A four year degree is now seen as the educational floor by most employers. Heck, even police departments and many certifications are requiring you have a four year degree (any degree will do). I think this trend is wrong headed, but at the same time how do we change organizations to train on the job. It is just a simple, and lazy, filter.
Train on the job. Easier said than done. How would you know if the person is even trainable? A degree should (not that ti does in many cases), but it should. Like a driver's license.
I wonder how much of this new floor is because high schools diplomas are now just participation certificates (due to budget cuts, policies like no child left behind, and the spread of treating kids like snowflakes), and people are showing up at college not being able to do math or read at their grade level...
Not saying high school education is great, but if there are droves and droves of people showing up at college not able to do math or read, how exactly did they get the necessary points on the ACT or SAT?
I mean, what you're saying is that the ACT/SAT are extremely easy tests, so that they can be completed without really knowing math or how to read. Or you're saying that gobs and gobs of people are cheating or using bribes to get the scores they need. Because they can't really read or do math well enough to be passing these tests on their own.
I have a little trouble believing anything like that is going on. I think kids are likely passing these tests on their own merit. And are perfectly capable of doing the math and reading on the tests in question.
I also strongly recommend Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society" [1]. It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article but Illich makes a very good case for looking at Government's support for higher education as basically a regressive tax on the poor, as they (meaning the poor) attend university at a much lower percentage compared to the middle and upper classes of society but they still pay for the government's support of said universities (through direct or indirect taxes, and nowadays by being financially forced out of residential areas located close to good schools that are seen as gateways to prestigious universities attended by the children of middle- and upper-class people).
It can be argued that the percentage of the poor who attend university is high considering the percentage of taxes that they actually pay ( compared to those who earn more than them)
That's why I added the indirect taxes thing, which generally it's a regressive and largely unescapable tax on the poor no matter what the Government decides to do with the money.
Also, if I were to be a marxist (which I'm not, quite the contrary, even though I do have a genuine admiration for Marx's thought) one could say that the well-off have myriad other ways of "taxing" the poor which don't necessarily involve direct monetary transactions, like asking those members of the poor class (not sure what today's equivalent term would be) to work on top of their agreed-upon working hours with no monetary compensation (I have a feeling that the poor are a lot more likely to do over-time without compensation compared to Silicon Valley people or to big-firm lawyers).
Very very good book. It sends you into an initial "NO that's preposterous!" thought but as you read through it becomes obvious the damage the current system has done and the weaponization of it.
> As any remaining illusion of a college meritocracy swirls down the drain, there remains one school where students are still admitted based on unadulterated academic aptitude: Caltech.
I'd certainly take issue with the opening paragraph of the article to the effect that "Older readers know how the leading American universities, which had risen to world-class status by the 1930s and 1940s, were upended by the traumatic campus events of the late 1960s and their aftermath." There's no doubt that US universities had risen in quality during the early part of the 20th century but they were still outclassed by institutions in Europe in most scientific disciplines. It was the advent of WWII and the destruction it visited upon Europe as well as the massive spending on R&D during the early stages of the Cold War that propelled US universities to the heights they enjoy today.
Education has value. Degrees are merely a conveyance of an education. The educational institution is an indicator of the educational rigor. None of these are perfect indicators.
If you're interviewing candidates and you have a candidate graduating from Stanford, one from MIT and one from Middle-of-Nowhere State - which candidates are you going to prefer? We can argue whether such preferential judgement is justified. Living near the East Coast I can tell you I've met my share of MIT grads who are idiots and Middle-of-Nowhere State grads who've been really good. Yet the perception persists. Why? Because of the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle-of-Nowhere State hasn't. Those handful of exceptional graduates skew people's perception of reality for a really long time.
Who knows? Maybe this scandal will change people's perception of these elite schools but I doubt it.
I'd phrase GP response as saying we attribute too much value on some degrees and not enough on others. They all have some (nominal?) value but we don't spend the time to figure it out and just shorthand it based on the "quality" of the school. The presumption is that these schools only let in the best so you can trust their stamp of approval but this scandal shows that is folly.
It can become a self-fullfilling prophecy: if most people believe that degrees have value, then the people who compete for those spots at "elite" colleges will go up, then the pool of high quality candidate goes up. Because the elite schools have the pick of the litter, the chances that their student body and thus their graduates will be successful goes up. This reinforces the perception that the degrees have value and the cycle repeats. I think an accident of history has started this cycle and it's going to endure for quite a while. It's akin to Silicon Valley: engineers think that being in SV helps them be successful and join the next rocketship. Startups get drawn to SV because they think SV is where the magic happens. Because the pool of talent and opportunities meet in SV, it reinforces the perception that SV is magic.
I think you hit on the way economists define "value"; value is derived from people believing something is valuable. Take gold or diamonds for example, which were highly valued before they even had industrial usages. Yes, both are pretty and are rare; however, there are many other equally pretty/rare things that weren't valued as highly. The only value they had was from perception, and that made the value real.
There's also the fact that a graduate from MIT is likely to have more opportunities and resources: a middle-of-nowhere state school is unlikely to have multiple professors who lead the field while an average MIT graduate might interact with several, and a student from MIT is more likely to have access to research and advanced classes by virtue of their university.
Internet discussions about universities seem to love to ignore this aspect of what makes elite institutions elite - sure, they're often old boys clubs, but those old boys fund endowments that can support specialty programs staffed by elite experts with elite lab facilities and guest speakers and all sorts of other opportunities beyond classroom learning.
I'm not saying that you can't get a good or even great education at a community college or average state school - but I am saying that its silly to pretend that all university experiences are created equal and are just a way to consolidate class or whatever. What you do matters more than where you go, but an institution with better resources is going to have far more opportunity for its students to do meaningfully educational things.
I'm going to take a resume that has some do-nothing degree from Central Midwest State U about as seriously as one that has a do-nothing degree from Stanford on it, but I would fully expect that your average Stanford resume might have a few more interesting line-items on it than the CMSU one based simply on having more opportunities available to them.
(And for the record, I didn't attend a particularly prestigious school, and studied music in college despite working in tech now. I'm not exactly trying to defend my own background with this post).
That’s one approach. Another approach is that you have a candidate that graduated from Stanford, one from MIT, and you have a candidate that doesn’t even have a degree from Middle-of-nowhere State but has 4 years full-time professional experience.
I’m going to be more excited about the last candidate than the other two.
There was actually an interesting article about this in WSJ this past weekend[0]. I believe it's based on her paper released a few months ago[1]. For most students, what you do while in college matters much more than where you go.
When I was in high school I was told there’s not really any such thing as “can’t afford MIT” as in, if you get in, they will make sure you can pay for it through grants/loans/etc.
Was that never true? Has that changed? Or by “can’t afford” do you mean “unwilling to take on debt” which is valid ... I’m just trying to understand that part of your story.
> The annual full price of an MIT education is $70,240.
> As a result, last year the average total price paid by an MIT student receiving need-based aid was $23,000, which is less than the cost of attending the average public university as an in-state student. Overall, we awarded nearly $120 million in scholarships, and 72% of students graduated debt free.
> Those who do borrow have debt at graduation considerably lower than the national average. Nationally, in 2017, graduates of four-year colleges who borrowed owed an average of $28,699 in loans. By comparison, members of the MIT Class of 2017 who took out loans graduated with an average debt of $19,819, way below the national average.
Looks like MIT might be cheaper than the average university.
I'm not sure if it's still true, but that was a development that occurred in the mid-to-late 2000s. Before then financial aid was aimed at poor students. But if your family was middle class, you'd get virtually nothing (but loan options).
I know several people who attend UIUC with me who got accepted to MIT, Stanford, etc, but their parents couldn't afford private school.
But by the time my sister went to school, all the elite schools offered better terms.
Moving to Boston and living there is expensive. Some people can’t just leave their family behind for 4 years. There are more costs to College than tuition. There’s also the opportunity cost of going to college instead of working and earning a salary now.
I can share my story. I am a first generation student that applied to in-state universities in CA. When I got the acceptance package I got sticker shock when I saw the cost of attendance nearing $40,000. I didn't know how things worked and I didn't know how to navigate the system nor who to talk to. My reaction was one of aversion, I can't go into such large debt. Loans can cover anything, but I don't know how to be in debt, I always paid for everything up front. So I went somewhere cheaper that I felt I could afford.
In retrospect, someone that knew about this stuff would have told me that I could have received better financial aid, and I was probably misinterpreting some of the financial numbers. I mean, I was on my own, an 18 year old kid that was jumping into a scary world of getting into debt. I don't want none of that, give me something affordable.
From personal experience I can say that there was such a thing in the early 1990s. I was accepted to and attended an "elite" university, but left after one semester. I was not offered financial aid, and student loans were such that I could not have borrowed enough under Stafford or any other normal loan program to pay my tuition. I wound up transferring to a less expensive in-state public university and experiencing the best of serendipity so it ended well.
depends on what your definition of "afford" is. i was accepted into MIT, but there was no way my family was going to make their contribution amount and the total debt i would have had to take on was way too high.
there's a large gap between people that get enough aid and those that can just pay out of pocket. i got bored at the university i could afford, dropped out, and ended up in the tech startup world. MIT would have been great, but they way they assess need means people in my position (middle class) can't/won't attend. it sucks, because i would have loved the challenge and the atmosphere, but it didn't make financial sense.
I think that is a very out of touch thing to say. If you're poor you can probably get financial aid. If you're upper middle class you can either afford it or get approved for a loan, but the median household income in the us is $53k. From there to about $100k is too poor to pay out of pocket for an elite school, and to rich to financial aid.
Plus, you have to get approved for loans, and have parental co-signers. For me personally my parents had no interest in co-signing a $100k loan. For others their parents may have really bad credit.
If you want it enough there are probably ways, but as an non-rich 18 year old (or parent of an 18 year old) it's a a HUGE gamble to take on that kinda debt for a degree that you might not even finish and if you do it might not pay for itself.
> Because of the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle-of-Nowhere State hasn't.
But I can equally say the same for the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary people who never even graduated from college. This is still one of those perpetuated beliefs that just because you spent 4+ years worth of time, effort, and money to get a degree you are more likely to be better than others.
I think it's possible you'll have an easier time finding what you want if you look to the good colleges -- but only because the graduates who went there accepted the same belief that the employers do: that you need the degree to get a job. Chicken and the egg problem? Yeah, but I think it's slowly starting to change. It just takes enough young people to show the world that university is NOT needed, only the perseverance and love for what you do.
You're kind of ignoring the thesis of the article.
This article is specifically NOT about hard schools (caltech, MIT) in fact it calls them out as counter-examples. This article is targeting prestigious, easy schools that do grade-inflation (e.g. Harvard). It is specifically accusing the easy-to-pass hard-to-get-in schools of being a mere status symbol, in turn the wider population of being silly for taking that symbol so seriously.
Ahh, a nice anti-education rant for HN to do the usual anti-college back and forth. Bonus points for focusing on technical schools as good, because you can actually get a job.
Ban the humanities, right?
I liked school. It was valuable. I have a better job because of it. I didn't spend absurd amounts of money to go.
What about opportunity cost (re: absurd amounts of money)? Do you have a better job because of all the things you learnt or because you went to school and got a degree?
Do you mean valuable as in it got you a better job or in what sense?
As someone who is happy they went to college despite it not directly helping get my current job, I believe it was valuable in that it made me more open to new things, better at developing relationships, and exposed me to different points of view. Worth the financial cost? That’s certainly debatable, but it was ultimately my decision to go and keep going.
I've come to believe that many degrees are overrated, including my own CS degree. I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time. While I don't like bootcamps, there is no reason why there are no IT trade schools. Maybe two years long. No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc. Not a degree, but a trade school. Hell, my plumber makes more than my wife and I together. He specializes in installing tankless water heaters. He makes a mint.
