> He says college rewards conformity and competition, not collaboration, theory
Wow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't know how to teamwork and learn from others.
I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others can be counterproductive, in my opinion.
Blanket statements like this are foolish. My own college experience had a lot of regurgitation, but whether you make productive use out of your time there is completely within your hands. I was able to do challenging, hands-on research, make connections that lead to my last two jobs, and build a solid resume.
However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.
I did plenty of group work at Georgia Tech. Built several working robots in teams, a video game, a bus monitoring device, and various other software projects.
I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.
"conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content, rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software development and literature.
"competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have their own problems.)
"regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.
"theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job.
I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless.
Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of it.
When I was in college group projects were extremely common. As were group-projects for clubs. The SW engineering sequence was all group based. The compiler sequence was group project based. OS was group project based. And architecture was group project based.
It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.
Is it really? Most of my tests were open book or take home. You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization.
Maybe he should check himself into Northeastern University. It was almost every course that started off teaming oneself up and heading right into the project work as a team. Loners were discouraged from venturing off.
"I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class."
Not to be mean, but that might be a problem with your college rather than colleges in general.
IMO, he's using excuses for his inability to work around these restrictions in a creative way.
In some ways, college was my personal social-engineering experiment.
Worrying your grade is in and of itself conformity, and if you throw the idea that you need to get a 4.0 to succeed in college out the window, the first two or three points are complete bunk. The theory vs. application thing is mostly bunk too, because you can find the application in college, but you will have to look, ask around, and find someone who is interested in it, and those people aren't always going to be in your academic sphere at the college of engineering.
I graduated with a 2.5, made a lot of mistakes, but like I said, college was a huge experiment for me, and I knew what I needed to do to come out ahead and I did. I used and abused every opportunity there to learn what I wanted to learn while getting a degree. I had access to a machine shop, made friends with the shop supervisor, and got to do whatever the hell I wanted on $100,000 CNC machines. I worked for an experiment for professors, suggested projects and got to work on them. I walked to the engineering department and talked to the DSP professor and got explanations on things I didn't understand, even though I wasn't even enrolled in any engineering classes.
It's such a cop out to just say college is broken because somebody isn't feeding you what you think you need to be fed. Nobody said you need to get a 4.0 in college to succeed in life, people just assume it, and nobody said things would just come to you when you were there, but people do assume that.
College is a collection of amazing resources, and I would think that any true entrepreneur would understand this. I'm not saying that college is for everyone, but I am saying that pretending it's worthless or a waste of time only shows a lack of imagination, creativity and proactivity.
Of course, if I had a startup called UnCollege I would say it was worthless too.
> That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in the real world. Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects and our own organizations. Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in improving the human condition.
Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.)
He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students do show an improvement.
I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.
I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people, so that there is a big confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.
Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing.
And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could have won the Vietnam War in just a few years.
19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.
Yeah, but he is part of the Thiel Fellowship, which I tend to see as a pretty damn smart group of young people. And I know Dale and know that he talks to these "moving forward" type of teens.
On the other hand, I'm yet another 19-year-old with an opinion. Yes, I think I know something about what the right decision for college is (and I think it's completely individual), so perhaps I just fall under that category and the above should just be ignored. Not that I think so, of course.
I don't know Dale, but reading that article leads me to different conclusions about him than you probably already have. :-)
I will say this for starters. I thought that college was actually one of the most open environments I've ever been in. Moreso than pre-college education. Moreso than working at a VC-backed startups. Moreso than working in corporate America. Probably the only time I had significantly more freedom was taking some time off between jobs.
When I see statements like, "Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity" -- I see immaturity. He punishes himself for failure. I've seen it as a learning opportunity since junior high at least (I think this something athletics really instils in children, although certainly not exclusive to athletics).
In any case, he sounds like a friend, and I don't want to rant on a friend, especially if he's not here to defend himself. I look forward to what he can do over the years. Maybe he'll prove me wrong.
