I think it's basically right. Go to college, see the outline of what people have figured out, and what they think you need to know. Also what the dead ends are eg broken window fallacy.
That's about it, though. You actually can learn all those things yourself, you just have to be pretty disciplined about following some sort of course or text, including the weird things that you have quite figured out are reasonably big.
You also won't actually know anything other than the outline once you're done. They throw so much at you and it seems detailed while you're studying, but you need to actually work with a field for a while to really understand it. You'll have the index though, and that's pretty useful for future reference.
I really value my undergrad degree. I'm 20+ years out of college, and am thankful I went that route, for many of the reasons outlined in this post. I feel like most HN conversations about degrees downplay these sorts of benefits.
That said, I'm now at the point where I'm close to looking at colleges with my oldest. Value/cost is very much on my radar. 20 years ago, you could go to college to "find yourself." You could explore a lot of ideas/careers quickly without the pressure to spend all the money. That's not as true today.
Can you reproduce the opportunities university gives you on your own? Yes, but it's very difficult.
I'd be interested in hearing if parents are increasingly having a say in where children go to college.
Seems like with inflation, need for graduate studies, dating markets etc. that adolescence is lengthening. Whereas you would have been kicked out of the house to figure it out at 18 now we stay with parents longer...
I had a long conversation with a coworker the other day. He has a 20 year old, and he's allowing this son to stay at home, but is charging rent and forcing him to start paying for more and more things.
I find that people who do that kind of thing just don't get it. Things have changed. It's a much more high-stakes world for young adults than it was when they were that age. It's very easy for middle class kids to now end up poorer than their parents, which was much rarer for the boomers and early gen x. Give your kid every advantage you can.
The problem is that financial pressures never improve people. Sure, extreme financial abundance can turn a person into an insufferable, amoral twat; but no one's life has ever been improved by deprivation.
Should a kid spend a summer during high school working a "regular" job so as to understand what bullshit average people have to go through (and to do everything possible not to end up in such circumstances)? Sure. Why not? It's a useful experience, when you're 17, to see what life is like for most people.
On the other hand, Game Theory 101 tells us that forced plays are often lousy moves, and that having more options entails higher expectancy. If your kid, as an adult, has to work crappy jobs that damage his career, while others get to make choices that enable them to have better futures because they aren't worried about month-to-month bullshit, then he's going to end up losing through no fault of his own... and, see, this is commonplace. We aren't actually smarter than the poors (the real poors, not non-billionaire "poors"). We just ended up getting dealt better options, whereas they had to operate constantly under constraint.
If you can take stupid obstacles out of your child's life, you should.
> On the other hand, Game Theory 101 tells us that forced plays are often lousy moves
I think this falls into the category of "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." Teaching children, in an age appropriate way that takes their unique strengths and weaknesses into consideration, is the definition of parenting. Preparing kids for life on their own is important.
Keeping commitments, budgeting and long-term planning are important skills. Having someone pay a small amount of rent is a reasonable way to do that. Not the only way, but it's a viable way.
If you're making your kids pay rent, there are bigger issues. Why aren't they able to find housing? Are they not able to find decent jobs? There could be any number of answers, and it might not be the kid's fault, but something may be pathological here. (Of course, there are also valid reasons for kids to live with their parents; elder care is just one of them.) The time to solve the problem (if there is one) was years ago.
In today's world, I don't think you should have kids unless you have enough wealth to guarantee that they won't have to rely on the labor market to survive. That doesn't mean you need to have enough money for them to live like private jet assholes; but you should be able to leave them enough that they can do what they want with their lives, because the era of "good jobs" seems to be ending.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to prepare children for the life that lies ahead for them. There are too many unknown variables. Within 10-15 years, we're either going to have a complete (and possibly quite violent, thus unpredictable) global overthrow of capitalism--this is necessary, but there's no guarantee of what comes afterward being better--or we will see the opening steps of regression into such a degraded state--techno-capitalist feudalism within a collapsing ecosystem (in Fraser's terminology, a rentism that turns into exterminism upon pressure)--that will leave humanity unlikely, within anyone's lifetime, to recover.
1950s parents prepared their kids for one world; in the 1980s, their kids entered one that was slightly shittier (economically speaking) but still fairly similar. Most of our (1980s and '90s) parents prepared us for a world that no longer exists; we ended up coming of age into an unrecognizable country. (Who would have predicted, in late 1990s, that working conditions and living standards in the US would be third world within a generation? No one; I remember; I was there.) I feel really bad for parents today, because there is no way of knowing what the future is going to look like, but the probability of it being absolutely atrocious is much, much higher than it should be.
