I think it's an ad hominem attack only when the character assertions bear no relation to the argument at hand. In this case, for him to call the OP young and ignorant is perfectly relevant, the implication being that he only dismisses higher education because he is not experienced enough to realise the value of it.
It's not relevant to the argument if there is only a weak implication that going to University would change the ignorant part, not to mention that he provides no backing to the idea that if you go to college you will "grow up" and become less ignorant. This smacks of a circular argument without actually evidence.
His criticism isn't about the OP's lack of time at University, it's about his lack of life experience. I mean, the guy's a sophomore at college, after all. It's not outrageous to suggest that he's a bit naive and/or idealistic.
He doesn't need to provide a "backing for the idea" - Holloway's point did that adequately. And for me, personally, reading the counterpoint just convinced me of the validity of Holloway's argument further.
The OP himself is trying to sway the argument with 'Appeal to Adventure' (not really a defined fallacy but appeal to emotion). For instance the call to take the blue pill is a reference to what the Hero of a very popular movie didn't do. The OP equates post college life with an un-heroic life.
There is a visible disconnect with the views in the arguments. They are more open and accepting at the start and get more emotional at the end. To state an example, the author mentions that 'school is in no way a negative experience...' and later mentions that 'Sure, school might maximize one’s chances of living a stable, moderately successful life with two and a half kids, a modest house, and a job. But is that really what we want? Does our generation want to forego pursuing our passions in order to be part of a shrinking, mundane “middle” class?', which seems to point that schools leave you passionless.
The OP also uses arguments that cannot be proved or argued against. For instance "Not that dropping out of school ensures success, but had Bob or say, Mark Zuckerberg, stayed in school, we could all still be hanging out on Myspace." What this statement assumes, is that (1) School didn't help Mark Zuckerberg, (2) He wouldn't have been able to build FB if he had waited to finish school (3) No one else could have come up with an alternative to MySpace, university student or otherwise. I am not dissecting the argument just for the sake of it, but I am arguing that the OP is selective about his dataset. Yes there are Mark Zuckerbergs, but there are Larry Pages as well.
What makes you think you know what's best for him? I guess you probably went to college, but maybe you didn't. What I do know, is that you didn't both go to college and also choose not to go to college.
If you did go, then you don't know what would've happened to you if you hadn't gone. You could have lived in Costa Rica for 3 years and decided to establish a charity, never thinking twice about the value of higher education. Maybe later you would've posted in this thread, and had the top rated comment about how much you learned on that trip in comparison to what your friends learned in college.
However, it's also possible that you didn't go to college, and are simply regretting that choice and trying to warn those younger than you not to make the choice that you did. But what if you had gone? Maybe you would've hated it, and dropped out after two years, thinking it was a completely horrible idea.
Whether or not you went to college, you don't have the full picture. You don't know what it would've been like to do the opposite. That's why this is not an easy question -- that's why people actually talk about this. If it were as easy as "I'm older than you, and I think you should go, therefore you should go," this thread wouldn't exist. So don't act like you have the right to tell others how to live very important parts of their lives. We all have to walk our own journey, and make our own decisions, and if we just listen to those more experienced than us, we will never get anywhere important. And we probably won't be very happy, either.
I read your counterpoint, and thought it was less coherently structured and argued than Holloway's. I think your argument may be stuck too much in an idealised present/future.
From the OP:
"Counterpoint author: David Fontenot is a serial hackathoner and director of MHacks Hackathon from South Florida. He is studying Computer Science Engineering in his Sophomore year at the University of Michigan."
> Counterpoint author: David Fontenot is a serial hackathoner and director of MHacks Hackathon from South Florida. He is studying Computer Science Engineering in his Sophomore year at the University of Michigan.
Is this you then?
What would be interesting is your argument for the case, ... obviously if you don't have one you might want to save some time and money and withdraw from UofM.
The existence of remarkable individuals, which is by no means a recent phenomena, demonstrates that for some a university education is not, in the strict sense, a necessity. That hardly addresses the issue of whether or not Universities as entities are worthwhile enough to be considered a necessity in a society.
As another CS student who has had the opportunity of working in many different companies on internships, I certainly agree with the sentiment that for our field of modern software development, university is certainly not necessary. Learning through experience and mentorship is by far a more effective process, though it is a lot more dependent on the student in terms of how effective it is.