I've never been impressed with Ivy league or other "rarified air" educational establishments. I've worked around people from some of these places and almost to a man, they reeked of one-upmanship, my father knows..., I know..., oh, you went to <insert no-name university> while glancing down their nose at you.
I worked with a guy like this at UUNet who went to Brown. He thought he was the cat's pajamas and everyone should defer to him because he went Ivy League. Oddly enough (sarcasm), his mistakes were often corrected by those who attended the no-name schools. He never saw the error of his ways. Daddy, after all, was a prominent attorney in the DC area. Why this guy went IT is a mystery. He would have been a better fit with the other sharks and scammers in DC or on Wall Street.
If a course, especially philosophy, can't justify its existence in all the hours of lectures, it has problems.
It's fine to study something for the sake of studying it. I have no problem with a course on basket-weaving because it's an art and worthy of attention in its own right. As a center for higher learning that explores the full human experience, it's entirely justifiable that a university should consider a course in basket-weaving.
But the academy is a human institution and subject to decay. More concrete courses like math are constantly checking themselves and anyone can work through proofs and say, "no, this is wrong," and get people back on track. Your basket-weaving course, on the other hand, has no practical moorings and can drift off into irrelevancy.
FWIW, I did a minor in philosophy, and while I found it very enlightening, they pretty much admitted it was pointless.
They're hit or miss depending on the instructor. Too easy for bias to seep in in the more social science type classes.
Not regarding any particular subject though, a breadth of experiences is always good because it gives you more contexts to think in and draw analogies from. Things like the behavior of ants influencing your thinking on distributed systems, issues of group communication brought up in a Communications class relevant to server architecture (connections in a group growing as a square), queue behavior in shopping centers/theme parks, thinking of Sherlock's investigation methods while debugging, lots of examples.
This is a dangerous mindset. If anything we should be encouraging technologists to take humanity courses (whether on their own time or through school doesn’t matter).
You don’t have to look far to see examples of leaders of companies who could’ve benefited from an education in humanities (e.g Facebook). Yes it’s still possible to act unethically and immorally after an education in humanities, but the hope is that it will lessen that outcome.
Ultimately ignoring ethics in technology will lead to bad outcomes.
You either have morals or you don't. Classes don't instill them. The most moral people I've ever worked with were the Marines I served with for 8 years. I've met others, but most people are, sadly, opportunists who will gladly do what's best for them at the drop of a hat.
Your opinions about what is moral act and what is not one matter. You can do quite a lot harm while believing you are doing good things.
Besides morality, knowledge of impact of this or that o world around matters. That is diferrent then morality and you can't derive it only from own experience.
Lastly, there are plenty of near psychopaths and assholes in the army including marines. And it is not like various units did not had problems with bullying harassment and what on. Or if ships did not hit other ships recently because of chain or errors quite a few of them in ethical category.
There are bad apples everywhere. No place or team is perfect. The military, however, quickly purges the idiots and losers once they are exposed. If only this were possible in the civilian world. You tend to hear of the negatives of the military over the news, never the thousands of little, often unnoticed or undocumented missions that occur daily where the military simply does what it does.
I've met more sociopath types in IT than I ever ran into in the military. The military tends to get a bad rap in civilian circles, particularly the Marines, because they attract alpha males. It takes a certain mindset and ability to deal with vast amounts of mind games and BS to serve in the Marines, but to outsiders, this makes no sense. The near-24-hour chaos provided in training and in garrison teaches people to deal with chaos while making decisions that affect the lives of teammates. The yelling, hazing, banter, and heavy physicality teach you that in your chosen profession, there is no rose garden. As George Orwell wrote: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
Bullying should be purged, near-harmless hazing, no. It teaches rite of passage, that membership is achieved and earned, not given. I don't want to work with beta males. They get people killed. Indecisiveness in combat gets people killed. When you're in combat, you're not giving a shit about the US or any other place. You're not fighting for that. You care only about the guys to your right and left. You live or die as a team.
Morals always put the other person first. Love of family or teammates is not an emotion, but an act of the will. Love is not an emotion, it's an act of the will. You will the good of the other for other, with their best intentions in mind, even if it costs you your life.
As Jesus said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
Bullying should be purged, but is not. And others comes before individuals, except beta males and non-members. Near-harmless hazing, teaches rite of passage to membership alright, but morals are not only nor primary about how you act to your own members and friends. And maybe I don't want to be member of your group and where does it leaves your behavior toward me, exactly?
Morals have more to do with how you treat non-members and beta males and competitors.
Not sure what all that has to do with combat. Ultimately, people in IT are not in combat. Our moral questions are about which projects to work on and whether overly optimistic estimate counts as lie. Should I fight my manger to be unethical and where is the line? How much tracking is ok and am I going to develop software that breaks the law?
I am sorry for you that you had such a bad experience with humans. I, for one, had the opposite experience, and have met many decent people around the world. It was rather minority in a group of people that made things go bad.
> You either have morals or you don't. Classes don't instill them.
Morals are learned, not inherited. You can teach morals, whether in a course, or in a family. Of course, the practical side is very important here... one has to learn to resist factors that corrupt your moral values.
Quite a lot has been written on the subject of morality and ethics since Aristotle's time. Orders of magnitude more than had ever been produced at the time he was alive, in fact. I'm not convinced his Nicomachean Ethics are as definitive as your comment seems to imply.
If what you're trying to say is that anyone can learn to become ethical, then that's a reasonable opinion. But I don't think citing Aristotle usefully refutes the parent commenter's point about people either having morality or not having it, because Aristotle hardly settled the matter on any major dilemma in philosophy. Furthermore, Aristotle's Ethics go on about "right" education quite a bit - to the point that you can reasonably conclude people can't become ethical if it's not instilled in them early enough on in their life.
Taking an ethics class taught me something that in retrospect should have been obvious but wasn't to me at the time: disagreements about ethical questions come largely from a different prioritization of certain values. If I come to one ethical determination and someone else comes up with another, it's not because they didn't apply logic in the same (obviously correct) way I did. Most likely, they just have different priorities or they use a different ethical framework.
That isn't to say that ethics is completely subjective or whatever you feel like, but the class helped nudge me out of an "everyone who disagrees with me must be wrong" attitude.
Plenty of people learn this without having to take a class but in my case the class was helpful.
It is not really about affecting how people care about the study of ethics, but rather making them aware of all the trade offs on each kind so they understand better the consequences of possible actions
I agree that there's value in studying the humanities, but my understanding is that studying ethics isn't an effective means of improving people's behaviour.
I took an Ethics in Technology course, and it was awesome! We actually researched systems that were ethical gray areas, then developed them into what we thought were ethical and unethical applications. I learned a lot from that class. All of the other humanities courses I took, which had nothing to do with my area of study, were a waste of time, and diffused my learning.
> see examples of leaders of companies who could’ve benefited from an education in humanities (e.g Facebook).
Zuckerberg studied psychology, most likely it helped him learn how to manipulate people and Facebook might not have been a success without it. Not sure if this was what you meant.
Yeah, I completely disagree with on the "BS classes". Philosophy may have been one of the most interesting and important classes that I took as a CS undergrad.
> I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time.
I sincerely doubt it. For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university.
> Not a degree, but a trade school
So, only directly applicable skills, no theory and nuts-and-bolts fundamentals? Sounds far inferior to a bachelor's degree.
The software field is known for being open to talented autodidacts, in a way that, say, bridge engineering is not. That doesn't mean it makes sense to dismiss the benefits of quality formal education.
Someone with a decent bachelor's degree in computer science will have a depth and breadth of knowledge far in excess of where they'd be if they'd spent that time teaching themselves web development on the job.
> No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc
Here in the UK, a STEM degree is quite 'pure', and you aren't expected to study topics like philosophy. That doesn't mean there's no value in studying them though. If philosophy struck you as a complete waste of time, then either it was taught badly, or you failed to make the most of it.
>I sincerely doubt it. For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university.
I think you kind of just made the point. Why would I pay for something that isn’t practical?
Because what may prove practical over a long term may not do so in the short or medium term.
And because what counts as “practicality” changes as people progress through their careers, but the foundations required to meet each new standard of what counts as practical often remain the same (or change less).
That's perhaps the key point. I have engineering degrees (not CS) yet I work for a software tech company and do a lot of things that are much more about a broader liberal arts education and extracurricular activities than they are about specific technical courses I took. And, even when I did work as an engineer, it mostly wasn't in an area where I directly applied coursework.
And my business courses have helped a lot more in both undergrad and as an MBA dropout.
Most of us are working to increase business value for companies - either by making them money or by saving them money. They could care less about “Cracking the Code” and LeetCode.
As long as I have been doing this professionally - over 2 decades and before that 10 years as a hobbyist writing 65C02 assembly and C. I can honestly say that at this point in my career, the computer science part of what I learned hasn’t really helped me besides one course in data structures. That was only because I spent over a decade doing C.
Most developers won’t be doing that these days.
As my career has progressed, it’s moved further away and at higher levels of abstractions. These days even hardware is abstracted behind an API with cloud providers.
I assume what the parent meant was a "data structures and algorithms" course, compared with say, "How to code in Java using the standard library".
The latter is "practical" - you can take what you learn and churn out code in Java.
The former is "non-practical" - you can't make the theories you now understand function without a practical implementation. But you can recognize the implementation in any environment, and understand its implications.
The general assertion is that an understanding of the "non-practical" will serve you longer than a purely "practical" education. I tend to agree.
A concrete example: My firewall rule is set to deny all incoming TCP connections except those originating from port 80, and destined for port 80. Why is it blocking all my HTTP connection attempts?
If you understand TCP, you'll understanding that we shouldn't be filtering on source port at all. If you have only the vague sort of understanding that comes from using a technology in practice but never having properly studied it, you might have no idea.
And yet I'd still count that as 'non-practical knowledge'. It isn't something you're ever going to apply 'directly', unless you're one of the handful of people implementing their own TCP stack.
There's similar value in studying complexity theory (why does this seemingly simple code take so long?), operating system fundamentals (aren't containers and VMs roughly the same though?), and compilers (for a deeper appreciation of programming in general, and, my personal favourite, to instil a due sense of terror regarding undefined behaviour in C-family languages).
While not everything learned in an undergraduate computer science program is practical in the sense that you'll use it all the time in the real world, there are a fair number of topics that while not necessary 99% of the time turn out to be the best solution that other 1% of the time. Finite state automata, for example, isn't something I'd bother to learn about but has proven helpful a handful of times.
In the US it's quite common for a BS in comp sci to include 1+ year of required liberal arts courses as a "general education" requirement.
It's not a stretch to look at this and wonder if a more focused 2-3 year or 4 year degrees would produce an equivalent or better result.
Disagree. University education is not just about learning how to do something,but more about developing yourself as a person and those additional courses are necessary. CS graduates with little to no exposure to other areas or fields are useless.This eventually results in people who's first email is 'send me the details to your api' instead of asking what issues I'm having,why i'm having and etc. There are also so many businesses opportunities that only become visible after exploring various fields, including liberal arts.
I continue to find great value in the Liberal Arts courses that I took when I went to University. Philosophy, in particular, serves me a great deal: it has helped me to understand the world and personal narratives that I live under, and aided me in finding an ethical framework that I might not have developed otherwise.
Regardless, courses in English, Literature, and other courses I had to take outside of my main coursework for Computer Science has made my personal experience better, I believe, or at least more fulfilling.
I believe that it is also the job of a good education to prepare someone to be a good member of a Democracy, and as part of that one must be able to accept other tolerant points of view, and be able to reach compromise. Courses all throughout our education should aid us in developing the empathy necessary for the process to work. It appears that we have failed, in the US, in this regard. Quite horribly.
In some Universities these mandatory Liberal Arts "electives" are fluffy filler topics where you are forced to buy the textbook written by the lecturer. You can only choose between four equally fluffy filler topics per semester.
