I often wonder how many people who write these kinds of posts actually benefitted greatly from college in ways they don't understand. For example, most people who didn't go to college can't write a blog post like this one.
In short, I think most people who can write great posts about how college didn't help them actually gained a lot of their most valuable (if intangible) skills from their college experience.
Do you ever wonder how many assumptions you're making about those who've not completed college? I don't mean this in an insulting way, but I feel it should be noted that it is quite degrading. Your comment assumes:
1) This writer is not self-aware. They haven't taken stock of the full impact of college.
2) Other writers, who also write similar posts, are also not self-aware. This trend is not that college is in fact bad, but that many people who leave college fail at recognizing the true benefits. This is an epidemic.
3) That most people who don't attend college are unable to write well.
4) On top of the items above, that you feel you know more than this person about their own life.
This all feels to me like hefty cognitive bias to me.
> For example, most people who didn't go to college can't write a blog post like yours.
I'm fairly certain this has more to do with the average type of person that doesn't go to college rather than any causal link between Freshman Composition and good writing skills.
That's somewhat of a straw man. I have no doubt it improves writing skills at least a little bit on average. I contend that it doesn't make a difference in any absolute sense.
I received AP credit and thus passed out of Freshman Composition so my experience is slightly different. In my AP class, everyone's writing skills improved but no one who was a bad writer became a good writer.
If you ask any author the most effective way to become a better writer they'll tell you to read. Most people don't like to read and thus (I believe there is a causal link here) most people are bad writers. It takes much more than two semesters of Freshman Comp. to radically improve ones writing skills. Quality writing is something that you internalize over many years.
Yeah, I agree with this. My English skills have always been top of the line (99% on standardized tests, 5s on APs, etc), and I fully accredit this to the fact that I have been reading CONSTANTLY since I was little. You have to develop an ability to hear the written word inside your head as your eyes move across the page--a lot of lower functioning people don't seem to have this, as indicated by the bizarre sentence constructions they vomit all over their word processor.
A knack for sentence flow isn't practiced, it is absorbed. Want to be a good writer? You need a vocabulary to match. Those of us who acquired extensive vocabularies through osmosis can tell when a lesser person has whipped out the thesaurus in an attempt to sound "smart." (usually, the fancy words they try to insert just end up hilariously misused, since they don't understand the different shades of meaning attached to them. You can only get that through observation of the word in its natural setting.)
As anecdata, I know someone with an English degree from our flagship state school who can't manage to comprehend the difference between "its" and "it's," "your" and "you're," and routinely mangles grammar in a manner absolutely horrifying even before you take into account the fact they studied English for OVER FOUR YEARS and still never managed to grasp the proper use of the possessive.
Possibly. But I have seen college itself (not just dedicated writing classes) help people write immeasurably. This is because writing is involved in most everything one does there. It's an extension of high school. Same concept.
My highschool courses were all graded on essays except the hard sciences. College is not the only place to learn to write. I also remember my 5th grade teacher telling me we all deserved As (for average instead of E for excellent) but that if anyone were to have an E it was me or this other girl. Writing is encouraged at all ages, not just college.
Causation and correlation makes this entire topic grey.
The truth is for 99% of people college is the best option for them. They'll get a job paying a decent salary, with a better work environment and the possibility of upward mobility if they so choose. Better than had they not gone to college.
There's a small, no miniscule, fraction of people who are motivated enough that they can achieve the same or more without the institutional learning and degree.
* I never finished college but benefited from my 3 years spent there.
I disagree with what you say, but a lot of people tend to agree with you. I'm assuming that most people haven't actually tried teaching themselves something to know what's more effective.
I would also argue that while learning stuff on your own is doable for most people, it is even more important to know what you need to learn and to stick with learning it, even if it doesn't seem immediately useful.
This is one thing I think CS programs provide that is really, really hard for people to do on their own. As programs like Udacity and Coursera get bigger and more mature, I think this is one area where they can really add a lot of value: giving people a roadmap and an external way to gauge their progress.
More challenging colleges teach you far more than you can teach yourselves.
A top 5 computer science school churns out a much more capable and knowledgeable computer science major who is both well versed in theory and knows how computers actually works down to the bytes.
Kudos to the writer, his ability to hustle is strong. There is more than one kind of talent.
I am well versed in theory and know how computers work down to the semiconductor level. (An aside: I am eternally grateful to Feynman for his wonderful book on that subject.)
Incidentally, I dropped out of high school my Junior year after I landed a programming internship at a local game studio. I have a GED.
I would say I'm capable of being put to work on any software project in any domain and in short order attain a high degree of productivity.
I spend my days researching optics and color theory. I'm the process of building a graphics research lab in my basement, and my purpose in life is to one day write a program which generates images that appear so real and so detailed that the observer would be convinced they were captured by a digital camcorder, rather than output from a 3D renderer.
Computers have been my life and passion for well over a decade. I'm 24.
Like many people have said, this is very anecdotal. Not all drop outs are as motivated or as capable as you seem to be. At the same time, neither are all college graduates. However, graduating from a top 5 cs program will at least ensure that you have learned a good deal of information from a wide variety of topics in computer science.
Graduating from a top 5 cs program will at least ensure that you have learned a good deal of information from a wide variety of topics in computer science.
It's been my experience that the most capable members of a team have all shared a passion for learning combined with open mind. The fact that the top schools tend to select for those traits have led people to conflate credentials with excellence.
That's great, very impressive. No one denies brilliant computer scientists with no formal education exist. But just because Ramanujans exist, doesn't mean the other 99.99% of people don't need an education. :)
Having gone to two of the top five cs schools, I haven't really learned much about computer science from either. The lectures were boring/unintelligible and not motivational (foreign researcher prof., you know what I'm talking about). The MPs were great, but they're not something you really need to pay for. These days you can find technical challenges for yourself anywhere. Read a book.
The biggest benefit was forcing me to learn things on my own, otherwise I would have never forgiven myself for flushing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet. All of my best CS experiences were when I individually worked on machine problems meant for two or three people, learning a lot through the struggle. At the end, I learned how to learn a little bit better, but I didn't learn much about CS. I thought I was the hottest thing on the block once I got into the job world, only to find out I knew nothing.
That was THE ONE thing that greatly motivated me and pushed me to learn everything I could about the domain. Once again, it wasn't college that did it.
The problem with this line of argument is that it is anecdotal. Yes, it’s great that this guy has gone on to earn a lot of money, but that result is not typical.
This is the data from Australia:
Over the working lifetime of a university graduate the financial gain generated from income is more than $1.5 million or 70 per cent more than those whose highest qualification is Year 12, even after taking into account the foregone earnings of students while they study. (http://www.youth.nsw.gov.au/__data/page/1165/whatpricethecle...)
The problem with such studies is that they don't demonstrate causation: does college make you successful or do most successful people just go to college?
Right, but it seems more accurate to attribute the income discrepancy to the productivity of those people, rather than "oh you went to uni here's extra money". This means we need to decide if "people who are super-productive tend to go to uni at some point" or "uni produces super-productive people".
The average tuition cost is approximately $16,000 per year. Plus assume another $10,000 in living costs, books, etc. $26,000 in total for a complete cost of $104,000 in a 4 year period. Some people choose to go more expensive by going to a private college and some people choose to go a little cheaper by going public but this is an average. Also, a huge assumption is that its just for a 4 year period. According to the Department of Education, only 54% of undergraduates graduate within 6 years. So for the 46% that don’t graduate, or take 10 years to graduate, this is a horrible investment. But lets assume your children are in the brilliant first half who finish within six years (and hopefully within four). Is it worth it? First, let’s look at it completely from a monetary perspective. Over the course of a lifetime, according to CollegeBoard, a college graduate can be expected to earn $800,000 more than his counterpart that didn’t go to college. $800,000 is a big spread and it could potentially separate the haves from the have-nots. But who has and who doesn’t?
If I took that $104,000 and I chose to invest it in a savings account that had interest income of 5% per year I’d end up with an extra $1.4 million dollars over a 50 year period. A full $600,000 more. That $600,000 is a lot of extra money an 18 year old could look forward to in her retirement. I also think the $800,000 quoted above is too high. Right now most motivated kids who have the interest and resources to go to college think it’s the only way to go if they want a good job. If those same kids decided to not go to college my guess is they would quickly close the gap on that $800,000 spread.