However, I feel that many of these kinds of arguments are approached in entirely the wrong manner. Not everyone can be Bill Gates and moreover, not every field can so easily cast aside a formal education in favour of "spunk and effort".
Even in other technology fields such as electrical or chemical engineering, the facilities the university provides in terms of laboratories and instruction are definitely very necessary for the training of such specialists.
Perhaps these arguments need to be narrowed down in scope.
As a college student, I'm always torn about whether or not it is worth it to get my CS degree. Sometimes, my classes seem really useless, but at other times, I feel like I'm learning a lot socially at college.
I felt the same way during my business undergrad -- everything I was learning, from CAPM to Deming's management ideas to queue theory and operations management, has a wiki page and at least a dozen very good blog posts. Essentially all we're paying for is someone with domain experience to tell us what's relevant to learn, and help us learn it.
How expensive is college if we take away tuition? Is a college really more than just an employment agency for professors, an agency that provides its own classrooms and spaces?
It all depends on how good of a HS education you got. It also depends on the fun and relationships you are having outside of your school work. For me that was the best part
Unless you have a revolutionary and marketable idea and are 110% confident about executing it with the utmost discipline that will guarantee something that you can call "success", please stay in school. Sorry if my tone is dick-ish - I'm just sick and tired of these debates about the value of college.
Which is why most successful startup founders are college dropouts. Wait.
(Btw, if you are being sarcastic and referring ironically to the last line of the counterpoint, my apologies for misreading you.)
I would be interested to know whether there are any cohort studies on dropout success. I know overall dropouts tend to make much less money and perform much worse on many other metrics. However, that may simply be because the weak drop out.
But overall, I guess it is an unsafe bet. If you can't seem to pursue your passion with a few hours of classwork a day in your way, you're going to have a hell of a time doing it while also working ten hour shifts as a waiter because you couldn't get a more lucrative, easier job thanks to your lack of higher education.
College is easy. If you can't pursue your passions while also doing college, you're gonna have a problem either way.
I'm sorry, but I don't follow that logic. It might be true for some people, but probably not for most of them. It's easy to forget that the great tech success stories, the drop-outs, were in the right place at the right time (read: major city or centre of technology). For most people, growing up in ordinary towns, going to college is a way to meet new types of people and ideas that you would never have been exposed to before. It's absolutely the place to find inspiration. That doesn't mean it works for everyone, but don't be so quick to dismiss it without some good justifications.
It's not a debate if you just tell people off and offer no rational.
I went through gen-ed classes that I literally never attended. I sometimes read the books and got A+s in the courses. I went through a high-level technical communications class that was to re-teach basic English mechanics that a proficient high school student ought to be able to master. I was retaught the primitive basics of C, Java, and C++; nothing that couldn't be learned through a few online tutorials and nothing advanced enough to prepare someone for an embedded job without prior internship experiences.
On the other hand, I got instruction on advanced algorithms and had two year long projects where we worked for actual clients (Microsoft, others) for actual money with deliverables and accountability. But that wasn't worth the $200K it would have cost if I didn't have scholarships.
>Unless you have a revolutionary and marketable idea and are 110% confident about executing it with the utmost discipline that will guarantee something that you can call "success", please stay in school.
I'm really not sure what that has to do with it; proportionally, I know more people that didn't go to college that got individual contributor programming or sysadmin jobs than who started companies. The things that school gets you can be as important (and sometimes more important) in a management/owner role than in an individual contributor role.
I know for me, it wasn't hard to get myself up to the minimum technical level for a Programmer/SysAdmin gig... but my social skills are, well, lacking. I don't know that you learn those in college, but I always thought that college was an important part of the social development of the 'middle-class adult' that I was missing.
At least 95% of the time, you'll be better served by finishing the degree. It's a low-risk high-reward choice. Unless you have a huge appetite for risk, I don't see the upside in dropping out. Work on your startup while you're in school, it's not like homework should be taking up a significant portion of your time (if you're really good enough to be dropping out anyway).
If you can afford it then do it. Those social lessons you are learning are no doubt invaluable. The issue is that for a lot of people it's just not affordable. And it's getting less so every year. If you're well-to-do and have the money then have fun and enjoy yourself.
What about a CS student who gets a full-time job offer as a sophomore? Why stick around and pay for school if you can instead be paid to get more valuable real world experience.