Disagree. In many cases academia DOES actively punish failure, through negative feedback mechanisms involving grades, comments on papers/essays and the like that subjugate "out-of-the-box-thinking" in favor of a certain theme or buzzword a professor wants to hear, what his or her political or economic viewpoint is, etc.
I'm not saying this is inherently good or bad either. If you're a surgeon or an airline pilot, your room for experimentation & outside the box thinking is slim to nil. But actively discouraging an aspiring hacker, developer, entrepreneur etc. from experimentation (I.E. a high rate of failure before success) is a surefire way to diffuse the creative process, in my mind.
Disagree. In many cases academia DOES actively punish failure, through negative feedback mechanisms involving grades, comments on papers/essays and the like that subjugate "out-of-the-box-thinking" in favor of a certain theme or buzzword a professor wants to hear, what his or her political or economic viewpoint is, etc.
I think you're conflating two things here: negative feedback and biased evaluation. Two very different things.
Regarding negative feedback -- it's not failure, it's feedback. And that's what I mean by the immaturity aspect. When I was a kid, I'd cry when I lost at chess. As I got older I usually learned more from my losses than my wins. They were no longer just failures, it was a chance to improve. Throughout school I felt the same way. Comments on papers/essays and grades I used to make myself better. I appreciated them.
The biased evaluation isn't unique to college. In fact its a pretty major part of life in general. You're going to have to deal with it in businss, dealing with VCs, dealing with spouses, banks, employees, etc... If you can figure out a way to remove it, I'd love to see it.
Regarding out of the box thinking, I generally found it well received. Especially in CS. But I guess YMMV.
A high college GPA sends me a very clear message: this candidate has a proven ability to identify what dozens of different professors and TAs wanted, and deliver it.
When I was 19, I didn't see it as a valuable skill, I just thought it was obnoxious bullshit. Today, I see it as so valuable that when faced with a pile of potential candidates, nearly everybody who graduated magna or summa gets at least a phone interview.
I also have trouble accepting statements about college from someone who attended one for less than a year. I don't think there is a set-in-stone college experience, and it seems from his article that his experience differed sharply from mine.
(The differences between good and bad colleges are, of course, usually missing from these sorts of discussions...I have difficulty taking seriously anyone who can critique or discuss "college" as if it were one monolithic program.)
College is not to teach you "how to be successful" or "become a better coder". In this case, it's about giving you the tools to learn to think. (...I think this doesn't apply for med school, though)
There's also the huge network of people you meet that help you later in your career. I've lost track of the number of people I know who have been given job offers from old friends/fraternity brothers/faculty they kept in touch with.
I have my current job because of an alumni from my school. There's a lot more to the college experience than just the diploma.
As kenjackson notes below, college-age students typically have everything figured out. As a sort of hangover from the teenage years, the world is astonishingly simple (the story of Asteroid Boy comes to mind) and traditional institutions are worthless. As a "smart" kid, I suffered from this myself.
The problem with the UnCollege movement is that it might disqualify a lot of smart students from graduate study, which IMO is where the teenage hubris starts melting away. Spend a few years in a PhD program, and even if you don't finish, you'll realize that the world is a lot more complicated than you imagined, and there is a lot of advanced knowledge out there that requires a period of dedicated study with a mentor. You might not need graduate school for it, but it's a structured environment for those who aren't fortunate enough to be adopted by a VC.
I would agree, but I think we are all on the same page on this subject (with Dale, that is). At least, he touches on the fact that students on the med track shouldn't really take the UnCollege route since there is intrinsic knowledge you pretty much need to be an active participant in the medical community in whatever capacity. (Around the end of the article.)
But yes, if you're saying that doing more education opens you up to more than just knowledge, but a realization that stuff is really a lot harder than you thought, definitely ++ on that.
Of course, there are things which are better suited for jumping right in—I'm thinking areas of work where experience can teach more than learning, like startups. But I'm biased.
In any case, I think with every article that's sensationalized like this, we can all agree that the headline sucks.
