I'm really tired of the same anti-college circlejerk. Maybe programmers don't need it, but I'm not going to a doctor that didn't go to med school and I'm not driving over a bridge designed by someone that went to a trade school.
2&3: I knew a guy, his father had sheep, plenty of them. He never bothered with Uni. He has been studying/training on seminars regarding agriculture, animal care, etc. He is set for life. He will never sit on a university theatre and keep notes. He does use technology (I remember how he was shocked when he discovered YouTube videos that exploded his mind and knowledge).
He picks up the phone and speaks to vets, he talks to agriculture specialists, he watches seminars, he gets better. He stays on top/ahead of things. He never spent 1 (pick your own currency) on University, housing, (Uni) books.
He stays in touch with his peers both in his country and abroad (he was taught English early on and how he sees the value of that investment).
I see him though being a guest lecturer in a Uni, to speak as a professional on this/his industry, speak on his part of the supply chain, what he would expect of "Education" to provide for him (his industry) in the future, what he would like to see people do for the promotion and progress of his industry. But pay for classes? Never.
Statistically, people with master earn more and it's easier to get a job (other options are: you get aquihired, have a shit of money; your parents have lot of great connections etc.)
This is conflating the selection and treatment effects. The difference in earnings between people who would be admitted to a Master’s programme if they applied and those who actually apply and graduate is going to be far smaller than the difference between a random Bachelor’s holder and a random Master’s holder.
I got the "everyday millionaire" book, by Chris Hogan (part of the Dave Ramsey 'gang')(haven't started reading it yet). From comments I've read in Reddit about that book, it seems like the vast majority of millionaires mentioned are lawyers/doctors, and you can't become neither without going to Uni.
They guy I was referring to in my post above, started with a certain wealth (even if that wealth is in a form of a 200-sheep-herd), a certain skillset (assisting his father in the business while growing up, having a 'knowledge base' right there in his home, having connections, having the equipment). What has gotten him to a few thousand animals since, is hard work and "invest in knowledge as you go". He didn't start from scratch.
The benefit with his line of business, is that the wealth/skills-handover was happening since he was 10 (experience, skills, knowledge). If one is to become a doctor, the mental training may start early on, but the actual knowledge is coming much later, and at a greater cost ($)(especially in the USA).
At least to see what's on offer. It's ok to drop out if you have proof that you are actually smarter than most of your classmates and you are really friggin sure what you are doing.
> if you have proof that you are actually smarter than most of your classmates
That's easy in the first year or so. It's harder to get proof that you're as smart as your professors. If you are Robin Williams and a Juilliard professor tells you that he has nothing to teach him, by all means fuck off and do your thing. Otherwise, chances are that you should stay in school.
I went to mediocre uni here in the UK studying Web Development. The educational value was pretty much worthless. I learnt more in a year at my first job than three years of university. But being forced to move out and become independent was invaluable.
Some education isn't all that useful. I had a computer-something-related class in college where we were talking about how computers were getting faster.
Professor: If you think computers are fast now, it'll blow your mind that back in the 60s the NSA has computers running at 1000.
I got in an argument with a philosophy professor. He put a stick in water and said 'look... the stick is broken'. I said "no, the stick is not broken. it appears broken because the index of refraction is different in water than air, which causes light to bed". he didn't like that very much. It's still not clear to me what point he was trying to make (that human senses are limited?)
you were of course correct, but your professor was simply illustrating a point- of whether we can trust our senses, of how we truly "know" something. philosophy often brings up "commonsensical" questions such as these. he probably didn't reply to you because he was bored from hearing the same smart alecky response every year :)
If that was his point, there are far better ways to argue for it (specifically, Descartes' great deceiver). There was nothiing smart alecky about my response- just touching the stick, or pulling the stick back out, would verify that it was not broken.
I just graduated (this summer). Previously I wasn't sold on university and did a year long internship with IBM in the UK. They offered me a full time 'degree-apprenticeship' in cyber security or consulting, but I instead left and studied literature at a UK University instead.
I often think the biggest difference between a graduate and non graduate is three years. As an 18 year old there is no way I would have been able to withstand the culture for another three years at IBM without it significantly affecting me (positively or negatively), but at 21 I feel much more mature and ready for a career. In many cases, does University just function as a waiting room in which young people can mature?
> I don't see why "male-dominated" should be a problem.
If you feel you need a few more skill-points in talking to women in order to find a girlfriend or wife. College is a much easier and more forgiving environment to learn that sort of thing.
Of course, that's not a concern for everyone. Some people know all they need to know already, or aren't looking for a hetero relationship!
In many cases, the best schools for engineering also have pretty uneven gender ratios. When I got an engineering degree way back when it was about 1/7 women. (It's more even these days.)
> In many cases, does University just function as a waiting room in which young people can mature?
And the opposite is true. If I were 18 now, I'd probably go to university. Back in the day, I had my reasons not to go, and when the time came to reconsider it (mid 20s), it felt much harder to justify.
I keep thinking that I wish I had a university education. It wasn't on the cards for me at the time.
But now I live in relative comfort, and I would have to stop working and generating an income. I have savings that could tide me over but when the choice is a home for a future family or a university degree with questionable worth it's a tough ask.
I can't imagine having dependents and going back to work.
Of course everyone is going to chime in and say that you don't need to do university full time, but, you do. Notwithstanding the mental exhaustion that comes with our jobs but also I believe it to be unlikely that you'd be able to get into the right mindset to be creative, social and learning deeply.
I sincerely believe that university is a thing that you can only do at a certain point in your life, and I'm passed that point.
I sincerely believe that university is a thing that you can only do at a certain point in your life, and I'm passed that point.
As someone who didn't graduate until they were 49 I strongly disagree. The only thing I would change now is I would have put work aside and studied full time instead of part time.
Yeah I mostly share those feelings. Having a degree most certainly wouldn't hurt, but as you say, it's not worth quitting over. And I certainly don't have the energy to get a degree while employed full time (I know some people who have done it!).
I'd still like to study though. At a sustainable part-time pace. Say, 1-4 courses per year, with focus on things I actually want to learn, and not so much on things that would award me a paper.
(It'd help a lot if I could work, say, 4 days a week)
If you have the option to go and you want to advance on your career, then there’s almost zero reasons to not go.
Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.
> If you have the option to go and you want to advance on your career, then there’s almost zero reasons to not go.
The entire point of the article was that if you have something better to do than university and good reason to believe you can actually do it you might at least consider it. Also, three to four years of foregone earnings are a powerful reason not to go to university if you’re already capable of earning a living in your chosen field. That is very far from zero reasons, especially when you consider the professional development you can fit into those years if that’s something you value.
> Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.
When you’re 40 no one but bureaucrats is going to give a crap what university you went to, compared to your actual accomplishments. If all you’ve got is side projects on GitHub no one will care whether you went to Oxford or University of Southern Florida or dropped out of high school. Actual accomplishments
Even at age 48, I see people getting on the inside track because they have degrees from name brand universities, including myself (I have a PhD from CMU). A degree from a good place signals (rightly or wrongly) that you were academically strong enough to get in and to finish.
As for career development - 3-4 years of career development "forgone" isn't really that much relative to the sum total of an entire career. One could just as easily say that when you're 40, no-one but bureaucrats is going to give a crap whether you have 19-20 years of experience or 23.
There are always exceptions - the whole "dropped out of university to found X or invent Y" thing - but 95% of people's actual accomplishments (as you so excitedly put it) are going to be a bunch of 'turned up, did pretty good' lines on a resume. All other things being equal, I'll hire the person who passed university-level calculus at a good school, thanks.
I would cut half of it. The best things I learned in college (CS) were economics, finance and statistics, it helped me a lot when I got a job as IT analyst in a sales team in a big company, being able to understand the work, purpose and environment and become a valuable contributor , not that geek that was speaking a different language nobody understood.
What I would add to college curriculum today is a good project management course, up to PMP level; also for CS, an equivalent of ITIL foundation.
For CS the biggest gap I see in fresh graduates are testing and performance and a more solid foundation on RDBMS: even in the era of NO-SQL and HADOOP the starting point is still understanding RDBMS.
I would abandon the whole "cram for N years and get a degree, then never again" scheme.
Imo education should be a lifelong thing: available at any time, part time or full time, on-demand; for example, new requirements come up at a job and you need new skills? grab a course. want to enter a new subfield? grab a few relevant courses. got interested in something new all of a sudden? grab a course and see if the interest doesn't wane. laid off? consider taking the chance to study full time for a few months and pick up some new skills or plug holes in prior knowledge.
It should be based more on voluntary interest ("I want to learn this thing!") or actual concrete need ("business is looking for someone with skill X and person Y looks like a good fit but they need to study a bit") and less on the idea that you sit through courses and exams and demos in exchange for points that eventually buy you a piece of paper..
University (or, rather, education in general) should be with us through the entire life.
There are open universities that sort of go in this direction, but the last time I looked at them, it felt like they're still rather structured around getting a degree and all the bs that goes with it.
I think the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs. This is a perk that not a lot of jobs in the real world offers. Almost nowhere else in a person's life are you given such an opportunity to invest in ones interests.
But I'm biased towards going to uni, since I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university.
Yeah it depends on a lot of things. Maybe university isn't where your interests are, but you kinda need a degree and a job? I see lots of students whose life revolves around making it through courses and collecting ECTS points instead of really pursuing their interests..
You are not paid to go the university in Denmark. You are awarded credits by the government, and it is up to you to do something sensible with those credits. Don't waste them on needless courses! Learn that which will yield you (and the Danish government) the greatest benefits throughout the rest of your life.
It reads a little like your are misunderstanding what is meant by “paid to go to university”. Danish citizens receive a grant called “SU” (Statens uddannelsesstøtte), which basically is a payment from the government for being enrolled in education. It is meant to be spend on food, rent, living, books etc
You are given money (5.435 dkk monthly after tax) for attending university in Denmark and pay no tuition. This is in stark contrast to most other countries.
> I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university
You are, of course, doubly fortunate.
> the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs
The hypothetical awakening of a person's intelligence is a battle against much more dominant social conditioning. And then students self-select for narrowness of perspective in a programme. As you note, the job market and consumerism are fatal stages of later conformity.
There is always the chance that some discussion or chance meeting will awaken a mind. But it seems far too accidental, assuming a society with libraries and recognised need for genuine public discourse.
In many economies, university isn't unconditional. It has become so expensive in some cases that graduates carry heavy debt for decades.
Does a person need to go to university? I would say that a person is better off reading at the library and seeking serious discussion rather than seeking credential-rewards in the edu-bubble. The shoddy mess should be rebuilt to make it a better deal. On-line learning is the only way I can see this happening.
I am 18 year old, I'm already working as a developer, and they have offered me a very nice full time job offer. I have been thinking about whether or not to go to university for most of the past year.