I am. We're a long way from automating all human labor out of existence, but we only have to automate some of it to trigger wage collapses, because the job market is inelastic in a way that works not in labor's favor.
The reason cappies are bitching about a "labor shortage" right now is that, during this anomalous period, inelasticity seems to be working against them (although, let's be honest, they're not hurting all that much). Is that going to trigger long-term movement in labor's favor? Probably not. Capital has political and social power, not to mention well-oiled PR machinery, and labor doesn't.
We'll still have jobs for human truckers in 2035. We might have only automated 10% of those jobs. It won't matter. A 10% cut in job availability can trigger a 50% drop in wages and working conditions. What are workers going to do, not work? It's the same thing as with gas prices. A small disruption can cause costs to spike.
If you rely on the labor market to survive, the future has literally nothing for you, unless corporate capitalism is overthrown.
Surely, you know that there is a difference between abstinence (voluntary, pursued for esoteric reasons) and deprivation (involuntary, imposed by a malevolent society).
I think children should do enough chores to have a sense of self-efficacy. Same with survival skills. Being college-age or older and not knowing how to cook or do basic cleaning is an embarrassment, even if you're rich.
All that said, if you want your kids to succeed in the world, they have to know how to do a task without becoming the one who does the task, if you catch the distinction. In the workplace, you have to be willing to do unpleasant jobs, but be extremely selective in what you're willing to let yourself become the one who does. Outside of the upper class, no one really learns this skill. People from working- or middle-class backgrounds are either too resistant to doing tasks they consider beneath them (which is a bad look) or too willing, which leads to recurring time and image costs that eat up their ability to have a career.
I'm aware, but they both have the same effect on a non-adult with no other recourse, and they both generally have the same goal of teaching appreciation of "success" in different forms.
So charing the college student rent and bills is not providing a sense of self efficacy (I like you put it like that). I also agree its all to teach how to do something without it owning you, and it is a life skill not all have.
> Can you reproduce the opportunities university gives you on your own? Yes, but it's very difficult.
No, not with Covid. Without in-person classes, you don't meet anybody and you don't learn anything more than with a $2.50 in late fees at a library, what Good Will Hunting talked about.
An undergraduate degree has value, but the costs should be considered, and it should all be weighed against the alternatives. For different people, the outcome of such an evaluation will be different. The unfortunate thing is that many people (like me) just assumed that college was the one and only option, and didn't think twice about it.
When you're in high school, everybody tells you to go to college. Teachers, guidance counselors, most adults. So, you just plan to go to college. Nobody is telling you "consider learning a trade," or "consider traveling", or "consider that you can write books/program computers/start businesses without a degree". Sophomores and Juniors in High School are often not worldly or mature enough to ask these questions themselves, and nobody is revealing to them the complexity of the first big, life-changing decision they'll have to make. Or, at least they weren't in my town in the 90s, maybe it's different now.
Going to college is still the optimal play for almost everyone, save the highly privileged who can actually drop out and get right back in at any time.
The trades are often romanticized, but overrated in their ability to reliably provide a middle-class standard of living. There will always be some trade that is in high demand and can therefore offer a middle-class salary... but within ten years, it will be flooded by new people, and that will end. (This is the case unless there is a strong union in place and it stays strong.) That's just how the labor market works. The selling point of an advanced education is that it provides insurance against labor market fluctuations, since you're hired for something other than your commodity labor (in theory). That's no longer the case these days, but that's a problem with our society, not our schools.
As engines of social mobility in the US, colleges aren't great--they're expensive, often very elitist, bloated due to runaway administrative costs, and usually staffed by researchers who consider undergraduate teaching to be their fifth priority if at all--but they're still better than literally anything else our society has in place. Our laws are written by millionaire Boomer scumbags, our businesses exist to ratify an existing hereditary elite as meritocrats while being hostile to actual meritocracy, and our culture is thinly-veiled capitalist propaganda. Our colleges might get a C-minus, but that's still ahead of the F that everything else in this country gets.
I think college is beneficial for everyone and I honestly have some regrets for not going that route myself, but I think the costs associated with it heavily outweigh any benefits at the moment, especially in the long term.
I'm curious where I would fit into your opinion of all this. I'm a high-school drop out with 1.7 GPA (ended up getting a GED eventually), but I've been in tech/software dev for nearly 17 years now. Whether it be job offers or ability to perform well in my role, the lack of college hasn't been a barrier at all. I currently work in a FAANG and usually outperform my peers and haven't had any problems getting offers for management positions. I got into software dev because of my love for video games. I have an average IQ and I'm not gifted. You say "almost everyone", but there's nothing special that sets me apart from "almost everyone". What are your thoughts on that?