Why pick French salons as the model for future progress, why not the Royal Society (which has probably done as much for "improving the human condition" as any other body). Maybe it's because the founders of the Royal Society were closely linked to Oxford and Cambridge?
There is a growing dissonance in college: one group of people are intent on having a career in the academics. The other are getting their bachelor's as only for the fact that it's the new high school diploma: just a necessity to keep up.
This leads to confusion for a lot of young people. The ones who are more ambitous will have thoughts that college isn't enough for them, and will consider their dissection
that college is a beauracratic sheepfarm to be brilliant, and they will have convincing
thoughts of leaving which is unfortunate.
It is unfortunate because there is another realm which a lot of these young people might find a lot of challenging enjoyment and that is the academic world. Unfortunately again, though, the first two years of college have been dumbed down to accomodate the new trend of having college not mainly being for aspiring academics.
I have to wonder that if these students stuck it out (and perhaps with the choosing of a rigorous major) they'd find their life leading a whole new direction by the end of their upper division courses.
College is more than learning the material, it's also about learning about yourself. Most of the time, it's your first taste of freedom and it's one of the only times where you aren't really a kid anymore and you aren't stuck working in a 9-5.
You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not that easy.
I was going to say the same thing, there real issues with college and education but the whole debate right now is starting to feel like a lot of sensationalism.
I went to college and did Mathematics. Why? Cause it looked cool. Was I good at it? Not really I had a hard time with many of my classes but I enjoyed the material. It was interesting even if useless. It's all about what you want to get out of college. I wanted to learn something interesting.
The best part is it wasn't useless at all in the end. Nobody really cares about what your degree is in except for some specific jobs and get it cheap (that even goes for Ivy schools, they are now cheaper than many private sub Ivy schools due to Financial aid).
Just don't get too carried away in the whole "college is useless" craze.
People that don't need college probably don't need anyone to tell them that. They are already doing that. Probably the result of all those anti-college campaigns will mostly be providing an excuse to ones looking for a silly one.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly talking about the short term effect.
In the mid-long run I'm sure we're looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.
"Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim..."
Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would even have accepted this as actual work.
College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I previously thought useless.
The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically speaking) serfdom.
College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system)
Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good salary. Going to college gets you on that track.
In my case, my business partner was my college roommate. We also have made a lot of contacts through school that continue to benefit us. Your classes are not the only thing about school that will help you in the future. Like I said in a previous post, college is what you make of it.
Most people however are better off as employees however
Why is this? We clearly ought to be overall better off since it allows greater specialization and higher productivity, but how much better do more specialized people with fewer choices actually do in general?
starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5
Yay for us programmers being FLSA-exempt I suppose...
"College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system)"
This isn't really true. Universities got started in the Middle Ages to a) collect what knowledge existed, especially from Greek and Roman sources and b) to a lesser extent, train religious authorities and theologians. In the U.S., universities got going to basically create gentlemen, and later to create scholars and researchers (Menand goes over a lot of this in his book The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...).
Today, a lot of colleges and college majors focus on creating employees, but that's a relatively recent shift that only began taking place on a large scale circa 1980, as far as I can tell. That's when the number of business majors, relative to the liberal arts and sciences, really takes off in the U.S. I don't know enough about the European situation to comment on it.
While I agree strongly with most of the author's thesis, the zero sum aspect to this debate is tiresome. And I say this as a dropout myself.
Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one.
Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments.
Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held in equal regard.
At the end of the day, College is what you make of it. No one can force you to really get involved, participate in team projects etc. You have to have the internal drive to make the most of your opportunity.
It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal. Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".
I said this in another post, but I agree completely.
Also, this kid apparently went to a Liberal Arts college in the middle of Arkansas, so some of his biases and thoughts about college are going to be based on that.
In my case he perfectly describes most of my lower division courses. Memorization, no group work, theory. The problem is he's making assumptions about an entire degree based on at most a year of education. At a liberal arts college.