In the end, I did choose to go to university. I will be working part-time to pay about 90% of it (including housing) which means I'll have practically no debt. The main reason for me to go, was that I don't want to de a developer for the rest of my life. I think that having a degree will make a eventual career switch a lot easier.
I'm not a Shopify intern. I work at a relatively small company, which is not internationally known. We are mainly a white label ISP, but also have both managed and unmanaged servers for companies and government entities which can not or will not use public cloud providers.
You made the right choice. I just graduated, and can feel the effects already with my offers. More importantly, I made many valuable friendships, connections, and learned a ton of theory while publishing papers - all much harder to gain in the real world. Have a great time, and good luck!
You should have some experiences that move you out (even if temporarily) from the bubble you live in. University is a easy choice for that. If you have more experiences you will also have more ways to think about the world and more ways to deal with life and it's problems. My university experience in terms of learning could have been a lot better, but the experience as a whole and all the people I would not have met otherwise are still very valuable more than a decade after it ended.
I had in my teams people without any college degree or college dropouts, some gave up after one year and some close to graduation. They were good developers, the only difference I saw between college graduates and the other developers was that the college graduates were less flexible and tending to apply what they learned in college to the letter, even where it did not make sense. A few days ago I was talking to one of these people doing some informal code review, he found a very formally correct explanation for a constructor that had no value in that context, something like "it is a good practice to do it because in case X it can be used for y", where x and y were completely not applicable in that code.
As a recruiter I never looked too serious for credentials, knowing myself going through the college only for that piece of paper at the end, working full time and knowing a lot more from the job than what the other students learned. From my former class in college I think I am the only one practicing IT, the others too other directions, including one that was a quite successful music band leader.
I've had the opposite experience working with a mix of uni-attendees and not.
Compared to their university-attended coworkers, the straight-to-industry folk were far more likely to cargo cult design patterns, languages, and frameworks.
A bit orthogonal to the actual discussion at hand, but I've become a big proponent of cargo-culting in a pragmatic fashion. I definitely ensure that everything is done in the "Rails Way" for any Ruby on Rails code, despite not necessarily agreeing with what's considered the "Rails Way" by rubocop or general rails developer consensus. If I'm doing code review for my colleagues I'll force them to refactor their changes into idiomatic Rails code, even if it's perfectly functional code. I'm less strict on JS or other languages, purely because I lack the experience to say what's the "right" or "wrong" way.
If your codebase follows a well-recognised style and pattern, it becomes a lot easier for new hires or contractors to get on their feet and start productive work than if you have some kind of brilliant idiosyncratic codebase that takes 3 months for a new hire to get their head around (as was the case when I joined my current company).
I'm taking the degree apprenticeship route (19 yo). From a purely educational point of view, there wasn't much University could teach me that I wasn't prepared to learn on my own, so making money and shipping real stuff is far more valuable for me. Of course, this highly depends on the individual.
There is also downsides, like the fact it is a job at the end of the day, and that comes with politics as well as technical challenges.
I'd again make the decision (over University) in a heartbeat.
Depends on the profession. Generally if the goal is to be a qualified medical / legal professional, it is required to get a university degree from either medical school / law school respectively. Researcher? Maybe, Maybe not. But I won't be surprised if many research positions will ask for a degree.
Software Developer? Not really. FAANMG SWE Job? I won't risk it if I'm not famous with 10K other people applying.
There's also a weird flip side to all these downsides. Once you establish yourself as competent there is this kind of threshold effect where not having a university degree can suddenly start causing people to actually take you more seriously. This kind of countersignalling effect seems to be common when you do non-traditional things.
I'm not sure this is a real thing unless you're, say, Richard Branson. I also can't really imagine many circumstances in which you're doing something non-traditional and you can't just pretend you don't have a degree by neglecting to mention it... and if you've already reached a level of "significance" in a non-traditional thing where someone might actually check, well, you've probably already done better than most.
I think it depends a lot on where you are in the world. In my country where access to education is paid for by the government, and the state pays you $850 a month to study for 5 years once reach educations beyond “High School”, work places kind of expect you to have a degree. You can’t even really be a sales person at a supermarket if you haven’t spent a few years getting a degree, or are under the age of 18 (less pay). Crafty professions takes you through a mix of bookish education and apprenticeship for 4 years, but they too lead to a degree.
Programming is one of the few fields, that isn’t packing boxes of frozen fish, where a career without a degree is possible here, and even on that field time is running out for people without degrees because so many young people have been getting them for the past decade.
But that is my country, here you’d be absolutely crazy (or perhaps challenged in some way) to not finish an education.
I’m from there and I never finished my degree. The reason was that I took some time off to travel, found a job during this time and I simply have not been back since. Almost a decade now.
Only recently have I looked into finishing it off through online courses but even then it is hard to motivate myself, not once have I been asked for it. I even ask recruiters and they also say I don’t need it to be hired (at least: Singapore, UK, Thailand, Sweden) and I’m talking about major companies. I can’t speak for countries other than where I am employed but here I am not underpaid due to lack of degree.
I did go through 3 years of university and I do agree that the experience itself is useful (even though it might seem otherwise at times).
(Edit: to be clear I’m working in software development)
I'm a senior in high school and decided to.
I started a startup and got invited for a YC interview(got rejected) and am onto another startup which is raising soon.
Despite how much success/failure/I learn I endure, college name matters... a lot. I snuck into Nuro's open house last year and found they exclusively invited Harvard/Stanford/MIT students (I can say this because I was a minor at the time of signing their NDAs)
College name matters, especially when you're starting out (which can impact where you evenetually end up... whether its working for a startup or working at a cool VC firm) In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now.
I went to a non-notable state school and have no trouble getting hired. I would advise people who plan to go to non-notable state schools to just go straight to industry instead.
Having the piece of paper, if you can get it (relatively) cheap, is very nice just to avoid ever having to talk about not having it. It's a whole conversation in many interviews (or a conversation that doesn't happen but that you'll be stressed about happening) that you can totally erase. Evening, weekend, and online classes are a thing and can be cheapish, especially if you're not going to a very well-known school (and if you're not, the name of the school is basically irrelevant, so do what's cheap). If you don't already have kids or other time-consuming obligations, working through school part-time over a few years 100% achievable while still having tons of free time. Also look into CLEP tests, as they can kill years (at part-time hours) of college credits quickly and at low cost.
If you’re already decided you’re into startups the network and prestige of Y Combinator will help more than most any college. If you want the stamp of admission to the US ruling class sure, go to where the elite send their children to find someone to marry but otherwise you could do worse than committing to what you actually want instead of chasing a network.
YCombinator might well disappear in a few years. Universities tend to last much longer, some of them have been around for centuries. In 50 years something like YC might be a footnote in wikipedia, but I can assure you that most respectable universities will still be around to “guarantee” one’s worth.
I never graduated and I was an idiot. Stay in school, kids.
Yes, YC is amazing and I'll probably drop out when (if) I get in. At the moment I'm going to an Ok-ish UC (university of california) and hoping that I'll be able to prove to better colleges that I can bring in big donations later on :) and transfer there before I drop out so at least I'll be able to say "I went to X good college"
Y Combinator might not be around in five years but the professional network that comes of participating in it will remain. If you aren’t sure what you want to do and want to keep as many options as possible open get a degree, but for most purposes any degree will do.
If you still want a degree it’s entirely possible to get a regionally accredited degree in a year from Western Governor’s University or a number of others if you’re willing to work hard at it and are exceptionally organized. If you want to know more you can go to degreeforum.net Or if you want to get a Master’s Oxford has one in Software Engineering that will accept work experience in lieu of a degree though each module requires a week’s residency.
>In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now.
Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.
Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.
Be sure to get the 4.0 GPA too - it's very nice to have for surprisingly long. Absolutely don't "challenge yourself". You can do that when you're not being graded on it.
I think this very much depends on where you're going. I did not have a stellar GPA in school, but I did take the most challenging courses available to me and it's paid dividends for years. I still work on projects where my college exposure allows me to have a deeper understanding. Working with customers operating at scale, my (in retrospect, amazing) exposure to HPC and distributed computing has been so valuable.
But these were the most challenging courses at a top 5 CS school, with some of the brightest researchers alive teaching course material. At another school that calculus is probably closer to what you're saying.
I haven't been asked what my GPA was since I got my first graduate job (which was a follow on from my internship), which is very convenient because I graduated with a shocking GPA.
Assuming that's remotely feasible. My alma mater only had 7 students graduate with a 4.0 ... In 60 years of existence.
I went to a top tier school and struggled with various parts of the curriculum (CHEM52, I'm looking at you). I convinced myself that I wasn't smart/good enough for various futures I'd previously envisioned, like academia or research. My confidence was shot and it affected where I applied for jobs out of college.
I ended up taking a contract position at Microsoft. I thrived, got my confidence back, and got hired full-time.
Two years after graduation an acquitance from my college reached out to me- he was coming to Microsoft Research for the summer, could I help him find a place to rent? We reconnected and got talking- It turned out his undergrad GPA was lower then mine! I never did find why he was more confident than me, but he had no problem thinking he was still qualified for a PhD program and was clearly doing well enough there to get picked up by prestigious research lab.
I'm pretty happy with the way my life has turned out, I have no reason to go back and change any decisions. In fact, many of the most valuable experience I had were unrelated to the classroom- student government, interactions with the board of trustees, putting together funding for various small projects. And I've had a great career since college. The only thing I wish I could change was how I felt about myself- I wish I'd been able to tell 20-year old me "you are doing fine! It'll be awesome in the end!" and have 20-year me believe me.
All of the above is a long way of saying- don't worry too much about your grades. Don't blow them off, but in the end they aren't as important as we often make them out to be.
ehh, I don't know about that. I haven't heard of GPA being useful for anything in tech apart from doing a PhD, which require you to have both a high GPA and to challenge yourself.
University has so much more value than the coursework and the name. The network you mention is a good starting point. You call it network and it evokes the idea of those connections that can help you later.
But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
Universities also do research you can be part of. I helped build a CubeSat during my uni time and was part of a sounding rocket mission. You can't do that in a YouTube video of a lecture and you can't to that as a side project.
University is a place to meet like minded people and learn about stuff you are interested in. You get teachers and facilities you wouldn't normally have access to. Use it!
And make sure that you go to uni with this mental model of it. Whenever you see uni doing things that don't fit in that model, try to change it. Unis aren't there to make sure you get a better job, get access to hidden networks in society, take loads of money from students, crank out degrees, ...
They are there to enable people growing personally and fuel that growth back into growing humanities knowledge.
... and yeah, some local hackerspaces are closer to that idea of an University that many Universities are. That's a problem.
> But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
Plenty of sites and forums to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
None of which come close to replicating the random occasions of running into a fellow student in the cafeteria and them asking you for a quick question. Or discussing the ideas you're studying over beer at the campus bar for hours. Asynchronous, anonymous, learning has its place but it is absolutely no substitute for the environment a campus provides.