I had this opportunity about 10 years ago. I passed, and in retrospect I'm incredibly glad I did. Couple of years after graduation, I realized I had interests beyond software engineering, and while the lack of a bachelors can play in Silicon Valley, it doesn't pretty much anywhere else. Also, if one day you decide to go into the management route and want an MBA, the lack of a bachelors is going to be a deal breaker.
Meh, maybe it's because I came of age during the first bubble... but I see life as a series of opportunities that open and close; they open and close in part based on your own attributes (e.g. you need to meet the minimum qualifications for the job, and you need to apply or otherwise make yourself available,) but also based on time, chance, and other things you don't control.
I got out of high school and got my first programmer/sysadmin job in '97 or so. (I had a few years of cable monkey and hardware/windows work in high school.) - But that was almost entirely timing; The minimum requirements in '97 were really low, due to the dot-com bubble; Pure luck, really. But then I was able to learn enough that I made the cut when the minimum requirements went way up after the crash. (There is no way I would have made that cut right out of highschool.)
If I had gone to college... well, it was really, really hard to find a job in my field with no experience, four years after '97. Maybe I would have learned enough in school to make the cut, maybe not. Maybe I would have been able to convince an employer that I was that good without paid work experience, maybe not[1].
Also, if someone else is paying for school? that's a big opportunity there, too, and it's possible that opportunity might not be there in a few years. (Is it a bigger opportunity than a job in the field you want? I don't know.)
But that's how I'd look at it.
[1] As a sidenote... if you are badass enough to go to school and have a job/internship in your field at the same time? that's best of all. Many of the best people I know did that. It's really difficult to pull off, though. I don't think I have what it takes to pull that off, not without stretching the school over 8+ years.
I'm not targeting you specifically, but in general, I see a lot of people making the mistake of using their own experiences as general rules. Mark Zuckerberg's success neither supports nor challenges the value of the university. He's a unique person with his own set of circumstances for whom dropping out was a better option. It means neither that everyone with a startup idea should drop out, nor that they shouldn't.
An education is necessary. Some schools are good at delivering that. Some are crap and you are wasting your time and money. And of course, lots of opportunity outside of school to learn as well.
an education is necessary. Some people conflate education with credentials (or certification). WHile one is a proxy for the other, some people don't see it as so and insist that you must have the credentials - for example, HR departments in large corporations. Hence, to cover your bases, you need the credentials, as well as a good education.
I think "necessary" needs clarification here. What you intend or expect to be able to do or understand dictates what's necessary or sufficient. There is no necessity for an education when your goal is simply to feed yourself; many menial jobs that are entirely within the grasp of people who have no formal training or education will satisfy this need.
In more of an HN demographic context... I'm in the "socialization" camp. College/university can serve a similar purpose as attending primary and secondary schooling, i.e. to further develop your social skills with other people as you age. While this can be found in other places, I'm not sure how effective it can be for those of us who wouldn't otherwise go out of their way to interact with others.
In the vein of preparing you to do specific, non-obvious things, I would agree with you that education is necessary; I do think we should get out of the "high school -> college -> job" idea that seems to have turned into a fallacy over the last decade or two.
Trade schools can be a good example of this; in my opinion, apprenticeship is also a great alternative, though in the US those are -- as far as I know -- almost nonexistent.
> But I'm sorry -- if you're more than 10 years out of college (or ~5 years for a CS degree)
Silicon Valley is cyclic. It's not always going to be in a boom phase. Eventually Google, Microsoft, etc, are going to figure out how to get more H1-B's, get colleges to pump out more CS grads, etc, etc, to increase supply, drive labor prices down and drive competition for jobs up.
Which is not to say you should or shouldn't go to college. Rather, you should have a slightly longer perspective on the issue and not just ignore peoples' opinions because they're more than 5 years out of school.
Dear people who think you should just "shut up and go to college":
You are wrong.
We respect you, and we're not denying your experience, and you can be right about nearly everything else. On this subject, you are wrong, and please, for the love of God, please stop talking about this issue when you have no skin in the game and you don't know what the modern education system is like. It's been decades since you've been in school -- you have no idea what goes on in a modern classroom. Please quit commenting on it.
One of the reasons older people get more respect is because they have more experience. They've been around the block. They know the score. But I'm sorry -- if you're more than 10 years out of college (or ~5 years for a CS degree), your experience with the system is so far removed from what it is like today that your experience is worthless. You literally know less about this subject than a college freshmen.