There are other factors as well. I won’t be spending $104,000 per child when my children, ages 10 and 7, decide to go to college. College costs have historically gone up much faster than inflation. Since 1978, cost of living has gone up three-fold. Medical costs, much to the horror of everyone in Congress, has gone up six-fold. And college education has gone up a whopping tenfold. This is beyond the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, any bubble you can think of.
So how can people afford college? Well, how has the US consumer afforded anything? They borrow it, of course. The average student now graduates with a $23,000 debt burden. Up from $13,000 12 years ago. Last year, student borrowings totaled $75 billion, up 25% from the year before. If students go on to graduate degrees such as law degrees they can see their debt burden soar to $200,000 or more. And the easy borrowing convinces colleges that they can raise prices even more.
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/02/dont-send-your-kids-to-....
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/10-more-reasons-why-par....
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/8-alternatives-to-colle....
I am a dropout; and we have recruited dropouts, engineering graduates, MBAs and students pursuing a degree distance a learning program at our startup. The best recruits were actually the distance learning students and dropouts by far.
I always recommend young hackers to take a year or two off before going to college and figure out what they want to do. For most jobs in Internet, a University degree is hardly helpful.
In fact, you can actually learn more by working at start for a year than you would learn in 4 years in college. An undergraduate programmer who can network his way to a job can get salary similar to graduates. The only challenge will be to network and demonstrate your skills because recruiters won't be selling you.
I think even great programmers who get solid on-the-job training doing a startup job will have major gaps as they progress. There is something to be said for learning fundamentals.
Give a kid access to computer and Internet, and he will find his way out. This was experimented with kids in Indian slums, who never went to school and can not even read/write.
Oh poppycock. This was Carnegie's line, only it was about libraries. Without the Internet, libraries were there for everyone to use. How are kids that can't read going ... Oh come on, can we stop with this "The Internet solves all of our education problems" nonsense?
I know it is, because this well educated populace doesn't exist and yet the Internet does.
I submit to you that there is very little you need to use the Internet to learn and I also submit that by your reasoning about how easy it is for people to learn then if if they were to purchase physical books, all they would need would be the "canon" of Penguin Press books. But yet people have never done this en masse or even in any significant other than ... wait for it .. outliers. :)
So, basically, the whole view is just one big unproven naked assertion.
No. :) That's interesting and wonderful but does not prove anything about this discussion. I haven't watched the whole but I saw the description, learn to use a PC. OK, there is a big difference between learning to use something and that designed with "usability" in mind and learning CS, physics, chemistry, law, medicine, whatever.
The internet is a great resource but never a replacement for a great teacher. There's so much to learn that most people don't even realize that only a good teacher can show you. During the first years at university I was confronted with so many things I never thought I'd have to learn which proved to be invaluable.
Additionally, a great teacher makes you learn things a lot quicker than you'd learn them yourself, because of the insights he can give you.
Oh and btw, I've found textbooks to be infinitely more useful than the internet.
Most articles and comments about higher education commit the gravest sin of thought: they assume what is right for one person (namely, the author) must be right for everyone.
I'm enrolled in a public institution pursuing a double major, working two jobs because I'm also middle class. I have a good -- not great -- GPA, and I get to do amazing and interesting things every day; I got into programming after volunteering with a CS major -- I learned about HN, ironically, from my Finance professor. After drudging through a K-12 curricula which routinely belittled the entire point of academia, I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.) It's unequivocally been the best three years of my life.
A lot of people are realizing college isn't a universal gateway to a better life, and that's good -- I don't particularly think it was meant to be one. I'm happy that the author made his way.
"College was my biggest mistake?" I'm glad you got out, then. But it sure as hell isn't mine.
>> "College was my biggest mistake?" ...it sure as hell isn't mine.
How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure? Firstly, opportunity cost is an impossible thing to calculate with certainty, especially when dealing with something so incredibly costly both in terms of time and money.
If you find yourself reasonably discerning, and learning efficiently what you are out to learn, and enjoying it and life, then great, you're likely in a good place.
"Double majoring", having an OK GPA, working two jobs and being middle class -- these all say absolutely nothing about whether you're making a mistake or not.
>> I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.)
Now that means a lot, and congrats for finding a place that has such an unusual but hugely beneficial atmosphere!
The job lead I got from my college advisor alone was worth the opportunity cost. And the humanities classes opened my mind up in ways wikipedia just can't dream of.
Yeah that's exactly the part that is so hard to quantify -- the liberal arts component. The purpose of all gen eds is basically to "open your mind", ie. to refine you as a human being. But what high school student goes to college for this purpose? Or a better question, what high school student truly knows that, or understands what that means? The only thing ever discussed seems to be how job-ready you are at graduation time.
I did, I had a rather high IQ, and solid high-school achievements so I could probably gone to MIT etc, instead I went to a small, local, and cheap liberal arts school. One of the things I realized in HS was being a slightly better programmer is not really that important and does not actually make you significantly more money etc. But, avoiding debt and actually having fun in collage is worth a hell of a lot.
It took 3.5 years plus ~70k. I did learn quite a lot both from computer classes and the more liberal arts. But, in the end it was the social scene that IMO was the most important part.
PS: I did take 23 credit hours one semester just to see what it was like, and even making mostly A's with one B I think I learned more when I had free time than I did cramming in more course work.
That's the way I looked at it. Get through it without a lot of debt and be a big fish in a little pond.
I'm smart enough to work on "hard" problems, but the stuff I do now is interesting, and while my gross income is lower, my net income is quite a bit higher.
I love how so many liberals that would never dream of insulting someone for being poor have this attitude that if you didn't go to college, you are some kind of uncultured hick. Somehow beneath all those baristas with hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt.
>The only thing ever discussed seems to be how job-ready you are at graduation time.
This is the opposite of what I saw before the recession. Maybe I am hanging out with wealthier people than you are? or maybe you are just too young to remember a time before the recession. I don't know. As far as I can tell, at least until the recession hit, considering how much money you'd make when you got out of college was considered extremely déclassé. College was all about finding yourself and becoming a better-educated person. Only the uneducated, uncouth hicks actually thought about money. How gauche!
Of course, now with the recession on, a whole lot more people find it impossible to pretend to not be poor, and actually taking steps to see to it that you can feed yourself later in life are gaining some social acceptance.
Personally, I'd say that I learned a very similar lesson to the barista when I bought a BMW during the first dot-com. You see, pretending to be rich is really expensive.
Yeah, I tried to warn my friends, but they all looked down on the idea. Now that they're out of college, most of them are working retail. They have no idea how much they owe or when it might be paid off--math is scary, so they just defer and defer and make the minimum payment when necessary.
Of course, given their relative inability to comprehend fiscal realities, almost all of them live with their parents. Any free money they have they immediately blow on unnecessary things (trips, designer clothing, etc) instead of even trying to get out from under their loan debt.
I really hope that people come around some day, because I'm really sick of people treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills. Not all of us have parents we can move back in with, you know? But even that concept is offensive to them.
People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.
>I'm really sick of people treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills.
you've gotta choose your friends and your peers. I'm not saying you should always insist on friends that accept you for who you are, it can be good to have peers that challenge you, but you need friends that would admire you if you became the person you want to be.
A whole lot of the misery of my younger life can be traced back to that. It's not fun to be in a situation where you have to lower yourself in your own eyes to raise yourself in the eyes of your peers.
>People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.
but... that's a lesson that needs to be learned through experience. Really, that's a big part of why I think the fact you can't get out of student loans the usual way is such a big problem; I mean, when I was that age, making my own stupid decisions, no bank would be idiotic to loan me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if they were, I'd have ended up bankrupt and the bank would have had to take the hit, as they should, for making such a boneheaded loan.
>It's not fun to be in a situation where you have to lower yourself in your own eyes to raise yourself in the eyes of your peers.
That's exactly how I feel all of the time. If I am who I am around normal people, they get all insecure about their intelligence. Technical people tend to accept me and make me feel so at home it's amazing, but they're a very small minority of the population where I'm at compared to the non-tech savvy. I wish I could learn how to interface with normal people better without compromising my identity and interests.
I think I've been there. My advice? put more effort into finding more of the sort of people you want to be around. You might need to move, too, but moving alone won't do it. The key is to initiate relationships. It's better (well, better for you) to be loud and slightly annoying than to be so quiet you don't have a chance of initiating relationships with people you meet. (I mean, by all means, desist when people tell you to go away. But don't be afraid of embarrassing yourself by initiating a conversation with a stranger.)