My dad was a grocery checker and my mom was a secretary. I didn’t go to college. I’m currently making more than six figures as a software engineer. The only meaningful networking connections I made outside of work was going to raves in the early 2000s.
My six siblings and I had farmer parents with a high school education. We all went to (and finished) college. Now we have 2 fortune-500 VPs, a research nursing administrator, an IT professional, and 2 self-employed business owners doing very well.
So it can help to go to college. Just saying.
Oh. And the next generation - 100% college educated. Several PhD's. All well employed. None working on the farm. So for some segment of America at some time, college was/is a huge factor in their social mobility.
There's nothing wrong with working on a farm, but it is objectively not a good job. Long hours, low pay, high stress. I understand being proud of working on a farm, but I understand being proud of not working on a farm too.
Success in America isn't "becomes a farm laborer". I think that's well-understood.
I actually live on my farm, have for 25 years. With Silicon Valley money from successful startup buyouts.
Btw "You …" kind of posts are sort of unnecessary. I know what I am; no need to tell me. Maybe just add your own thoughts, its less argumentative and we learn something.
1. Nobody was attacking you in first place. Re-read the comments. 2. You complained about my writing style and got a reply in a same way. Ironically you seem to have problem with that. 3. I don't care much about karma and posts turning grey. If you don't like my opinion just move on.
Learn that there are more views than your own. I won't be writing in a way you want to get upvotes from you. So again, keep your lectures for yourself and stick on point.
Good for you if your kids know how. I am not really interested in that, so keep it to yourself.
I didn't downvote you :) Its not possible to downvote responses to your own posts.
Reading motivation into my words is certainly rude, and unnecessary. As I've mentioned its always better to just add one's own thoughts, instead of warping other's words to fit your narrative. Just a thought.
For most of my career, nobody 'created' a job for me. I went out and figured out something useful to do, did it, and made a living.
And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Why would we wish that on ourselves? How does that improve the world?
Even worse, the implied understanding that our society cannot function without an uneducated subject class is worrisome. Are the socialists right, and Capitalism/the free market demands a slave class?
Anyway, with automation any such demand diminishes yearly and is already small.
>And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people?
Have you been involved much in hiring? I suspect if you had it would disabuse you of the notion that university is effective at producing "capable, educated, useful people".
For people who make it through the initial technical screening to the on-site round, I think there's probably a positive correlation to outcome for those who are self-taught. (I equally suspect there's a higher percentage filtered out before on-site, of course.)
College would have alleviated it for four years during college. I’m not convinced that the job market transforms quickly to absorb twice as many people in jobs we think of today as “college required”.
I’m not sure what the correlation between income (or other life outcomes) is between “attended college” vs “would typically have chosen college but took another route” but I suspect it’s a lot smaller than between that latter group and the “was never even considering college” group.
It’s not clear for an individual who “should” attend college how important the decision to actually attend is. I seem to recall studies that suggested there was a much stronger correlation between applying to Harvard than there was between that and attending Harvard.
As summarized by the Atlantic: "For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
This finding suggests that the talents and ambitions of individual students are worth more than the resources and renown of elite schools. Or, less academically, the person you’re becoming at 18 is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22. The takeaway here: Stress out about your habits and chill out about college."
To be fair, the Atlantic continues on to say that the effect is different for women (which they ascribe primarily to increased workforce participation rates).
Unless I completely misremember that article, the article says nothing about not going to college at all. I don't think I'd use that paper to conclude that highly talented individuals will have similiar income outcomes regardless if they go to university or not. The credentialing effect is likely very important
That being said- strongly consider going to a place that is willing to throw scholarship money or special programs at you. The financial aspect of that advice should be obvious, but buy in from the school into your education can mean better access and sponsorship from professors as well
If you're in India (and I'd imagine most other developing countries), getting a degree is one of the most surefire methods of ensuring that you live a good life.
It's much less the case in Western countries, especially here in Australia, where tradespeople tend to earn on-par or more than white collar professionals.
Yes! Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the price of a plumber or other trade, I say "Yeah! Where do they get off, wanting to earn a living? Why can't they just live in a van down by the river like their parents?!"
I'm perfectly happy to pay a competent trade for good work, at whatever rate gets me out of painting/plumbing/pumping sewage.
I hate the attitude that tradespeople should get paid less than white collar professionals, it takes the same to finish an apprenticeship as a bachelors degree, it's skilled work just as much as computer programming or accounting or law (incidentally the only time I needed a lawyer I would've been better off representing myself, he was literally worse than useless). I pay my barber $35 for a 20 minute haircut, he certainly cuts my hair better than I ever could, and I write code better than he can. We all have our role in society.
A large proportion of professionals are completely incapable of doing the work that tradespeople do, most people can't even replace a tap washer on their own, let alone replace the transmission in their car. It's conceited and elitist to think you're more valuable than somebody else just because you have the luxury of sitting in front of a computer screen all day. It's not even an intelligence thing (which I think shouldn't matter at all), plenty tradespeople are just as clever as programmers or accountants, they just don't want a job that keeps them cooped up in an office all day. Especially when it comes to trades like electricians or plumbers, where you're still diagnosing problems and creating solutions, a good tradie is worth their weight in gold.
Pay is defined by political and economic leverage, not by intelligence or by actual ability.
Tradespeople aren't paid seven figures a year because they have very little political and economic leverage. Top-rank CEOs, and people working in corporate law and finance are, because they tend to accumulate both - although often from a place where they start with plenty.
You can argue that this is neither fair nor justified, and I will agree with you. In fact I will argue that this is a fundamental failure which makes any political and economic system that lacks feedback loops to limit excesses of privilege inherently unstable.
But it helps to be clear about how the system really works before criticising it. Cleverness is not the primary decider. Nor is skill. Earnings are set by leverage and perceived power, all the way down.
The market determines price at that level, not some conspiracy. Agreed, nothing to do with fair. But something to do with, the decline in trade schools in America which limits supply.
You are correct about the numbers in absolute, but this is one of those cases where the stats are lying.
Once you go to university, it is relatively easy to get a job making around 2.5-4 lakh a year. The total cost of university stays under 4 lakhs for most people, which is an acceptable percentage of projected annual wage.
It is also a lot easier to live under your means in India, where a single person can easily live under 1.5 lakhs/year.
On the other hand, a university degree in the wrong major in the US can mean a $30k gig at Starbucks, with saving being nearly impossible and student debt worth $200k.
> Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.
> Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents.
Haven't we already seen that this mindset is exactly what plagues academia with the most recent Admissions scandal? I mean parents of Wealth use that to leverage their children getting into that system to further entrench it and admissions offices use that to base their admissions on more than anything else.
I'm beyond the University Model, I have gotten to do some of the coolest things in my career not even mentioning I went to University and only based on merit and networking--though most assumed and asked loaded questions that reveal that I had indeed gone. But none of them asked for a transcript, as I don't even know where they are at this point.
I went to a low-tier (but highly applied to) CSU/UC, that has/had strong Research History, but saw it was all mis-allocated to serve a series of career academics with clout and had no real purpose other than to keep up the with 'publish or die' model and fluff their CVs. We as undergrads often had to work with broken lab equipment, limited class availability that prolonged your graduation date, and other budget cuts and this is was in an impacted major! As a student from the 2008 financial crises I don't envy what your time will be like in a STEM in this environment, frankly.
I dislike University for the horrible unforgivable debt loads it places on young people, but I HATE it for the waste of Human Capital it ultimately creates. It does occasionally offer some amazing discoveries but that seems more consequential than it does like the intended purpose; you need only see how University takes it's inflated share of researcher's grants and are legally allowed to take any and all IP from the research done.
You're free to do as you please, and you seem like a bright person so I hope its a full scholarship, but please understand that its disheartening to see what was supposed to be your most intellectually formulative years be wasted on such a horrible and corrupt system. Especially because as even before going in you understand the substance of the degree can be learned elsewhere and it serves no real purpose besides a form of perverse virtue signalling to HR.
I think you're right in many scenarios, but in the VC/startup world it def. seems to matter. I've been relentlessly reading people's stories and have been looking into how to get internships at various VC/tech companies and it always comes down to: which college you're going to.
Nuro for example had this open house that exclusively invited Harvard/MIT students (i snuck in) and I'm sure there's a lot of similar opportunities that are open to kids in these colleges.
In the long term, I'm sure it'll fade away, but starting out matters as to where you will end up (whether you go to X startup or get to work for X VC)
You may or may not realize to whom you are replying. Walter may not be overly impressed by names like Nuro. Walter might think that working for some boring non-VC-dependant company like, say, Boeing, is a perfectly reasonable career path.
You seem to be very impressed by the likes of Nuro. I would be over the moon to be able to work with Walter at any company. I'd love to just take a class from him at any school of any name.
This is related to seniority. When your carreer proves your worth and your wits, people stop asking at what age you started speaking, at what age you stopped pooping your pants, when you learned to read and write, what your SAT scores are (or whatever the equivalent is at your country) and finally which college you went to. Then they stop asking (but are still impressed by) the places you worked at, the projects you worked at and they finally let you off the hook when there is nothing else to prove.
Converse anecdote: people constantly ask me what college I attended and what I majored in, nearly 15 years into my career. Senior jobs now are also strongly looking for advanced degrees on top of that. My experience has been that in the U.S., outside of software the importance of college is very high for most professional jobs.
I get asked what university I attended, and when I tell them they always follow by asking where it is, as it's a foreign no-name university with no particular international standing. I'm always asked more as a curiosity than because they're judging me.
As far as undergraduate degrees go, most universities teach you the same thing, the only difference is that some universities are more selective in who can attend than others. I learned the same material at the University of Canterbury down at the bottom of the world in New Zealand as what undergrads learn at Stanford.
I guess it's a bit different if you live in a country where there's competitive university entry, in New Zealand most universities simply require that finished high school to enter, you pick you university for lifestyle reasons (usually either because it's close to home or because you want to escape home). I've discovered that here in Australia there's much more of a hierarchy of which university you attended, as admissions are much more competitive. I guess that's what happens when you have 6 universities in the same city.
The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well.
Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification.
This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance to writing JavaScript for a living.
I often hear people say that a university education teaches nothing useful, that it's just learning to take tests, that the course material is irrelevant, that it's just for networking and signalling, etc.
I suspect they both a) selected the wrong major and b) went to the wrong university.
I suspect going to a university is helpful in most STEM related fields. In anything medical or law related you don't even have to think about getting a job without a degree. I don't see how anyone can compensate an economical or business study by doing project on their own.
If anything I think IT is an outlier, because not going to university and learning the subjects you would have been taught on your own might be a valid option.
I was commenting to the argument that college teaches nothing useful.
Law and medicine are the poster child for credentialism, you are forced by law to complete the degree to work, even if most law and medical professionals will tell you, work has nothing to do with college.
They suffer the “driving license problem”, having the title says nothing about your competence.