Once you get past the prerequisites and basic classwork, it's a world of difference. I feel bad for the people who will be missing out on some truly great educational experiences because this kid couldn't stick it out for more than a few semesters. Few people will have his success rate right out of high school.
This isn't the first anti-college discussion to come up recently... not even the first in the last 24 hours.
What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into these arguments that all higher education is worthless.
You're missing the point. It's time to challenge the traditional education business model. This is the digital age where information is cheap -- and college Institutions have no incentive to capitalize on this. They don't want to drive down their costs, why would they? Education should be like any other service and made available to anyone who wants it. Not to the richest kid. Not the kid with the highest GPA. Anyone.
No one is arguing specialized education is bad, but there are much more efficient ways of getting there.
But college isn't about information gathering. And the Internet doesn't make eduction available to anyone. Public libraries make information available to anyone.
There is one thing that the article points out however, that's very important:
"College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago"
This is insane. Public university tuition has inflated about 360%, while salaries have stayed flat or declined, and unemployment is on the rise.
I agree with others that college benefits those who take advantage of what it offers, but when you come out with 6-figure debt, the cost/benefit of "investing in yourself" is seriously in question.
The societal fabric in the USA has been under assault by the rich and elite, and public schooling (both k12 and collegiate) is merely one of those threads that's becoming unraveled (by the excessive burden of the profiteers/leeches).
"What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students."
Some colleges and some majors. I wrote elsewhere: "the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not." This also applies to majors / departments, and the problem with criticizing "college" is that you're criticizing such a heterogeneous set of institutions, practices, and experiences that you're not actually describing a specific good or ill.
I believe what has been happening, and Mike Rowe recently talked about this in his address to congress, is that America has adopted the process of high school -> college as the norm, rather then the exception. 18 year olds go to college because they think they're supposed to, rather then going to help them accomplish something specific.
I think the anti-college movement is good because it helps draw a line between those parts of the workforce that value a degree and those that don't.
His statements are absolutely true... about a handful of fields people go to school for:
Computer Sciences, absolutely.
Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure.
Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it.
Biology & Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study
None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught in a formal setting.
Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming and web development.
I'd leave chemistry off the list: lab work is essential, and very few individuals have the money or the permits to obtain the chemicals you work with in a chem-majors class. I don't know biology well enough to talk, but I suspect that molecular bio at least suffers from the same problems as chem. And you can self-teach physics theory, but experimental physics can require some very specialized and expensive equipment. Not to mention the opportunities to work in research labs, which is where I did most of my education...
This article merely proves the point that Thiel's coverage on HN has pounded into the ground: smart, driven kids interested in entrepreneurship don't need college.
What seems to be missing from these kinds of discussions is a focus on what kinds of college programs we should be emulating.
I think that the college system is terribly broken.
In my view, college is broken in 3 ways:
1. It is too expensive -- this severely limits talented people from going to college
Hopefully, online, free college lectures will go a long way to remedy this situation.
2. Brilliant PhDs are not able to find jobs in their area
This is not about money but about the ability to do research and about the ability for these people to contribute in their chosen fields.
3. The Wrong People are going to college
People are going to college because they don't know what else to do and because everyone tells them it's what you should do.
College should be optional for jobs. Some of the most brilliant engineers that I have worked with are self-taught without a college degree.
You don't need college to be educated and you don't need a college degree to make lots of money.
College is the entry point to the academic community which should be regularly enriched by the world's best talent.
For many people, it is the ritual, the sports, the experience, and the opportunity to explore ideas for the first time that makes college so worthwhile.
College isn't entirely about learning things in the classroom, it's four years where young, hopefully creative people get to have almost nothing to do but think and create. The overwhelming majority of people in the world don't get to work in cool offices, on cool problems, with cool co-workers who want to solve difficult problems with them. The majority of us spend our days under fluorescent lights working on mundane business-intelligence type things. Not to say that creativity cannot be found in anything, but sitting in my dorm hacking until all hours of the morning because I didn't really have to go to class is certainly more conducive to creativity than working an 8:00-6:00 and going to bed at 10:00 because I have to be up in the morning.
