a school that didn’t have a basketball team. He never offered any advice on financial aid, although given my family situation, I now realize could have helped me expand my college horizons. In the end, though, I am glad I went to my alma mater. After a very rude awakening, I figured out how to study & did reasonably well academically. Being at a school populated by people like me - kind of geeky - was a godsend. I was no longer on the outside looking in, socially. I had a lot of fun, and I met my H (we’ve been together for 44 wonderful years). I co-op’d for a major corporation, and I had amazing work experience. In the end, I left the corporation to work in higher education. I didn’t need my technical degree, but the hard work I put into it definitely helped me in life. So, no regrets for me. However, my twin brothers, who are a year younger than I, attended the school & dropped out before graduation. Neither finished college, but they have a business together & are happy with their lives.
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Same and same.
I still love this book. I re-read it aloud to my high school age kids a few months ago while on vacation in a rustic cabin adjacent to a huge parcel of National Forest land.
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LOL - as a History major married to a History major, we frequently told our kids, who we dragged to historic places on many vacations, that History is a great hobby but not a great career. We’ve done ok working in state university jobs but my Economics major son is making more in his first job out of college than either of us are after 30+years in ours. I was pretty good at Math when I entered college but hated boring Math and didn’t pursue anything in that area which would have been more financially rewarding.
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I was outside in my residential college courtyard getting some air during a fall weekend party. I saw Jodie Foster sitting by herself. This was her freshmen year so I am sure she was still looking to meet people. We made eye contact but I “froze” and went back inside.
This was not the end of my record of celebrity freezes. Cindy Crawford at the next table in a restaurant in SoHo. Uma Thurman next to me in line for post midnight slices at a Rays in Greenwich Village. Jennifer Aniston in front of me checking in at the Four Seasons in Singapore. Froze every time.
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You could have been Mr or Mrs Foster. Or an extra in a movie 
I really enjoyed my time in college. I met my spouse, majored in a subject I loved, and went on a lot of fun weekend adventures. My only regret is that I didn’t study abroad. But, I was a first-generation college student with no passport and, aside from military kids, didn’t know anyone who had lived abroad. The thought of leaving the country was frightening.
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I was invited to apply for a Rhodes scholarship. When I learned it meant leaving the U.S., I said I wasn’t interested.
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“Regret” is probably too strong a word, but I do wonder how things might have turned out if I had gone to a different college. There were definitely upsides to my actual experience - I met my eventual spouse, had quite a few interesting classes with good professors, and emerged with minimal debt thanks to a generous merit scholarship. But socially, it was a bad fit from the start. I was a bookish introvert with little money on a campus dominated by affluent students and super-social Greek life, and I just never quite found my niche. Other than my spouse and a grad student that I knew from my campus job, I didn’t make a single friendship that lasted much beyond graduation, and there were long stretches where I just felt completely out of place. I’m honestly envious of those who had the most exciting and fulfilling four (or five) years of their lives during college.
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Trust me the money isn’t worth it in the end.
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I know how you feel. I only stayed in touch with one friend from college. I’ve felt the same way, but at the same time, college is only a few years out of your life and you can meet a lot of great friends after college too. I also know a lot of people where college is like the peak of their life and it’s all downhill from there, like the people in who peak in high school. They sort of have a hard time moving on from college. It’s hard because I do sometimes wish I had made more friends in college, but that’s life.
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I only regret that I didn’t do a semester abroad. At the time, I didn’t want to leave my friends and boyfriend (now husband). It isn’t a huge regret, but it is probably my biggest in life.
I didn’t really grasp the scope of the opportunity to spend three or four months living abroad and traveling on mom and dad’s dime, and I didn’t think about what it would be like to try to see the world later when I have limited time off and limited funds to do so.
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I would have gone to a smaller school and would have used my athletic recruitment very differently than I did. Knowing what I know now, I think a LAC or maybe up to the size of a school like Dartmouth or Wake Forest would have been perfect for me as a student. I’m not sure D3 would have been a great fit athletically (by the level of competition as I perceived it back then), but in this game of assuming I knew then what I know now I would not have cared.
My majors were fine, but I probably would have switched one of them out for an accounting concentration, which is curious given that I wouldn’t have been able to do that at any of the schools I’d target if I had it to do over.
Went to a local, middling quality, smallish LAC that my dad went to. I don’t regret that for a minute because I was pretty unprepared for school. I could write well and did well on standardized tests, but as far as doing homework, earning good grades, attending class, not too concerned. I drank a lot, skipped plenty of classes, went through four majors in four years and barely scraped by with a 3.0 in the end. But you know the only thing I’d do differently was study abroad. I couldn’t see how it’d matter as a computer programmer, I was sure I’d go back on my own at some point and my parents were kind of strapped for cash with three in college so I didn’t go. Plus I had this odd conviction that going abroad to a place that spoke English wasn’t really going abroad, but I had no other language. Whatever, I’m older now and would choose differently, and kind of have. I finally went back to Europe in 2019 in my 50s with my kids to make sure they all got a chance: one went to a technical college and another was on her way to a service academy so they weren’t going abroad. It was a blast.
Oh, and if we’re doing hindsight then I’d also take counsel from my experience and avail myself of the fact that colleges have far more attractive single women than IT departments later in life. I’m not sure what I expected, but the odds were better in school.
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I don’t regret my choice of schools. My LAC was close to perfect for me and let me grow in ways that I’m not sure would have happened elsewhere. My grad school was a good fit and clearly set me up for a great career.
Things I regret:
- the lost semester of fall of my sophomore year where I made a series of unwise choices about the balance between studying and partying.
- not going to more of the lectures presented on campus
- largely checking out of grad school after I got my job offer in November of my 2nd year. I still did the work required to get the grade but I definitely was not engaged with the school community.