I was fucking furious when I realized I'd been duped. I'm a voracious omnivore and I do believe Universities should promote wider learning but this was a straight up money extraction scam.
I think it is worse the other way around though. Science majors generally have to take real history and English classes, often side by side with humanities students. Humanities majors generally are corralled into things like "Biology and You" and "Physics for Poets". It's unfortunate because it isn't surprising that these people then fall for the postmodern critique of science as nothing particularly special because they've only been exposed to dumbed-down versions of it.
Watching my daughter struggle with some difficult course choices that she made in high school, I find it troubling how our entire grading system works.
We shouldn't be punished for choosing difficult courses, and actually learning the material, even if it is slightly behind the pace of the course itself. Unfortunately, doing so has implications for your entire future in the United States (unless you have the money to buy your way into college, of course).
I've been thinking about this comment a lot the last few days.
It could be specific to the University I went to, or some aspect of the fact that I went to a Jesuit University that made the quality of the philosophy coursework I took so high.
Define "better"? I'd argue that the general lack of critical thought, ethics, and compassion for humanity in general - including those with rarefied STEM degrees - is a direct result of not enough liberal arts classes during college.
Then again, twenty-five years ago I wouldn't have even entertained the idea that more liberal education classes for me would serve me and the world around me better. It wasn't until I started reading those books out of curiosity later in life that I really appreciated their value.
Your last paragraph really sums up my perception of the liberal arts courses I was required to take: they don't have value at this point in my life. They are a large waste of time, and a massive waste of money. I would be quite happy taking those courses later on in life, at my leiser, when the opportunity cost they incur is not nearly so high.
Too much of that stuff is indoctrination and opinion being passed off as education as of late.
It results in people who believe they are "educated" because they have learned to hold certain opinions. And judging others "education" by the opinions they hold rather than fact that they know.
That isn't to say an understanding of history, of languages etc isn't worth having, it certainly is. Some of the other stuff not so much.
Additionally, the sad reality on the ground often is a person is judged as educated by the display of indoctrination they receive, so practically speaking, at this point in time it does have some value can open doors. But that's kind of BS really imo, and I don't care for it.
Ahhhh this is a whole new can of worms. I have a personal anecdote about the educational indoctrination issue as well: I transferred colleges between 2nd and 3rd year. My new university's registration system would not allow me to register for classes until I'd completed their "Cultural Inclusivity Module". This was about 6 hours of clicking through a pretty (but disfunctional) web app which would have you read several pages, then ask you 10 questions. If you missed more than one, it would put you back on the first page, forcing you to do a minimum timed rereading of the content. The module was entirely fluff about how I am not allowed to perform microagressions against cultural ideas that I disagree with, even if they are despicable. It was full of factual errors, incomplete sentences and ideas, and the best of all, sometimes at the end of a section when I went to submit my answers, the submit button would be grayed out, forcing me to go through the mind fucking content again. I ended up refusing to do it, had a conference with the dean where I explained that no where in my obligations to the school did I agree to perform classes for no credit, against my will, while paying for them. Twas quite a time to be alive!
This is a real problem, and it does undermine the comp sci degree. Some people are completely intimidated by programming and immediately give up, they get enough credits through the modules that don’t require any actual coding and then do their dissertation on something totally abstract.
I think these students are failed by the system as programming’s core concepts are quite basic, it seems to be the tooling around it that students struggle with.
Computer Science is not there to prepare you to be a good software developer.
Comp Sci is 'Sci' :)
It just so happens that being a good programmer is mostly an applied skill, and that you don't have to have rocket science Comp Sci chops to be a decent developer.
In fact, in 2019, a lot of development just isn't really Comp Sci.
That said, I wonder if programs should adapt and be more applied to have more of a professional kind of designation.
Think of chemistry vs. chemical engineering. Chemistry worries about atoms and molecules, and the reactions that transform one set of molecules into another set. Chemical engineering worries about efficiently producing the desired reactions, at scale, without blowing up the factory. Chemists don't spend much time thinking about pipe bursting strength; chemical engineers do. Sure, a chemical engineer needs to know a fair amount of chemistry, but someone with a chemistry degree is not ready to be a chemical engineer.
It's the same way with CS. It should be part of the college of science, just like chemistry. Software engineering should be a separate discipline, and be within the college of engineering. And having a CS degree doesn't really prepare you to work as a software engineer.
Unfortunately, what we have is CS departments turning out graduates, most of whom will work as software engineers rather than computer scientists, and who are therefore badly trained for the career that they're going to try to have...
It's a good analogy. The reason I didn't use it is because I'm a Computer Engineer myself, not Comp Sci and I still don't think I was remotely prepared for the workplace!
Partly due to the fact 'Engineering' is a hard thing to apply in the computer world.
Partly because software R&D and Enterprise Software isn't engineering either!
>I sincerely doubt it. For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university.
This is just nonsense. I would go so far as to say that I never actually learned anything in my undergrad CS classes. A combination of challenging internships and personal curiosity let me to teach myself everything I was taught in school before I was taught it in school. Of course, I only got those internships in the first place because I went to a good school and had connections that I gained by attending that school, but the idea that an otherwise competent developer can't teach themselves CS theory efficiently on their own is totally absurd.
Furthermore, being taught CS fundamentals in a university is far from a good indicator of developer ability. I've interviewed a shocking number of candidates with at least a BS in computer science who were completely unable to complete incredibly simple exercises (think similar in complexity to FizzBuzz). I expect developers to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals, but they also need to be able to actually apply those fundamentals. CS departments are utterly failing in that regard.
I learnt plenty in my CS courses. I just don’t use most of them, and most of the skills I do use I didn’t learn there. That does not mean it was a waste of time - knowing the theory behind various data structures, algorithms, and circuitry make programming more satisfying for me.
> I would go so far as to say that I never actually learned anything in my undergrad CS classes.
I'm not sure whether to think your school had an awful CS program or you went into your classes with the wrong attitude.
There are lots of practical skills that get taught in universities that aren't direct trade knowledge -- you didn't feel like you learned how to learn? Or were exposed to new ideas and parts of the field that you otherwise wouldn't know about?
> For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university.
God forbid you don't even consider that you're wrong. "Wrong attitude" signaling is pathetic.
> There are lots of practical skills that get taught in universities that aren't direct trade knowledge
That's a problem, but it's also hyperbole. I mean, I'm talking to a 1998 CS/EE from Berkeley who couldn't bother to try to repair his own power supply because it has a danger sticker on it. What you learn in University is to be so blind in your lane, that you don't even recognize it. It's the antithesis of learning to learn.
> A combination of challenging internships and personal curiosity let me to teach myself everything I was taught in school before I was taught it in school.
Which doesn't mean that their CS program wasn't teaching anything worthwhile, just that it didn't have a monopoly on that value. It also doesn't mean that they had the wrong attitude; on the contrary, I think learning out of self-interest is a much better attitude than waiting for that knowledge to be fed to oneself in a classroom.
Oh, practical skills, eh? Debugging? Nope. Version control? Nope. Testing? Nope (at least, no class directly about testing---you were on your own to get your programs working). Multithreading? Nope. ML? Okay, an introductory course in AI involving LISP. Functional programming? Nope. Declarative programming? A bit of SQL and that's it. Design patterns? Nope.
Out of that list, I think the only thing I hadn't heard about prior to attending college was multithreading [1]. They did cover a lot of theoretical material though. In fact, there were a few professors in the computer science department that despised computers and barely touched the things (personally, I think they were failed math professors).
[1] I attended university in the late 80s/early 90s.
Which university? Sounds like the course offerings were weak or you selected poorly. (Though early-90s CS programs were different than today -- truly a different era).
It was a state university. Their stand out program was in ocean engineering (much better than MIT's program), and the computer science department was new when I attended.
This mirrors my own experience in college. Lower level CS classes (with an EXCELLENT professor, Scholler) helped to fill in a a few important gaps, but 90% of the information from my classes I already knew and had been using for a couple years prior to college.
Also, all of the BS humanities and other non-pertinent classes were entirely useless, and for many it seemed the curriculum was entirely politically driven; learned very little from these.
> I sincerely doubt it. For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university
IBEW electricians apprentice program is 5 years long. 6 months classroom, 6 months on a job site, repeat for 5 years until you're a journeyman.
IMO the exact same pattern would be more effective than a 4 year degree any day. I've interviewed 100s of college grads at a top tech company, and I used to teach a bootcamp program. My 14 week bootcamp grads were more useful than any college grad I've interviewed, but had weak understanding of the fundamentals. If that bootcamp was 2 years I could've probably gotten them up to speed. If that classroom time was intermixed with actual industry experience they'd come out the other end ready to hit the ground running.
> were more useful than any college grad I've interviewed, but had weak understanding of the fundamentals
That's the issue with bootcamps, along with the cost.
A local bootcamp (Wyncode) is 11 weeks at $10,000, which is ridiculous. 1-2 programming classes at a local school can probably supplement your fundamentals, honestly, Operating Systems, Parallel Programming, and Senior Project would probably be the most useful courses for a bootcamp grad.
I don't think you understand what a bootcamp is. The one I taught was 14 weeks of 40 hours per week classroom plus an additional 20+ hours of homework. It is BY FAR the most bang for your buck for practical hands on coding skills. A couple programming classes isn't even in the same universe.
Beyond that, our course material was bleeding edge. When some new hottness came out we incorporated it into our curriculum. Colleges have too much bureaucracy to keep up with the latest tech trends.
I think it's wonderful that a bootcamp leaves out requirements that involve stuff like sociology, art history, community service, political science, and similar undesired gunk.
I think it is tolerable that a bootcamp leaves out 3 semesters of calculus, 3 semesters of physics, 2 semesters of discrete math, 1 semester of statistics, 1 semester of digital logic, more math, and more science. The value here is limited.
What is terrible is that a bootcamp usually neglects anything outside of one narrow specialty that happens to be popular, typically web development. The typical bootcamp isn't teaching how to create a compiler, an OS, factory automation, life-critical software, or hard real-time software.
> IBEW electricians apprentice program is 5 years long. 6 months classroom, 6 months on a job site, repeat for 5 years until you're a journeyman.
I mean, I did that for my CS degree. It was 8 months classroom, 4 months in the field, but pretty close, right? And I got paid pretty good money for those 4 months in the field!
I'll never understand the others in my program that didn't try to find internships.
> Someone with a decent bachelor's degree in computer science will have a depth and breadth of knowledge far in excess of where they'd be if they'd spent that time teaching themselves web development on the job.
Also, zero professional judgement, and more likely than not, not even knowing what they are missing. Engineering curricula have their problems but at least fresh MEs and EEs IME realize that they don't know anything. Fresh CS grads come in and want to do a rewrite--in a language not used anywhere else in the company no less. Give me a self taught guy any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
> zero professional judgement, and more likely than not, not even knowing what they are missing. Engineering curricula have their problems but at least fresh MEs and EEs IME realize that they don't know anything. Fresh CS grads come in and want to do a rewrite--in a language not used anywhere else in the company no less
I agree with all of this.
I suspect it's due at least in part to the way the software world has an attitude of move fast and break things, whereas bridge engineers and aeronautical engineers are shown disaster photos to emphasise the point that If you screw up in your professional responsibilities, you may kill hundreds of people.
You don't ask a fresh graduate to single-handedly design a bridge. If you did, I like to imagine they'd be sufficiently terrified that they'd decline, and not just because of the legal regulations.
There is no such 'culture of responsibility' in the software world, excepting a few life-critical problem domains.