> College will teach you to write, and ideally, to speak as well. Even just simple frameworks like the five paragraph essay or thesis-antithesis-synthesis work wonders for idea organization. It's critical to be able to organize your thoughts into a loose structure of "introduction", "what people have previously thought", "what I think", "reasons others might disagree and why they're wrong," and "conclusion."
At one time, every student at most colleges had to take "Rhetoric" 101 and 102, where those things were taught. You only have to look at modern social networks to see that they're not being taught anymore.
Innumeracy gets a lot of play on here but I've met an awful lot of college graduates—even those with higher degrees—who aren't technically illiterate but are fairly incompetent readers. I'm not convinced the situation with mathematics is unique—poor readers seem to be a solid majority, even among the college educated. I do think attitudes about the two are different, which may be why the situations look different. People will readily tell you that they're bad at math. To figure out that they're awful readers requires observation, and it's a lot less polite to talk about.
If you see the subjects a child in Ancient Greece or Rome studied, "rhetoric" was usually one of them. The ability to speak well and convince your fellow citizens was considered fundamental in any sort of democracy (however imperfect).
Yeah, I know rhetoric isn't about reading, exactly—I'm looking at the cheerful green spine of a Loeb edition of Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric on my shelf right this moment—but there seems to be a general deficiency in the ability to even follow, let alone construct, arguments or lines of reasoning. Often, bare comprehension of meaning is severely lacking, before we even get to interpreting and evaluating a text.
I mean simply that reading well is a distressingly uncommon skill; that one may hardly hope to write well without that foundation; and that there's a great deal of overlap between reading comprehension, and evaluating oral argument or presentation. I agree that instruction in rhetoric is lacking, but universities, and certainly high schools, aren't even doing a great job of ensuring graduates are skilled at more fundamental aspects of communication. However, perhaps that's backwards, and more robust rhetorical instruction would fill in some of the gaps in reading ability. I wouldn't mind seeing it attempted, since the current approach doesn't seem to be very effective.
If you like college good for you. But the first two years are bullshit. The last two, you should be able to learn them on the job for many career tracks and test them out.
Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree? Because the british said so many centuries ago is not a good reason. Neither is "what about the profits of colleges".
We put up with 12 years of random but generally useful things forced on us. Once we decide a career as adults, information not directly useful to the job we will be working should be optional.
Not to mention the financial burden and lost time in a person's prime years
University is not trade school. There is more function there than simply learning to do the narrow job one believes the future may have in store for them. Here are some others:
- Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation
- Find sexual mates
- Find platonic mates
- Learn many disconnected things
- Learn many connected things
- Learn to take criticism in the open
- Learn to render criticism in the open
- Engage diversity
- Engage similarity
- Discover the value of value
- Make mistakes in the open... recover
- Watch others make mistakes in the open... help them recover
- Learn to how to think
- Learn the history of thinking
- Become a robust citizen of the universe
- Learn you are much smaller than you thought you were
A "liberal education" was, originally, an education appropriate to free people, as opposed to slaves. Slaves got an education that was more like trade school, if at all. Free people got an education for those who didn't have to work for a living. If you're getting that education today, it has value, but you'd better be in a position where you don't need it to get you a job when you're done.
On the other hand:
> Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation
One of the things you don't learn in college: Not to talk like that.
Fair. I stated it badly, which made it look like a personal attack. So let me try again:
In most environments, that kind of writing comes across as pretentious, and even as deliberately obscure. But for at least some people, in college they learn to write that way, because it gives them better grades. But they would in fact communicate better if they didn't write that way, and college in general would be better if they taught people how to write for a general audience, instead of for professors.
Now you in particular, just that one sentence struck me that way. Your writing in general didn't come across that way, and my comment should not be taken as a personal attack. That one sentence, though, I feel merits criticism.
In a different context or some other format, I would not have been so brief. But the point of the list was simply to rattle off indications of ideas, not to communicate concepts with reliable clarity.
Further, what's pretentious to one audience is idiomatic to another. HN has a diverse crowd with many backgrounds. Implying that your own taste in this matter is representative is a bit much.
Edit: I'll admit I'm feeling a little sensitive at the moment. I've had a bad week. If I'm being a bit defensive here, I apologize. I do essentially agree with your judgment re that particular bullet -- I might have landed on better words.
Hey, I've never done that. Never been over sensitive on HN. Never snapped at anyone because I was having a bad week. Never... um, or maybe not this week... um... (checks time of my initial post in this thread) this afternoon?
You don’t need to go to college to do any of that.