The thing is, most nerds (and most of the people that nerds get along with) are kinda introverted. Introverted people tend to not initiate new relationships. If you wait around for other people to initiate relationships, you will only be able to choose among the extroverts that like you, so practice going out of your way to initiate contact with people you think you might get along with. You don't have to be an extrovert; but you do have to initiate conversations, extrovert-style, at least until you find your group.
Moving to an area with more of your target person type helps a lot, too. I mean, I meet all sorts of interesting people, for instance, waiting in line for BBQ. Living in a higher-density area gives you more people to meet, and some high density areas have more of us than others. I'm in silicon valley, which is medium density, but you can't swing a cat without hitting a programmer.
If you are like me, learning to better interface with 'normal people' won't solve the problem. In fact, I suspect the real problem is that I see 'normal people' and I see 'my people' - but I haven't been able to overcome that.
treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills
People treat you like shit for your choice of major? Hasn't happened to me (engineer) but if anybody did this to me I would choose to spend time around different people.
A lot of people have looked down on me for it. Especially arts/liberal arts majors who have graduated and now make like...8-12K/year with their degree. They like to imply that they're the better person because they went to college for ~knowledge's sake~ or whatever. (Like I don't also love learning???)
Ah, got it. Sounds like a rationalization based on envy and resentment.
As in, their college experience isn't paying off financially, but they are better than you for pursuing pure love of knowledge rather than chasing the filthy dollar.
If you hadn't gone to college you would have been doing something else during those years and you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else. You can know that the job lead you got was good, but you have no way of knowing that your lead was better than you might have gotten by going to a jobs fair or some sort of special-interest convention or local community center.
And note that you could have taken humanities courses at a community college or audited them for free at a private college or done self-study. You don't have to be paying full college tuition to "open your mind" that way.
I took my humanities courses because I was required to. At the time, I would have been happy if all of my classes were math/CS. But afterwards, as in, a few years later, I realized that I probably would have learned most of the technical stuff on my own. It was being forced to study the non-technical that really taught me something new and interesting that I likely wouldn't have learned on my own.
This year marks ten years since I graduated. I cannot prove that college was a worthwhile thing, but I look back on that time very favorably.
you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else.
I'm not sure this is really true. I wasn't out of school yet, I had very few contacts. In fact after that first job I was effectively out of work for 9 months. College let me go to classes a bit, study a bit, and do whatever I wanted the rest of the time, while still getting the benefits of a huge professional network at the end.
Hitting up job fairs for months on end was equally effective as following up on a single email my advisor sent me.
The big difference is the discussions with a group of other people (especially great: of different majors!) and a professor who knows what you're talking about and how to steer the conversation. Trying to understand a book and trying to understand people is very different.
I had a great seminar this semester where we would talk about "knowledge" from a philosophical, historical, theological and physical point of view with the respective students and professors. Often, we were none the wiser about our original question afterwards, but had had a great discussion, and quoting the philosophy professor, "understood the question better".
Again, my point - it is not about gained knowledge, and the way a conversation engages your mind is hard to replicate with a book.
But then, I live in Germany and can live off 6000€ including university costs for a year, so YMMV.
Here I feel that it's a lot more common to pay $20,000+ a year to have a professor read off a slide. Most professors I've had can't steer for shit. (Although I've had 2 philosophy professors who were very good at it! They are in the minority, unfortunately.)
You also have to keep in mind that colleges here will accept just about anyone (no matter how stupid) if they have the money to pay--from what I've heard, Europe's system is free for those who are smart enough to get in, and the entrance standards filter out a lot of the dumbasses who would otherwise just destroy the intellectual level of the class discussion.
I'm not talking about sources of information. I mean someone who knows what books in that library are worth reading. And honestly, I don't remember 90% of the "information" I learned in college, but I learned a ton of new ways of approaching information that I don't think I would have learned except by example.
You could listen to someone tell you what books are worth reading, or you could learn critical thinking by trying to work it out for yourself. In the real world, you often have to parse data from a variety of sources without much guidance from a higher authority as to what you should consider legitimate.
I'm not saying that college isn't helpful for some people--but it's certainly not the only way.
Sorry but I think having a guide who knows things that have been passed down over centuries is much better than re-inventing the wheel every generation. It's like getting a 2,000+ year head start on understanding how to think. By all means get some experience in the actual territory but don't forget to take a map.
> How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure?
Well then how does the author knows that his assessment is the correct one? I agree with the GP for three reasons: (1) I am not a super intelligent, 140 IQed, childhood prodigy who can learn so much faster than most if not all of my peers that I find the courses in my university program slow/unnecessary. (2) I fail at keeping myself motivated for months without direction, peer support and proper schedule. I am more likely to slag off in a side project that I am doing than in a course project that I have to do. (3) I am also more likely to learn things that are absolutely necessary but I personally don't find interesting (Logic Design, for example was one such topic).
> people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am
I think that is largely a function of how good the university is and how likely you are to identify motivated people. I was lucky to find some really motivated people around me who would challenge everything they encounter. I am much more passive than they are during sleep and just observing them struggle to tackle the weirdest problems was worth it. I am of course, not from a US university. My 5 year program (B.Tech. + M.Tech) would have costed me not more than $20K as a large part of my academic expenses are subsidized by our government. But all I can say is that at a good university, neither is this behaviour unusual or is it rare.
It seems like most of the people who complain about college received poor education or were not receptive to education in the first place.
College isn't for everyone but there are a great number of us whose lives have been greatly enriched by our years at good liberal arts colleges. If you're evaluating college through the lens of some kind of personal business plan then it's not a clear win but if you care about the life of the mind there are few substitutes to studying with your peers under passionate dedicated professors.
Whether or not someone should go to *IT or get a CS degree so that they can pursue a technical career is mostly a function of the person and their capacity to engage in self-directed learning.
I live in asia and I'm a dropout. And now after some years of reading great books I found on amazon and other courses from the teaching company, I regret gotten a bad education. In my country the quality of teachers is not very good, plus the teaching is not holistic. The books they use to teach is just plain bad. The people you hang out with or befriend also influence your attitude and worldview. I find here in my country bad schools and colleges have students with either bad attitude or worldview. They were not smart.
Also I was also stuck in a kind of catch-22, I too had a bad worldview and lived in a bad neighborhood which further got worse when I tried to hang with not so smart people. How do you change yourself when your whole neighborhood and peer group have weird beliefs and worldview, its like hanging out with people from Afghanistan/Iraq or something.
It is my firm belief that everyone should study philosophy or humanities. Just to learn critical thinking and "how to think" part of it, without it all the other STEM subjects(science, tech, engineering, math) just doesn't connect well. Checking the beliefs and assumptions you hold dear to yourself is very important. Systems thinking is very important. Every subject interconnected to each other. Plus the type of people you hang out with is very important.
Going to college (as an adult) was by far the best thing I have ever done for myself.
I already had a career and thought I knew it all but the experience of working on theory and mixing in with some seriously smart people really pushed me to places that I would never have gotten to on my own.
Also I owe much of my current success to the relationships I formed during my time at university.
If you want to hustle, create great internet products and live a creative free, independent life then college and it's massive debt may not be right for you.
But if you want a lower risk, stable life with good long term prospects then college may not be such a bad idea.
One of the things college (actually my masters degree) taught me is that the answer to most important questions is 'it depends'. There is no one size fits all approach to most big decisions in life - that I think is wonderful because it leads to such diversity.
The most interesting thing about this is the feedback loop. These kind of stories seem to strike a chord and in turn more people will post about this.
Yet the discussion always goes along the same lines. The problem is that all of these are unavoidably anecdotal in nature and thus something that is basically impossible to discuss.
Sure, it might have worked out for some and might not have worked out for others. The problem is that everyone has their own experience with this, which basically confirms or denies other anecdotal evidence.
These posts pop on HN a lot, yet I find them useless. Sure it worked out (or didn't), but nobody is able to tell how things would have been if the poster had stayed in college (or in other cases, if he had left college).
All these submissions seem to do is get the "anti-college" crowd on here happy, giving them more anecdotal evidence that really, see, all I ever said is right because that dude had a similar experience while at the same time bringing out everyone for whom college did do something to scream at those who disagrees.