I suspect universities could reduce the fresh graduate know-it-all effect if they made the effort:
* Teach students about the cognitive biases that will cause them to overestimate their own expertise early in their careers
* Related: teach them the principle of Chesterton's Fence (especially valuable in junior developers)
Also, perhaps explicitly enumerate the skills that they simply will not have on day 1 in industry -- the skills that cannot really be taught in a university -- such as:
* The ability to work effectively with with legacy systems that are large, badly written, use inconsistent style, and are poorly documented (like a boxer, much of a developer's job is simply to cope with chaos)
* The ability to communicate effectively with non-technical customers (coursework is a poor simulacrum)
> Give me a self taught guy any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Perhaps if you're hiring them for a 6 month stint, this might make good sense.
I'm not saying a degree is a substitute for industry experience, I'm saying there's value in what's taught, and that developers are unlikely to ever learn those things on the job.
> developers are unlikely to ever learn those things on the job
On the job, you're probably right. But if someone happens to be the type of person that sees a link about a new asymptotically fastest multiplication algorithm and ends up spending an hour reading about karatsuba multiplication then he or she is likely to catch up after too many years, and then pass the formally educated that aren't so inclined.
So if you'll take a friendly amendment I'd say:
- If you want someone for a six month stint, go self taught
- If your company is using the tournament model and you churn through juniors in two or three years on average, go with CS grads (careful of those sharp edges though)
- If you are looking to invest in employees for the long term, go with lifelong learners regardless of credentials
> she is likely to catch up after too many years, and then pass the formally educated that aren't so inclined.
I'm not sure about this. It seems to me that this really downplays the value of attending a good university.
Speaking for myself, I really can't imagine 'catching up with myself' had I not gone to university.
I wouldn't have developed my writing skills. I likely wouldn't have seen what proper grown-up mathematics looks like. I wouldn't have seen how academics work, up close. I can't honestly say I would likely have studied the various dry-but-valuable topics that universities are known for. I'd probably have a much harder time reading computer science research papers.
Additionally, universities teach students how to learn independently. I don't think this should be underestimated.
> If you want someone for a six month stint, go self taught
Well, kinda. If you want someone for a six month stint, and your choice is somehow between a green-horn graduate and a seasoned developer who never went to university, then sure, you're probably best off with the experienced developer.
(Assuming of course that the problem domain doesn't require any particular technical specialism.)
There's a reason large companies run training programmes for fresh graduates: they want people with formal training and the necessary working knowledge.
> If your company is using the tournament model and you churn through juniors in two or three years on average, go with CS grads
I'm sure this happens, but I'm not sure it makes any sense. I know it's the norm for software professionals to move jobs every few years to get the raise they deserve, but I'm not convinced this is in the interests of the employers. They have spend considerable effort bringing their replacement up to speed.
> If you are looking to invest in employees for the long term, go with lifelong learners regardless of credentials
I don't follow. Credentials reflect expertise and achievement, it's just that they aren't the whole picture. Do Google recruiters discount the grades of their applicants? No, they're looking for top-flight hires, and grades are an important part of that.
> there is no known learning environment that beats a university.
I've tried university twice and left both times before getting a degree. We are utterly incompatible, despite my grades being in the top 1% from an academic standpoint (And while attending my GPA was 4.0)
I was headhunted in 1st year (the first time) and never looked back. I've come across many 'self motivated' coders like myself who thrive in all things IT, without needing to be spoonfed.
> no theory and nuts-and-bolts fundamentals?
I've done digital and electronics and full stack engineering, written compilers, embedded systems, 3D engines and modellers, etc, etc.
I think that suffices as 'nuts and bolts'. I'm only yet to write my own OS.
When hiring, I would basically ignore the degree and look at their work: their code and their ability to communicate their understanding of it.
I think we live in two different worlds indeed! I'm more like OP and like getting down and dirty. I see problems (in the marketplace) and I make solutions - however they come whether it be JS or ASM.
> We are utterly incompatible, despite my grades being in the top 1% from an academic standpoint (And while attending my GPA was 4.0)
It seems fairly clear then that you aren't representative.
> When hiring, I would basically ignore the degree and look at their work: their code and their ability to communicate their understanding of it.
This could well be a wise strategy. I'm not saying academic achievement is the best predictor of industry success - there are plenty of horror stories of seemingly impressive graduates failing fizzbuzz.
It seems clear to me though that for many of us, a CS degree is the proper way to start one's tech career.
> I'm more like OP and like getting down and dirty
But you're clearly quite capable at working with advanced topics 'behind the code'. This can't be said of all professional programmers. There are plenty of code monkeys out there who don't even understand basic data-structures, let alone the concepts behind compilers and rendering engines.
> I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time.
I think people with CS degrees working the field could probably re-cover all of the content of their degree in 4-5 months of independent study, however, there's a lot of school which is deliberative practice. Hours that you need to spend getting good at understanding concepts, writing proofs and building the skill of critical thinking in a computing context.
I think post graduation there's a tendency to compress that period and forget about the hours of practice and just being terrible at building things that it took to gain the craftsman's mind.
I think it is true that it takes a lot of practice to develop implementation skill but that is largely optional in cs. You can graduate from cs programs with no implementation skills and only the ability to talk about programming.
> I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time.
I'm sure this does apply to almost everyone - given a specific curriculum and removing constraints people could learn things faster.
But that doesn't mean that without the constraints you could come up with the same curriculum and still learn things you're not forced to learn immediately.
On the other hand, I have a BSME from Caltech. For all degrees, Caltech required 3 years of math, 2 years of physics, one of chemistry, a chemlab, 3 of humanities. My career is one of programming, after a stint at Boeing.
The point is, if I was only a self-taught programmer, it never would have occurred to me to take those "irrelevant" physics classes. But those classes, along with the mechanical engineering classes, math, etc., have helped improve my programming in quite unexpected ways.
There's also the simple pleasure of knowing how things work. I'm able to figure out why my car doesn't work, and when the mechanic is giving me a line of bull. Many, many features of the house I live in was the result of my diverse education. (For example, don't use iron nails to hold copper. Don't run cat5 cables through the same holes as the 125V wires.)
Two other courses everyone should take, and I think they should be in high school, are basic accounting and learning how to touch type. These will pay off for your entire life. A very good investment. Public speaking, too.
"I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time."
If you were just looking for a specific skill or job training then Uni may have not been the place for you.
"I've never been impressed with Ivy league or other "rarified air" educational establishments."
I did undergrad at a great but niche school and Grad school at a fairly exceptional school and there is a difference. The top schools generally have the best profs, students, facilities. It was inspiring and motivating, and the relationships and networks do matter as well.
As far as 'looking down their noses' ... this comes in two parts 1) they are doing it, sometimes without knowing it but 2) often we perceive 'snobbery' when really it's just our own insecurity. When we perceive someone to be of higher social status (ie our perception), or, when we think that they may perceive us as having lower social status, then I think we have a tendency to interpret every little thing as snobbery, when really it might be nothing at all.
You make great points, and thank you for responding with zero perceived animosity, a rarity these days.
Personally, I'm not insecure. I grew up military, and served for 8 years. I'm you're atypical alpha male. I have will and intent in spades, but I care deeply for other people. Let me explain...
My time in the Corps taught me that we are all equal, no matter our origins. I don't play favorites, be it education, time in position, man/woman, it doesn't matter. I believe in earned merit. Full stop. I treat everyone with dignity and respect, but merit is earned and demonstrated. I don't yell at juniors, I lead from the front. There is nothing I will not do for a teammate who tries their best. I tell my teammates even now, please, make mistakes. It's healthy. If you bork a production server, and you did your best, but made mistakes, we'll fix it together. You learn, and I'll learn along with you, because maybe I could have done something better, like documentation, or settings. Good leaders are open to correction. If your ideas are better than mine, convince me. If you're right, I stand corrected. If you're wrong, I still want you to keep stabbing forward. I encourage experimentation, tinkering, and always improving.
As far as social status, I've never been envious of those from that arena. I just don't care. I look like Shaggy Rogers if that says anything. I can afford a much nicer car than I drive, but I don't care. Ditto my clothes. It's point A-B for me. I'd rather my children have better clothes, nicer treats, and time spent together. I have zero tolerance for social snobbery, as it shows an air of superiority that is not real. If you (metaphorically) think you're better than me, let's see how things go when the power is out, the food stops being delivered, and your apps don't work. Me? I would thrive in this world should it happen. When the zombies are coming, you'll be running to my house.
We have those in Belgium and they work great. It's three years and you'll go out with a "professional" bachelor's degree in applied IT, with one of the specialisations being software development. I did this and am now an engineer at Facebook five years later, so they work at least to some extent, and in Belgium attract about the same numbers computer science BSc's do.
You start off right away with object oriented programming basics and simple algorithms, with most of your first year dedicated to those, design patterns, basic maths, basic communication (English and French in our case).
Second year moves into specialisations (networking, business systems design, or software development). I did software development and that's where the Java enterprise projects come in (applying design patterns), some Android programming, some more advanced algorithm stuff (still easy on the whole, similar level to the leetcode questions at FB interviews), ...
The final year will have some side courses on introduction to law (focus on copyright), some stuff about extreme programming, some communication, a bigger project and then the second half will be an internship.
And that's it. No crazy math, no super theoretical stuff, only basic non-engineering skills with a focus on the things that are practical skills as a software engineer.
I felt prepared for the professional world after that. Maybe not the things where you micro-optimise algorithms, build low-level tools and languages. But it definitely gave me a fantastic basis to join a web development company. Enough knowledge about programming and patterns to be able to pick up new languages and be productive in them fast.
You'll see few people with this degree in the hard computer science jobs, but I do think (having seen both) that people straight from school with my degree are better at just building applications on top of existing frameworks. We had practical experience with a lot of popular tools at school, and maybe less hang-ups about not always sticking with the theoretical most efficient way if it'd take longer to implement.
This type of education exists, works and has it's place.
(Note: I actually dropped out after three years without finishing the internship and without passing some of the non-coding courses because I had a nice job offer. I did do every subject so basically have the education, just not the proof.)
Totally agree with this. I've been saying for at least 10 years that Software Engineer should be a trade not something you go to university for. If you want to be a researcher then academia is the right path, but if you want to build software a trade program / apprenticeship would be much more effective imo.
I've interviewed 100s of university grads and most of them don't know how to actually do anything useful. They have the foundations to grow into the position, but they certainly need someone to hold their hand for a while.
One great example is IBEW electricians. They do a 5 year program. 6 months class room, 6 months on a job site as an apprentice applying the skills learned. Repeat for 5 years with gradual pay raises until you hit journeyman and it jumps up to full union scale.
I think the exact same type of program would work GREAT for software engineering. Learning for 4 months in a vacuum and THEN working in the industry for the first time is a terrible idea. However, doing 6 months back and forth would allow you to apply what you learn and more importantly to learn what you don't know so you can focus on those things during the classroom segments.
> I've come to believe that many degrees are overrated, including my own CS degree. I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time.
I think I have something to add to this. During the course of completing a Ph.D. in computer science I discovered that I actually have a huge passion for behavioral ecology. For the first years of my Ph.D. I just treated it like a side hobby and tried to learn as much about it on my own. Halfway though the Ph.D. I decided I might as well take some intro bio courses and as many ecology/evolution courses as possible since my tuition was being paid for anyways. The amount that the coursework improved my learning rate was incredible even though I was spending approximately the same amount of time as before.
As to why I think it is a combination of many factors. One of the main ones being held accountable to truly mastering the material (tests, projects, homeworks etc...).
This is just a sample of 1, but from my experience the classroom experience was a huge net benefit to learning about a subject I really cared about.
Not wanting to insult, but im often called as a firemen to projects that have been run and run-into-the-ground by self-tought people.
I do not believe that university fullfills a really good role when it comes to filtering for intelligence, it rather filters for familys who put pressure to preservere on kids.
But they do a really good job, on forcing people through stuff, that a self-tought person might skip- because they found it useless or not applicable. Algorithm theory and the limits of computation? That is a dry topic and tough to get through without beeing forced too.