While college might not really offer much in the way of knowledge acquisition (at least until grad school), it would does offer the time to work on things you're passionate about, and network with other people of similar inclinations.
I dropped out of college when I was 19, and it was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. For somebody who is already a member of the silicon valley set, this might be good advice, for everybody else this train of thought is parasitic.
(I'm not saying that networking and hacking and soforth isn't possible when you're working a "real" job [hell, I spend almost every waking second I'm not spending at my job hacking and writing and networking], I'm just saying that college is a better environment for it)
Part of the problem with college is that it doesn't do a very good job of preparing students to go to work. The value prop for companies is that colleges sorts students, so the best companies can take the best graduates. Part of the problem is that the sorting is broken - the "best" students according to the university aren't the best workers. And the process of college isn't very helpful. As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic.
College is great preparation for grad school, which is great preparation for a teaching job. The system serves itself very well, thank you.
The other big problem I see is that the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not.
And even if college only filters students ("Theory one" in Menand's article), it does still serve some kind of signaling function. As you note, "As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic." But most programming jobs do still appear to require a college degree. There's probably a reason for that: even if it is too low a bar, it is still a bar that not everyone can hurdle. People capable enough to be self-taught can hurdle it and, ideally, learn more; those not capable enough can't accomplish even that.
What on Earth college are you talking about? "Almost nothing to do but think and create?" This isn't a commune, it's a school. There's coursework and homework and studying and some extracurricular activities, and once you're done with all that I suppose you can "think and create", but nowhere and nohow is that the goal or reality of college, except maybe a visual arts college.
If your college left you with nothing but "time to think and create", dropping out was absolutely the right choice! The entire point (until PhD studies) is that you should be learning and doing things according to some curriculum; if you're not there for the curriculum, what are you doing there at all?
University exposed me to a broad array of topics in my field. It allowed me to explore my interests and specialize in a particular area. It gave me the opportunity to hack, tinker, discuss with my peers, get to know the literature, gain discipline and control over my life, build a basic network, learn the craft from professors, learn to write, find information, think about how to build a business, design systems in my mind, etc. All without the distractions of a job.
Does the education system in the US need to be changed? Absolutely 100% agree that it does. Do 18-19 year old people have the world figured out? Not by a long shot, but they sure think they do.
The article—appropriately, perhaps—reads like a high school essay from a smart student. Grammatically correct, logical, structured but stiff.
I guess the biggest thing that college gave me wasn't knowledge, it was a firing range where I could practice shooting without actually harming anyone. If I think of myself when I was 18-20, if I was actually put into a position of responsibility my net contribution would be negative.
There are certainly exceptions, but the net value of an unexperienced 18 year old is negative. He costs more to the company (in mentoring and mistakes) than the value he provides.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadWow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't know how to teamwork and learn from others.
I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others can be counterproductive, in my opinion.
However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.
I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.
"conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content, rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software development and literature.
"competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have their own problems.)
"regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.
"theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job.
I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless.
Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of it.
When I was in college group projects were extremely common. As were group-projects for clubs. The SW engineering sequence was all group based. The compiler sequence was group project based. OS was group project based. And architecture was group project based.
It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.
Is it really? Most of my tests were open book or take home. You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization.
Particularly math classes. Memorization was almost meaningless and tests could be open book for all the prof cared.
Not to be mean, but that might be a problem with your college rather than colleges in general.
In some ways, college was my personal social-engineering experiment.
Worrying your grade is in and of itself conformity, and if you throw the idea that you need to get a 4.0 to succeed in college out the window, the first two or three points are complete bunk. The theory vs. application thing is mostly bunk too, because you can find the application in college, but you will have to look, ask around, and find someone who is interested in it, and those people aren't always going to be in your academic sphere at the college of engineering.