I think these types of posts are becoming popular because we all grew up under the belief that college was the only way to become successful, and it's becoming increasingly clear that not only is that not true, it can be harmful in some cases. This is a big shift from the thinking of previous generations and probably amplified by the current looming student loan crisis and poor economy.
Yes, college works for some and not for others, but only recently has the suggestion that maybe college isn't a golden ticket to success started to sound pretty reasonable.
I think you have a good point. I grew up never hearing anything negative about college, only positive things. All the adults I knew, when I was young, who went to college had nice houses, cars, vacations, etc. Then me and some friends went to college, and many of us were not so fortunate. Bearing large debt that keeps us close to poverty, seeing people that have almost half our IQ, half our discipline, half our ethics making more money than us ... it was a shockingly rude awakening. And when people have such a shift in thinking, we are drawn to articles that try to explain and make sense of our shattered perceptions (kind of like a Phillip K. Dick novel).
The US alternatives to college are terrible, particularly if you didn't have money/access. Trade schools are almost fraudulent (and not like Canada, which at least encourages vocations) and the whole entrepreneur out of high school mindset seems downright irresponsible (I would hope there's a better pipeline for ambitious world-changers than just going through the school of hard knocks).
And the worst part of the discussion is it's not even informed. Like, you will never see anyone in these threads recommend joining the military. I joined the military 2 years after college, but had I been informed of my opportunities earlier (say, in high school), I would have definitely joined the military right out of high school and then done college later, once I was ready for it and had GI Bill benefits to use.
All that said, college went okay for me. I don't really know of anyone in my circles that didn't get at least something productive out of going to college, based on where they are now, over a decade later.
You have a point there, especially when you name the economic situation, which arguably changes behaviour patterns.
To expand a bit more on my previous "anecdotal in nature" point though, I think that the articles we see here are not just anecdotal, they are also overgeneralising. I reckon CS is one of the few areas that lends itself most to showing qualification in a way other than presenting a degree.
Normally, the degree signifies the consensus that you have done a certain amount of work and passed a certain set of requirements. In CS (amongst some other things), this can also be shown to a potential employer by showing them your actual coding work, prototypes, programs, scripts, websites etc. Here then, the degree becomes less of an issue because you can show proficiency in a different way.
This however does only work in a limited area of expertise, such as design, art, programming, journalism (to a degree) etc. For most other purposes, a degree is still a certificate of (baseline) proficiency, so saying "college becomes irrelevant" (not that you did) is overly broad and only partially true under certain circumstances.
Now I know HN is mostly programmers, CS students, maths students, some designers etc., as can be seen by the outright hostile attitude towards the humanities displayed by some of the other comments to this submission (especially further up), but it still peeves me to see people inductively draw conclusions from their own experience, ultimately concluding "how things are", thereby implying "for everyone".
College was actually exactly what this guy needed. He found his passion, discovered what did and did not work for him in terms of learning, and managed to enter the job market at a time where people with his level of experience and expertise could demand salary like what he has now. Offsetting a few years in either direction and he likely would have entered the job market at a very BAD time for people without college degrees.
"I'm in the middle of college but like work a lot better, I'll finish someday" is very different than "I never went to college, and spent the last few years making ends meat. I programed at home, and I'm great. Give me $100k." Pretending those are the same is just intellectually dishonest.
If he thinks college was his biggest mistake and he's doing really well after doing some college (and still trading on college acceptance/progress as part of his contract negotiation), well that's just a poor understanding of cause and effect.
A lot of people assume that college is this magical place where people find their passions... People usually don't change too much and stick to their passions well past highschool/college(meaning that they would've come to a similar conclusion with or without college). Many people cite all these CEOs and CTOs who left college and did amazing things, but these people are merely finding out that they can't learn in a classroom setting(neither can i) and pursued a different path.
Sorry -- I don't like these kinds of posts. They just incite the same sort of college-vs-no-college debate I've heard a million times. I think there's some kind of "hacker" pride that makes people act as if not attending college is "bucking the system" or circumventing some dumb thing the Man tells you that you have to do in order to succeed. It's not.
One size doesn't fit all. If not going to college works better -- do that. If going to college works better -- do that. I did both, sort of: I went to college but studied literature and philosophy as an undergraduate while working tech jobs to pay the bills. I loved my classes but also self-taught myself the skills I used for work. And I got exposed to a lot of stuff that I never would have learned if I had just worked and not taken those classes. That worked for me.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to get out of some single anecdotal experience that this guy didn't go to college and turned out okay. Except to say: I'm happy that's the case! Self-education rules.
Also: Can we please stop acting like college has to cost $44k/yr. It doesn't. State schools. They rule. They're relatively cheap. If you're unsure about college then, yes, going $200k in debt over something you're not sure you want is dumb. Especially when there are cheaper options.
I completely agree with the sentiment about high college costs, the state school I went to cost ~44k for all four years, add in various scholarships (some of which I got as I'm pretty sure I was the only person to apply for them) and internships and I graduated college with no debt and more money than I started. Going to college does not necessitate taking on crushing debt, it just requires some extra legwork and picking a school that more fits your budget.
I feel like everything I read nowadays on this topic has had the tone of "don't go to college it's a waste of time" etc etc. While I agree it's definitely not for everybody, I don't agree with it being a waste of time or that nobody should go to school (even if you're not pursue a career a law/medicine/etc).
I have self-taught myself everything I've learned in software engineering, beginning in middle school when I picked up a VB6 book. Then through high school/college with some C++, Delphi, and then eventually moving to the LAMP stack and beyond. Although even before getting into college I knew exactly what I wanted to do (I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early in my high school years) and knew college wasn't going to do much in helping me achieve my dreams, I was still excited for those 4 years.
I wanted to have that college experience rather than looking back years later in life and saying "man I wish I got to see what that was like." But more importantly than the experience of college, I wanted to learn things I knew I'd seldom get the chance to later on in life, such as philosophy, art, history, astronomy, finance, theology, etc. While many argue that you can learn those things on your own without having to go to college, and yes I agree anyone can order an eBook or go to your locally library and pick up a bunch of books on those various topics, but it won't be the same as getting taught by a professor who has spent a great part of their life learning, teaching, researching and working in those various fields.
My goals in life have been not only to be a successful entrepreneur and a great engineer, but to also be a knowledgable man overall, one who is well versed in a number of topics. And while college won't give you all of that in 4 years, it'll definitely help you get started on your journey.
I believe that going to college is worth it if you're being selectively taught by the top 1%. The rest of the 99%? Forget about it-- you can learn more with an internet connection.
Yes I came in to say something similar. I would of absolutely loved to attend MIT or Stanford but went a shoddy 3rd tier state school. All this talk about research opportunities and connections with renown professors does not apply to students in universities not in the top ~50. Modern universities are extended high schools with more parties and social events than actual studying.
I think if you can get into a Carnegie Melon or Harvard then you should definitely attend, but there are over 2500 universities in the US. I, like many others, did not have any direction in high school and ended up attending a local state school where most of the professors were grad students more preoccupied with their own course load than with their students being able to understand the material.
I'm glad you are motivated enough to give yourself a complete college education with an internet connection, and smart enough to parse all that information in a vacuum without advisors/peers to help.
Most people likely have not tried teaching themselves anything. It's like learning anything else-- it's hard at first but it gets easier as you practice. You can teach yourself to teach yourself.
Actually, he never encouraged anyone else not to go to college. I think the part about college being a waste of his time was really just to emphasize how he persevered and was able to create his own success.
$44k a year for tuition is ridiculous and entirely not worth it if your primary goal is to get a job that does not require a college degree.
However, paying a reasonable amount for tuition with the goal of personal enrichment and/or getting a job that requires a college degree is certainly worth it.
As a current college student and part-time developer, I feel like college was a great choice for me-- even though I could've landed a full-time programming job without it. Although the curriculum can be monotonous at times, just having the chance to talk and work with other computer science students on a daily basis has been enlightening.
Yes, you can teach yourself programming-- but college can help (really!).
You can talk to smart people without having to go to college. If you live in the city, you can attend a number of meetups chock full of ridiculously smart people, some willing to teach you/work with you.
But if he'd finished college, he'd know that "infront" is two words!
But in all honesty, I also dropped out of college and I agree with the sentiment of this post wholeheartedly.
In fact, I might go a step further and say that the fear and uncertainty that came with not having a degree actually pushed me to hustle harder than I think I would've otherwise.
> In fact, I might go a step further and say that the fear and uncertainty that came with not having a degree actually pushed me to hustle harder than I think I would've otherwise.