The same can be accomplished with a year of travel and a year of internships/apprenticeships.
Also I think at this point it’s safe to say that a college environment does not in any way shape or form engage diversify. It tends to be a monolithic culture that is hostile to contrarian views that may disrupt may d disrupt the status quo.
Military service does much more in those social areas than college. Intermixing with others and learning how to get along and communicate are not optional there -- as unpopular as that may be.
You can do all of those things outside of University though. I think you actually made a very valid argument against your point.
University is beneficial for access to laboratory infrastructure that you otherwise couldn't obtain on your own without incurring significant cost. A good - albeit extreme - example is the nuclear reactor at Reed College. University also provides you with resources to ask questions on observations or thoughts around what you experiment with in the lab. It's a great sandbox and gives you flexibility to determine what you want to do in life before you fully invest into it. This is only true to the extent in which you're not pouring thousands of dollars down the drain at college to learn you just wanted to weld shit together. Conversely I think trade school is where you've discovered what you want to do and you go learn how to do it with peak proficiency in a controlled setting.
I am glad you like those things but for most people an undergrad degree is a piece of paper and a line on the resume. If it does not help me with my job and future income it should not be mandatory for employers to require it. I have no problem with degrees not required by employers. If you apply at a tech company and get rejected because of lack of undergrad degree then are you saying becoming "a robust citizen of the universe" and finding sexual mates was why?
It's both I think. I can understand employers wanting employees to know more than leetcode for example. English/writing would help having good documentation for example. The current undergrad regime is too broad is my argument. I am not a coder but in my field undergrads are not very well prepared to enter the workforce.
Anyone making an argument against the value of philosophy usually fails because they don't have the analytical/argumentative toolkit to construct a good argument. Precisely because they didn't study philosophy. And if they had, they probably wouldn't be making the argument in the first place.
I don't have anything against philosophy man, I just don't to be forced into debt and lose valuable time to learn someone else's philosophy. And even that a very western centric perspective. And how is that relevant to compsci undergrad?
Saying "that argument is faulty" is a valid argument about the other argument. It is not a valid argument about the original topic.
I can say that the argument is invalid without even taking a position on the original topic. I can do so with extra appreciation of the irony when the original claim was "those people can't construct a valid argument".
I learned enough in the first two years to start working as far as compsci was concerned. Everything after that was supplemental. Depending on what you are studying and where you are studying, the first two years absolutely aren't bullshit.
Yes, I had to take a bunch of classes that I wasn't interested in, but there's also no way that I would have been able to cram in all the math and compsci that I wanted to into 2 years. Especially as not everything can be learned concurrently. Like I said, I could have started working after the first two years, but I would have never gotten the depth that I did if I had stopped there.
People with CompSci degrees have changed the world in the past few decades. Many of those changes are good, but they have also built tools that are being used to undermine democratic processes, to cause wide-scale depression, the violation of the people's rights, etc.
The reason is exactly because people with CompSci already do not study enough philosophy, ethics, sociology and hence do not have any idea that you have to think about the consequences of the tools you build on society. Or do great evil.
> We put up with 12 years of random but generally useful things forced on us. Once we decide a career as adults, information not directly useful to the job we will be working should be optional.
It is optional. You just can't get a bachelor's degree without doing that, because that degree indicates completion of a broader course of work than you're interested in.
There are tons of schools that have weak gen-ed requirements, which can often be tested out of either with high school AP's or as a college student with CLEPs. My undergrad was about 3.5 years of rigorous engineering education with roughly a semester of gen-eds spread over it. You should try to research the school and program before attending.
> Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree?
In Europe (AFAIK this is very broadly true) you're expected to have covered these in high school, and university is for focusing on a single field (and its prerequisites, so lots of math in engineering fields, e.g.)
See that makes sense to me. But dare I ask why europe is not 2 years then? Do US colleges teach less because in the US, you could be studying oceanology or electrical engineering and the first two years are more or less same courses. In HS, I mostly showed up to class and cruised through with minimal effort last two years bc it wasn't that interesting or challenging.
At least for my undergrad (CS, at www.epfl.ch), the answer was basically "more math" (2 years of).
The usual generic answer was "it's approximately like a US master's".
And at least for the EPFL today, they've essentially formalised your suggestion and that master's equivalence: you get a "bachelor's" after 3 years. And you can optionally continue 2 more years and get a "master's".
This is a benefit of getting a BFA. BA has the fewest credit hours in your major, BS has more, but BFA requires the most. Out of 4 years in my program I only took 3 classes unrelated to my major and didn’t have to pay my college for any sort of P.E. class. A decade later and I see plenty of people working in my field with BA and BS degrees who still didn’t know even basic things because their college programs were so sidetracked with these credit requirements.