I'm more than a little pissed about this. >90% of writers I read about education are already through the system. Their pain is in the past. Furthermore, I doubt that any education writer was receiving multiple 6-figure offers halfway through their schooling. They haven't had to make the decision to consciously throw away tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years of their lives simply because society is slow to change, and people are too lazy to think about it -- "shut up and go to college" is certainly much less cognitive work for a parent hoping to guide their children to a better future.
I'm sick of it. This isn't a game, this isn't a fun political issue, this is a generation's goddamn lives and hopes and dreams we are talking about. Every day I waste in class could be a day I spend learning a new programming language, building my software business, or doing one of any millions of activities which would better myself and make me a more well-rounded, competent employee.
Reply:
I graduated college < 1 year ago, and I definitely say it's worth it. You ever think there is more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good at coding? I got a CS degree from a well-repudiated state school, and maybe half of what you learn is programming.
You learn things such as writing, a foreign language, social skills, how to argue and to be more than just a hacker who knows 10 programming language, but can't explain his thoughts. Yea, maybe you are great and have the 'next big idea', but sorry, chances are you are not. Most startups fail, it is a fact - deal with it.
Some classes may be a waste, but if a significant portion are, you are at a bad school. Plus those days 'you waste in class' are actually helping to 'make you a more well-rounded, competent employee'.
You are more than a little pissed about this? You don't seem to have finished school - so you are arguing about something you don't know. Most people are getting 6-figure offers for dropping out of school, they are the exception - not the rule. And if you want to go on and be more than just a 'hacker' and do some serious research and expand the field rather than exploit it, you'll probably have to finish your degree and then get another one. You think taking critical writing sucks when you haven't done it in 3 years, try taking it after 13 years - it'll be worse.
No one is saying this is a game. Yes, college is very helpful. No, you don't have to go to MIT or Harvard (neither of which is that great for real-world CS, search WSJ recruiter rankings). Those schools are known for research and business. Go to a cheap local school for a few years and transfer in to a big name school if that's what you want; when you graduate, your piece of paper looks the same. But in the end, go to a school, meet people, learn new things, travel abroad and do the things that are not what you are studying, because those things you can't read about in a book or some blog.
>meet people, learn new things, travel abroad and do the things that are not what you are studying, because those things you can't read about in a book or some blog.
How are any of those things exclusive to University? Especially considering the cost?
they aren't exclusive to university, but you'd be hardpressed to find a similarly aged group of people all doing exactly this, if you don't go to university. Whether the cost is worth it is up to the individual, because that is indeed subjective.
No, it's clear: university is not necessary. From a business perspective, universities have been a bubble for some time now: as Americans, we're expected to think and produce at the highest level of global citizens, to make our people thought workers... and yet we bitterly lament the exporting of our wealth to China to support manufacturing that we as the general public are too holy to embrace.
We sent those jobs over there and inflated unemployment by expecting that everyone in the country become scholarly. It's unbalanced and degrading to our people.
Have you ever eaten artisanal food? Real Parmigiano-Reggiano instead of shaky Kraft cheese? Real Boeuf Bourguignon instead of Campbell's Chunky Cow Nuggets? Then you understand the value of tradesmanship, of learning a craft.
If we want to take back manufacturing, to reduce unemployment, and to keep American products the pre-eminent craft in the world, we need to get over ourselves. Americans are smart regardless of our level of education. Let's stop degrading the working man, the trade skill worker, the apprenticeship: the things that make us human are the things that require a lifetime to master, not the ones that are learned from a book.
College is not always the answer. Not being haughty better-than-thous is the answer. We should appreciate American craftsmanship. Meanwhile, I'll eat the real Italian cheese while you eat the American cheez product.
-From a college graduate and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. And foodie, if it's not obvious.
I think it's important to note that "is university necessary?" is not the same as "should a person go to university?" The second question is largely pointless because whether or not the university, as an institution, is necessary is determined only by the mean benefit it provides to society. Individually, everyone is different. College is for some people and not for others.
If you are a sophomore or junior in college right now, and you get a job offer doing (for example) Ruby on Rails, you will likely learn nothing in your final years of college that will help you with doing Ruby on Rails in that job.
But maybe the job will involve more than just a web frontend to a database. Maybe you will will need to optimize a solution somewhere, and you'll think, "Hey, I bet I could use simulated annealing for that". Or you'll think, "Hey, I could write a simple grammar to solve this just like the first problem in my compilers class". Or "I can simulate the system variance by convolving the individual component variances" and thus you'll be able to provision your system better. Or whatever.
