Should You Ever Skip Class? - College Info Geek - Hey, what's up guys? So today we are tackling the age old question, is it ever worth it to skip a class? Now, you're probably expecting me to say something like, "Always go to class, eat your vegetables, I'm your dad," because I have a beard and I'm probably a bit older than you but if I said that this video would be five seconds long and it probably wouldn't be worth your click. So instead let's look at this a little bit more objectively because this is a question about skipping classes, yes but it's also a more general question about opportunity costs. [WORDS ON SCREEN: "Opportunity Cost: The loss of potential gains from other choices when one path is chosen."] So let's get this out of the way right up front. If you're in high school, I'm not going up against the truancy laws here. You should go to class, just deal with it. Yeah it sucks sometimes. Go to class if you're in high school. If you're in college though, the question becomes a little bit different because in college now you're an adult, you can make your own choices, and you are choosing to pay money for more education that is not legally required of you. And that's the big thing here. You're choosing to pay money for these classes and every class you decide to skip costs you money, and in fact, using some simple math we can break down exactly how much money you're throwing away if you decide to skip a class. So let's say you're going to a university like the one I went to which charges a flat rate per semester instead of charging per credit. And let's also say you're taking the standard 15 credit per semester load, which means you're gonna have five three-credit classes, each of which meet three times a week and an average rate for semester tuition at this point is about $4,000 for in-state public tuition so we're gonna use that here. So breaking all that down your cost per credit is $266.67, which means each three-credit class ends up being about $800 and since you're gonna go to each of those classes 48 times over the course of the semester, that means you end up with a per class cost of $16.67. Meaning every single time you decide to skip a class by the straight math you are throwing away $17 that you already paid and you're no long getting the value for. That example is the simple math-based way to put it but it breaks down when we consider a couple of other things. Number one being not every class is considered equal. For one, you're gonna have general education classes which you don't care about as much as your major classes and then for each individual class you're gonna have certain sessions that are really important because they're either tests or the professor's giving away some vital information you need for the tests or on certain days you're just gonna have classes that go over like edge cases or case studies or something you really don't need to know about in the future. So, each class is not gonna be worth as much as the other one and furthermore, you need to think about what the actual value of these classes is because the value isn't the time you spend sitting in the seat. [WORDS ON SCREEN: "Job-market signaling: Potential employees send "signals" about their ability levels to employers by acquiring credentials. This is the value your degree provides."] The value actually is the signaling value your degree is going to give to potential employers in the future. Basically saying this person is qualified to do the job they wanna do and also the knowledge and skills that your classes and your other college experiences are gonna give you, which will help you get those jobs as well. Basically, your focus should be on the value of each class as it applies to your earning potential in the future because, make no mistake about it, college is a business decision. It's an investment on your part. You're choosing to spend thousands of dollars to sit in classes and take tests and you're also choosing to sacrifice many years of your life that you could be otherwise working and making money, and this is where the opportunity cost comes in. You're sacrificing one thing of value to gain something else. So the earnings you make in the future from college eventually need to outpace what you could've done otherwise. This is the financial ROI, or return on investment. And yeah, college gives you other benefits. You learn things, you gain experiences, you meet new people, but as Matt Damon so eloquently put it in Good Will Hunting, "You coulda gotten all that "for a dollar fifty in late fees at the library." So, we're not gonna get off into the weeds about all that stuff. We're just gonna keep the focus on the financial ROI here. Keeping that in mind, for any particular class what's gonna happen if you skip it? Well, you might miss some vital information that's gonna be really important on a test or maybe you miss a test altogether and that's gonna lead to a lower GPA down the line. You also might form a negative perception in the mind of your professor if you skip and they're gonna think you're like some sort of lazy, entitled millennial and they're gonna shake their fist at you and tell you to get off their lawn, or maybe nothing's gonna happen, who knows? On the other side of the equation though you have to ask, "What am I gaining by skipping class?" Because money isn't the only cost. There's another cost to your classes and that's your time. Yeah, you're paying tuition dollars but you're also using 45 minutes of your precious time every day that you walk into that classroom. So what could you gain if you use that time somewhere else? If you're just feeling lazy and you really don't wanna go to class I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that's a good decision because frankly it's not. You've already committed resources and it's a waste of your money and time to throw away those resources because you don't feel like it. You probably know how I feel about not feeling like it. But, if there's something else that you can do instead of going to class and it's valuable to you then that changes the situation significantly. For example, when I was a senior I actually skipped about three days of class to go down to Texas for an event called Finish Up Weekend. This was basically an event where lots of creative people came into one space and they were all working as hard as they possibly could to finish up a lot of cool projects and they were helpin' each other out and I met a lot a cool people during that event, people who I still talk to today, and I also learned how to build iPhone apps in one weekend through a course that somebody pointed me to and for me, that was way, way more valuable than a few computer networking classes. Also, during my freshman year I skipped a few of my general education classes that were just not useful to me and some days I would just schedule extra part-time work, make a little bit of extra money, and I would just keep my eye on the syllabus to make sure I wasn't skipping any important days. Though, for those of you who are thinking this is an endorsement of skipping class and who wanna follow my footsteps, here are a couple of caveats. Number one, I will say that after my freshman year I made it a point to always attend class and I never skipped class again other than those times where there was a really important thing to go to like the Texas trip. And number two, I really recommend getting to know your professors, introducing yourselves to them at the beginning of the semester, and if you do this there's a higher likelihood that your professor's gonna notice if you're gone. So if you're skipping because you're lazy or you just wanna sleep in, you're not gonna make a good impression. [WORDS ON SCREEN: "The smaller the class, the more disrespectful of your professor's time it is to skip without notifying them beforehand."] Anyway, those are the facts. That's all I've really got to say about this and it really comes down to your own values and priorities and your own decision if you wanna skip class or not. It's an opportunity cost decision and you need to weigh the costs and the benefits. However, if you're gonna skip class at least do it smart. Have a friend who can fill you in on any details or maybe let you copy the notes and make sure you're staying as up to date on the out-of-class work as you can so you're not falling behind. You also wanna gauge the class to see if what's on the test is kinda mirrored from the textbook or if there's a lot of really vital information you can only get in lectures. And lastly, make sure you're paying attention to the syllabus as much as you can and write down any test dates, quiz dates, or homework dates in your calendar, I mean, you should be doing this anyway, but if you're gonna skip it's vitally important, like doubly so. Though I will say that it's not foolproof because I've had times where the professor's had to change the location or the time or the date of a test and they've only told the people who were in the lecture hall. So, if you're gonna skip a class there's inherent risk built into it no matter what you do, no matter what you do to mitigate that risk there's gonna be some there. So, just keep that in mind. And one last thing, if you're gonna be going to a class where you have to work on a group project don't skip, don't be a jerk. Right there, yeah. Anyway guys, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video give it a like to support this channel and if you wanna get new videos on being a more effective student every single week you can click that Subscribe button right down there. I also wrote a free book on how to earn better grades and if you wanna get a copy of it click the picture of the book, I'll send one to you. There's also an article for this video with a little bit more detail and some more examples I didn't put into the video. So click the orange button right there to watch it. And if you missed last week's video we discussed the topic of brain enhancing music and talked a bit about whether or not it works, dug into the science a bit, so check it out if you missed it. Also, I'm Tom Frankly on Instagram and Twitter if you'd like to connect or you can leave a comment down below. Thanks for watching.