I rather find it strange as here those subjects are covered in High School, to different depths depending where student is aiming at. This might be too early, but in general it opens up avenues to Universities or Applied Schools. Where goal is to teach focused things in certain fields.
Yeah - I did a CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s and it was 4 years of maths & CS stuff - pretty focused.
Learning how to actually write code was something you were pretty much expected to pick up by yourself - most of the CS classes had requirements to do a personal project which was a large part of the marks for that class. Absolutely no way could any graduate from that course without having produced multiple applications in everything from assembler (6502 and 68000) through to Pascal on a mainframe (yuck) and C and Prolog on Unix minis and graphics programming in C on Atari STs - which was great fun.
I loved it - although I did make a bit of a mess of my first year, but you just had to get through that - no impact on my final degree.
Edit: I should explain - Scotland so first degrees are 4 years rather than the 3 years of the rest of the UK.
Would love to take a look at the courses in that degree. That's my main hangup, I have such a thirst to learn college level compsci (not how to code but algorithms, theories,etc...) and crypto but spending two years writing english essays and philosophy presentations is no bueno.
As far as I know most UK universities tend to have focused degrees - you sign up to a particular course and that area is what you focus on for 3 or 4 years. The good side of this is the focus on a particular area, the downside is that if you choose a course that you find that you don't like it can be difficult to transfer to other courses unless they are closely related.
Mind you - my experience is 30+ years old at this point.
I did a CS degree at a UK university in the early 2000s and we were forced to take two modules of non-CS in the first year. Due to the ridiculous way places were allocated (you literally had a single day in which to physically run around the university town trying to visit the offices and find courses with space), I ended up doing history and archaeology.
Mostly, this reinforced the general impression that these subjects were extremely easy and involved next to no work, compared to CS. It didn't help me much in later life though.
> Imagine learning to play music by fooling around with a piano and discovering that some keys sound good together. Even if after a while you begin to structure music that sounds halfway decent, if you ever want to get good and collaborate with other musicians, you're going to have to start from the beginning and learn theory, chords, and musical notation.
Or entire generations of first-rate blues musicians. They may have had instruction from older players, but many had no formal musical training. Many got their initial "education" by playing around on homemade-from-literal-garbage single-string instruments.
Yeah it’s odd because this analogy does actually work with technical fields in many cases (i.e needing a base in mathematics for higher level physics etc) but it’s not like the vast majority of musicians in the history of the species have had formal training!
As a self taught musician this is totally bullshit TO AN EXTENT. I fucking shred and know zero music theory. All self taught and I can tune by ear as well.
When you start to play with a higher caliber of musicians, it becomes an expected threshold. I think its a bad analogy but it kind of is true the better you get. Still bad analogy
"I don't read music or write music, none of us do it in the Beatles. We did some good stuff though."
The 3 examples I listed are also probably the most well-known artists who have not studied theory, all 3 of them have said at various points in time that they can't read sheet music (and therefore definitely do not have a formal musical education). Funnily enough I _can_ read and play sheet music, and you do not see me drawing massive crowds..
>You don't want to become experienced at writing software in your unique, bespoke way, only to realize that you've been doing things inefficiently and/or differently than everyone else in the field and have to start over from first principles
While a good ideal, the speed of change makes that difficult for universities that simply operate on a longer timeline than the current industry.
To use the bowling metaphor: there isn't a right way to do software as well-known as bowling well. When you go to find that foundation, you get CompSci fundamentals (which are a solid foundation) alongside a bunch of industry best practices that appear to be changing really quickly. Software certainly isn't only about CompSci fundamentals.
The Javascript scene has slowed (for the better IMHO) but it's a good example of a drastic change of styles/techniques over a short time span. Plus we have new languages that are doing new things that may not be taught in undergrad courses.
Even if you zoom out from a single ecosystem like JS and look at the major styles - OOP, functional, procedural - that has changed pretty quickly too. OOP is not necessarily the "right way to bowl" any more than procedural or functional is.
My conclusion here is that the theory of peak practice is very difficult to apply to writing software, however, it probably works with purely CompSci stuff (which can be practiced in any language). By contrast, this theory applies well to bowling, because bowling well is a much slower moving, more well-known target to work towards.
It was the mid-2010s and "college dropout" was the mark of an up-and-coming genius. Headlines were questioning the need for degrees at all and billionaire Peter Thiel was awarding high school graduates $100,000 not to attend college and become entrepreneurs instead. "Not long ago, dropping out of school to start a company was considered risky," wrote the Wall Street Journal. "For this generation, it is a badge of honor, evidence of ambition and focus."