I graduated with a 2.5, made a lot of mistakes, but like I said, college was a huge experiment for me, and I knew what I needed to do to come out ahead and I did. I used and abused every opportunity there to learn what I wanted to learn while getting a degree. I had access to a machine shop, made friends with the shop supervisor, and got to do whatever the hell I wanted on $100,000 CNC machines. I worked for an experiment for professors, suggested projects and got to work on them. I walked to the engineering department and talked to the DSP professor and got explanations on things I didn't understand, even though I wasn't even enrolled in any engineering classes.
It's such a cop out to just say college is broken because somebody isn't feeding you what you think you need to be fed. Nobody said you need to get a 4.0 in college to succeed in life, people just assume it, and nobody said things would just come to you when you were there, but people do assume that.
College is a collection of amazing resources, and I would think that any true entrepreneur would understand this. I'm not saying that college is for everyone, but I am saying that pretending it's worthless or a waste of time only shows a lack of imagination, creativity and proactivity.
Of course, if I had a startup called UnCollege I would say it was worthless too.
Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.)
He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students do show an improvement.
I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.
Your thoughts are welcome.
Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing.
And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could have won the Vietnam War in just a few years.
19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.
On the other hand, I'm yet another 19-year-old with an opinion. Yes, I think I know something about what the right decision for college is (and I think it's completely individual), so perhaps I just fall under that category and the above should just be ignored. Not that I think so, of course.
I will say this for starters. I thought that college was actually one of the most open environments I've ever been in. Moreso than pre-college education. Moreso than working at a VC-backed startups. Moreso than working in corporate America. Probably the only time I had significantly more freedom was taking some time off between jobs.
When I see statements like, "Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity" -- I see immaturity. He punishes himself for failure. I've seen it as a learning opportunity since junior high at least (I think this something athletics really instils in children, although certainly not exclusive to athletics).
In any case, he sounds like a friend, and I don't want to rant on a friend, especially if he's not here to defend himself. I look forward to what he can do over the years. Maybe he'll prove me wrong.
Disagree. In many cases academia DOES actively punish failure, through negative feedback mechanisms involving grades, comments on papers/essays and the like that subjugate "out-of-the-box-thinking" in favor of a certain theme or buzzword a professor wants to hear, what his or her political or economic viewpoint is, etc.
I'm not saying this is inherently good or bad either. If you're a surgeon or an airline pilot, your room for experimentation & outside the box thinking is slim to nil. But actively discouraging an aspiring hacker, developer, entrepreneur etc. from experimentation (I.E. a high rate of failure before success) is a surefire way to diffuse the creative process, in my mind.
I think you're conflating two things here: negative feedback and biased evaluation. Two very different things.
Regarding negative feedback -- it's not failure, it's feedback. And that's what I mean by the immaturity aspect. When I was a kid, I'd cry when I lost at chess. As I got older I usually learned more from my losses than my wins. They were no longer just failures, it was a chance to improve. Throughout school I felt the same way. Comments on papers/essays and grades I used to make myself better. I appreciated them.
The biased evaluation isn't unique to college. In fact its a pretty major part of life in general. You're going to have to deal with it in businss, dealing with VCs, dealing with spouses, banks, employees, etc... If you can figure out a way to remove it, I'd love to see it.
Regarding out of the box thinking, I generally found it well received. Especially in CS. But I guess YMMV.
When I was 19, I didn't see it as a valuable skill, I just thought it was obnoxious bullshit. Today, I see it as so valuable that when faced with a pile of potential candidates, nearly everybody who graduated magna or summa gets at least a phone interview.
(The differences between good and bad colleges are, of course, usually missing from these sorts of discussions...I have difficulty taking seriously anyone who can critique or discuss "college" as if it were one monolithic program.)
College is not to teach you "how to be successful" or "become a better coder". In this case, it's about giving you the tools to learn to think. (...I think this doesn't apply for med school, though)
I have my current job because of an alumni from my school. There's a lot more to the college experience than just the diploma.