Software-architecture? Cant see me using that- those small projects i worked on always worked well without.
And so on and so forth.
University does one thing right, it forces you to be interested in stuff you do not know you should be interested in.
I do find the filtering out of people who go to university - either by school grades or by monetary parent background really nasty though. In my eyes, anyone who is shown to apply himself, should be able to stay at a higher education.
This is a good point, though for most people, valuable skills are often "dry" and undesirable like plumbing, so someone who was really passionate might've persevered on his own anyways. Even if academia has the merit of making you persevere through a class you wouldn't have on your own, it's not efficient; Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes.
Front-loading on dry subjects also has the downside of scaring away people who would've otherwise done well given a different path of learning.
The timing of when you learn some things is also important; it matters not if you learned software architecture in college only to have all the knowledge become obsolete by the time you really need that skill - you'd have to review or worse relearn it by yourself all over again.
> Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes.
There's no way to know in advance which of those classes you won't need, though. Programming has become very specialized; it's no longer possible for a University to provide an education sufficient to prepare a student for the work they'll be doing in the "real world" because there's so much variability from one job to the next. Having a broad education, though, puts a person in a situation where they can more readily adapt to a wide variety of roles than they would without that background knowledge.
I went to a school that is pretty much as you described. A 2 year intensive program designed to make you productive right out of the gate. We still took math, operating systems, computer architecture, and the like, but in general there was a big focus on writing a lot of code (often doing so in groups), and learning how to communicate effectively. It wasn't perfect, but it was absolutely the best decision for someone like me where programming wasn't my first career.
Do you mind sharing what school you went to? My partner is looking at getting into software engineering and I don't think a bootcamp is comprehensive enough for them and would prefer they look for schools like this.
It's been almost 20 years since I completed my degree.
Three things that I got out of it:
- engineering processes,
- data structures and modelling, and
- algorithms and the application
Learning to code well in a particular language you really did in your own time, and that never stops.
It was those fundamentals and learning how to apply software engineering to develop a solution to a problem that I came away with.
You could learn those fundamentals from a book, but the degree should really be an indicator that you have mastered those basics.
Given the risk of privacy and security breaches and the financial/legal consequences if you get it wrong, it's probably time there was an IEEE/AMA/Bar equivalent that signals that you have that understanding and rigorous process.
I respect what you say for the most part, but I'd like to offer my opinion that philosophy is not BS. Nor is history, or literature, or a slew of other academic disciplines which are unlikely to help a person find employment.
The author highlights that none of the students attempted admission to Caltech or MIT. Going further, I would venture that none enrolled in a science program but opted for a standard liberal arts/communications program. If you tailor your course choices such programs are pretty hard to flunk out of as opposed to science programs where the moment of truth hits during the first calculus/physics/chemistry exam.
To be fair, if you ask the average guy on the street which is the better school, Yale or MIT? They're gonna say Yale. If you ask the average guy which is better, Stanford or CalTech? They're gonna say Stanford.
We, on HN, might think MIT is better than Stanford, but outside of the bubble, believe it or not, there is an entire world of people who never even heard of CalTech. A world of people who have no idea what MIT is.
There is no point in using something for conspicuous consumption, unless that something is actually conspicuous.
> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not graduate many future elites
> As long as Ivy League alumni occupy positions of power, academic credentials will remain costly and scarce. Ongoing credential inflation is not evidence of a bubble about to burst, but a reflection of how successful the elites are at convincing the greater populace that degrees are valuable.
The underlying implication of the article doesn't seem to be hit home. If "good" schools don't produce rich powerful/people, but "name" schools do, that's because there is heavy corruption by the established elite to favor their alma mater's to make sure their degrees remain valuable - is I think a core tenet of the article.
Tell that to the many tech and other companies who only want to recruit from what they see as the "top" schools. If you don't come from that tier, you are locked out of many, many opportunities -- you can be better at your job than most but without the ivy league degree you are nothing.
The Caltech argument in this argument doesn't take into account that Caltech is a very small school. They enroll around 200 new undergrad students a year which is about 1/10 the number most Ivy league schools admit. I think this is the primary factor why you don't see many big name Caltech grads, there aren't as many of them. Especially when you are comparing Caltech to ALL Ivy league schools grouped together.
This, and the fact that they're a technical school by nature. Politics and business garners more news cycles than hard science, and hence skews peoples perception of the prestige of a university or success of their alumni. Look at the number of Nobel prizes per capita and Caltech blows Harvard out of the water. 17 Nobel prizes over 22k living alum for Caltech, versus 48 over 371k for Harvard. Even if you only look at financial success, CalTech still comes out ahead in both early and mid-career (https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors). They should try comparing to a state school with similar academic focus and ratings.
TL;DR: Small school focusing on low-visibility fields is a poor comparison.
The xITs are known for doing math and science courses. Those kinds of things tend to show quite easily who is putting in the effort, at least in my experience. For one, you tend to get asked things that require knowledge of a specific model eg thermodynamics, and very often you're asked to calculate specific numbersa and mentioned very specific keywords. I've sat in tutorials with professors where the other student literally did not know anything and it was embarrassing.
Chances are of you found the number you understood at least something about the model. And if you showed your working out, which is always a good idea, you provide more quite specific evidence.
In stuff that's more essay based, the weak can hide and the strong can be mistaken for middling. Essays can be long but still formulaic: talk about the question, mention the main things people have suggested about it, pros and cons. There's a lot of permutations of arguments that are valid, making it hard to disqualify someone who has mentioned a few relevant things. But also hard to make someone stand out, because people know the answer required is a bunch of bullet points, and if you just fire enough bullets some will resemble a smart answer. I've sat in essay subject tutorials that went perfectly fine for everyone despite very little prep having gone in.
Back to the article, naturally you don't want to buy your way into a degree that you have no hope of completing.
In my grandfathers time, compulsory schooling finished at 12. By my fathers time it had risen to 14. By my time 16, commonly rising to 18.
I think we are simply seeing another generational rise.
And why not - human beings one big advantage is our brains - and training our young to use that advantage as best we can is the single best ROI we can make ().
Will it cost us? Yes. Will it benefit us. Yes.
()there are many others as my socialist soul will tell you)
The face that it can be used as a social signal doesn't mean it is exclusively used so.
> Online courses (and before that, public libraries) rendered institutions of higher learning unnecessary for, you know, learning. But the idea that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will replace colleges is a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of a university degree.
I think the author misunderstands as well. Classic "if it's in a book then the class is worthless".
Information is not the teaching. The idea is that a teacher can instruct better than a mere textbook. YMMV, but there's no denying that having a pre-planned curriculum with instruction and 1:1 Q&As inherently supersedes walking into a store and hoping you can find and understand the right books in general. Never mind that books don't grade or provide feedback on homework, etc.
The problem is that university became a requisite for people who didn't want to attend. Standards for what the teaching we expect of universities has plummeted. That's why they work so hard to keep their brand. For the self-motivated and good learners, MOOCs and libraries can replace big parts of university. That's not for everyone.
> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not graduate many future elites. Alumni go on to be successful in their academic fields, but don’t tend to dominate finance, tech or politics.
A school exclusively for technical competence doesn't produce as many social elite [citation needed] as a school that's not focused on technical competence? I wonder why. How many of the financial elite came from mechanical engineering background at all? It's a silly comparison.
Side note: Don't forget it's an order of magnitude smaller, CalTech has ~2,200 students in contrast to Harvard's ~22,000.
> Successful parents in the upper middle class can leave money to their children, but that doesn’t guarantee entrée into the social elite. The more reliable way for powerful parents to buy power for their children is through a name-brand, exclusive education.
> Jared Kushner’s father famously secured Harvard acceptance for his son with a $2.5 million charitable contribution.
When did people making $2.5m donations become "upper middle class"?
These are all good points. Also, I think another point often missed in the discussion around social signaling is that certain schools create a higher opportunity for a reference check. Upon reviewing a candidate early in her career, if she went to X, I know someone who graduated the same year, I can ask that friend/co-worker what that person is like. I think this is especially beneficial when someone doesn't work at a large company their first job out of school. It is less about the school name on the diploma, and more about obtaining an additional reference firsthand.
Today, degrees are a way to communicate and verify to others that you have generated and currently possess some amount of intellectual and social capital, which in the right situations can be converted to financial, political, and other hard forms of capital.
The recent scandals don't necessarily indicate a degree don't verify capital stocks, but it does clearly demonstrate the divide between those who have capital and those who do not, and the myriad methods capital perseveres in self-preservation. And as these loopholes will most likely remain open in one way or another, it will continue to teach this lesson across generations.
I think this, and numerous other blatant shows of power, underline just how important it is to federate capital across class boundaries and prevent capital concentration. The "old boys clubs" care about your pedigree. The SME CEO cares about putting food on the table for his/her family and his/her employees, and cares moreso for your merit. Greater capital distribution leads to stricter capital verification (yes you are smart in practice) due to the decentralization of trust, greater alignment between merit and success and exercise of existing talent surpluses, and higher societal cohesion due to greater class turnover.
It's a shame this piece doesn't function as much more than a Caltech/MIT endorsement.
I dropped out and hate the system as much as the next guy, but to pretend that degrees have literally zero value and exist purely as a wealth transfer mechanism is a bit shortsighted. The author discredits MOOCs in the very same breath, but forgets to mention that thousands of companies are only using a degree as a baseline and all it would take is for HR to start accepting a slightly different piece of paper.
There will always be an Ivy club, fraternities, secret societies, and so on. Flood the market with Ivy degrees and the social elite will pick something else. But those are pretty small factions if you think about everybody else, at the University of Nowhere Special.
Ironically, the current US Secretary of Education and her obsession with over-funding unregulated charter schools seems to be building a future where the only people in the country who will be allowed a chance at any education are the ones whose lives are paid for regardless of not even doing the work.
I recently saw it suggested that college admissions should operate on a lottery basis (beyond baseline academic requirements). That would surely help with socioeconomic diversity.
Truer words have never been spoken: "Forget Bribery. The Real Scam Is Pretending That Degrees Have Value".
I particularly like their solution: Increase enrollment to point of where it inflates away their value. The intrinsic value would still remain, but the bragging rights will fall away.
182 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadI don't think people have changed that much in the last few decades. Hell, in the last few millennia.
Most people who don't appear to be trainable are actually just assholes who want to make everyone else around them do the work.
I mean, what you're saying is that the ACT/SAT are extremely easy tests, so that they can be completed without really knowing math or how to read. Or you're saying that gobs and gobs of people are cheating or using bribes to get the scores they need. Because they can't really read or do math well enough to be passing these tests on their own.
I have a little trouble believing anything like that is going on. I think kids are likely passing these tests on their own merit. And are perfectly capable of doing the math and reading on the tests in question.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society
Also, if I were to be a marxist (which I'm not, quite the contrary, even though I do have a genuine admiration for Marx's thought) one could say that the well-off have myriad other ways of "taxing" the poor which don't necessarily involve direct monetary transactions, like asking those members of the poor class (not sure what today's equivalent term would be) to work on top of their agreed-upon working hours with no monetary compensation (I have a feeling that the poor are a lot more likely to do over-time without compensation compared to Silicon Valley people or to big-firm lawyers).
In general, corporate management employees work very long hours.
[Citation needed]
If you're interviewing candidates and you have a candidate graduating from Stanford, one from MIT and one from Middle-of-Nowhere State - which candidates are you going to prefer? We can argue whether such preferential judgement is justified. Living near the East Coast I can tell you I've met my share of MIT grads who are idiots and Middle-of-Nowhere State grads who've been really good. Yet the perception persists. Why? Because of the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle-of-Nowhere State hasn't. Those handful of exceptional graduates skew people's perception of reality for a really long time.
Who knows? Maybe this scandal will change people's perception of these elite schools but I doubt it.