Sure, you could have figured out how to do all of these by carefully reading wikipedia. But how would you have even known the right questions without having been exposed to the material?
And then, of course, there's that next job ten years from now, that isn't Ruby on Rails. It's something else, maybe even in a different problem domain altogether, where the Ruby on Rails expertise doesn't give you any advantage. Wouldn't it be nice to have a good solid grounding in a wider base of material?
Several times in my career, I've been brought in to tackle a problem that has been vexing other (and maybe even better) programmers, and I've said, "Well, I don't know much about it, but I think we could solve that problem using X", where X is algorithm or technique I learned in graduate school. It is great to be able to have those moments, and I know had I not gone to school (and gotten my MS) I would not have those insights.
Even though I'm actually overall pretty positive on the value of higher education, the argument lost me at:
> "The question is, “Can you be successful in truly meaningful ways without going to college?” The answer for most of you is “No.”"
... because it sets up two simultaneous No True Scotsmen: any given counterexample can either be dismissed as not "truly meaningful success" or not by "most people".
Since gailees's counterpoint is pretty lackluster, let me offer a different one:
University was never meant to be a system of general education. But because of the prestige garnered by graduates, it slowly began to be a status symbol. Instead of being a system of truly advanced knowledge, it has become an extra pipe on the education system, bringing to the table little intrinsic value. The concept of the university, in short, has been eroded by its growing recognition of the incapacity of its students. And because the university has access to funding that the public school system does not, it was able to expand itself to attempt to meet these needs; the price it paid was a loss of vision.
Entire swaths of the university curriculum should be torn out and moved into high schools, which in turn need to be re-conceived to produce fully-grown adults who find the choice between going to college and going to work to be a real choice. In such a world, the university is not at all necessary: it is where you go for that above-and-beyond level of intellectual rigor, but that is not a requirement for all people. Professor Holloway talks about the discipline and structure a university provides, but I ask why this is absent in the halls before one reaches university. For it must be, else these particular characteristics would not define the common student's need.
The university is necessary only because it is our latest patchwork fix on a system that is a conglomeration of patchwork fixes itself. If only Professor Holloway had advocated his ideas for secondary education, and considered the implications of such reform on the university due to the consequent changes in the nature of the applicant, I would have agreed with him fully.
I'm recycling a comment I made two weeks ago because it's relevant here, and it saves me the typing and thought-bandwidth of retyping the exact same thing in a slightly different way.
The absolute worst thing I've ever done for myself was to go to college. I had a 50% scholarship towards one of THE top electrical engineering schools in the country (not MIT, but you'd be in the right state if you were guessing), and I toughed it out for four years. Due to financial aid f&ckery, I made the choice to drop out with around half a year of credits left to complete my BS. I had my own IT consulting business at the time, and I made a pretty decent run of it for about a year at which point I realized I was a MUCH better 'technology person' than 'business person'. I made the jump to full-time sysadmin for other companies at that time, and haven't looked back since. NONE of the skills I use today (either in my 'day job' as a nix sysadmin or 'real job' as a musician/bandleader) came from my college experience. I had over $100k worth of debt (slightly less now, almost 10 years later) and no degree. If I had to do it all over again, I would've skipped college entirely, gone straight into the 'failed' consulting business, and taken the extra four years of earnings instead of the staggering amount of debt. I have never once felt limited due to my lack of degree. The fact that I don't have one is easily eclipsed by what I've achieved professionally, and companies have had no problem bringing me on at top dollar (according to the various sysadmin salary surveys I read) to do my thing.
I'm not saying my path is for everyone, and as always Your Mileage May Vary. However, if I had a time machine I'd go back and slap my younger self around until he decided to forgo college entirely :-) In my experience, it wasn't worth it - from the 'you NEEEEEED a degree to get a good job!' perspective AND the 'crushing amounts of debt' perspective.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadHe doesn't need to provide a "backing for the idea" - Holloway's point did that adequately. And for me, personally, reading the counterpoint just convinced me of the validity of Holloway's argument further.
There is a visible disconnect with the views in the arguments. They are more open and accepting at the start and get more emotional at the end. To state an example, the author mentions that 'school is in no way a negative experience...' and later mentions that 'Sure, school might maximize one’s chances of living a stable, moderately successful life with two and a half kids, a modest house, and a job. But is that really what we want? Does our generation want to forego pursuing our passions in order to be part of a shrinking, mundane “middle” class?', which seems to point that schools leave you passionless.