Stress caused by feeling behind is not a strong endorsement in my opinion.
I'm glad it helped give me the motivation to push myself to get where I am today - and in the process learn how much that work and dedication could pay off in the long term.
I have little doubt that, had things turned out otherwise, I'd be sitting at a desk working a safe little office job in my home town.
It could be worse, you could have started law school circa 2006.
3 years completely wasted, vis-a-vis programming and arguably just about the whole tech universe, $150,000 in tuition. After that you get a degree that serves as an entrance to a profession that is extremely economically depressed, near universally reviled, and the few jobs there are have terrible working conditions and are filled with unhappy people.
Live, learn, and try and pass on some hard won lessons.
As someone who started law school in 2005, this hits close to home -- and is unfortunately true. Unless you were an engineer beforehand and went into IP law, probably the only field in the profession that's still hiring now. But then you'd end up writing patents, which sucks your soul and why I still work in tech at a startup now.
This brings me to my new motto I tell those considering the profession: "law school is never the answer."
Not getting a CS education was my biggest mistake.
I got most of a Finance degree, then dropped out when I ran out of money and found out people would pay decent money to a relatively inexperienced programmer. I'm happy with the way things have turned out for me career-wise - I think I'm a pretty competent developer and have a decent income and good future prospects - but I feel like there are opportunities that I'm much less likely to be able to take advantage of because I've mostly learned things as I've needed them.
Yes, I can (and am) independently learn everything you would in a CS program, but it is much more difficult, and the piece of paper is sometimes useful, too. Yes, plenty of folks get by without one, but I hope people don't get the idea that because they can teach themselves to throw together a website, they won't learn anything from a CS program - when I was 18, I had this idea that CS degrees taught outdated and relatively useless information, which I now believe to be false.
Even beyond the core CS curriculum, there are a lot of benefits to attending college - I feel like I at least got some of those by completing most of a degree.
It is certainly valid for some people to skip college, and that's fine, I just hope that all of this anti-college sentiment we've seen recently isn't just going to create another generation of people like me who regret thinking they didn't need the formal CS education.
I'm fine with anti-college sentiment as long as it's not anti-learning sentiment. College and structured, traditional, classroom based learning works for some people and it slows others down. All of the material learn in a CS degree can't be learned independently outside of college. Any benefit college gives to a person is going to be subjective and highly anecdotal, like "professor interaction" or being around like-minded peers as though people can't learn from others without being at college. Often times, if those concepts are learned outside of college they are learned out of necessity and immediately applied, rather than pushed to the back of one's mind on the off chance they might come in handy sometime down the road.
The OP's beef wasn't with college - it was with the false belief that college is the only way to become successful in life.
I don't know that anyone says it is the "only" way. The real claim is that college offers a significant advantage which it would be foolish to turn down.
Hard to say how most High School students would be able to accurately gauge that college would be useless for them ahead of time, except if they already couldn't handle academics.
Of course not, because it is not implied that it is impossible to do without, only that it is an advantage and that it is prudent to take all the advantages you can afford.
College isn't necessarily about well-roundedness at all. If your very specific goal is to become (say) a doctor, lawyer or professional engineer then you don't have much of an option of avoiding school (though you can certainly take a pass on a liberal arts degree, that isn't college in general).
Classes didn’t hold my attention- I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class.
If this were true then you would have spent four afternoons learning Calculus, Business, Communications, and Databases, and another four afternoons showing up for the finals, and you would have gotten a 3.0 instead of a 0.3.
Provide those subjects could hold his/her attention, which is really the qualifier there. OP taught themselves rails and bootstrapped themselves into a $70k+ job in a matter of months. I'd say that took as much effort as passing a few introductory courses in your average public college.
Yeah but that's probably just a purely theoretical concept; let's be honest. It's like saying "I could be Einstein or Newton if I just found physics interesting." It's just kind of self-serving. I don't think learning RoR to get a $60K job is that much effort. There are many "programmers" that make six figures that don't know anything ... and then this is like something is unique to our industry and may not hold for so long. I mean, good for him, no ill will, but let's be honest.
I'm in the same boat as the OP: I've been in school for 3 years but everything I know comes from teaching myself. I dropped out and started teaching myself rails/html/css and I'm currently looking for a programming gig(hopefully in a startup). I agree with the OP's sentiment that you shouldn't go for a college degree unless you're looking to work in something that requires credibility(law, medical, etc) and I always tell Highschool graduates about the many options they can pursue without having to waste money paying for a diluted and meaningless education.
I think the comments in this thread would be most useful if everyone noted how much debt they had on leaving college. :)
When you owe 80k to an institution there is quite a bit of incentive to believe in college's power. I think this pressure is a net positive though in a few ways, as it forces personal action and makes one double-check their decisions.
I left school with no debt, but not a full degree. It allowed me to take risks with my first few jobs which ended up paying off in the long haul. Had I needed money to pay loans I don't believe I would have been so lucky.
Paying $44k a year to not go to any of your classes was indeed a big mistake.
I could tell you another story about how I decided to take on a stupid amount of debt for school, but -- in the face of a lifetime of certain poverty -- the people I grew to know and the projects I actively pursued and worked hard on led me to a fulfilling life and a job that I love that covers my loans with ease.
There is a point in this post somewhere: asking 18 year olds to decide whether or not taking on crushing debt to attend classes they aren't sure they want to take (or even which ones they should take) is not a great thing to bet our economy and our children on. I don't really have an answer for communicating to someone just leaving home that the amount of money they're paying isn't worth it, though. Several people said it to me, but it was so abstract to me it was easy not to care.
In any case, anecdotes can give us guidance in our own lives (and crucially, they can provide us hope as we walk into an interview or open a late payment notice from sallie mae), but they're a pretty poor decision basis if we're aiming toward a societal optimum here.
I think this link started out as a post here on hn[1]. I'm not sure why the author insists on using $175k in debt as a strawman for the discussion. In the earlier thread on HN he stated that $100k, not $175k, was the actual debt figure he was confronted with. It is unfortunate because the discussion of higher-ed/debt is an important topic (I dropped out of law school for similar reasons) and the inflated debt figure needlessly cheapens the discussion.
You: "Luckily, I left after my 2nd year and only walked away with $50k in student loans."
Me: "Why did two years cost $50k but four years costs $175k? (2/4 != 50/175)"
You: "No one really pays sticker price for college. I had some grants, financial aid, and (like someone else mentioned), the co-op program helped pay for some of my tuition."
Me: "If nobody pays sticker price for college why did you use the sticker price when discussing how much debt you chose not to accept?"
"I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class"... depends on what you consider "learning". Of course you don't need to go to any class to learn Rails and get a pay check. To learn hundred other life skills you need to go to class. You are equating "success" with size of pay check. That might not be the measure for many.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadIn short, I think most people who can write great posts about how college didn't help them actually gained a lot of their most valuable (if intangible) skills from their college experience.
1) This writer is not self-aware. They haven't taken stock of the full impact of college.
2) Other writers, who also write similar posts, are also not self-aware. This trend is not that college is in fact bad, but that many people who leave college fail at recognizing the true benefits. This is an epidemic.
3) That most people who don't attend college are unable to write well.
4) On top of the items above, that you feel you know more than this person about their own life.
This all feels to me like hefty cognitive bias to me.
I'm fairly certain this has more to do with the average type of person that doesn't go to college rather than any causal link between Freshman Composition and good writing skills.
I received AP credit and thus passed out of Freshman Composition so my experience is slightly different. In my AP class, everyone's writing skills improved but no one who was a bad writer became a good writer.
If you ask any author the most effective way to become a better writer they'll tell you to read. Most people don't like to read and thus (I believe there is a causal link here) most people are bad writers. It takes much more than two semesters of Freshman Comp. to radically improve ones writing skills. Quality writing is something that you internalize over many years.
A knack for sentence flow isn't practiced, it is absorbed. Want to be a good writer? You need a vocabulary to match. Those of us who acquired extensive vocabularies through osmosis can tell when a lesser person has whipped out the thesaurus in an attempt to sound "smart." (usually, the fancy words they try to insert just end up hilariously misused, since they don't understand the different shades of meaning attached to them. You can only get that through observation of the word in its natural setting.)
As anecdata, I know someone with an English degree from our flagship state school who can't manage to comprehend the difference between "its" and "it's," "your" and "you're," and routinely mangles grammar in a manner absolutely horrifying even before you take into account the fact they studied English for OVER FOUR YEARS and still never managed to grasp the proper use of the possessive.
