Since no other information on this silly question is given, naturally I’d choose the car. It has to be a bird in the hand choice if there ever was one. Many years ago, I earned a bachelor’s degree in a subject that guaranteed either a boring career in teaching or an exciting lifetime starving in a Paris (not France, but Texas) garret while I contemplated cutting off an ear. Fortunately, after drifting toward the latter fate, I won a university grad assistantship with a slightly less starvation stipend, learned a profession that was viable to the current economic times and made a decent living for the next 30 years or so.
If you can call buying a car that costs $40,000 and up an investment, then so is stuffing the equivalent money into your mattress. Except the money doesn’t depreciate to half value within two years, nor lose at least $5,000 a year in maintenance and fuel. If you choose the other … er … choice, earning an internet bachelor’s degree from an upstanding internet institution, such as Mrs. Murphy’s University and Storm Door Company, may cost just a couple of hundred dollars, and may take as much as six months of intense study and staring at your computer.
On the other hand, if you choose to do it the old fashioned way by attending a live college … you know, ones with dorms, live professors, keg parties, classrooms and honest degrees … the annual cost, including all expenses, is about $30,000 a year. That means you won’t get to wear that cap and gown until you’ve shelled out $120,000, or the cost of three BMWs. That’s my conclusion, but as yet I haven’t figured out just what it means.
Anyhow, if you’ve earned enough and saved up such a stack of money from your current wages that you can buy a BMW in the first place, why in hell would you need a bachelor’s degree?