For instance, pretty much everyone has to study trigonometry, but very little people actually need to know trigonometry to do their job. In that sense technical fields are an outlier, because knowing trigonometry actually matters to your career.
I can't speak for lawyers, but MD education is very relevant. Maybe other MDs can chime in, but at least once a week in practice I use something I learned once in medical school (which was a LONG time ago :) ). Now a 4-year undergraduate education could have been trimmed to ~2-3 years i'd say.
> The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me.
I will explain why. Hint: you are the part of the problem.
> I've never seen anyone without a good education do it well.
This is your lived experience, so I respect it. On the other hand, a lot of people on HN's lived experience is that, they witnessed, first hand, people without a good education do it well, so very well, extremely wonderfully well. Please respect it too.
I do not think that the fact that there are many people who can make a wonderful job without having gone to any university implies that there should be an anti-university sentiment. I think academic careers are necessary, not for everyone, but all that people working without any studies are building on the work done by lots of academics. That should be respected (by the way, I don't think it is not, but if it generally is not I think that it is a problem).
People say things like "I've never seen anyone without a good education do it well", which can only mean they live in such a bubble that they didn't get to meet any. That's certainly possible, but "I live in a bubble!" is nothing to be proud of. Such proud but ignorant proclamation is the reason why there is anti-university sentiment.
I did a CS degree in the 1980s which I'm still very happy that I did (the fact that it didn't cost me a penny probably helps) - but I do think that CS is irrelevant to 95% of development jobs.
I think the sentiment is very U.S. specific. The US seems to have higher education system with some peculiarities. They have the best universities but also some shady ones and it can be expensive.
Obviously if you just want quick vocational-type training, you don't need university level education. But then you should not be the one having problems with procrastination or self-discipline either. Most students in universities are there because they would not study or learn difficult or uninteresting subjects if left on their own. You also need to learn to communicate verbally and in writing with your peers. Knowing stuff but not being to able to communicate and work with others leads directly to low level jobs.
I've worked with a guy that didn't finish his studies (started working out of university/ during 1st year and completely neglected it until they expelled him). He was surprisingly good though as in he had a solid theoretical foundation, knew the inner workings of a compiler (this was relevant for the project we worked on) etc.
Also at my former company there was a principal computer scientist who was quite proud that he didn't have a university degree; I didn't work with him much but he was obviously fairly accomplished, career-wise. So that worked fine for him.
Most people are not like that, though; even though in theory you can study everything by yourself nowadays, I find that in practice people who didn't go to university often tend to have a fairly narrow & shallow field of expertise ("narrow" = don't have experience with many different things/ often focus on one language and a few sets of related technologies; "shallow" = they often don't understand too many layers of abstraction, and get completely lost if they need to go too deep). This is perfectly fine at the start of your career, but as years go by (like, 20years in, when you're still only mid-career) I can't imagine this working too well; unless maybe you switch to management?
It all depends on your goals. Is it to earn a decent living? I know millionaires who never went to university. They started a practical, blue collar business, and enjoyed that path. Is it to experience a broader culture? You could do the 100 Rabbits approach for a lot less money, and get something more interesting out of it. Is it to learn from one of the best minds in a particular field? University is probably the best fit.
I have two bachelors' degrees, one in Mathematics, and one in Japanese. Those two programs were night-and-day in terms of rigor.
The mandatory "general education" classes were an absolute waste of time, and accounted for over a third of the cost of my college education.
It would have been more productive to spend that money on Pokemon cards.
The reality is, for a lot of people, university is massive waste of time and money. It largely was for me. We would be better off following the German model, with tracks outside University for professional workers and artisans.
Moreover, there are some excellent self-taught programmers out there, who work in the industry, and learn the mathematics and the physics and all the rest because they are passionate about the subject.
To be clear, being self-taught doesn’t mean they didn’t go to university. It could be that their university experience put them in a better position to self-teach.
Agreed! University enabled me to leave the trailer park in the Midwest that I grew up in and now have a comfortable life. It is possible that this could have happened without university, however learning how to think/work through hard problems and the friends/networks I made have paid large dividends.
During undergrad, I was worried about the ~40k in loans I took out to pay for it. However, I was able to pay them off fairly soon after finishing up, and would never have been able to attend without the federal loans that did not require a co-signer.
> The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me.
Mmm...how do measure that? I think it's balanced. I suspect that the majority of the folks that comment have at least an undergraduate degree. Even the ones who argue that the degree is not of great value..
I think there are a few additional aspects to this than just a simple anti-university sentiment.
This site is very US-centric, which adds a huge monetary component to this decision. That makes this an entirely different question compared to a country where higher education is free.
I also think that software development is a field that is quite friendly and attractive to people switching from a different career or field. So you have the related, but still distinct discussion about whether you should have a CS degree specifically to work as a software developer.
It’s weird in the UK. I think framing it as a £50k (ish) loan is bad but also the loan structure is bizarre. It’s basically a tax on being a graduate which for some reason is higher (over the 30 years you have it) for people who make a medium amount of money than for people who make a smaller or higher amount of money.
Ultimately it doesn’t particularly punish people for getting a degree which isn’t worth much because if their degree isn’t worth much then they are less likely to have to pay much of the tax. And I think people are still statistically better off going even if you take the tax into account.
I find it weird because I can’t work out what it is trying to punish. At least with income tax there are arguments that better paid people are able to contribute more and so they should. But with the student “loans” it seems like it’s trying to discourage people from getting a degree which confers them a moderate advantage in income. It doesn’t seem to discourage degrees that are in some sense not worth the government’s money. I guess one way to look at it is that they wanted something that looked like loans but wasn’t burdensome and also had an interest rate that wouldn’t go to 0 if the base interest rates were very low and that’s how we ended up with the system.
It’s also means tested which seems fair but I think can be quite hard for the families on the various boundaries.
From my perspective, somebody who has not attended university but still learned everything they need to do a dev job well has demonstrated something really important：the ability/motivation to learn new academic things in their own free time. So many people seem to completely stop learning once they leave university. I work in HFT, where things are constantly changing and people need to be at the top of their game to stay competitive, so the ability and willingness to keep learning new things is vital for success, as the majority of what makes a quant-dev successful will be stuff they learned on their own/on the job, not stuff they learned in uni.
In this sense the biggest value of a degree in hiring is just the crude proxy it is for IQ and conscientiousness. That being said, I've never interviewed anyone without a degree, but then I've never seen a candidate without a degree either. I have hired people whose degree is completely unrelated to the role, because they demonstrated the ability and interest to learn something outside of what they studied at uni.
So perhaps part of the opposition to university is due to the (possibly incorrect) feeling that it encourages people to think of it as "this is the period I do my learning", whereas some alternative to university might better promote people to develop a habit of lifelong learning. I.e. maybe people have been jaded by the experience of interviewing/hiring people with degrees from good universities who just spend all their spare time consuming media.
Which is not to suggest attending university is a bad idea, given its value as a signal, just that it doesn't seem ideal for developing the habit of lifelong learning.
Yes, as a Canadian attending Canadian university the most important learnings happened outside of the program stream and in many cases outside of the classroom altogether.
We were required to take a breadth of courses first year that helped create a well rounded foundation to my studies in software which I value greatly.
I can tell many people in the field have never looked past the technicals to think about how computer science connects to the world at large and it's a shame because there is a lot to learn and much wisdom to be gained by taking a holistic view.
Some of my favorite courses were sociology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, biology (I did switch majors) not to mention classics and astronomy.. They gave me a very rich insight into the philosophy of thought outside of software and I've always applied my learnings to corporacy and professionalism.
Not all universities are like this and graduates while technically proficient graduate wholly unprepared for the realities of social programming because let's face it software is a social medium in the truest sense of the word and university work with its emphasis on solo work i.e. individual performance and occasional groups (which are invariably one person pulling all the others' weight or someone bossing everyone until they give in) as well as emphasizing marks as the primary metric serves very little utility in preparing people for the real world and even co-op programs serve only to reinforce the stereotypes rather than disrupt them.
I inherently believe that this is a U.S.-centric thing as a few commenters mentioned. Specifically a degree in the U.S. is held as a way to advance your career prospects first and it's value is often marketed as a trade off of get X dollars in debt but make Y dollars more in your career on average. So a lot of that attitude becomes I am taking this class to check boxes to get a piece of paper which says I'm worth more in the job market. I am a graduate student but understand the jadedness, especially because I had to retake virtually the same class multiple times because it wasn't "as rigorous" for this specific major as I changed majors a few times (and had to get one of those approved for a different major). But because a lot of people see it as a way for getting a better monetary outcome college in the U.S. is often treated more like a vocational school I feel so the extra "B.S." one has to go through feels like a particular waste of resources.
I enjoyed college but, I very quickly understood that its only purpose wasn't to enhance my education as I sat through multiple classes that were nearly identical to previous all because I had to check a box. And generally I felt classes moved to slow and would have been much happier studying on my own, but courses often forced my attendance. Though I am a bit unique in my ability on that admittedly.
The most important things I gained from university weren't vocational knowledge or my degree. I don't use most of what I learned at university at my job and never will, and beyond putting it on my resume, and after my first grad job no employer has actually looked at my degree, it's a requirement on plenty of jobs but I could absolutely get away with lying about having a degree with no real consequences. I could definitely do my job without having gone to university and I'm not a JS dev building misc CRUD apps (not to belittle people who do that for a living).
It's hard to put into words, but university was a unique experience for me that was instrumental in helping me grow to become the person I am today. Finishing high school and then going to a coding bootcamp for a few months before joining the workforce just wouldn't have provided that space for me to "discover myself", for lack of a better term.
That's not to say that everybody should go to university, although I definitely benefited from it and don't regret it at all, I was definitely railroaded into tertiary education by my parents and teachers. And that's not to say that university is the only place where I would've experienced the kind of personal growth that I did. I have plenty of friends who went into trades and completed apprenticeships (actually more than went to university), and most of them don't regret doing that either.
I was going to make the snap judgment that HN happens to be popular among computer programmers, an occupation that is fairly unique in terms of providing lucrative indoor work without strictly needing college training. Many of the programmers of my generation (graduated high school in 1982) have little or no formal training in programming.
I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom. Maybe there are some out there, but I haven't met them.
But it goes further. What strikes me is not only an anti-university sentiment, but also a strong anti high school sentiment. I've been surprised by the number of comments from people who are obviously smart and diligent enough to be programmers, but for whom high school was a disaster. And it occurs to me that this does reveal that education is not serving everybody equally well.
So, even though I value my university education, I'm still interested in hearing how others have experienced it. However for students, my advice is that you have to find the thing that makes college worthwhile for you. If you go in with a cynical attitude, that it's just "signaling" or "networking," then you are likely to be blinding yourself to the other kinds of opportunities that it presents.