The OP also uses arguments that cannot be proved or argued against. For instance "Not that dropping out of school ensures success, but had Bob or say, Mark Zuckerberg, stayed in school, we could all still be hanging out on Myspace." What this statement assumes, is that (1) School didn't help Mark Zuckerberg, (2) He wouldn't have been able to build FB if he had waited to finish school (3) No one else could have come up with an alternative to MySpace, university student or otherwise. I am not dissecting the argument just for the sake of it, but I am arguing that the OP is selective about his dataset. Yes there are Mark Zuckerbergs, but there are Larry Pages as well.
If you did go, then you don't know what would've happened to you if you hadn't gone. You could have lived in Costa Rica for 3 years and decided to establish a charity, never thinking twice about the value of higher education. Maybe later you would've posted in this thread, and had the top rated comment about how much you learned on that trip in comparison to what your friends learned in college.
However, it's also possible that you didn't go to college, and are simply regretting that choice and trying to warn those younger than you not to make the choice that you did. But what if you had gone? Maybe you would've hated it, and dropped out after two years, thinking it was a completely horrible idea.
Whether or not you went to college, you don't have the full picture. You don't know what it would've been like to do the opposite. That's why this is not an easy question -- that's why people actually talk about this. If it were as easy as "I'm older than you, and I think you should go, therefore you should go," this thread wouldn't exist. So don't act like you have the right to tell others how to live very important parts of their lives. We all have to walk our own journey, and make our own decisions, and if we just listen to those more experienced than us, we will never get anywhere important. And we probably won't be very happy, either.
Yeesh.
Quick question, have you gone to university?
Is this you then?
What would be interesting is your argument for the case, ... obviously if you don't have one you might want to save some time and money and withdraw from UofM.
The existence of remarkable individuals, which is by no means a recent phenomena, demonstrates that for some a university education is not, in the strict sense, a necessity. That hardly addresses the issue of whether or not Universities as entities are worthwhile enough to be considered a necessity in a society.
How expensive is college if we take away tuition? Is a college really more than just an employment agency for professors, an agency that provides its own classrooms and spaces?
(Btw, if you are being sarcastic and referring ironically to the last line of the counterpoint, my apologies for misreading you.)
I would be interested to know whether there are any cohort studies on dropout success. I know overall dropouts tend to make much less money and perform much worse on many other metrics. However, that may simply be because the weak drop out.
But overall, I guess it is an unsafe bet. If you can't seem to pursue your passion with a few hours of classwork a day in your way, you're going to have a hell of a time doing it while also working ten hour shifts as a waiter because you couldn't get a more lucrative, easier job thanks to your lack of higher education.
College is easy. If you can't pursue your passions while also doing college, you're gonna have a problem either way.
That's probably why the statistics favour the students.
I went through gen-ed classes that I literally never attended. I sometimes read the books and got A+s in the courses. I went through a high-level technical communications class that was to re-teach basic English mechanics that a proficient high school student ought to be able to master. I was retaught the primitive basics of C, Java, and C++; nothing that couldn't be learned through a few online tutorials and nothing advanced enough to prepare someone for an embedded job without prior internship experiences.
On the other hand, I got instruction on advanced algorithms and had two year long projects where we worked for actual clients (Microsoft, others) for actual money with deliverables and accountability. But that wasn't worth the $200K it would have cost if I didn't have scholarships.
I'm really not sure what that has to do with it; proportionally, I know more people that didn't go to college that got individual contributor programming or sysadmin jobs than who started companies. The things that school gets you can be as important (and sometimes more important) in a management/owner role than in an individual contributor role.
I know for me, it wasn't hard to get myself up to the minimum technical level for a Programmer/SysAdmin gig... but my social skills are, well, lacking. I don't know that you learn those in college, but I always thought that college was an important part of the social development of the 'middle-class adult' that I was missing.
I got out of high school and got my first programmer/sysadmin job in '97 or so. (I had a few years of cable monkey and hardware/windows work in high school.) - But that was almost entirely timing; The minimum requirements in '97 were really low, due to the dot-com bubble; Pure luck, really. But then I was able to learn enough that I made the cut when the minimum requirements went way up after the crash. (There is no way I would have made that cut right out of highschool.)