The problem with the UnCollege movement is that it might disqualify a lot of smart students from graduate study, which IMO is where the teenage hubris starts melting away. Spend a few years in a PhD program, and even if you don't finish, you'll realize that the world is a lot more complicated than you imagined, and there is a lot of advanced knowledge out there that requires a period of dedicated study with a mentor. You might not need graduate school for it, but it's a structured environment for those who aren't fortunate enough to be adopted by a VC.
But yes, if you're saying that doing more education opens you up to more than just knowledge, but a realization that stuff is really a lot harder than you thought, definitely ++ on that.
Of course, there are things which are better suited for jumping right in—I'm thinking areas of work where experience can teach more than learning, like startups. But I'm biased.
In any case, I think with every article that's sensationalized like this, we can all agree that the headline sucks.
This leads to confusion for a lot of young people. The ones who are more ambitous will have thoughts that college isn't enough for them, and will consider their dissection that college is a beauracratic sheepfarm to be brilliant, and they will have convincing thoughts of leaving which is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because there is another realm which a lot of these young people might find a lot of challenging enjoyment and that is the academic world. Unfortunately again, though, the first two years of college have been dumbed down to accomodate the new trend of having college not mainly being for aspiring academics.
I have to wonder that if these students stuck it out (and perhaps with the choosing of a rigorous major) they'd find their life leading a whole new direction by the end of their upper division courses.
You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not that easy.
I went to college and did Mathematics. Why? Cause it looked cool. Was I good at it? Not really I had a hard time with many of my classes but I enjoyed the material. It was interesting even if useless. It's all about what you want to get out of college. I wanted to learn something interesting. The best part is it wasn't useless at all in the end. Nobody really cares about what your degree is in except for some specific jobs and get it cheap (that even goes for Ivy schools, they are now cheaper than many private sub Ivy schools due to Financial aid).
If someone spends $100,000 on school and they don't make that after graduating, people label it as a failure.
College's worth shouldn't be evaluated in a purely financial context.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly talking about the short term effect. In the mid-long run I'm sure we're looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.
Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would even have accepted this as actual work.
College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I previously thought useless.
The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically speaking) serfdom.
Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good salary. Going to college gets you on that track.
Why is this? We clearly ought to be overall better off since it allows greater specialization and higher productivity, but how much better do more specialized people with fewer choices actually do in general?
starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5
Yay for us programmers being FLSA-exempt I suppose...
This isn't really true. Universities got started in the Middle Ages to a) collect what knowledge existed, especially from Greek and Roman sources and b) to a lesser extent, train religious authorities and theologians. In the U.S., universities got going to basically create gentlemen, and later to create scholars and researchers (Menand goes over a lot of this in his book The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...).
Today, a lot of colleges and college majors focus on creating employees, but that's a relatively recent shift that only began taking place on a large scale circa 1980, as far as I can tell. That's when the number of business majors, relative to the liberal arts and sciences, really takes off in the U.S. I don't know enough about the European situation to comment on it.
Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one.
Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments.
Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held in equal regard.
It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal. Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".
Also, this kid apparently went to a Liberal Arts college in the middle of Arkansas, so some of his biases and thoughts about college are going to be based on that.
Once you get past the prerequisites and basic classwork, it's a world of difference. I feel bad for the people who will be missing out on some truly great educational experiences because this kid couldn't stick it out for more than a few semesters. Few people will have his success rate right out of high school.
What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into these arguments that all higher education is worthless.
This isn't good logic, much less good advice.
No one is arguing specialized education is bad, but there are much more efficient ways of getting there.
Now that you told me what college isn't about, what is it about? And why must it be threatened by a modern business model?
"College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago"
This is insane. Public university tuition has inflated about 360%, while salaries have stayed flat or declined, and unemployment is on the rise.
I agree with others that college benefits those who take advantage of what it offers, but when you come out with 6-figure debt, the cost/benefit of "investing in yourself" is seriously in question.