High school was a total disaster. I talked my way into the co-op program, and got an internship at a security company. I was only taking 4 classes my senior year. I did go to college for almost 12 weeks, but it wasn't working out.
I am honestly jealous of the people who say they valued their university experience. I really wish I could have enjoyed formal education that much.
My life was funded by the ability to walk into software development jobs. If I were born 5 years later, I would be a different (probably non-functioning) person.
>I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom.
I think the vast majority has technically learned maths and physics outside the college classroom. The teaching quality I'm getting at my university isn't the greatest (bar a few exceptions), and I find myself regularly going to Khan Academy or 3blue1brown to understand a concept better. This is learning outside the classroom!
In a lot of ways, I find universities to be assessment centres and certificate issuers. Not in all ways of course, certain aspects such as labs, coordination of group projects, someone to ask questions to get back to you instantly, are all things which cannot be replaced in any circumstance. But when it comes to the dry theoretical stuff, I'm not sure why I would go to a lecture if I know I can get a better quality of teaching somewhere else online.
Of course this is only true for a few subjects (maths and entry level physics/engineering). I unfortunately have to rely on the lectures provided for the more specialist modules I'm being assessed on (such as heat transfer and chemical engineering principles). This is mainly so that I can comply with the teacher's specific assessment criteria and the terminology/definitions/textbook/ordering they use. I may be able to find heat transfer explanations somewhere else online, and they probably would explain things better, but they wouldn't help much when it came time to use the terminology that the lecturer expects you to use during an assessment, or if you're expected to use the equation sheet that the teacher made for you and expects you to use.
I think part of your argument about learning from Khan Academy or 3blue1brown is highly predicated upon being in subjects that are widely known and studied, particularly introductory mathematics/physics/engineering. I personally cannot speak for physicists, but I imagine it is similar as follows.
One of the most valuable parts of a Engineering/Mathematics Degree (Both at the BS and the MS levels) is that of the upper division elective courses for specialization. At research universities, these classes often contain lots of information/techniques that can't be found in a textbook, let alone in a youtube video. At best, there might be a very cursory blog post, or a collection of research papers that you really aren't ready to explore on your own. Often, these classes result in final projects which can be expanded into research papers or portfolio projects with the professor teaching the class, both of which are valuable learning opportunities for the student and effective signaling mechanisms post-graduation.
These classes are where the real technical value of a college education is found.
In addition, there a quite a few classes which are offered if not required for such Engineering/Mathematics students which are pretty difficult to approach on your own and surmise in a short period of time. For examples, I point towards Analysis 1/2/Complex, PDEs, Dynamics, and Probabilistic Robotics.
I personally got a lot from my undergrad, I (and this may only apply to me) strictly would not have succeeded in learning all the topics I did if my only motivation was my personal learning in my free time, particularly in the short time horizon I did. The pressure cooker (cough engineering school) I went through was very formative, built a number of professional/personal connections, and taught me almost all the personal and professional skills I have.
I don't think Khan Academy or 3brown1blue are a replacement for upper level math and physics courses. Khan seems to stop at calculus/statistics and not dive into any of the proof based math. I'm not sure on 3brown1blue since I haven't watched very much of him.
I grew up on a farm. Went to a school in the countryside the first eight years. Went to high school on the Standing Rock Reservation.
I can with certainty say I did not have everything I needed to go off and have the best possible career. Not all of us were born into that type of situation.
I would not have become an economist without going to college and taking an economics class to fulfill a requirement. It was so right for me that I even got a PhD. Needless to say, that would not have happened if I had stuck around to take over my dad's excavating business or the family farm. [Edit: I was a licensed sewer and water installer before I graduated high school, so I was in a better place than a lot of high school grads.]
> This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance to writing JavaScript for a living.
High school dropout here, no uni degree, I can write more than just JS thanks. I know C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, ruby, Typescript, Go. I know DDD, SOLID, TDD, and AOP. I have forgot more about Linux than most people will learn in a lifetime and I did all of it without attending one uni course. I come from a poverty background, grew up in a trailer park, got fucked up on all sorts of drugs and didn't do well in school. Some time in my early 20's I had a revelation that I was nobody and I was going to die poor and alone if I didn't get my act together. Sadly with my piss poor grades there was no way I was going to get a scholarship to pay my way through college, my family just made enough that I couldn't get finaid easily either. So I decided to wing it. I looked in the newspaper for high paying jobs, decided I wanted to be Systems Administrator, and looked up the skills required to be one. Did I get a sysadmin job? Hell no, I worked my way up from Help Desk to PC Tech, to Network Tech, to Systems Tech, to Systems Admin, to DevOps, and then to Sr. Software Developer, I'm now a Principal Engineer.
Here's the deal, I know bright people who made it through college and I know stupid people who made it through college, but I also know bright people who have worked their way up from the bottom, like myself. I've been working my way up since 2003. My personal opinion is that Uni is not only not for everyone, but that perhaps some industries, including software engineering, may work better on the guild system than in a class room.
The author mention the visa question and I think that bears repeating, if you plan to live abroad, having a degree (preferably a master) will make getting a visa in any country much easier.
I'd however recommend going to a country where education is close to free to get a degree, even if it involves losing a year learning the local language...
I had a discussion about this years ago and I remember a good question being thrown into it: 'what happens if you don't do it?',as opposed to 'what happens if you do it?'. For an average person, in a lot of countries, not having a degree equals to crappy jobs for the rest of their lives. Average person+ degree= slightly better prospects and maybe some easier office job.if a person is very intelligent, motivated,and is a bit streetwise,so to speak, they'd succeeded irrespectively. The main problem is that when you 18-20 years old, the perspective on the world is kind of limited,unless you grew up in a rich family doing all sorts of businesses ventures and they show you some aspects of it. Personally, growing up in small town,where pretty much nobody was doing some very interesting things,it was an eye opener when I moved to London and because of the work and the city itself, I did realise how much money there's in the world, that people are ready to pay stupid money for the most absurd things and so on. It opens your eyes in terms of what other people do and what's possible,gives you all sorts of ideas and etc.
If your own answer to your own question isn't absolutely YES then take a gap year or years. Join the Navy. See the world. When you're done with that you'll be much much more ready than if you indifferently do what you suppose you're supposed to do.
But yes, you do need to go to university, a good one. And you need to graduate.
Can’t upvote this enough. I wish I had taken a gap year back then, and I will insist that my kids do it. More than a decade of schooling inevitably takes a toll, and optimizing for highschool success can mislead one’s choice for university.
30 year old here, I'm considering a new degree in computer science to add to my chem Engineering degree. I have 12 years casual programming experience.
My work experience has been design Engineering, which is a low 6 figure job. I also live in an area with an old industry that's getting Engineers outsourced.
I'm considering a comp sci degree so I can get into embedded, or electrical engineering, AI, or pretty much any 180k/yr job. I'm okay with taking a pay cut for a few years.
I don’t think you need a degree for that sort of career shift. Just get a short training course and start building stuff and applying for jobs.
University degrees are, fundamentally, a mark of status and patience: “this guy had enough money and willpower to sit through years of drudgery, so it’s safe to hire him to do the same for us”. After a few years nobody cares what the degree was actually about, particularly in IT where everything gets redone every few years.
I have projects that people consider impressive already. Here is what I've been told from various managers-
>Only hire computer scientists
>I don't have relevant work experience (which means taking a 60k/yr web dev job to begin my career?)
>My projects are good, but I need to contribute to open source projects.
The reason for the degree is to get access to high quality programming jobs rather than 60k/yr web dev. Not to mention, I imagine I'll learn everything about security and algorithms which I'm sure are weaknesses.
You can fix two of those with some solid effort in a high-profile FOSS project for a few months.
As for the first, you don't want to be in an environment that values credentials so strictly, imho - it poisons the air. There is always a chance they would then say "we only hire CS from Stanford/MIT" - sometimes stuff like this is just a polite way of saying "we don't think you can cut it".
> I imagine I'll learn everything about security and algorithms
Algos yeah, plenty - and I agree it's where universities really make a difference (I'm weak there too, and part of the reason for dropping out, and more recently changing career, was that I'm not really interested in that part of the job).
With Chem Engineering I don't think your degree will limit you. I have a Biomedical Engineering Degree and most HR screeners will read engineering and pass you through to the hiring manager. But if you want to go back get that degree for the purpose of knowledge and education than go for it!
I have a degree in Theoretical Physics. During my second year I started to realise that I don't want to stay in academia, and at the same time I started to do a lot programming. I finished my Bachelors and got a job as a backend dev.
The way I see it, altough I learned a lot in uni, it's basically a "VIP" token to get yourself a job. And that's sad. Lots of companies will hire physics and math grads _just because_. They think they have "problem solving skills" - let me tell you - there are a tonne of STEM grads that do not have these skills (putting it politely) but get hired anyway.
Some universities teach formula plugging, and some teach fundamentals. I've worked with the graduates of both, and the former can't solve any problem that doesn't have a book answer, and they'll misapply that.
Can't speak for other professions but as a dev I've got no regrets in getting a CS degree. There's nothing you'll learn there that you couldn't maybe teach yourself but that's exactly the point. Unless you're a gifted autodidact you'll face considerable difficulty and will likely end up skipping through the important stuff coming away with a very flawed understanding indeed.
I don't have a CS degree (or any degree for that matter), but I did review a CS degree program requirement and class materials. They do cover important stuffs. It's just that it doesn't take 4 years to learn them.
Required classes for a CS curriculum I reviewed were: discrete math, data structure, algorithm, computer architecture, programming language, operating system.
Error analysis is important stuff and there's no easily accessible description of it, mostly because it's not a small stuff as opposed to some algorithm.
Well let's pretend I don't have a field and I'm just about to go to uni because someone on the internet said I should go there to learn the important stuff.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] thread2&3: I knew a guy, his father had sheep, plenty of them. He never bothered with Uni. He has been studying/training on seminars regarding agriculture, animal care, etc. He is set for life. He will never sit on a university theatre and keep notes. He does use technology (I remember how he was shocked when he discovered YouTube videos that exploded his mind and knowledge).
He picks up the phone and speaks to vets, he talks to agriculture specialists, he watches seminars, he gets better. He stays on top/ahead of things. He never spent 1 (pick your own currency) on University, housing, (Uni) books.
He stays in touch with his peers both in his country and abroad (he was taught English early on and how he sees the value of that investment).
I see him though being a guest lecturer in a Uni, to speak as a professional on this/his industry, speak on his part of the supply chain, what he would expect of "Education" to provide for him (his industry) in the future, what he would like to see people do for the promotion and progress of his industry. But pay for classes? Never.
So.. 2 & 3 :)
Edit: typos
They guy I was referring to in my post above, started with a certain wealth (even if that wealth is in a form of a 200-sheep-herd), a certain skillset (assisting his father in the business while growing up, having a 'knowledge base' right there in his home, having connections, having the equipment). What has gotten him to a few thousand animals since, is hard work and "invest in knowledge as you go". He didn't start from scratch.