I'm not saying that you can't get a good or even great education at a community college or average state school - but I am saying that its silly to pretend that all university experiences are created equal and are just a way to consolidate class or whatever. What you do matters more than where you go, but an institution with better resources is going to have far more opportunity for its students to do meaningfully educational things.
I'm going to take a resume that has some do-nothing degree from Central Midwest State U about as seriously as one that has a do-nothing degree from Stanford on it, but I would fully expect that your average Stanford resume might have a few more interesting line-items on it than the CMSU one based simply on having more opportunities available to them.
(And for the record, I didn't attend a particularly prestigious school, and studied music in college despite working in tech now. I'm not exactly trying to defend my own background with this post).
I’m going to be more excited about the last candidate than the other two.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-right-way-to-choose-a-colle...
[1] https://ed.stanford.edu/news/first-step-choosing-right-colle...
None of our team went to elite schools, we've all worked with elite individuals (also not from elite schools).
I didn't even go to university, but through hard work, perseverance and a TON of luck, have been able to work my self up to some interesting places.
I know when I'm hiring, I look more at where a person has worked than the school they have come from.
Was that never true? Has that changed? Or by “can’t afford” do you mean “unwilling to take on debt” which is valid ... I’m just trying to understand that part of your story.
> As a result, last year the average total price paid by an MIT student receiving need-based aid was $23,000, which is less than the cost of attending the average public university as an in-state student. Overall, we awarded nearly $120 million in scholarships, and 72% of students graduated debt free.
> Those who do borrow have debt at graduation considerably lower than the national average. Nationally, in 2017, graduates of four-year colleges who borrowed owed an average of $28,699 in loans. By comparison, members of the MIT Class of 2017 who took out loans graduated with an average debt of $19,819, way below the national average.
Looks like MIT might be cheaper than the average university.
I know several people who attend UIUC with me who got accepted to MIT, Stanford, etc, but their parents couldn't afford private school.
But by the time my sister went to school, all the elite schools offered better terms.
In retrospect, someone that knew about this stuff would have told me that I could have received better financial aid, and I was probably misinterpreting some of the financial numbers. I mean, I was on my own, an 18 year old kid that was jumping into a scary world of getting into debt. I don't want none of that, give me something affordable.
there's a large gap between people that get enough aid and those that can just pay out of pocket. i got bored at the university i could afford, dropped out, and ended up in the tech startup world. MIT would have been great, but they way they assess need means people in my position (middle class) can't/won't attend. it sucks, because i would have loved the challenge and the atmosphere, but it didn't make financial sense.
Plus, you have to get approved for loans, and have parental co-signers. For me personally my parents had no interest in co-signing a $100k loan. For others their parents may have really bad credit.
If you want it enough there are probably ways, but as an non-rich 18 year old (or parent of an 18 year old) it's a a HUGE gamble to take on that kinda debt for a degree that you might not even finish and if you do it might not pay for itself.
But I can equally say the same for the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary people who never even graduated from college. This is still one of those perpetuated beliefs that just because you spent 4+ years worth of time, effort, and money to get a degree you are more likely to be better than others.
I think it's possible you'll have an easier time finding what you want if you look to the good colleges -- but only because the graduates who went there accepted the same belief that the employers do: that you need the degree to get a job. Chicken and the egg problem? Yeah, but I think it's slowly starting to change. It just takes enough young people to show the world that university is NOT needed, only the perseverance and love for what you do.
This article is specifically NOT about hard schools (caltech, MIT) in fact it calls them out as counter-examples. This article is targeting prestigious, easy schools that do grade-inflation (e.g. Harvard). It is specifically accusing the easy-to-pass hard-to-get-in schools of being a mere status symbol, in turn the wider population of being silly for taking that symbol so seriously.
Ban the humanities, right?
I liked school. It was valuable. I have a better job because of it. I didn't spend absurd amounts of money to go.
Interesing, I had the same thought about expensive artwork.
I've never been impressed with Ivy league or other "rarified air" educational establishments. I've worked around people from some of these places and almost to a man, they reeked of one-upmanship, my father knows..., I know..., oh, you went to <insert no-name university> while glancing down their nose at you.
I worked with a guy like this at UUNet who went to Brown. He thought he was the cat's pajamas and everyone should defer to him because he went Ivy League. Oddly enough (sarcasm), his mistakes were often corrected by those who attended the no-name schools. He never saw the error of his ways. Daddy, after all, was a prominent attorney in the DC area. Why this guy went IT is a mystery. He would have been a better fit with the other sharks and scammers in DC or on Wall Street.
....you totally missed the point of those classes.
It's fine to study something for the sake of studying it. I have no problem with a course on basket-weaving because it's an art and worthy of attention in its own right. As a center for higher learning that explores the full human experience, it's entirely justifiable that a university should consider a course in basket-weaving.
But the academy is a human institution and subject to decay. More concrete courses like math are constantly checking themselves and anyone can work through proofs and say, "no, this is wrong," and get people back on track. Your basket-weaving course, on the other hand, has no practical moorings and can drift off into irrelevancy.
FWIW, I did a minor in philosophy, and while I found it very enlightening, they pretty much admitted it was pointless.
Not regarding any particular subject though, a breadth of experiences is always good because it gives you more contexts to think in and draw analogies from. Things like the behavior of ants influencing your thinking on distributed systems, issues of group communication brought up in a Communications class relevant to server architecture (connections in a group growing as a square), queue behavior in shopping centers/theme parks, thinking of Sherlock's investigation methods while debugging, lots of examples.
You don’t have to look far to see examples of leaders of companies who could’ve benefited from an education in humanities (e.g Facebook). Yes it’s still possible to act unethically and immorally after an education in humanities, but the hope is that it will lessen that outcome.
Ultimately ignoring ethics in technology will lead to bad outcomes.
Besides morality, knowledge of impact of this or that o world around matters. That is diferrent then morality and you can't derive it only from own experience.
Lastly, there are plenty of near psychopaths and assholes in the army including marines. And it is not like various units did not had problems with bullying harassment and what on. Or if ships did not hit other ships recently because of chain or errors quite a few of them in ethical category.
I've met more sociopath types in IT than I ever ran into in the military. The military tends to get a bad rap in civilian circles, particularly the Marines, because they attract alpha males. It takes a certain mindset and ability to deal with vast amounts of mind games and BS to serve in the Marines, but to outsiders, this makes no sense. The near-24-hour chaos provided in training and in garrison teaches people to deal with chaos while making decisions that affect the lives of teammates. The yelling, hazing, banter, and heavy physicality teach you that in your chosen profession, there is no rose garden. As George Orwell wrote: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
Bullying should be purged, near-harmless hazing, no. It teaches rite of passage, that membership is achieved and earned, not given. I don't want to work with beta males. They get people killed. Indecisiveness in combat gets people killed. When you're in combat, you're not giving a shit about the US or any other place. You're not fighting for that. You care only about the guys to your right and left. You live or die as a team.
Morals always put the other person first. Love of family or teammates is not an emotion, but an act of the will. Love is not an emotion, it's an act of the will. You will the good of the other for other, with their best intentions in mind, even if it costs you your life.
As Jesus said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
Morals have more to do with how you treat non-members and beta males and competitors.
Not sure what all that has to do with combat. Ultimately, people in IT are not in combat. Our moral questions are about which projects to work on and whether overly optimistic estimate counts as lie. Should I fight my manger to be unethical and where is the line? How much tracking is ok and am I going to develop software that breaks the law?
> You either have morals or you don't. Classes don't instill them.
Morals are learned, not inherited. You can teach morals, whether in a course, or in a family. Of course, the practical side is very important here... one has to learn to resist factors that corrupt your moral values.
If what you're trying to say is that anyone can learn to become ethical, then that's a reasonable opinion. But I don't think citing Aristotle usefully refutes the parent commenter's point about people either having morality or not having it, because Aristotle hardly settled the matter on any major dilemma in philosophy. Furthermore, Aristotle's Ethics go on about "right" education quite a bit - to the point that you can reasonably conclude people can't become ethical if it's not instilled in them early enough on in their life.
That isn't to say that ethics is completely subjective or whatever you feel like, but the class helped nudge me out of an "everyone who disagrees with me must be wrong" attitude.
Plenty of people learn this without having to take a class but in my case the class was helpful.
Zuckerberg studied psychology, most likely it helped him learn how to manipulate people and Facebook might not have been a success without it. Not sure if this was what you meant.
I sincerely doubt it. For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university.
> Not a degree, but a trade school
So, only directly applicable skills, no theory and nuts-and-bolts fundamentals? Sounds far inferior to a bachelor's degree.
The software field is known for being open to talented autodidacts, in a way that, say, bridge engineering is not. That doesn't mean it makes sense to dismiss the benefits of quality formal education.
Someone with a decent bachelor's degree in computer science will have a depth and breadth of knowledge far in excess of where they'd be if they'd spent that time teaching themselves web development on the job.
> No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc
Here in the UK, a STEM degree is quite 'pure', and you aren't expected to study topics like philosophy. That doesn't mean there's no value in studying them though. If philosophy struck you as a complete waste of time, then either it was taught badly, or you failed to make the most of it.
I think you kind of just made the point. Why would I pay for something that isn’t practical?
And because what counts as “practicality” changes as people progress through their careers, but the foundations required to meet each new standard of what counts as practical often remain the same (or change less).
Most of us are working to increase business value for companies - either by making them money or by saving them money. They could care less about “Cracking the Code” and LeetCode.
Most developers won’t be doing that these days.
As my career has progressed, it’s moved further away and at higher levels of abstractions. These days even hardware is abstracted behind an API with cloud providers.
I assume what the parent meant was a "data structures and algorithms" course, compared with say, "How to code in Java using the standard library".
The latter is "practical" - you can take what you learn and churn out code in Java.
The former is "non-practical" - you can't make the theories you now understand function without a practical implementation. But you can recognize the implementation in any environment, and understand its implications.
The general assertion is that an understanding of the "non-practical" will serve you longer than a purely "practical" education. I tend to agree.
A concrete example: My firewall rule is set to deny all incoming TCP connections except those originating from port 80, and destined for port 80. Why is it blocking all my HTTP connection attempts?
If you understand TCP, you'll understanding that we shouldn't be filtering on source port at all. If you have only the vague sort of understanding that comes from using a technology in practice but never having properly studied it, you might have no idea.
And yet I'd still count that as 'non-practical knowledge'. It isn't something you're ever going to apply 'directly', unless you're one of the handful of people implementing their own TCP stack.
There's similar value in studying complexity theory (why does this seemingly simple code take so long?), operating system fundamentals (aren't containers and VMs roughly the same though?), and compilers (for a deeper appreciation of programming in general, and, my personal favourite, to instil a due sense of terror regarding undefined behaviour in C-family languages).
Regardless, courses in English, Literature, and other courses I had to take outside of my main coursework for Computer Science has made my personal experience better, I believe, or at least more fulfilling.
I believe that it is also the job of a good education to prepare someone to be a good member of a Democracy, and as part of that one must be able to accept other tolerant points of view, and be able to reach compromise. Courses all throughout our education should aid us in developing the empathy necessary for the process to work. It appears that we have failed, in the US, in this regard. Quite horribly.
I was fucking furious when I realized I'd been duped. I'm a voracious omnivore and I do believe Universities should promote wider learning but this was a straight up money extraction scam.
We shouldn't be punished for choosing difficult courses, and actually learning the material, even if it is slightly behind the pace of the course itself. Unfortunately, doing so has implications for your entire future in the United States (unless you have the money to buy your way into college, of course).
It could be specific to the University I went to, or some aspect of the fact that I went to a Jesuit University that made the quality of the philosophy coursework I took so high.
Regardless, I'm sorry you had that experience.