The societal fabric in the USA has been under assault by the rich and elite, and public schooling (both k12 and collegiate) is merely one of those threads that's becoming unraveled (by the excessive burden of the profiteers/leeches).
Some colleges and some majors. I wrote elsewhere: "the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not." This also applies to majors / departments, and the problem with criticizing "college" is that you're criticizing such a heterogeneous set of institutions, practices, and experiences that you're not actually describing a specific good or ill.
I think the anti-college movement is good because it helps draw a line between those parts of the workforce that value a degree and those that don't.
Computer Sciences, absolutely. Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure. Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it. Biology & Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study
None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught in a formal setting.
Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming and web development.
definitely a good movement to demand for change in education, will it revolutionize the system? probably not.
What seems to be missing from these kinds of discussions is a focus on what kinds of college programs we should be emulating.
In my view, college is broken in 3 ways:
1. It is too expensive -- this severely limits talented people from going to college
Hopefully, online, free college lectures will go a long way to remedy this situation.
2. Brilliant PhDs are not able to find jobs in their area
This is not about money but about the ability to do research and about the ability for these people to contribute in their chosen fields.
3. The Wrong People are going to college
People are going to college because they don't know what else to do and because everyone tells them it's what you should do.
College should be optional for jobs. Some of the most brilliant engineers that I have worked with are self-taught without a college degree.
You don't need college to be educated and you don't need a college degree to make lots of money.
College is the entry point to the academic community which should be regularly enriched by the world's best talent.
For many people, it is the ritual, the sports, the experience, and the opportunity to explore ideas for the first time that makes college so worthwhile.
College isn't entirely about learning things in the classroom, it's four years where young, hopefully creative people get to have almost nothing to do but think and create. The overwhelming majority of people in the world don't get to work in cool offices, on cool problems, with cool co-workers who want to solve difficult problems with them. The majority of us spend our days under fluorescent lights working on mundane business-intelligence type things. Not to say that creativity cannot be found in anything, but sitting in my dorm hacking until all hours of the morning because I didn't really have to go to class is certainly more conducive to creativity than working an 8:00-6:00 and going to bed at 10:00 because I have to be up in the morning.
While college might not really offer much in the way of knowledge acquisition (at least until grad school), it would does offer the time to work on things you're passionate about, and network with other people of similar inclinations.
I dropped out of college when I was 19, and it was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. For somebody who is already a member of the silicon valley set, this might be good advice, for everybody else this train of thought is parasitic.
(I'm not saying that networking and hacking and soforth isn't possible when you're working a "real" job [hell, I spend almost every waking second I'm not spending at my job hacking and writing and networking], I'm just saying that college is a better environment for it)
College is great preparation for grad school, which is great preparation for a teaching job. The system serves itself very well, thank you.
Depends on what you mean by "work" and what you think the purpose of college is. That's one point of Louis Menand's recent article, "Debating the Value of College": http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110... and his book, The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... . Should college prepare people for work, or for general kinds of abstract thinking? At the moment, colleges do both (and neither).
The other big problem I see is that the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not.
And even if college only filters students ("Theory one" in Menand's article), it does still serve some kind of signaling function. As you note, "As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic." But most programming jobs do still appear to require a college degree. There's probably a reason for that: even if it is too low a bar, it is still a bar that not everyone can hurdle. People capable enough to be self-taught can hurdle it and, ideally, learn more; those not capable enough can't accomplish even that.
If your college left you with nothing but "time to think and create", dropping out was absolutely the right choice! The entire point (until PhD studies) is that you should be learning and doing things according to some curriculum; if you're not there for the curriculum, what are you doing there at all?
I guess the biggest thing that college gave me wasn't knowledge, it was a firing range where I could practice shooting without actually harming anyone. If I think of myself when I was 18-20, if I was actually put into a position of responsibility my net contribution would be negative.
There are certainly exceptions, but the net value of an unexperienced 18 year old is negative. He costs more to the company (in mentoring and mistakes) than the value he provides.