The benefit with his line of business, is that the wealth/skills-handover was happening since he was 10 (experience, skills, knowledge). If one is to become a doctor, the mental training may start early on, but the actual knowledge is coming much later, and at a greater cost ($)(especially in the USA).
That's easy in the first year or so. It's harder to get proof that you're as smart as your professors. If you are Robin Williams and a Juilliard professor tells you that he has nothing to teach him, by all means fuck off and do your thing. Otherwise, chances are that you should stay in school.
Professor: If you think computers are fast now, it'll blow your mind that back in the 60s the NSA has computers running at 1000.
Me: 1000? You mean 1000 megahertz?
Professor: No, 1000.
Me: facepalm
I'm still paying off those student loans.
I often think the biggest difference between a graduate and non graduate is three years. As an 18 year old there is no way I would have been able to withstand the culture for another three years at IBM without it significantly affecting me (positively or negatively), but at 21 I feel much more mature and ready for a career. In many cases, does University just function as a waiting room in which young people can mature?
Do you really want to be engulfed by a male-dominated IBM/Google monoculture for 4 formative years?
I don't see why "male-dominated" should be a problem. Statistically, I would even probably have more shared interests with them.
If you feel you need a few more skill-points in talking to women in order to find a girlfriend or wife. College is a much easier and more forgiving environment to learn that sort of thing.
Of course, that's not a concern for everyone. Some people know all they need to know already, or aren't looking for a hetero relationship!
And the opposite is true. If I were 18 now, I'd probably go to university. Back in the day, I had my reasons not to go, and when the time came to reconsider it (mid 20s), it felt much harder to justify.
But now I live in relative comfort, and I would have to stop working and generating an income. I have savings that could tide me over but when the choice is a home for a future family or a university degree with questionable worth it's a tough ask.
I can't imagine having dependents and going back to work.
Of course everyone is going to chime in and say that you don't need to do university full time, but, you do. Notwithstanding the mental exhaustion that comes with our jobs but also I believe it to be unlikely that you'd be able to get into the right mindset to be creative, social and learning deeply.
I sincerely believe that university is a thing that you can only do at a certain point in your life, and I'm passed that point.
As someone who didn't graduate until they were 49 I strongly disagree. The only thing I would change now is I would have put work aside and studied full time instead of part time.
I'd still like to study though. At a sustainable part-time pace. Say, 1-4 courses per year, with focus on things I actually want to learn, and not so much on things that would award me a paper.
(It'd help a lot if I could work, say, 4 days a week)
Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.
The entire point of the article was that if you have something better to do than university and good reason to believe you can actually do it you might at least consider it. Also, three to four years of foregone earnings are a powerful reason not to go to university if you’re already capable of earning a living in your chosen field. That is very far from zero reasons, especially when you consider the professional development you can fit into those years if that’s something you value.
> Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.
When you’re 40 no one but bureaucrats is going to give a crap what university you went to, compared to your actual accomplishments. If all you’ve got is side projects on GitHub no one will care whether you went to Oxford or University of Southern Florida or dropped out of high school. Actual accomplishments
Source: am 42 with no degree, and I’m surprised when my CV makes it through HR filters, because it’s so rare.
As for career development - 3-4 years of career development "forgone" isn't really that much relative to the sum total of an entire career. One could just as easily say that when you're 40, no-one but bureaucrats is going to give a crap whether you have 19-20 years of experience or 23.
There are always exceptions - the whole "dropped out of university to found X or invent Y" thing - but 95% of people's actual accomplishments (as you so excitedly put it) are going to be a bunch of 'turned up, did pretty good' lines on a resume. All other things being equal, I'll hire the person who passed university-level calculus at a good school, thanks.
If you could change the way the university tech you, what you would do?
What I would add to college curriculum today is a good project management course, up to PMP level; also for CS, an equivalent of ITIL foundation.
For CS the biggest gap I see in fresh graduates are testing and performance and a more solid foundation on RDBMS: even in the era of NO-SQL and HADOOP the starting point is still understanding RDBMS.
Imo education should be a lifelong thing: available at any time, part time or full time, on-demand; for example, new requirements come up at a job and you need new skills? grab a course. want to enter a new subfield? grab a few relevant courses. got interested in something new all of a sudden? grab a course and see if the interest doesn't wane. laid off? consider taking the chance to study full time for a few months and pick up some new skills or plug holes in prior knowledge.
It should be based more on voluntary interest ("I want to learn this thing!") or actual concrete need ("business is looking for someone with skill X and person Y looks like a good fit but they need to study a bit") and less on the idea that you sit through courses and exams and demos in exchange for points that eventually buy you a piece of paper..
University (or, rather, education in general) should be with us through the entire life.
There are open universities that sort of go in this direction, but the last time I looked at them, it felt like they're still rather structured around getting a degree and all the bs that goes with it.
But I'm biased towards going to uni, since I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university.
But as you go closer towards research those people start falling off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_Denmark
You are, of course, doubly fortunate.
> the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs
The hypothetical awakening of a person's intelligence is a battle against much more dominant social conditioning. And then students self-select for narrowness of perspective in a programme. As you note, the job market and consumerism are fatal stages of later conformity.
There is always the chance that some discussion or chance meeting will awaken a mind. But it seems far too accidental, assuming a society with libraries and recognised need for genuine public discourse.
In many economies, university isn't unconditional. It has become so expensive in some cases that graduates carry heavy debt for decades.
Does a person need to go to university? I would say that a person is better off reading at the library and seeking serious discussion rather than seeking credential-rewards in the edu-bubble. The shoddy mess should be rebuilt to make it a better deal. On-line learning is the only way I can see this happening.
In the end, I did choose to go to university. I will be working part-time to pay about 90% of it (including housing) which means I'll have practically no debt. The main reason for me to go, was that I don't want to de a developer for the rest of my life. I think that having a degree will make a eventual career switch a lot easier.
As a recruiter I never looked too serious for credentials, knowing myself going through the college only for that piece of paper at the end, working full time and knowing a lot more from the job than what the other students learned. From my former class in college I think I am the only one practicing IT, the others too other directions, including one that was a quite successful music band leader.
Compared to their university-attended coworkers, the straight-to-industry folk were far more likely to cargo cult design patterns, languages, and frameworks.
If your codebase follows a well-recognised style and pattern, it becomes a lot easier for new hires or contractors to get on their feet and start productive work than if you have some kind of brilliant idiosyncratic codebase that takes 3 months for a new hire to get their head around (as was the case when I joined my current company).
There is also downsides, like the fact it is a job at the end of the day, and that comes with politics as well as technical challenges.
I'd again make the decision (over University) in a heartbeat.
Software Developer? Not really. FAANMG SWE Job? I won't risk it if I'm not famous with 10K other people applying.
I'm not sure this is a real thing unless you're, say, Richard Branson. I also can't really imagine many circumstances in which you're doing something non-traditional and you can't just pretend you don't have a degree by neglecting to mention it... and if you've already reached a level of "significance" in a non-traditional thing where someone might actually check, well, you've probably already done better than most.
Programming is one of the few fields, that isn’t packing boxes of frozen fish, where a career without a degree is possible here, and even on that field time is running out for people without degrees because so many young people have been getting them for the past decade.
But that is my country, here you’d be absolutely crazy (or perhaps challenged in some way) to not finish an education.
I’m from there and I never finished my degree. The reason was that I took some time off to travel, found a job during this time and I simply have not been back since. Almost a decade now.
Only recently have I looked into finishing it off through online courses but even then it is hard to motivate myself, not once have I been asked for it. I even ask recruiters and they also say I don’t need it to be hired (at least: Singapore, UK, Thailand, Sweden) and I’m talking about major companies. I can’t speak for countries other than where I am employed but here I am not underpaid due to lack of degree.
I did go through 3 years of university and I do agree that the experience itself is useful (even though it might seem otherwise at times).
(Edit: to be clear I’m working in software development)
Despite how much success/failure/I learn I endure, college name matters... a lot. I snuck into Nuro's open house last year and found they exclusively invited Harvard/Stanford/MIT students (I can say this because I was a minor at the time of signing their NDAs)
College name matters, especially when you're starting out (which can impact where you evenetually end up... whether its working for a startup or working at a cool VC firm) In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now.
I never graduated and I was an idiot. Stay in school, kids.
If you still want a degree it’s entirely possible to get a regionally accredited degree in a year from Western Governor’s University or a number of others if you’re willing to work hard at it and are exceptionally organized. If you want to know more you can go to degreeforum.net Or if you want to get a Master’s Oxford has one in Software Engineering that will accept work experience in lieu of a degree though each module requires a week’s residency.
Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.
But these were the most challenging courses at a top 5 CS school, with some of the brightest researchers alive teaching course material. At another school that calculus is probably closer to what you're saying.
After 2 years in the field no one gives a damn. The degree is basically just a box for HR to check off.
I went to a top tier school and struggled with various parts of the curriculum (CHEM52, I'm looking at you). I convinced myself that I wasn't smart/good enough for various futures I'd previously envisioned, like academia or research. My confidence was shot and it affected where I applied for jobs out of college.
I ended up taking a contract position at Microsoft. I thrived, got my confidence back, and got hired full-time.
Two years after graduation an acquitance from my college reached out to me- he was coming to Microsoft Research for the summer, could I help him find a place to rent? We reconnected and got talking- It turned out his undergrad GPA was lower then mine! I never did find why he was more confident than me, but he had no problem thinking he was still qualified for a PhD program and was clearly doing well enough there to get picked up by prestigious research lab.
I'm pretty happy with the way my life has turned out, I have no reason to go back and change any decisions. In fact, many of the most valuable experience I had were unrelated to the classroom- student government, interactions with the board of trustees, putting together funding for various small projects. And I've had a great career since college. The only thing I wish I could change was how I felt about myself- I wish I'd been able to tell 20-year old me "you are doing fine! It'll be awesome in the end!" and have 20-year me believe me.
All of the above is a long way of saying- don't worry too much about your grades. Don't blow them off, but in the end they aren't as important as we often make them out to be.
But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
Universities also do research you can be part of. I helped build a CubeSat during my uni time and was part of a sounding rocket mission. You can't do that in a YouTube video of a lecture and you can't to that as a side project.
University is a place to meet like minded people and learn about stuff you are interested in. You get teachers and facilities you wouldn't normally have access to. Use it!
And make sure that you go to uni with this mental model of it. Whenever you see uni doing things that don't fit in that model, try to change it. Unis aren't there to make sure you get a better job, get access to hidden networks in society, take loads of money from students, crank out degrees, ...
They are there to enable people growing personally and fuel that growth back into growing humanities knowledge.
... and yeah, some local hackerspaces are closer to that idea of an University that many Universities are. That's a problem.
Plenty of sites and forums to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
So it can help to go to college. Just saying.