If I had gone to college... well, it was really, really hard to find a job in my field with no experience, four years after '97. Maybe I would have learned enough in school to make the cut, maybe not. Maybe I would have been able to convince an employer that I was that good without paid work experience, maybe not[1].
Also, if someone else is paying for school? that's a big opportunity there, too, and it's possible that opportunity might not be there in a few years. (Is it a bigger opportunity than a job in the field you want? I don't know.)
But that's how I'd look at it.
[1] As a sidenote... if you are badass enough to go to school and have a job/internship in your field at the same time? that's best of all. Many of the best people I know did that. It's really difficult to pull off, though. I don't think I have what it takes to pull that off, not without stretching the school over 8+ years.
In more of an HN demographic context... I'm in the "socialization" camp. College/university can serve a similar purpose as attending primary and secondary schooling, i.e. to further develop your social skills with other people as you age. While this can be found in other places, I'm not sure how effective it can be for those of us who wouldn't otherwise go out of their way to interact with others.
In the vein of preparing you to do specific, non-obvious things, I would agree with you that education is necessary; I do think we should get out of the "high school -> college -> job" idea that seems to have turned into a fallacy over the last decade or two.
Trade schools can be a good example of this; in my opinion, apprenticeship is also a great alternative, though in the US those are -- as far as I know -- almost nonexistent.
If you have a better, actual alternative to university, do that. Else, do university, which is an established default for those who can afford it.
If you can't afford it, the debate isn't even relevant.
2. Look at unemployed graduates.
3. Define "established default", or better "establish good default".
Silicon Valley is cyclic. It's not always going to be in a boom phase. Eventually Google, Microsoft, etc, are going to figure out how to get more H1-B's, get colleges to pump out more CS grads, etc, etc, to increase supply, drive labor prices down and drive competition for jobs up.
Which is not to say you should or shouldn't go to college. Rather, you should have a slightly longer perspective on the issue and not just ignore peoples' opinions because they're more than 5 years out of school.
Dear people who think you should just "shut up and go to college": You are wrong. We respect you, and we're not denying your experience, and you can be right about nearly everything else. On this subject, you are wrong, and please, for the love of God, please stop talking about this issue when you have no skin in the game and you don't know what the modern education system is like. It's been decades since you've been in school -- you have no idea what goes on in a modern classroom. Please quit commenting on it. One of the reasons older people get more respect is because they have more experience. They've been around the block. They know the score. But I'm sorry -- if you're more than 10 years out of college (or ~5 years for a CS degree), your experience with the system is so far removed from what it is like today that your experience is worthless. You literally know less about this subject than a college freshmen. I'm more than a little pissed about this. >90% of writers I read about education are already through the system. Their pain is in the past. Furthermore, I doubt that any education writer was receiving multiple 6-figure offers halfway through their schooling. They haven't had to make the decision to consciously throw away tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years of their lives simply because society is slow to change, and people are too lazy to think about it -- "shut up and go to college" is certainly much less cognitive work for a parent hoping to guide their children to a better future. I'm sick of it. This isn't a game, this isn't a fun political issue, this is a generation's goddamn lives and hopes and dreams we are talking about. Every day I waste in class could be a day I spend learning a new programming language, building my software business, or doing one of any millions of activities which would better myself and make me a more well-rounded, competent employee.
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I graduated college < 1 year ago, and I definitely say it's worth it. You ever think there is more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good at coding? I got a CS degree from a well-repudiated state school, and maybe half of what you learn is programming.
You learn things such as writing, a foreign language, social skills, how to argue and to be more than just a hacker who knows 10 programming language, but can't explain his thoughts. Yea, maybe you are great and have the 'next big idea', but sorry, chances are you are not. Most startups fail, it is a fact - deal with it.
Some classes may be a waste, but if a significant portion are, you are at a bad school. Plus those days 'you waste in class' are actually helping to 'make you a more well-rounded, competent employee'.
You are more than a little pissed about this? You don't seem to have finished school - so you are arguing about something you don't know. Most people are getting 6-figure offers for dropping out of school, they are the exception - not the rule. And if you want to go on and be more than just a 'hacker' and do some serious research and expand the field rather than exploit it, you'll probably have to finish your degree and then get another one. You think taking critical writing sucks when you haven't done it in 3 years, try taking it after 13 years - it'll be worse.