The truth is for 99% of people college is the best option for them. They'll get a job paying a decent salary, with a better work environment and the possibility of upward mobility if they so choose. Better than had they not gone to college.
There's a small, no miniscule, fraction of people who are motivated enough that they can achieve the same or more without the institutional learning and degree.
* I never finished college but benefited from my 3 years spent there.
This is one thing I think CS programs provide that is really, really hard for people to do on their own. As programs like Udacity and Coursera get bigger and more mature, I think this is one area where they can really add a lot of value: giving people a roadmap and an external way to gauge their progress.
A top 5 computer science school churns out a much more capable and knowledgeable computer science major who is both well versed in theory and knows how computers actually works down to the bytes.
Kudos to the writer, his ability to hustle is strong. There is more than one kind of talent.
Incidentally, I dropped out of high school my Junior year after I landed a programming internship at a local game studio. I have a GED.
I would say I'm capable of being put to work on any software project in any domain and in short order attain a high degree of productivity.
I spend my days researching optics and color theory. I'm the process of building a graphics research lab in my basement, and my purpose in life is to one day write a program which generates images that appear so real and so detailed that the observer would be convinced they were captured by a digital camcorder, rather than output from a 3D renderer.
Computers have been my life and passion for well over a decade. I'm 24.
As will books: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/books/list.html
It's been my experience that the most capable members of a team have all shared a passion for learning combined with open mind. The fact that the top schools tend to select for those traits have led people to conflate credentials with excellence.
The biggest benefit was forcing me to learn things on my own, otherwise I would have never forgiven myself for flushing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet. All of my best CS experiences were when I individually worked on machine problems meant for two or three people, learning a lot through the struggle. At the end, I learned how to learn a little bit better, but I didn't learn much about CS. I thought I was the hottest thing on the block once I got into the job world, only to find out I knew nothing.
That was THE ONE thing that greatly motivated me and pushed me to learn everything I could about the domain. Once again, it wasn't college that did it.
This is the data from Australia:
Over the working lifetime of a university graduate the financial gain generated from income is more than $1.5 million or 70 per cent more than those whose highest qualification is Year 12, even after taking into account the foregone earnings of students while they study. (http://www.youth.nsw.gov.au/__data/page/1165/whatpricethecle...)
Bruce Chapman, the designer of Australia's income contingent education loan system, found that the Return on Investment of higher education in Australia is between 10 and 6 per cent. (http://vital.new.voced.edu.au/vital/access/services/Download...)
The average tuition cost is approximately $16,000 per year. Plus assume another $10,000 in living costs, books, etc. $26,000 in total for a complete cost of $104,000 in a 4 year period. Some people choose to go more expensive by going to a private college and some people choose to go a little cheaper by going public but this is an average. Also, a huge assumption is that its just for a 4 year period. According to the Department of Education, only 54% of undergraduates graduate within 6 years. So for the 46% that don’t graduate, or take 10 years to graduate, this is a horrible investment. But lets assume your children are in the brilliant first half who finish within six years (and hopefully within four). Is it worth it? First, let’s look at it completely from a monetary perspective. Over the course of a lifetime, according to CollegeBoard, a college graduate can be expected to earn $800,000 more than his counterpart that didn’t go to college. $800,000 is a big spread and it could potentially separate the haves from the have-nots. But who has and who doesn’t? If I took that $104,000 and I chose to invest it in a savings account that had interest income of 5% per year I’d end up with an extra $1.4 million dollars over a 50 year period. A full $600,000 more. That $600,000 is a lot of extra money an 18 year old could look forward to in her retirement. I also think the $800,000 quoted above is too high. Right now most motivated kids who have the interest and resources to go to college think it’s the only way to go if they want a good job. If those same kids decided to not go to college my guess is they would quickly close the gap on that $800,000 spread. There are other factors as well. I won’t be spending $104,000 per child when my children, ages 10 and 7, decide to go to college. College costs have historically gone up much faster than inflation. Since 1978, cost of living has gone up three-fold. Medical costs, much to the horror of everyone in Congress, has gone up six-fold. And college education has gone up a whopping tenfold. This is beyond the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, any bubble you can think of. So how can people afford college? Well, how has the US consumer afforded anything? They borrow it, of course. The average student now graduates with a $23,000 debt burden. Up from $13,000 12 years ago. Last year, student borrowings totaled $75 billion, up 25% from the year before. If students go on to graduate degrees such as law degrees they can see their debt burden soar to $200,000 or more. And the easy borrowing convinces colleges that they can raise prices even more. http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/02/dont-send-your-kids-to-.... http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/10-more-reasons-why-par.... http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/8-alternatives-to-colle....
I am a dropout; and we have recruited dropouts, engineering graduates, MBAs and students pursuing a degree distance a learning program at our startup. The best recruits were actually the distance learning students and dropouts by far.
I always recommend young hackers to take a year or two off before going to college and figure out what they want to do. For most jobs in Internet, a University degree is hardly helpful.
In fact, you can actually learn more by working at start for a year than you would learn in 4 years in college. An undergraduate programmer who can network his way to a job can get salary similar to graduates. The only challenge will be to network and demonstrate your skills because recruiters won't be selling you.
Give a kid access to computer and Internet, and he will find his way out. This was experimented with kids in Indian slums, who never went to school and can not even read/write.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.htm...
I know it is, because this well educated populace doesn't exist and yet the Internet does.
I submit to you that there is very little you need to use the Internet to learn and I also submit that by your reasoning about how easy it is for people to learn then if if they were to purchase physical books, all they would need would be the "canon" of Penguin Press books. But yet people have never done this en masse or even in any significant other than ... wait for it .. outliers. :)
So, basically, the whole view is just one big unproven naked assertion.
> How are kids that can't read going
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I agree, basic schooling is very important; there is no replacement for it. College / University education is nice to have, but it is not must.
Additionally, a great teacher makes you learn things a lot quicker than you'd learn them yourself, because of the insights he can give you.
Oh and btw, I've found textbooks to be infinitely more useful than the internet.
I'm enrolled in a public institution pursuing a double major, working two jobs because I'm also middle class. I have a good -- not great -- GPA, and I get to do amazing and interesting things every day; I got into programming after volunteering with a CS major -- I learned about HN, ironically, from my Finance professor. After drudging through a K-12 curricula which routinely belittled the entire point of academia, I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.) It's unequivocally been the best three years of my life.
A lot of people are realizing college isn't a universal gateway to a better life, and that's good -- I don't particularly think it was meant to be one. I'm happy that the author made his way.
"College was my biggest mistake?" I'm glad you got out, then. But it sure as hell isn't mine.
I have two comments:
>> "College was my biggest mistake?" ...it sure as hell isn't mine.
How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure? Firstly, opportunity cost is an impossible thing to calculate with certainty, especially when dealing with something so incredibly costly both in terms of time and money.
If you find yourself reasonably discerning, and learning efficiently what you are out to learn, and enjoying it and life, then great, you're likely in a good place.
"Double majoring", having an OK GPA, working two jobs and being middle class -- these all say absolutely nothing about whether you're making a mistake or not.
>> I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.)
Now that means a lot, and congrats for finding a place that has such an unusual but hugely beneficial atmosphere!
It took 3.5 years plus ~70k. I did learn quite a lot both from computer classes and the more liberal arts. But, in the end it was the social scene that IMO was the most important part.
PS: I did take 23 credit hours one semester just to see what it was like, and even making mostly A's with one B I think I learned more when I had free time than I did cramming in more course work.
I'm smart enough to work on "hard" problems, but the stuff I do now is interesting, and while my gross income is lower, my net income is quite a bit higher.
>The only thing ever discussed seems to be how job-ready you are at graduation time.
This is the opposite of what I saw before the recession. Maybe I am hanging out with wealthier people than you are? or maybe you are just too young to remember a time before the recession. I don't know. As far as I can tell, at least until the recession hit, considering how much money you'd make when you got out of college was considered extremely déclassé. College was all about finding yourself and becoming a better-educated person. Only the uneducated, uncouth hicks actually thought about money. How gauche!
Of course, now with the recession on, a whole lot more people find it impossible to pretend to not be poor, and actually taking steps to see to it that you can feed yourself later in life are gaining some social acceptance.