Oh. And the next generation - 100% college educated. Several PhD's. All well employed. None working on the farm. So for some segment of America at some time, college was/is a huge factor in their social mobility.
You seem to be proud, but sound derogatory towards those who actually work on a farm and are proud of it.
I actually live on my farm, have for 25 years. With Silicon Valley money from successful startup buyouts.
Btw "You …" kind of posts are sort of unnecessary. I know what I am; no need to tell me. Maybe just add your own thoughts, its less argumentative and we learn something.
Learn that there are more views than your own. I won't be writing in a way you want to get upvotes from you. So again, keep your lectures for yourself and stick on point.
Good for you if your kids know how. I am not really interested in that, so keep it to yourself.
Reading motivation into my words is certainly rude, and unnecessary. As I've mentioned its always better to just add one's own thoughts, instead of warping other's words to fit your narrative. Just a thought.
You: "Notice how those posts turn grey?"
Me: "I won't be writing in a way you want to get upvotes from you.".
You: "I didn't downvote you :) Its not possible to downvote responses to your own posts.".
Making things up is certainly unnecessary and commenting on someones writing style is certainly rude.
Again, that's my view, it doesn't have to match your view. We can both have different views and express them freely.
And I work remotely. Have, for 20 years.
If you make $100,000 through $999,999, then you make six figures.
More than six figures implies $1,000,000 or more.
I’m a significant proponent of college attendance for social and educational reasons, but even with that bias, I don’t agree with “necessary for 95%”.
But yeah it was worded strangely.
And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Why would we wish that on ourselves? How does that improve the world?
Even worse, the implied understanding that our society cannot function without an uneducated subject class is worrisome. Are the socialists right, and Capitalism/the free market demands a slave class?
Anyway, with automation any such demand diminishes yearly and is already small.
Have you been involved much in hiring? I suspect if you had it would disabuse you of the notion that university is effective at producing "capable, educated, useful people".
I’m not sure what the correlation between income (or other life outcomes) is between “attended college” vs “would typically have chosen college but took another route” but I suspect it’s a lot smaller than between that latter group and the “was never even considering college” group.
It’s not clear for an individual who “should” attend college how important the decision to actually attend is. I seem to recall studies that suggested there was a much stronger correlation between applying to Harvard than there was between that and attending Harvard.
As summarized by the Atlantic: "For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
This finding suggests that the talents and ambitions of individual students are worth more than the resources and renown of elite schools. Or, less academically, the person you’re becoming at 18 is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22. The takeaway here: Stress out about your habits and chill out about college."
To be fair, the Atlantic continues on to say that the effect is different for women (which they ascribe primarily to increased workforce participation rates).
That being said- strongly consider going to a place that is willing to throw scholarship money or special programs at you. The financial aspect of that advice should be obvious, but buy in from the school into your education can mean better access and sponsorship from professors as well
It's much less the case in Western countries, especially here in Australia, where tradespeople tend to earn on-par or more than white collar professionals.
I'm perfectly happy to pay a competent trade for good work, at whatever rate gets me out of painting/plumbing/pumping sewage.
A large proportion of professionals are completely incapable of doing the work that tradespeople do, most people can't even replace a tap washer on their own, let alone replace the transmission in their car. It's conceited and elitist to think you're more valuable than somebody else just because you have the luxury of sitting in front of a computer screen all day. It's not even an intelligence thing (which I think shouldn't matter at all), plenty tradespeople are just as clever as programmers or accountants, they just don't want a job that keeps them cooped up in an office all day. Especially when it comes to trades like electricians or plumbers, where you're still diagnosing problems and creating solutions, a good tradie is worth their weight in gold.
Tradespeople aren't paid seven figures a year because they have very little political and economic leverage. Top-rank CEOs, and people working in corporate law and finance are, because they tend to accumulate both - although often from a place where they start with plenty.
You can argue that this is neither fair nor justified, and I will agree with you. In fact I will argue that this is a fundamental failure which makes any political and economic system that lacks feedback loops to limit excesses of privilege inherently unstable.
But it helps to be clear about how the system really works before criticising it. Cleverness is not the primary decider. Nor is skill. Earnings are set by leverage and perceived power, all the way down.
This applies only in the case of the US, because university implies a $100k student loan.
Once you go to university, it is relatively easy to get a job making around 2.5-4 lakh a year. The total cost of university stays under 4 lakhs for most people, which is an acceptable percentage of projected annual wage. It is also a lot easier to live under your means in India, where a single person can easily live under 1.5 lakhs/year.
On the other hand, a university degree in the wrong major in the US can mean a $30k gig at Starbucks, with saving being nearly impossible and student debt worth $200k.
> Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents.
Haven't we already seen that this mindset is exactly what plagues academia with the most recent Admissions scandal? I mean parents of Wealth use that to leverage their children getting into that system to further entrench it and admissions offices use that to base their admissions on more than anything else.
I'm beyond the University Model, I have gotten to do some of the coolest things in my career not even mentioning I went to University and only based on merit and networking--though most assumed and asked loaded questions that reveal that I had indeed gone. But none of them asked for a transcript, as I don't even know where they are at this point.
I went to a low-tier (but highly applied to) CSU/UC, that has/had strong Research History, but saw it was all mis-allocated to serve a series of career academics with clout and had no real purpose other than to keep up the with 'publish or die' model and fluff their CVs. We as undergrads often had to work with broken lab equipment, limited class availability that prolonged your graduation date, and other budget cuts and this is was in an impacted major! As a student from the 2008 financial crises I don't envy what your time will be like in a STEM in this environment, frankly.
I dislike University for the horrible unforgivable debt loads it places on young people, but I HATE it for the waste of Human Capital it ultimately creates. It does occasionally offer some amazing discoveries but that seems more consequential than it does like the intended purpose; you need only see how University takes it's inflated share of researcher's grants and are legally allowed to take any and all IP from the research done.
You're free to do as you please, and you seem like a bright person so I hope its a full scholarship, but please understand that its disheartening to see what was supposed to be your most intellectually formulative years be wasted on such a horrible and corrupt system. Especially because as even before going in you understand the substance of the degree can be learned elsewhere and it serves no real purpose besides a form of perverse virtue signalling to HR.
Nobody ever asks me what college I attended. Nobody cares.
Nuro for example had this open house that exclusively invited Harvard/MIT students (i snuck in) and I'm sure there's a lot of similar opportunities that are open to kids in these colleges.
In the long term, I'm sure it'll fade away, but starting out matters as to where you will end up (whether you go to X startup or get to work for X VC)
Man, I thought this sort of discriminatory bullshit was limited to incestuous fields like law. Sad to see it infected the tech world as well.
Then again, it's a sign that the field is "normalizing".
You seem to be very impressed by the likes of Nuro. I would be over the moon to be able to work with Walter at any company. I'd love to just take a class from him at any school of any name.
As far as undergraduate degrees go, most universities teach you the same thing, the only difference is that some universities are more selective in who can attend than others. I learned the same material at the University of Canterbury down at the bottom of the world in New Zealand as what undergrads learn at Stanford.
I guess it's a bit different if you live in a country where there's competitive university entry, in New Zealand most universities simply require that finished high school to enter, you pick you university for lifestyle reasons (usually either because it's close to home or because you want to escape home). I've discovered that here in Australia there's much more of a hierarchy of which university you attended, as admissions are much more competitive. I guess that's what happens when you have 6 universities in the same city.
Usually this is a good sign you do not want to be an employee there.
Either you are an employer or an employee, make your choice.
Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification.
This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance to writing JavaScript for a living.
I often hear people say that a university education teaches nothing useful, that it's just learning to take tests, that the course material is irrelevant, that it's just for networking and signalling, etc.
I suspect they both a) selected the wrong major and b) went to the wrong university.
You are almost by definition an edge case.
I suspect going to a university is helpful in most STEM related fields. In anything medical or law related you don't even have to think about getting a job without a degree. I don't see how anyone can compensate an economical or business study by doing project on their own.
If anything I think IT is an outlier, because not going to university and learning the subjects you would have been taught on your own might be a valid option.
Law and medicine are the poster child for credentialism, you are forced by law to complete the degree to work, even if most law and medical professionals will tell you, work has nothing to do with college.
They suffer the “driving license problem”, having the title says nothing about your competence.
For instance, pretty much everyone has to study trigonometry, but very little people actually need to know trigonometry to do their job. In that sense technical fields are an outlier, because knowing trigonometry actually matters to your career.
I will explain why. Hint: you are the part of the problem.
> I've never seen anyone without a good education do it well.
This is your lived experience, so I respect it. On the other hand, a lot of people on HN's lived experience is that, they witnessed, first hand, people without a good education do it well, so very well, extremely wonderfully well. Please respect it too.
But you didn't.
I do not think that the fact that there are many people who can make a wonderful job without having gone to any university implies that there should be an anti-university sentiment. I think academic careers are necessary, not for everyone, but all that people working without any studies are building on the work done by lots of academics. That should be respected (by the way, I don't think it is not, but if it generally is not I think that it is a problem).
Personal attacks on HN are not allowed. Please don't do that again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Obviously if you just want quick vocational-type training, you don't need university level education. But then you should not be the one having problems with procrastination or self-discipline either. Most students in universities are there because they would not study or learn difficult or uninteresting subjects if left on their own. You also need to learn to communicate verbally and in writing with your peers. Knowing stuff but not being to able to communicate and work with others leads directly to low level jobs.
Also at my former company there was a principal computer scientist who was quite proud that he didn't have a university degree; I didn't work with him much but he was obviously fairly accomplished, career-wise. So that worked fine for him.
Most people are not like that, though; even though in theory you can study everything by yourself nowadays, I find that in practice people who didn't go to university often tend to have a fairly narrow & shallow field of expertise ("narrow" = don't have experience with many different things/ often focus on one language and a few sets of related technologies; "shallow" = they often don't understand too many layers of abstraction, and get completely lost if they need to go too deep). This is perfectly fine at the start of your career, but as years go by (like, 20years in, when you're still only mid-career) I can't imagine this working too well; unless maybe you switch to management?
You wanna go to university to be a coder/designer? Don't do it.
You wanna be a researcher/scientist/politic/etc? Yeah, go.
P.S. I obtained a degree.
You apparently didn't learn to have a better look at those things at the university, it might surprise you some time.
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I have two bachelors' degrees, one in Mathematics, and one in Japanese. Those two programs were night-and-day in terms of rigor.
The mandatory "general education" classes were an absolute waste of time, and accounted for over a third of the cost of my college education.
It would have been more productive to spend that money on Pokemon cards.
The reality is, for a lot of people, university is massive waste of time and money. It largely was for me. We would be better off following the German model, with tracks outside University for professional workers and artisans.
Moreover, there are some excellent self-taught programmers out there, who work in the industry, and learn the mathematics and the physics and all the rest because they are passionate about the subject.
I'll take that kind of drive any day of the week.
same story.