No one is saying this is a game. Yes, college is very helpful. No, you don't have to go to MIT or Harvard (neither of which is that great for real-world CS, search WSJ recruiter rankings). Those schools are known for research and business. Go to a cheap local school for a few years and transfer in to a big name school if that's what you want; when you graduate, your piece of paper looks the same. But in the end, go to a school, meet people, learn new things, travel abroad and do the things that are not what you are studying, because those things you can't read about in a book or some blog.
How are any of those things exclusive to University? Especially considering the cost?
But maybe the job will involve more than just a web frontend to a database. Maybe you will will need to optimize a solution somewhere, and you'll think, "Hey, I bet I could use simulated annealing for that". Or you'll think, "Hey, I could write a simple grammar to solve this just like the first problem in my compilers class". Or "I can simulate the system variance by convolving the individual component variances" and thus you'll be able to provision your system better. Or whatever.
Sure, you could have figured out how to do all of these by carefully reading wikipedia. But how would you have even known the right questions without having been exposed to the material?
And then, of course, there's that next job ten years from now, that isn't Ruby on Rails. It's something else, maybe even in a different problem domain altogether, where the Ruby on Rails expertise doesn't give you any advantage. Wouldn't it be nice to have a good solid grounding in a wider base of material?
Several times in my career, I've been brought in to tackle a problem that has been vexing other (and maybe even better) programmers, and I've said, "Well, I don't know much about it, but I think we could solve that problem using X", where X is algorithm or technique I learned in graduate school. It is great to be able to have those moments, and I know had I not gone to school (and gotten my MS) I would not have those insights.
> "The question is, “Can you be successful in truly meaningful ways without going to college?” The answer for most of you is “No.”"
... because it sets up two simultaneous No True Scotsmen: any given counterexample can either be dismissed as not "truly meaningful success" or not by "most people".
University was never meant to be a system of general education. But because of the prestige garnered by graduates, it slowly began to be a status symbol. Instead of being a system of truly advanced knowledge, it has become an extra pipe on the education system, bringing to the table little intrinsic value. The concept of the university, in short, has been eroded by its growing recognition of the incapacity of its students. And because the university has access to funding that the public school system does not, it was able to expand itself to attempt to meet these needs; the price it paid was a loss of vision.
Entire swaths of the university curriculum should be torn out and moved into high schools, which in turn need to be re-conceived to produce fully-grown adults who find the choice between going to college and going to work to be a real choice. In such a world, the university is not at all necessary: it is where you go for that above-and-beyond level of intellectual rigor, but that is not a requirement for all people. Professor Holloway talks about the discipline and structure a university provides, but I ask why this is absent in the halls before one reaches university. For it must be, else these particular characteristics would not define the common student's need.
The university is necessary only because it is our latest patchwork fix on a system that is a conglomeration of patchwork fixes itself. If only Professor Holloway had advocated his ideas for secondary education, and considered the implications of such reform on the university due to the consequent changes in the nature of the applicant, I would have agreed with him fully.
The absolute worst thing I've ever done for myself was to go to college. I had a 50% scholarship towards one of THE top electrical engineering schools in the country (not MIT, but you'd be in the right state if you were guessing), and I toughed it out for four years. Due to financial aid f&ckery, I made the choice to drop out with around half a year of credits left to complete my BS. I had my own IT consulting business at the time, and I made a pretty decent run of it for about a year at which point I realized I was a MUCH better 'technology person' than 'business person'. I made the jump to full-time sysadmin for other companies at that time, and haven't looked back since. NONE of the skills I use today (either in my 'day job' as a nix sysadmin or 'real job' as a musician/bandleader) came from my college experience. I had over $100k worth of debt (slightly less now, almost 10 years later) and no degree. If I had to do it all over again, I would've skipped college entirely, gone straight into the 'failed' consulting business, and taken the extra four years of earnings instead of the staggering amount of debt. I have never once felt limited due to my lack of degree. The fact that I don't have one is easily eclipsed by what I've achieved professionally, and companies have had no problem bringing me on at top dollar (according to the various sysadmin salary surveys I read) to do my thing.
I'm not saying my path is for everyone, and as always Your Mileage May Vary. However, if I had a time machine I'd go back and slap my younger self around until he decided to forgo college entirely :-) In my experience, it wasn't worth it - from the 'you NEEEEEED a degree to get a good job!' perspective AND the 'crushing amounts of debt' perspective.