Personally, I'd say that I learned a very similar lesson to the barista when I bought a BMW during the first dot-com. You see, pretending to be rich is really expensive.
Of course, given their relative inability to comprehend fiscal realities, almost all of them live with their parents. Any free money they have they immediately blow on unnecessary things (trips, designer clothing, etc) instead of even trying to get out from under their loan debt.
I really hope that people come around some day, because I'm really sick of people treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills. Not all of us have parents we can move back in with, you know? But even that concept is offensive to them.
People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.
you've gotta choose your friends and your peers. I'm not saying you should always insist on friends that accept you for who you are, it can be good to have peers that challenge you, but you need friends that would admire you if you became the person you want to be.
A whole lot of the misery of my younger life can be traced back to that. It's not fun to be in a situation where you have to lower yourself in your own eyes to raise yourself in the eyes of your peers.
>People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.
but... that's a lesson that needs to be learned through experience. Really, that's a big part of why I think the fact you can't get out of student loans the usual way is such a big problem; I mean, when I was that age, making my own stupid decisions, no bank would be idiotic to loan me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if they were, I'd have ended up bankrupt and the bank would have had to take the hit, as they should, for making such a boneheaded loan.
That's exactly how I feel all of the time. If I am who I am around normal people, they get all insecure about their intelligence. Technical people tend to accept me and make me feel so at home it's amazing, but they're a very small minority of the population where I'm at compared to the non-tech savvy. I wish I could learn how to interface with normal people better without compromising my identity and interests.
The thing is, most nerds (and most of the people that nerds get along with) are kinda introverted. Introverted people tend to not initiate new relationships. If you wait around for other people to initiate relationships, you will only be able to choose among the extroverts that like you, so practice going out of your way to initiate contact with people you think you might get along with. You don't have to be an extrovert; but you do have to initiate conversations, extrovert-style, at least until you find your group.
Moving to an area with more of your target person type helps a lot, too. I mean, I meet all sorts of interesting people, for instance, waiting in line for BBQ. Living in a higher-density area gives you more people to meet, and some high density areas have more of us than others. I'm in silicon valley, which is medium density, but you can't swing a cat without hitting a programmer.
If you are like me, learning to better interface with 'normal people' won't solve the problem. In fact, I suspect the real problem is that I see 'normal people' and I see 'my people' - but I haven't been able to overcome that.
People treat you like shit for your choice of major? Hasn't happened to me (engineer) but if anybody did this to me I would choose to spend time around different people.
As in, their college experience isn't paying off financially, but they are better than you for pursuing pure love of knowledge rather than chasing the filthy dollar.
And note that you could have taken humanities courses at a community college or audited them for free at a private college or done self-study. You don't have to be paying full college tuition to "open your mind" that way.
This year marks ten years since I graduated. I cannot prove that college was a worthwhile thing, but I look back on that time very favorably.
I'm not sure this is really true. I wasn't out of school yet, I had very few contacts. In fact after that first job I was effectively out of work for 9 months. College let me go to classes a bit, study a bit, and do whatever I wanted the rest of the time, while still getting the benefits of a huge professional network at the end.
Hitting up job fairs for months on end was equally effective as following up on a single email my advisor sent me.
Believe it or not, there are actually sources of information outside of wikipedia and $1000000000/credit college courses. Amazing, right?
I had a great seminar this semester where we would talk about "knowledge" from a philosophical, historical, theological and physical point of view with the respective students and professors. Often, we were none the wiser about our original question afterwards, but had had a great discussion, and quoting the philosophy professor, "understood the question better". Again, my point - it is not about gained knowledge, and the way a conversation engages your mind is hard to replicate with a book.
But then, I live in Germany and can live off 6000€ including university costs for a year, so YMMV.
You also have to keep in mind that colleges here will accept just about anyone (no matter how stupid) if they have the money to pay--from what I've heard, Europe's system is free for those who are smart enough to get in, and the entrance standards filter out a lot of the dumbasses who would otherwise just destroy the intellectual level of the class discussion.
I'm not saying that college isn't helpful for some people--but it's certainly not the only way.
Well then how does the author knows that his assessment is the correct one? I agree with the GP for three reasons: (1) I am not a super intelligent, 140 IQed, childhood prodigy who can learn so much faster than most if not all of my peers that I find the courses in my university program slow/unnecessary. (2) I fail at keeping myself motivated for months without direction, peer support and proper schedule. I am more likely to slag off in a side project that I am doing than in a course project that I have to do. (3) I am also more likely to learn things that are absolutely necessary but I personally don't find interesting (Logic Design, for example was one such topic).
> people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am
I think that is largely a function of how good the university is and how likely you are to identify motivated people. I was lucky to find some really motivated people around me who would challenge everything they encounter. I am much more passive than they are during sleep and just observing them struggle to tackle the weirdest problems was worth it. I am of course, not from a US university. My 5 year program (B.Tech. + M.Tech) would have costed me not more than $20K as a large part of my academic expenses are subsidized by our government. But all I can say is that at a good university, neither is this behaviour unusual or is it rare.
College isn't for everyone but there are a great number of us whose lives have been greatly enriched by our years at good liberal arts colleges. If you're evaluating college through the lens of some kind of personal business plan then it's not a clear win but if you care about the life of the mind there are few substitutes to studying with your peers under passionate dedicated professors.
Whether or not someone should go to *IT or get a CS degree so that they can pursue a technical career is mostly a function of the person and their capacity to engage in self-directed learning.
I live in asia and I'm a dropout. And now after some years of reading great books I found on amazon and other courses from the teaching company, I regret gotten a bad education. In my country the quality of teachers is not very good, plus the teaching is not holistic. The books they use to teach is just plain bad. The people you hang out with or befriend also influence your attitude and worldview. I find here in my country bad schools and colleges have students with either bad attitude or worldview. They were not smart.
Also I was also stuck in a kind of catch-22, I too had a bad worldview and lived in a bad neighborhood which further got worse when I tried to hang with not so smart people. How do you change yourself when your whole neighborhood and peer group have weird beliefs and worldview, its like hanging out with people from Afghanistan/Iraq or something.
It is my firm belief that everyone should study philosophy or humanities. Just to learn critical thinking and "how to think" part of it, without it all the other STEM subjects(science, tech, engineering, math) just doesn't connect well. Checking the beliefs and assumptions you hold dear to yourself is very important. Systems thinking is very important. Every subject interconnected to each other. Plus the type of people you hang out with is very important.
I already had a career and thought I knew it all but the experience of working on theory and mixing in with some seriously smart people really pushed me to places that I would never have gotten to on my own.
Also I owe much of my current success to the relationships I formed during my time at university.
But if you want a lower risk, stable life with good long term prospects then college may not be such a bad idea.
One of the things college (actually my masters degree) taught me is that the answer to most important questions is 'it depends'. There is no one size fits all approach to most big decisions in life - that I think is wonderful because it leads to such diversity.
Yet the discussion always goes along the same lines. The problem is that all of these are unavoidably anecdotal in nature and thus something that is basically impossible to discuss.
Sure, it might have worked out for some and might not have worked out for others. The problem is that everyone has their own experience with this, which basically confirms or denies other anecdotal evidence.
These posts pop on HN a lot, yet I find them useless. Sure it worked out (or didn't), but nobody is able to tell how things would have been if the poster had stayed in college (or in other cases, if he had left college).
All these submissions seem to do is get the "anti-college" crowd on here happy, giving them more anecdotal evidence that really, see, all I ever said is right because that dude had a similar experience while at the same time bringing out everyone for whom college did do something to scream at those who disagrees.
Repeat ad infinitum...
Yes, college works for some and not for others, but only recently has the suggestion that maybe college isn't a golden ticket to success started to sound pretty reasonable.
The US alternatives to college are terrible, particularly if you didn't have money/access. Trade schools are almost fraudulent (and not like Canada, which at least encourages vocations) and the whole entrepreneur out of high school mindset seems downright irresponsible (I would hope there's a better pipeline for ambitious world-changers than just going through the school of hard knocks).
And the worst part of the discussion is it's not even informed. Like, you will never see anyone in these threads recommend joining the military. I joined the military 2 years after college, but had I been informed of my opportunities earlier (say, in high school), I would have definitely joined the military right out of high school and then done college later, once I was ready for it and had GI Bill benefits to use.
All that said, college went okay for me. I don't really know of anyone in my circles that didn't get at least something productive out of going to college, based on where they are now, over a decade later.