During undergrad, I was worried about the ~40k in loans I took out to pay for it. However, I was able to pay them off fairly soon after finishing up, and would never have been able to attend without the federal loans that did not require a co-signer.
Mmm...how do measure that? I think it's balanced. I suspect that the majority of the folks that comment have at least an undergraduate degree. Even the ones who argue that the degree is not of great value..
This site is very US-centric, which adds a huge monetary component to this decision. That makes this an entirely different question compared to a country where higher education is free.
I also think that software development is a field that is quite friendly and attractive to people switching from a different career or field. So you have the related, but still distinct discussion about whether you should have a CS degree specifically to work as a software developer.
If I was 18 now I don't think I would go to university. I mentioned this to my father a few weeks ago and he supported this decision.
Ultimately it doesn’t particularly punish people for getting a degree which isn’t worth much because if their degree isn’t worth much then they are less likely to have to pay much of the tax. And I think people are still statistically better off going even if you take the tax into account.
I find it weird because I can’t work out what it is trying to punish. At least with income tax there are arguments that better paid people are able to contribute more and so they should. But with the student “loans” it seems like it’s trying to discourage people from getting a degree which confers them a moderate advantage in income. It doesn’t seem to discourage degrees that are in some sense not worth the government’s money. I guess one way to look at it is that they wanted something that looked like loans but wasn’t burdensome and also had an interest rate that wouldn’t go to 0 if the base interest rates were very low and that’s how we ended up with the system.
It’s also means tested which seems fair but I think can be quite hard for the families on the various boundaries.
In this sense the biggest value of a degree in hiring is just the crude proxy it is for IQ and conscientiousness. That being said, I've never interviewed anyone without a degree, but then I've never seen a candidate without a degree either. I have hired people whose degree is completely unrelated to the role, because they demonstrated the ability and interest to learn something outside of what they studied at uni.
So perhaps part of the opposition to university is due to the (possibly incorrect) feeling that it encourages people to think of it as "this is the period I do my learning", whereas some alternative to university might better promote people to develop a habit of lifelong learning. I.e. maybe people have been jaded by the experience of interviewing/hiring people with degrees from good universities who just spend all their spare time consuming media.
Which is not to suggest attending university is a bad idea, given its value as a signal, just that it doesn't seem ideal for developing the habit of lifelong learning.
We were required to take a breadth of courses first year that helped create a well rounded foundation to my studies in software which I value greatly.
I can tell many people in the field have never looked past the technicals to think about how computer science connects to the world at large and it's a shame because there is a lot to learn and much wisdom to be gained by taking a holistic view.
Some of my favorite courses were sociology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, biology (I did switch majors) not to mention classics and astronomy.. They gave me a very rich insight into the philosophy of thought outside of software and I've always applied my learnings to corporacy and professionalism.
Not all universities are like this and graduates while technically proficient graduate wholly unprepared for the realities of social programming because let's face it software is a social medium in the truest sense of the word and university work with its emphasis on solo work i.e. individual performance and occasional groups (which are invariably one person pulling all the others' weight or someone bossing everyone until they give in) as well as emphasizing marks as the primary metric serves very little utility in preparing people for the real world and even co-op programs serve only to reinforce the stereotypes rather than disrupt them.
I enjoyed college but, I very quickly understood that its only purpose wasn't to enhance my education as I sat through multiple classes that were nearly identical to previous all because I had to check a box. And generally I felt classes moved to slow and would have been much happier studying on my own, but courses often forced my attendance. Though I am a bit unique in my ability on that admittedly.
It's hard to put into words, but university was a unique experience for me that was instrumental in helping me grow to become the person I am today. Finishing high school and then going to a coding bootcamp for a few months before joining the workforce just wouldn't have provided that space for me to "discover myself", for lack of a better term.
That's not to say that everybody should go to university, although I definitely benefited from it and don't regret it at all, I was definitely railroaded into tertiary education by my parents and teachers. And that's not to say that university is the only place where I would've experienced the kind of personal growth that I did. I have plenty of friends who went into trades and completed apprenticeships (actually more than went to university), and most of them don't regret doing that either.
I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom. Maybe there are some out there, but I haven't met them.
But it goes further. What strikes me is not only an anti-university sentiment, but also a strong anti high school sentiment. I've been surprised by the number of comments from people who are obviously smart and diligent enough to be programmers, but for whom high school was a disaster. And it occurs to me that this does reveal that education is not serving everybody equally well.
So, even though I value my university education, I'm still interested in hearing how others have experienced it. However for students, my advice is that you have to find the thing that makes college worthwhile for you. If you go in with a cynical attitude, that it's just "signaling" or "networking," then you are likely to be blinding yourself to the other kinds of opportunities that it presents.
I am honestly jealous of the people who say they valued their university experience. I really wish I could have enjoyed formal education that much.
My life was funded by the ability to walk into software development jobs. If I were born 5 years later, I would be a different (probably non-functioning) person.
I think the vast majority has technically learned maths and physics outside the college classroom. The teaching quality I'm getting at my university isn't the greatest (bar a few exceptions), and I find myself regularly going to Khan Academy or 3blue1brown to understand a concept better. This is learning outside the classroom!
In a lot of ways, I find universities to be assessment centres and certificate issuers. Not in all ways of course, certain aspects such as labs, coordination of group projects, someone to ask questions to get back to you instantly, are all things which cannot be replaced in any circumstance. But when it comes to the dry theoretical stuff, I'm not sure why I would go to a lecture if I know I can get a better quality of teaching somewhere else online.
Of course this is only true for a few subjects (maths and entry level physics/engineering). I unfortunately have to rely on the lectures provided for the more specialist modules I'm being assessed on (such as heat transfer and chemical engineering principles). This is mainly so that I can comply with the teacher's specific assessment criteria and the terminology/definitions/textbook/ordering they use. I may be able to find heat transfer explanations somewhere else online, and they probably would explain things better, but they wouldn't help much when it came time to use the terminology that the lecturer expects you to use during an assessment, or if you're expected to use the equation sheet that the teacher made for you and expects you to use.
One of the most valuable parts of a Engineering/Mathematics Degree (Both at the BS and the MS levels) is that of the upper division elective courses for specialization. At research universities, these classes often contain lots of information/techniques that can't be found in a textbook, let alone in a youtube video. At best, there might be a very cursory blog post, or a collection of research papers that you really aren't ready to explore on your own. Often, these classes result in final projects which can be expanded into research papers or portfolio projects with the professor teaching the class, both of which are valuable learning opportunities for the student and effective signaling mechanisms post-graduation.
These classes are where the real technical value of a college education is found.
In addition, there a quite a few classes which are offered if not required for such Engineering/Mathematics students which are pretty difficult to approach on your own and surmise in a short period of time. For examples, I point towards Analysis 1/2/Complex, PDEs, Dynamics, and Probabilistic Robotics.
I personally got a lot from my undergrad, I (and this may only apply to me) strictly would not have succeeded in learning all the topics I did if my only motivation was my personal learning in my free time, particularly in the short time horizon I did. The pressure cooker (cough engineering school) I went through was very formative, built a number of professional/personal connections, and taught me almost all the personal and professional skills I have.
This is just my 2 cents though.
In fact, I will go one further. Almost all self-taught physicists I have met are kooks - bonkers crazy conspiracy theorists.
I can with certainty say I did not have everything I needed to go off and have the best possible career. Not all of us were born into that type of situation.
I would not have become an economist without going to college and taking an economics class to fulfill a requirement. It was so right for me that I even got a PhD. Needless to say, that would not have happened if I had stuck around to take over my dad's excavating business or the family farm. [Edit: I was a licensed sewer and water installer before I graduated high school, so I was in a better place than a lot of high school grads.]
High school dropout here, no uni degree, I can write more than just JS thanks. I know C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, ruby, Typescript, Go. I know DDD, SOLID, TDD, and AOP. I have forgot more about Linux than most people will learn in a lifetime and I did all of it without attending one uni course. I come from a poverty background, grew up in a trailer park, got fucked up on all sorts of drugs and didn't do well in school. Some time in my early 20's I had a revelation that I was nobody and I was going to die poor and alone if I didn't get my act together. Sadly with my piss poor grades there was no way I was going to get a scholarship to pay my way through college, my family just made enough that I couldn't get finaid easily either. So I decided to wing it. I looked in the newspaper for high paying jobs, decided I wanted to be Systems Administrator, and looked up the skills required to be one. Did I get a sysadmin job? Hell no, I worked my way up from Help Desk to PC Tech, to Network Tech, to Systems Tech, to Systems Admin, to DevOps, and then to Sr. Software Developer, I'm now a Principal Engineer.
Here's the deal, I know bright people who made it through college and I know stupid people who made it through college, but I also know bright people who have worked their way up from the bottom, like myself. I've been working my way up since 2003. My personal opinion is that Uni is not only not for everyone, but that perhaps some industries, including software engineering, may work better on the guild system than in a class room.
I'd however recommend going to a country where education is close to free to get a degree, even if it involves losing a year learning the local language...
But yes, you do need to go to university, a good one. And you need to graduate.
My work experience has been design Engineering, which is a low 6 figure job. I also live in an area with an old industry that's getting Engineers outsourced.
I'm considering a comp sci degree so I can get into embedded, or electrical engineering, AI, or pretty much any 180k/yr job. I'm okay with taking a pay cut for a few years.
University degrees are, fundamentally, a mark of status and patience: “this guy had enough money and willpower to sit through years of drudgery, so it’s safe to hire him to do the same for us”. After a few years nobody cares what the degree was actually about, particularly in IT where everything gets redone every few years.
>Only hire computer scientists
>I don't have relevant work experience (which means taking a 60k/yr web dev job to begin my career?)
>My projects are good, but I need to contribute to open source projects.
The reason for the degree is to get access to high quality programming jobs rather than 60k/yr web dev. Not to mention, I imagine I'll learn everything about security and algorithms which I'm sure are weaknesses.
As for the first, you don't want to be in an environment that values credentials so strictly, imho - it poisons the air. There is always a chance they would then say "we only hire CS from Stanford/MIT" - sometimes stuff like this is just a polite way of saying "we don't think you can cut it".
> I imagine I'll learn everything about security and algorithms
Algos yeah, plenty - and I agree it's where universities really make a difference (I'm weak there too, and part of the reason for dropping out, and more recently changing career, was that I'm not really interested in that part of the job).
Security... eh. It really depends on the program.
That being said, a PhD is probably only required if you wish to go into teaching.
The way I see it, altough I learned a lot in uni, it's basically a "VIP" token to get yourself a job. And that's sad. Lots of companies will hire physics and math grads _just because_. They think they have "problem solving skills" - let me tell you - there are a tonne of STEM grads that do not have these skills (putting it politely) but get hired anyway.
Required classes for a CS curriculum I reviewed were: discrete math, data structure, algorithm, computer architecture, programming language, operating system.