Yeah, this cannot be a smart move. $100k doesn't even cover the annual salary of a dev. Good luck starting a business or any initiative with that. Advertising is so expensive these days, along with everything else. I would rather put the $100k in an index fund anyway. Thiel had 2 big successes, those being Facebook and PayPal, everything else he says or does has dubious or is wrong, whether it's bitcoin or imploring kids to drop out of college. College is worthwhile because the median is higher in terms of success, income. Focusing on the outliers who drop out of college ignores that the median is lower.
Plenty of thiel fellows have started billion/multi million dollar companies (figma, ethereum, luminar, upstart, etc.), so it seems that $100k had been enough for them.
But was this with the $100k. I am guessing they got chosen by Thiel and then with his connections raised a lot of funding later from someone else. There is no way you can start a successful tech company with just $100k. Things are so expensive. Maybe 100k is good enough for a hobby but you are not going to make a living off that.
Well they seemed to have done it, I know plenty of startup founders that have bootstrapped with less than that.
The stamp of approval from Thiel and his network help of course, and is likely more valuable than the $100k but for a lot of these students it gives enough runway to tinker for 2-3 years before landing product market fit.
facebook was 17 years ago. What about since? If you cannot adjust to the times or if your new advice is bad, it does not matter how good your prior successes were.
At the risk of breaking the rules, what recent successes do you have that are in any way close to Facebook or PayPal that makes you able to give advice?
I am more interested in # of successes and consistency, than size of successes. A lotto winner is a huge success but is is reproducible? Likely not. I recommended tesla stock in 2013, Facebook 2012, bitcoin 2013, was bullish on stocks in early 2020 during Covid, etc.
The article statements and leading questions are off. "Are you aware that Israel has considered trading land for peace many times, and it has only worked twice?" Egypt offered peace terms to Israel after 1968 but Israel wanted to keep the Sinai. So Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 and Israel was in dire straits until the US began rushing arms to Israel, which also gave the US a say in how the Sinai would be settled. Israel had little choice but to retreat from the Sinai ultimately.
Also the notion that only democratic governments were overthrown by the Arab spring makes no sense. Ben Ali was pushed out in Tunisia, Mubarak ousted in Egypt etc. If those governments are "democratic" there were nominally only - the "presidents" ruled from 1987 and 1981 to 2011 respectively, and jailed (and tortured) the opposition.
I think a lot of what is shared here is the value of learning and building relationships. College is not the only, or in many cases the best way to learn or build relationships. It's expensive, takes a lot of time, and for most graduates, the outcome is an entry level office job and $28-70K in debt to pay off over a couple of decades.
This is where elite colleges shine. You make connections with the kind of people who go to elite colleges. Those are much more valuable than connections with people who go to Random State University.
Why does this essay feel so flat to me? It reads like it was written for class, or for an essay contest for the American Legion: Write about why you went to college.
I almost don't believe the author. It feels like you're lying to me.
Looks to be written and self-published by a recent grad. I think the feeling of "flatness" comes from the author's background as a less experienced writer. Nonetheless, I found their points notable and respect their choice to publish.
I'm a software dev now. I only write Haskell. My bachelors was in electrical and computer engineering. The experience I got in the lab making analog circuits, asics, and from-scratch computers on an FPGA was invaluable. There was a lot I don't remember - fair. But my education is well beyond any peer I've run into in my time at FAANG and startups alike. And I went to an in-state school in the Midwest for cheap!
It was the mid-2010s and "college dropout" was the mark of an up-and-coming genius. Headlines were questioning the need for degrees at all and billionaire Peter Thiel was awarding high school graduates $100,000 not to attend college and become entrepreneurs instead. "Not long ago, dropping out of school to start a company was considered risky," wrote the Wall Street Journal. "For this generation, it is a badge of honor, evidence of ambition and focus."
This whole thing is a dangerous, scummy lie. Millions of people drop out of college, and most of them don't end up founding billion-dollar companies. Why do they drop out? They can't afford it, they don't have the social support, they get sick, they lack the preparation or are too young for it... all sorts of causes. It is not glamorous. It is not a sign of great ambition, nor is it taken to be such. It is usually a case of failure (that may or may not be the person's fault) and, in the real world, failure hurts. Sure, dropping out of Harvard to found Facebook is a winning play, but most people don't have those kinds of options and can't afford such a major misstep.