To expand a bit more on my previous "anecdotal in nature" point though, I think that the articles we see here are not just anecdotal, they are also overgeneralising. I reckon CS is one of the few areas that lends itself most to showing qualification in a way other than presenting a degree.
Normally, the degree signifies the consensus that you have done a certain amount of work and passed a certain set of requirements. In CS (amongst some other things), this can also be shown to a potential employer by showing them your actual coding work, prototypes, programs, scripts, websites etc. Here then, the degree becomes less of an issue because you can show proficiency in a different way.
This however does only work in a limited area of expertise, such as design, art, programming, journalism (to a degree) etc. For most other purposes, a degree is still a certificate of (baseline) proficiency, so saying "college becomes irrelevant" (not that you did) is overly broad and only partially true under certain circumstances.
Now I know HN is mostly programmers, CS students, maths students, some designers etc., as can be seen by the outright hostile attitude towards the humanities displayed by some of the other comments to this submission (especially further up), but it still peeves me to see people inductively draw conclusions from their own experience, ultimately concluding "how things are", thereby implying "for everyone".
[edit] spelling [/edit]
"I'm in the middle of college but like work a lot better, I'll finish someday" is very different than "I never went to college, and spent the last few years making ends meat. I programed at home, and I'm great. Give me $100k." Pretending those are the same is just intellectually dishonest.
If he thinks college was his biggest mistake and he's doing really well after doing some college (and still trading on college acceptance/progress as part of his contract negotiation), well that's just a poor understanding of cause and effect.
One size doesn't fit all. If not going to college works better -- do that. If going to college works better -- do that. I did both, sort of: I went to college but studied literature and philosophy as an undergraduate while working tech jobs to pay the bills. I loved my classes but also self-taught myself the skills I used for work. And I got exposed to a lot of stuff that I never would have learned if I had just worked and not taken those classes. That worked for me.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to get out of some single anecdotal experience that this guy didn't go to college and turned out okay. Except to say: I'm happy that's the case! Self-education rules.
Also: Can we please stop acting like college has to cost $44k/yr. It doesn't. State schools. They rule. They're relatively cheap. If you're unsure about college then, yes, going $200k in debt over something you're not sure you want is dumb. Especially when there are cheaper options.
Thank you. Drive safe.
I have self-taught myself everything I've learned in software engineering, beginning in middle school when I picked up a VB6 book. Then through high school/college with some C++, Delphi, and then eventually moving to the LAMP stack and beyond. Although even before getting into college I knew exactly what I wanted to do (I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early in my high school years) and knew college wasn't going to do much in helping me achieve my dreams, I was still excited for those 4 years.
I wanted to have that college experience rather than looking back years later in life and saying "man I wish I got to see what that was like." But more importantly than the experience of college, I wanted to learn things I knew I'd seldom get the chance to later on in life, such as philosophy, art, history, astronomy, finance, theology, etc. While many argue that you can learn those things on your own without having to go to college, and yes I agree anyone can order an eBook or go to your locally library and pick up a bunch of books on those various topics, but it won't be the same as getting taught by a professor who has spent a great part of their life learning, teaching, researching and working in those various fields.
My goals in life have been not only to be a successful entrepreneur and a great engineer, but to also be a knowledgable man overall, one who is well versed in a number of topics. And while college won't give you all of that in 4 years, it'll definitely help you get started on your journey.
I think if you can get into a Carnegie Melon or Harvard then you should definitely attend, but there are over 2500 universities in the US. I, like many others, did not have any direction in high school and ended up attending a local state school where most of the professors were grad students more preoccupied with their own course load than with their students being able to understand the material.
Lower ranked ones tend to be teaching focussed.
Not all of us are as fortunate as you are.
My friend just linked me his own blog post after reading Steve's. http://www.jayhuang.org/blog/success-is-very-far-away-but-pe...
However, paying a reasonable amount for tuition with the goal of personal enrichment and/or getting a job that requires a college degree is certainly worth it.
As a current college student and part-time developer, I feel like college was a great choice for me-- even though I could've landed a full-time programming job without it. Although the curriculum can be monotonous at times, just having the chance to talk and work with other computer science students on a daily basis has been enlightening.
Yes, you can teach yourself programming-- but college can help (really!).
But if he'd finished college, he'd know that "infront" is two words!
But in all honesty, I also dropped out of college and I agree with the sentiment of this post wholeheartedly.
In fact, I might go a step further and say that the fear and uncertainty that came with not having a degree actually pushed me to hustle harder than I think I would've otherwise.
Stress caused by feeling behind is not a strong endorsement in my opinion.
I have little doubt that, had things turned out otherwise, I'd be sitting at a desk working a safe little office job in my home town.
3 years completely wasted, vis-a-vis programming and arguably just about the whole tech universe, $150,000 in tuition. After that you get a degree that serves as an entrance to a profession that is extremely economically depressed, near universally reviled, and the few jobs there are have terrible working conditions and are filled with unhappy people.
Live, learn, and try and pass on some hard won lessons.
This brings me to my new motto I tell those considering the profession: "law school is never the answer."
I got most of a Finance degree, then dropped out when I ran out of money and found out people would pay decent money to a relatively inexperienced programmer. I'm happy with the way things have turned out for me career-wise - I think I'm a pretty competent developer and have a decent income and good future prospects - but I feel like there are opportunities that I'm much less likely to be able to take advantage of because I've mostly learned things as I've needed them.
Yes, I can (and am) independently learn everything you would in a CS program, but it is much more difficult, and the piece of paper is sometimes useful, too. Yes, plenty of folks get by without one, but I hope people don't get the idea that because they can teach themselves to throw together a website, they won't learn anything from a CS program - when I was 18, I had this idea that CS degrees taught outdated and relatively useless information, which I now believe to be false.
Even beyond the core CS curriculum, there are a lot of benefits to attending college - I feel like I at least got some of those by completing most of a degree.
It is certainly valid for some people to skip college, and that's fine, I just hope that all of this anti-college sentiment we've seen recently isn't just going to create another generation of people like me who regret thinking they didn't need the formal CS education.
The OP's beef wasn't with college - it was with the false belief that college is the only way to become successful in life.
Hard to say how most High School students would be able to accurately gauge that college would be useless for them ahead of time, except if they already couldn't handle academics.
That sure makes it sound like it's the only way.
If this were true then you would have spent four afternoons learning Calculus, Business, Communications, and Databases, and another four afternoons showing up for the finals, and you would have gotten a 3.0 instead of a 0.3.
Anectodal evidence is just that: anecdotal. I'd rather have more data before claiming that it was college that was a mistake.
When you owe 80k to an institution there is quite a bit of incentive to believe in college's power. I think this pressure is a net positive though in a few ways, as it forces personal action and makes one double-check their decisions.
I left school with no debt, but not a full degree. It allowed me to take risks with my first few jobs which ended up paying off in the long haul. Had I needed money to pay loans I don't believe I would have been so lucky.
This is a common statement from people who drop out of college - if this is the case, why did you fail?
I could tell you another story about how I decided to take on a stupid amount of debt for school, but -- in the face of a lifetime of certain poverty -- the people I grew to know and the projects I actively pursued and worked hard on led me to a fulfilling life and a job that I love that covers my loans with ease.
There is a point in this post somewhere: asking 18 year olds to decide whether or not taking on crushing debt to attend classes they aren't sure they want to take (or even which ones they should take) is not a great thing to bet our economy and our children on. I don't really have an answer for communicating to someone just leaving home that the amount of money they're paying isn't worth it, though. Several people said it to me, but it was so abstract to me it was easy not to care.
In any case, anecdotes can give us guidance in our own lives (and crucially, they can provide us hope as we walk into an interview or open a late payment notice from sallie mae), but they're a pretty poor decision basis if we're aiming toward a societal optimum here.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332885
Me: "Why did two years cost $50k but four years costs $175k? (2/4 != 50/175)"
You: "No one really pays sticker price for college. I had some grants, financial aid, and (like someone else mentioned), the co-op program helped pay for some of my tuition."
Me: "If nobody pays sticker price for college why did you use the sticker price when discussing how much debt you chose not to accept?"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332885
And yeah, that first job where I started making decent money after years of minimum wage?
Just like winning the powerball.
I'm very happy and grateful for what I have, but I'm even more grateful I joined a startup of such great people.
It also helps if economy isn't in shitter like it has been for many years.