Then again, twenty-five years ago I wouldn't have even entertained the idea that more liberal education classes for me would serve me and the world around me better. It wasn't until I started reading those books out of curiosity later in life that I really appreciated their value.
Too much of that stuff is indoctrination and opinion being passed off as education as of late.
It results in people who believe they are "educated" because they have learned to hold certain opinions. And judging others "education" by the opinions they hold rather than fact that they know.
That isn't to say an understanding of history, of languages etc isn't worth having, it certainly is. Some of the other stuff not so much.
Additionally, the sad reality on the ground often is a person is judged as educated by the display of indoctrination they receive, so practically speaking, at this point in time it does have some value can open doors. But that's kind of BS really imo, and I don't care for it.
I think these students are failed by the system as programming’s core concepts are quite basic, it seems to be the tooling around it that students struggle with.
Comp Sci is 'Sci' :)
It just so happens that being a good programmer is mostly an applied skill, and that you don't have to have rocket science Comp Sci chops to be a decent developer.
In fact, in 2019, a lot of development just isn't really Comp Sci.
That said, I wonder if programs should adapt and be more applied to have more of a professional kind of designation.
It's the same way with CS. It should be part of the college of science, just like chemistry. Software engineering should be a separate discipline, and be within the college of engineering. And having a CS degree doesn't really prepare you to work as a software engineer.
Unfortunately, what we have is CS departments turning out graduates, most of whom will work as software engineers rather than computer scientists, and who are therefore badly trained for the career that they're going to try to have...
Partly due to the fact 'Engineering' is a hard thing to apply in the computer world.
Partly because software R&D and Enterprise Software isn't engineering either!
Well, no. Of course not.
Theoretical computer science, for instance, might be defined as mathematics that pertains to computation.
Rice's Theorem isn't the result of any programming. Neither is information theory.
This is just nonsense. I would go so far as to say that I never actually learned anything in my undergrad CS classes. A combination of challenging internships and personal curiosity let me to teach myself everything I was taught in school before I was taught it in school. Of course, I only got those internships in the first place because I went to a good school and had connections that I gained by attending that school, but the idea that an otherwise competent developer can't teach themselves CS theory efficiently on their own is totally absurd.
Furthermore, being taught CS fundamentals in a university is far from a good indicator of developer ability. I've interviewed a shocking number of candidates with at least a BS in computer science who were completely unable to complete incredibly simple exercises (think similar in complexity to FizzBuzz). I expect developers to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals, but they also need to be able to actually apply those fundamentals. CS departments are utterly failing in that regard.
I'm not sure whether to think your school had an awful CS program or you went into your classes with the wrong attitude.
There are lots of practical skills that get taught in universities that aren't direct trade knowledge -- you didn't feel like you learned how to learn? Or were exposed to new ideas and parts of the field that you otherwise wouldn't know about?
God forbid you don't even consider that you're wrong. "Wrong attitude" signaling is pathetic.
> There are lots of practical skills that get taught in universities that aren't direct trade knowledge
That's a problem, but it's also hyperbole. I mean, I'm talking to a 1998 CS/EE from Berkeley who couldn't bother to try to repair his own power supply because it has a danger sticker on it. What you learn in University is to be so blind in your lane, that you don't even recognize it. It's the antithesis of learning to learn.
Write a substantive counterpoint, if you want me to consider a differing opinion.
If you aren't interested in doing that, there's little point attacking me for expressing mine.
> A combination of challenging internships and personal curiosity let me to teach myself everything I was taught in school before I was taught it in school.
Which doesn't mean that their CS program wasn't teaching anything worthwhile, just that it didn't have a monopoly on that value. It also doesn't mean that they had the wrong attitude; on the contrary, I think learning out of self-interest is a much better attitude than waiting for that knowledge to be fed to oneself in a classroom.
Out of that list, I think the only thing I hadn't heard about prior to attending college was multithreading [1]. They did cover a lot of theoretical material though. In fact, there were a few professors in the computer science department that despised computers and barely touched the things (personally, I think they were failed math professors).
[1] I attended university in the late 80s/early 90s.
Today, I'd expect any recent CS graduate to have studied most, or perhaps all, of those topics. In my CS degree we covered every one of them.
(Of course, I'm simply mirroring beambot's comment, here.)
Also, all of the BS humanities and other non-pertinent classes were entirely useless, and for many it seemed the curriculum was entirely politically driven; learned very little from these.
IBEW electricians apprentice program is 5 years long. 6 months classroom, 6 months on a job site, repeat for 5 years until you're a journeyman.
IMO the exact same pattern would be more effective than a 4 year degree any day. I've interviewed 100s of college grads at a top tech company, and I used to teach a bootcamp program. My 14 week bootcamp grads were more useful than any college grad I've interviewed, but had weak understanding of the fundamentals. If that bootcamp was 2 years I could've probably gotten them up to speed. If that classroom time was intermixed with actual industry experience they'd come out the other end ready to hit the ground running.
That's the issue with bootcamps, along with the cost.
A local bootcamp (Wyncode) is 11 weeks at $10,000, which is ridiculous. 1-2 programming classes at a local school can probably supplement your fundamentals, honestly, Operating Systems, Parallel Programming, and Senior Project would probably be the most useful courses for a bootcamp grad.
Beyond that, our course material was bleeding edge. When some new hottness came out we incorporated it into our curriculum. Colleges have too much bureaucracy to keep up with the latest tech trends.
I think it is tolerable that a bootcamp leaves out 3 semesters of calculus, 3 semesters of physics, 2 semesters of discrete math, 1 semester of statistics, 1 semester of digital logic, more math, and more science. The value here is limited.
What is terrible is that a bootcamp usually neglects anything outside of one narrow specialty that happens to be popular, typically web development. The typical bootcamp isn't teaching how to create a compiler, an OS, factory automation, life-critical software, or hard real-time software.
I mean, I did that for my CS degree. It was 8 months classroom, 4 months in the field, but pretty close, right? And I got paid pretty good money for those 4 months in the field!
I'll never understand the others in my program that didn't try to find internships.
Hell if you had called any of my pears on my Mech Eng Btech (termo fluids) course an apprentice we would have told you where to shove it.
Also, zero professional judgement, and more likely than not, not even knowing what they are missing. Engineering curricula have their problems but at least fresh MEs and EEs IME realize that they don't know anything. Fresh CS grads come in and want to do a rewrite--in a language not used anywhere else in the company no less. Give me a self taught guy any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
I agree with all of this.
I suspect it's due at least in part to the way the software world has an attitude of move fast and break things, whereas bridge engineers and aeronautical engineers are shown disaster photos to emphasise the point that If you screw up in your professional responsibilities, you may kill hundreds of people.
You don't ask a fresh graduate to single-handedly design a bridge. If you did, I like to imagine they'd be sufficiently terrified that they'd decline, and not just because of the legal regulations.
There is no such 'culture of responsibility' in the software world, excepting a few life-critical problem domains.
I suspect universities could reduce the fresh graduate know-it-all effect if they made the effort:
* Teach students about the cognitive biases that will cause them to overestimate their own expertise early in their careers
* Related: teach them the principle of Chesterton's Fence (especially valuable in junior developers)
Also, perhaps explicitly enumerate the skills that they simply will not have on day 1 in industry -- the skills that cannot really be taught in a university -- such as:
* The ability to work effectively with with legacy systems that are large, badly written, use inconsistent style, and are poorly documented (like a boxer, much of a developer's job is simply to cope with chaos)
* The ability to communicate effectively with non-technical customers (coursework is a poor simulacrum)
> Give me a self taught guy any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Perhaps if you're hiring them for a 6 month stint, this might make good sense.
I'm not saying a degree is a substitute for industry experience, I'm saying there's value in what's taught, and that developers are unlikely to ever learn those things on the job.
On the job, you're probably right. But if someone happens to be the type of person that sees a link about a new asymptotically fastest multiplication algorithm and ends up spending an hour reading about karatsuba multiplication then he or she is likely to catch up after too many years, and then pass the formally educated that aren't so inclined.
So if you'll take a friendly amendment I'd say:
- If you want someone for a six month stint, go self taught
- If your company is using the tournament model and you churn through juniors in two or three years on average, go with CS grads (careful of those sharp edges though)
- If you are looking to invest in employees for the long term, go with lifelong learners regardless of credentials
I'm not sure about this. It seems to me that this really downplays the value of attending a good university.
Speaking for myself, I really can't imagine 'catching up with myself' had I not gone to university.
I wouldn't have developed my writing skills. I likely wouldn't have seen what proper grown-up mathematics looks like. I wouldn't have seen how academics work, up close. I can't honestly say I would likely have studied the various dry-but-valuable topics that universities are known for. I'd probably have a much harder time reading computer science research papers.
Additionally, universities teach students how to learn independently. I don't think this should be underestimated.
> If you want someone for a six month stint, go self taught
Well, kinda. If you want someone for a six month stint, and your choice is somehow between a green-horn graduate and a seasoned developer who never went to university, then sure, you're probably best off with the experienced developer.
(Assuming of course that the problem domain doesn't require any particular technical specialism.)
There's a reason large companies run training programmes for fresh graduates: they want people with formal training and the necessary working knowledge.
> If your company is using the tournament model and you churn through juniors in two or three years on average, go with CS grads
I'm sure this happens, but I'm not sure it makes any sense. I know it's the norm for software professionals to move jobs every few years to get the raise they deserve, but I'm not convinced this is in the interests of the employers. They have spend considerable effort bringing their replacement up to speed.
> If you are looking to invest in employees for the long term, go with lifelong learners regardless of credentials
I don't follow. Credentials reflect expertise and achievement, it's just that they aren't the whole picture. Do Google recruiters discount the grades of their applicants? No, they're looking for top-flight hires, and grades are an important part of that.
I've tried university twice and left both times before getting a degree. We are utterly incompatible, despite my grades being in the top 1% from an academic standpoint (And while attending my GPA was 4.0)
I was headhunted in 1st year (the first time) and never looked back. I've come across many 'self motivated' coders like myself who thrive in all things IT, without needing to be spoonfed.
> no theory and nuts-and-bolts fundamentals?
I've done digital and electronics and full stack engineering, written compilers, embedded systems, 3D engines and modellers, etc, etc.
I think that suffices as 'nuts and bolts'. I'm only yet to write my own OS.
When hiring, I would basically ignore the degree and look at their work: their code and their ability to communicate their understanding of it.
I think we live in two different worlds indeed! I'm more like OP and like getting down and dirty. I see problems (in the marketplace) and I make solutions - however they come whether it be JS or ASM.
It seems fairly clear then that you aren't representative.
> When hiring, I would basically ignore the degree and look at their work: their code and their ability to communicate their understanding of it.
This could well be a wise strategy. I'm not saying academic achievement is the best predictor of industry success - there are plenty of horror stories of seemingly impressive graduates failing fizzbuzz.
It seems clear to me though that for many of us, a CS degree is the proper way to start one's tech career.
> I'm more like OP and like getting down and dirty
But you're clearly quite capable at working with advanced topics 'behind the code'. This can't be said of all professional programmers. There are plenty of code monkeys out there who don't even understand basic data-structures, let alone the concepts behind compilers and rendering engines.
I think people with CS degrees working the field could probably re-cover all of the content of their degree in 4-5 months of independent study, however, there's a lot of school which is deliberative practice. Hours that you need to spend getting good at understanding concepts, writing proofs and building the skill of critical thinking in a computing context.
I think post graduation there's a tendency to compress that period and forget about the hours of practice and just being terrible at building things that it took to gain the craftsman's mind.
I'm sure this does apply to almost everyone - given a specific curriculum and removing constraints people could learn things faster.
But that doesn't mean that without the constraints you could come up with the same curriculum and still learn things you're not forced to learn immediately.
The point is, if I was only a self-taught programmer, it never would have occurred to me to take those "irrelevant" physics classes. But those classes, along with the mechanical engineering classes, math, etc., have helped improve my programming in quite unexpected ways.