Peter Thiel's anti-college push is something even worse. Our education system in this country isn't as good as one might want it to be. It's expensive, often elitist, and of dubious quality (even at prestigious schools) except for people with outlier levels (outlier among those under 25, at least) of self-motivation. All that said, it's the one component of our society that still kinda works and that still, in some privileged subsections, is run by people with decent intentions. It's the last bastion of meritocracy left. Perfect meritocracy? Not even close. But if a professor played favorites as brazenly as an average corporate manager (65% and "culture fit" = A+/executive fast track; 97% without "culture fit" = C/"Meets Expectations") his life would be made hell. Getting "screwed" in college means studying your ass off and making a B, due to some tricky question on the final. Getting screwed in the corporate world means losing your income--possibly, your housing and your reputation as well--over the smallest infraction or none at all.
Education is the one component that's left in our society where a working-class person can outperform his social "superiors". This is the real reason why royalists and rightists like Peter Thiel want to destroy it. Think we lack social mobility now in the US? We do, but scrapping the colleges is going to make it worse... so keep that in mind every time some Silicon Valley asshat says that formal education is a waste of time.
I say the same thing about the SAT. Is it flawless? No, of course not. It picks up a number of cultural or socioeconomic factors with no correlation to true ability. However, without it, though college admissions are going to become more socioeconomic, not less.
When I was in college, I had to enroll in a course called "Structured Systems Analysis" for my computer science major. It remains, to this day, the most boring course I have ever taken. It was essentially a crash course in business for software developers: we discussed topics like software estimates, methods of team management, and company mission statements. It was slow, stultifying, mind-numbingly-boring information. The professor was actually great, but there was only so much he could do with the material. I fell asleep studying for the final - literally. And I was the kind of student who read textbooks for fun.
This is a common experience: finding the most boring class also to be the most applicable one on the job. The jobs are what's broken, not the schools. I find it sad that software estimation is taught at all in schools. See, I'm a believer in the liberal arts education in the classical sense: liberal, in this context, means an education appropriate to a free person (as contrasted with servile arts). Real computer science is a liberal art, but giving estimates (or, say, doing user stories) is a servile art.
The problem with our society isn't that a liberal arts education is outdated or elitist, so much as that our society has very few positions left in which a liberal arts education is actually useful or appropriate. Colleges are forced to take one of two options, neither free of ugliness. One is to dilute the program with servile skills like writing user stories to make graduates more employable in the strata of jobs they'll actually be able to get; the other is to give people an education that wildly overestimates the quality of job positions that will be available to them. (As I said, the liberal arts education is designed for free people, but how many people really are free of the labor market? I'm a leftist, so I'd like to see this addressed, but I'm not holding my breath.) I'm not surprised that a course focusing on software politics turned out to be more useful than any of the others, but it's sad that this was the case.
this is all the same rehashed Boomer garbage defending college. Reality is that all of these benefits could easily be replicated at a fraction of the cost.
Cultural inertia is the only thing keeping the current university system alive, everything about the tenure track and how graduate students have to work is broken as well. The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern workforce to maintain a modern economy , so it fails miserably
> The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern workforce to maintain a modern economy , so it fails miserably
By what metric is it failing? Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce? What is your emphasis on “modern” referring to? You clearly have strong feelings about this, and I’m curious why, but your comment doesn’t clearly communicate why you feel this way, nor give much evidence to back up the belief that education is broken and that fixing it is easy. Where is the evidence that education could be more efficient? What does more efficient mean? Are you talking about financial cost, or time & effort spent learning, or something else? If it’s “easily replicated” more efficiently then why hasn’t it already happened?
the trillion dollars of student debt that can't be paid off because many degrees don't produce real economic value to justify the cost of education. Having millions of people waste years of their lives and massive amounts of money is a failure.
>Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce?
because I know the history of the university system and it's barely changed in centuries
>If it’s “easily replicated” more efficiently then why hasn’t it already happened?
because the government subsidizes it with trillions of dollars so there is no incentive to change
> the trillion dollars of student debt that can't be paid off because many degrees don't produce real economic value to justify the cost of education.
Less than 10% of student loan debt is in default, and the total debt is less than 2 trillion, so I don’t believe it’s accurate to say “trillions” can’t be paid off. Also according to the US Fed, degree holders earn on average 2x more than non degree holders. (Think about the increase in tax base as a result).
Student loan debt isn’t necessarily any indicator of failure. Debt is (perhaps) a natural part of the economy. There might be reasons that we should fund education and not ask students to borrow. But the borrowing by itself is not proof that anything is wasted or wrong.
> it’s barely changed in centuries.
