Q&A: Community College is looking more useless by the second; should I drop out or go to a 4 year?

Question by eric s: Community College is looking more useless by the second; should I drop out or go to a 4 year?
I’m almost 20 years old – been in community college for 3 years now, and thus far, college seems positively useless. My ultimate goal at this time is to get enough income to comfortably start a family and own a home(if you can really call a 30 year loan ownership).

So now I feel that I have a few options:
A. Drop out of school, and start working full time – I already have a job, and they want me full time. If I did that, I could be making 33K/yr + overtime in the technology field as a call-center manager. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike my job – it’s actually quite fun, but I definitely wouldn’t be there if they weren’t paying me. I’ve been there for 2+ years now, and have worked my way up to that pay rate. Eventually, I will get further raises and such, but I doubt that I will ever get over $ 45k/yr – a decent amount, but not exactly within my standards for “living comfortably.” Plus, if anything were to happen to this job, I wouldn’t be able to find a comparable paying job right off the bat; I’d have to work my way up AGAIN at another company.

B. Keep working part time, and keep going to community college for Audio Engineering – my “real” passion. The problem is, once I’m out of college(and my parents aren’t supporting me anymore,) I don’t know what I will do with this “degree.” Most audio engineering work is done by contract – (grossly oversimplified)someone calls and says “my band wants a CD of our song” so I(the engineer) rent out a studio for 4 hours, come in, record the band, and give them a CD. Maybe they’ll be back – maybe not. What I’m getting at is, this profession will never make me any (reliable/predictable/salary)money, and I’ve accepted that. Not only will I probably never make enough money to live comfortably with this profession, the classes I’m taking for it are a complete joke. 90% of what I’ve learned has been from self teaching, reading any text I can get my hands on, and just exploring/practicing on my own – this thought is reinforced when I hear the questions the other students in class ask – it’s like they are so clueless, they don’t even know what to ask. Luckily, in my almost 3 years at a 2 year college, I have completed all of my core classes, so I could:

C. Drop Audio Engineering and go to a 4 year college to get a 4 year degree, and become a corporate pawn like my mom and dad did. I would most likely become a programmer. This was actually my original plan in college, and I already have some programming experience – which is initially why I got a job where I work now. The problem is, in programming, most of the jobs themselves flat out suck… Programming is just slightly more predictable than audio engineering; people contact you and say “Hey I need on my forum site – I’ll pay you $ 300 to design and implement it.” If you get lucky, maybe you’ll get hired on as a salary or wage worker – but chances are, I would be getting hired to build some new system that the company needs – and once that’s up and running, they only need 1 programmer around to maintain the system. All the programming jobs I’ve found that are true salary or wage jobs don’t want straight out of college programmers – actually, most care more about your experience and actual knowledge than they do about degrees – half of the jobs I’ve looked at for programming don’t even mention a degree. Even if I decide to become a programmer, I don’t know what degree I would need. There’s all sort of computer science and computer engineering degrees, but looking at the curriculum, I don’t see how any of this would land me a programming job when the job description reads “Must have 2+ years experience working in .”
So then I guess the other option is to :

D. Find a different career path… Honestly, I’ve searched high and low, and can’t really think of anything else I would rather do(that wouldn’t require 6+ years of college) besides programming or audio engineering. I definitely don’t see myself working in a call center for the rest of my life.

So what do you guys think I should do? Are there any other options I’m missing?
Thanks for the info PE2008. Looking into hartford now..

As for the other replies – If you are just spammers – please gtfo. If you are seriously trying to sell me a loan, don’t bother. Money to get my education isn’t the issue – getting an education that will make a decent amount of money is the problem…

Best answer:

Answer by PE2008
“Audio Engineering” as offered by most trade schools, is bogus. Hartford University has one of the few legitimate Audio Engineering Technology degrees in the country.

If you want to study “programming”, you will probably find Computer Science, and even Computer Engineering, are too theoretical for your needs. You should look at degrees called “Computer Engineering Technology” or similar. San Jose State has a very good degree called “Computer Electronics and Network Technology”.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!