There's also the simple pleasure of knowing how things work. I'm able to figure out why my car doesn't work, and when the mechanic is giving me a line of bull. Many, many features of the house I live in was the result of my diverse education. (For example, don't use iron nails to hold copper. Don't run cat5 cables through the same holes as the 125V wires.)
There absolutely are schools where programming is treated as a trade, eg: https://www.bcit.ca/study/programs/5500dipma
I've worked with several graduates from this school and I can say it produces excellent programmers, particularly for low-level systems stuff.
If you were just looking for a specific skill or job training then Uni may have not been the place for you.
"I've never been impressed with Ivy league or other "rarified air" educational establishments."
I did undergrad at a great but niche school and Grad school at a fairly exceptional school and there is a difference. The top schools generally have the best profs, students, facilities. It was inspiring and motivating, and the relationships and networks do matter as well.
As far as 'looking down their noses' ... this comes in two parts 1) they are doing it, sometimes without knowing it but 2) often we perceive 'snobbery' when really it's just our own insecurity. When we perceive someone to be of higher social status (ie our perception), or, when we think that they may perceive us as having lower social status, then I think we have a tendency to interpret every little thing as snobbery, when really it might be nothing at all.
Personally, I'm not insecure. I grew up military, and served for 8 years. I'm you're atypical alpha male. I have will and intent in spades, but I care deeply for other people. Let me explain...
My time in the Corps taught me that we are all equal, no matter our origins. I don't play favorites, be it education, time in position, man/woman, it doesn't matter. I believe in earned merit. Full stop. I treat everyone with dignity and respect, but merit is earned and demonstrated. I don't yell at juniors, I lead from the front. There is nothing I will not do for a teammate who tries their best. I tell my teammates even now, please, make mistakes. It's healthy. If you bork a production server, and you did your best, but made mistakes, we'll fix it together. You learn, and I'll learn along with you, because maybe I could have done something better, like documentation, or settings. Good leaders are open to correction. If your ideas are better than mine, convince me. If you're right, I stand corrected. If you're wrong, I still want you to keep stabbing forward. I encourage experimentation, tinkering, and always improving.
As far as social status, I've never been envious of those from that arena. I just don't care. I look like Shaggy Rogers if that says anything. I can afford a much nicer car than I drive, but I don't care. Ditto my clothes. It's point A-B for me. I'd rather my children have better clothes, nicer treats, and time spent together. I have zero tolerance for social snobbery, as it shows an air of superiority that is not real. If you (metaphorically) think you're better than me, let's see how things go when the power is out, the food stops being delivered, and your apps don't work. Me? I would thrive in this world should it happen. When the zombies are coming, you'll be running to my house.
You start off right away with object oriented programming basics and simple algorithms, with most of your first year dedicated to those, design patterns, basic maths, basic communication (English and French in our case).
Second year moves into specialisations (networking, business systems design, or software development). I did software development and that's where the Java enterprise projects come in (applying design patterns), some Android programming, some more advanced algorithm stuff (still easy on the whole, similar level to the leetcode questions at FB interviews), ...
The final year will have some side courses on introduction to law (focus on copyright), some stuff about extreme programming, some communication, a bigger project and then the second half will be an internship.
And that's it. No crazy math, no super theoretical stuff, only basic non-engineering skills with a focus on the things that are practical skills as a software engineer.
I felt prepared for the professional world after that. Maybe not the things where you micro-optimise algorithms, build low-level tools and languages. But it definitely gave me a fantastic basis to join a web development company. Enough knowledge about programming and patterns to be able to pick up new languages and be productive in them fast.
You'll see few people with this degree in the hard computer science jobs, but I do think (having seen both) that people straight from school with my degree are better at just building applications on top of existing frameworks. We had practical experience with a lot of popular tools at school, and maybe less hang-ups about not always sticking with the theoretical most efficient way if it'd take longer to implement.
This type of education exists, works and has it's place.
(Note: I actually dropped out after three years without finishing the internship and without passing some of the non-coding courses because I had a nice job offer. I did do every subject so basically have the education, just not the proof.)
I've interviewed 100s of university grads and most of them don't know how to actually do anything useful. They have the foundations to grow into the position, but they certainly need someone to hold their hand for a while.
One great example is IBEW electricians. They do a 5 year program. 6 months class room, 6 months on a job site as an apprentice applying the skills learned. Repeat for 5 years with gradual pay raises until you hit journeyman and it jumps up to full union scale.
I think the exact same type of program would work GREAT for software engineering. Learning for 4 months in a vacuum and THEN working in the industry for the first time is a terrible idea. However, doing 6 months back and forth would allow you to apply what you learn and more importantly to learn what you don't know so you can focus on those things during the classroom segments.
I think I have something to add to this. During the course of completing a Ph.D. in computer science I discovered that I actually have a huge passion for behavioral ecology. For the first years of my Ph.D. I just treated it like a side hobby and tried to learn as much about it on my own. Halfway though the Ph.D. I decided I might as well take some intro bio courses and as many ecology/evolution courses as possible since my tuition was being paid for anyways. The amount that the coursework improved my learning rate was incredible even though I was spending approximately the same amount of time as before.
As to why I think it is a combination of many factors. One of the main ones being held accountable to truly mastering the material (tests, projects, homeworks etc...).
This is just a sample of 1, but from my experience the classroom experience was a huge net benefit to learning about a subject I really cared about.
I do not believe that university fullfills a really good role when it comes to filtering for intelligence, it rather filters for familys who put pressure to preservere on kids. But they do a really good job, on forcing people through stuff, that a self-tought person might skip- because they found it useless or not applicable. Algorithm theory and the limits of computation? That is a dry topic and tough to get through without beeing forced too. Software-architecture? Cant see me using that- those small projects i worked on always worked well without. And so on and so forth.
University does one thing right, it forces you to be interested in stuff you do not know you should be interested in.
I do find the filtering out of people who go to university - either by school grades or by monetary parent background really nasty though. In my eyes, anyone who is shown to apply himself, should be able to stay at a higher education.
Front-loading on dry subjects also has the downside of scaring away people who would've otherwise done well given a different path of learning.
The timing of when you learn some things is also important; it matters not if you learned software architecture in college only to have all the knowledge become obsolete by the time you really need that skill - you'd have to review or worse relearn it by yourself all over again.
There's no way to know in advance which of those classes you won't need, though. Programming has become very specialized; it's no longer possible for a University to provide an education sufficient to prepare a student for the work they'll be doing in the "real world" because there's so much variability from one job to the next. Having a broad education, though, puts a person in a situation where they can more readily adapt to a wide variety of roles than they would without that background knowledge.
Three things that I got out of it:
- engineering processes, - data structures and modelling, and - algorithms and the application
Learning to code well in a particular language you really did in your own time, and that never stops.
It was those fundamentals and learning how to apply software engineering to develop a solution to a problem that I came away with.
You could learn those fundamentals from a book, but the degree should really be an indicator that you have mastered those basics.
Given the risk of privacy and security breaches and the financial/legal consequences if you get it wrong, it's probably time there was an IEEE/AMA/Bar equivalent that signals that you have that understanding and rigorous process.
We, on HN, might think MIT is better than Stanford, but outside of the bubble, believe it or not, there is an entire world of people who never even heard of CalTech. A world of people who have no idea what MIT is.
There is no point in using something for conspicuous consumption, unless that something is actually conspicuous.
> As long as Ivy League alumni occupy positions of power, academic credentials will remain costly and scarce. Ongoing credential inflation is not evidence of a bubble about to burst, but a reflection of how successful the elites are at convincing the greater populace that degrees are valuable.
The underlying implication of the article doesn't seem to be hit home. If "good" schools don't produce rich powerful/people, but "name" schools do, that's because there is heavy corruption by the established elite to favor their alma mater's to make sure their degrees remain valuable - is I think a core tenet of the article.
TL;DR: Small school focusing on low-visibility fields is a poor comparison.
Chances are of you found the number you understood at least something about the model. And if you showed your working out, which is always a good idea, you provide more quite specific evidence.
In stuff that's more essay based, the weak can hide and the strong can be mistaken for middling. Essays can be long but still formulaic: talk about the question, mention the main things people have suggested about it, pros and cons. There's a lot of permutations of arguments that are valid, making it hard to disqualify someone who has mentioned a few relevant things. But also hard to make someone stand out, because people know the answer required is a bunch of bullet points, and if you just fire enough bullets some will resemble a smart answer. I've sat in essay subject tutorials that went perfectly fine for everyone despite very little prep having gone in.
Back to the article, naturally you don't want to buy your way into a degree that you have no hope of completing.
I think we are simply seeing another generational rise.
And why not - human beings one big advantage is our brains - and training our young to use that advantage as best we can is the single best ROI we can make ().
Will it cost us? Yes. Will it benefit us. Yes.
()there are many others as my socialist soul will tell you)
> Online courses (and before that, public libraries) rendered institutions of higher learning unnecessary for, you know, learning. But the idea that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will replace colleges is a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of a university degree.
I think the author misunderstands as well. Classic "if it's in a book then the class is worthless".
Information is not the teaching. The idea is that a teacher can instruct better than a mere textbook. YMMV, but there's no denying that having a pre-planned curriculum with instruction and 1:1 Q&As inherently supersedes walking into a store and hoping you can find and understand the right books in general. Never mind that books don't grade or provide feedback on homework, etc.
The problem is that university became a requisite for people who didn't want to attend. Standards for what the teaching we expect of universities has plummeted. That's why they work so hard to keep their brand. For the self-motivated and good learners, MOOCs and libraries can replace big parts of university. That's not for everyone.
> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not graduate many future elites. Alumni go on to be successful in their academic fields, but don’t tend to dominate finance, tech or politics.
A school exclusively for technical competence doesn't produce as many social elite [citation needed] as a school that's not focused on technical competence? I wonder why. How many of the financial elite came from mechanical engineering background at all? It's a silly comparison.
Side note: Don't forget it's an order of magnitude smaller, CalTech has ~2,200 students in contrast to Harvard's ~22,000.
> Successful parents in the upper middle class can leave money to their children, but that doesn’t guarantee entrée into the social elite. The more reliable way for powerful parents to buy power for their children is through a name-brand, exclusive education.
> Jared Kushner’s father famously secured Harvard acceptance for his son with a $2.5 million charitable contribution.
When did people making $2.5m donations become "upper middle class"?
The recent scandals don't necessarily indicate a degree don't verify capital stocks, but it does clearly demonstrate the divide between those who have capital and those who do not, and the myriad methods capital perseveres in self-preservation. And as these loopholes will most likely remain open in one way or another, it will continue to teach this lesson across generations.
I think this, and numerous other blatant shows of power, underline just how important it is to federate capital across class boundaries and prevent capital concentration. The "old boys clubs" care about your pedigree. The SME CEO cares about putting food on the table for his/her family and his/her employees, and cares moreso for your merit. Greater capital distribution leads to stricter capital verification (yes you are smart in practice) due to the decentralization of trust, greater alignment between merit and success and exercise of existing talent surpluses, and higher societal cohesion due to greater class turnover.
I dropped out and hate the system as much as the next guy, but to pretend that degrees have literally zero value and exist purely as a wealth transfer mechanism is a bit shortsighted. The author discredits MOOCs in the very same breath, but forgets to mention that thousands of companies are only using a degree as a baseline and all it would take is for HR to start accepting a slightly different piece of paper.
There will always be an Ivy club, fraternities, secret societies, and so on. Flood the market with Ivy degrees and the social elite will pick something else. But those are pretty small factions if you think about everybody else, at the University of Nowhere Special.
I particularly like their solution: Increase enrollment to point of where it inflates away their value. The intrinsic value would still remain, but the bragging rights will fall away.