What are you referring to? The fields of Bioengineering and Computer Science didn’t exist centuries ago. Physics and Chemistry have changed completely. Almost nothing in the modern soft sciences did either. Modern research funding is nothing like it was centuries ago, or even 50 years ago. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
> because the government subsidizes it so there is no incentive to change
Then it means people pay less than they would otherwise? That further begs the question of what kind of efficiency you want. What should a college education cost, and who should pay for it? How much should professors get paid, and who should pay them, where should the money come from?
You complained both about govt subsidizing and debt. So how do you envision this getting cheaper? I’m in favor of govt funding education, but that’s a bigger subsidy than today. I think the govt can already afford it (since degree holders earn 2x more than non degree holders) but that doesn’t change the efficiency of the system.
The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern workforce to maintain a modern economy , so it fails miserably
If anything, the problem with the US education system is that it was designed to do that, and does it well.
Low-income public schools have metal detectors and a significant police presence. Show up a minute late to class (the bells were put there at the request of industrialists) and you'll lose points. They're treated like possible future criminals. High-income public schools have open campuses and forgiving attitudes toward late work and adolescent mischief, but still have lots of rules about when people can do what. Prep schools have guidance counselors that tell you exactly what you need to do, and who will start setting you up at 14, to get into whatever undergraduate college you choose--they train you to expect to be handed everything you want by society.
Whether it's by design or emergence, the system funnels people into socioeconomic strata that neatly correspond to the one they were born into. In the middle class, this means they get an education that is by-and-large competently delivered and that offers a little bit of autonomy but does not, in general, reward creativity.
The average middle school, with its stultifying rules, its emphasis on memorization and busywork, and its reward/punishment systems, is great training for the median industrial job. High school, with the culture of status-seeking and social pettiness, is great preparation for the white-collar corporate world. College trains people for the kind of job that would have been available to them fifty years ago; but in today's economy, all the decent opportunities are spoken-for.
The pro college crowd has a tool the anti-college crowd doesn't: They understand that the masses respond emotionally rather than rationally. If there is to be meaningful change in society, we need to make people feel embarrassed for attending college.
You don't need to stigmatize college. Just get employers to stop favoring graduates, and enrollment will plummet to a tiny fraction of its current level. Meanwhile, you'll have trouble getting people to feel bad about going to college if graduates still have an easier time in the job market than non-graduates.
I don’t understand framing this as some kind of tribal pro or anti college. Are people against education, or upset by the costs in the US? Other countries manage to fund it a bit more sanely. You will otherwise be pretty hard pressed to make people embarrassed by learning more and earning more.
There's a lot to unpack here. College is not synonymous with education. I'm anti-college insofar as I feel that it is a net-negative for society, and greatly so. For the vast majority, college is a means to an end, a way to receive some training at best, or mere credentialing at worst, to work for some entity (mostly for-profit corporations). Does society need this to function, is it even desirable?
The university system is full of cons and frauds. Anyone that gives that system money is helping to perpetuate the system.
Right, that’s my question to you, what exactly are you referring to when you say you’re anti college: the cost or the education?
What’s the evidence for college being a large net negative? Are you talking about the US only, or are you including, say, Norway too? (Are you actually anti college, or anti current US education funding?)
What do you mean is it needed/desirable? Are you suggesting that education alone is a bad thing, or that well rounded (non-vocational) education is bad for society, that people would be better off not taking math / writing / history? Is vocational job training unnecessary? Any reason to think it would be equally effective if corporations did it privately, or that it would cost less all else being equal?
Currently, the training plus credentialing yields 2x earnings in the US above non college graduates. Whether good or bad, the result is more money moving to society. There is no clear financial net negative, in fact the current financial benefit to society is so large that it’s obvious the US govt could fully fund college education for all on the increased tax revenue alone, and still have multiples more than that to spare. I don’t yet see your argument at all.
Without context, that’s nothing more than a platitude. In some sense it is perhaps tautological and meaningless since the words educate and indoctrinate could be viewed as practically synonymous. Anyway I’m sure there’s a pithy quote about lacking education and being less educated and/or more poor, but the real question is what is the actual, realistic, practical alternative? There is nothing wrong with choosing not to attend college with eyes wide open IMO, but globally increasing education opportunities is considered to be critical for eliminating poverty. So is Chomsky’s quote even relevant to whether to go to school, or is he critiquing or reflecting on the philosophy of our style of education? The man has a PhD after all.
That's about it, though. You actually can learn all those things yourself, you just have to be pretty disciplined about following some sort of course or text, including the weird things that you have quite figured out are reasonably big.
You also won't actually know anything other than the outline once you're done. They throw so much at you and it seems detailed while you're studying, but you need to actually work with a field for a while to really understand it. You'll have the index though, and that's pretty useful for future reference.