I'm pretty sure most/all the people who think that college gives you a unique social experience that you can't get elsewhere are just suffering from confirmation bias, and also perhaps want to justify why they spent so much money.
I went to a top-tier 4-year university, and did develop several life-long friendships, many of which have led to introductions to other people, which have further increased my social and professional circles. It'd be easy to say if I hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have that now, and, well, that's actually true... but it's missing the point. I'd still be me, and I'd still have the same drive to meet people and take advantage of opportunities. My life would be different, certainly, but I doubt it'd be less socially fulfilling.
I partially disagree. Assuming you are majoring in something that has some positive ROI and do enough to actually graduate, which isn’t hard at most colleges, the party experience can be very supportive of most people’s future careers.
The social skills, networks, and alumni connections you build at college are a large fraction of the benefit that college gives the average person to further their career.
Otherwise, I agree. College is a great time to take advantage of the time you have to change your network, generate new ideas and take risks. And I also agree that most there can be benefit (though highly unlikely) for some people to not attend college or to drop out.
I do sometimes wish that I had "the college experience", the dorms, the parties, the social aspect and forming long-term friendships with people.
However, as it seems that the most common reason people go to college is to be able to get a good job afterwards, and I currently have a well-paying job that I enjoy very much (programming), and no college debt, I call that a success.
Having the "college experience" is not worth the thousands of dollars of debt that I see my friends and peers struggling to pay off, especially for those who did not go into a well-paying field like programming.
College isn't just about making more money afterwards. It's about meeting people you'll keep in touch with for the rest of your life, learning from interesting people that excel in their field and networking with people that you might be able to help in the future and/or might be able to help you. It's priceless IMO.
Not to mention being able to avoid the "so you don't go to college?" conversation with dates..
The general sentiment here is that people have used college as an extremely expensive social club and believe that is its greatest value. I wouldn’t think of investing $100,000 of my current or future income in order to make friends or learn about myself.
I hope I’m not alone in thinking that I learned difficult material that I would not have grasped on my own and had self-improvement from meeting academic challenges under my own responsibility. Maybe this is rare, but I have directly applied my undergrad education to solving problems and used its foundation for learning more.
The social aspect of college is not itemized on the tuition statement. The cost of tuition is related to the quality of education directly provided by the school.
I have a real problem with the way a large number of people on HN dismiss college because there are better & less expensive ways to learn the things you need to know and get the credentials you need. Of course there are. The diagnosis is correct, but the prescription is wrong.
There is no better & less expensive way for someone between the ages of 18 and 21 to surround themselves with people the same age, who are as smart as they are, and learn how to be a positive social creature.
Maybe it's because I have a liberal arts degree instead of an engineering degree, but college taught me how to be a person, in the broadest sense. I'm perfectly happy to admit I went to college because that was "the thing to do," and I'm glad I can relate to so many people by virtue of having done it.
My best friends are still the 5 people living on my freshman floor who played counterstrike on 2ms ping university servers at 4am with our doors open, shouting at each other down the hall.
College is FUN. F-U-N. It is a highly structured 4-year period where you have exactly 2 responsibilities: graduate and don't die.
Sure, there might be less expensive ways to socialize, but none that so forcefully eject you from the shell you built around yourself in high school - something I suspect many who hope to eventually be in startups have built. You can say "oh, go to tech meetups", but you can still stand in the corner there, an intimidated 18-year old, just as easily as anywhere else.
If you can take Guy Kawasaki's advice: live off your parents as long as humanly possible. And if you have to pay for college yourself, consider it an investment in what many people consider the best 4 years of their lives.
>The "college experience" isn't a myth. I had a much better two years of personal and social development than they did due to the "college experience."
I bought into this. Did a year of Engineering at USC because of it. Had a terrible experience; the "personal and social development" was mostly rich kids posturing. Decided to drop out and go back home. Completed an associates at a community college in 3 quarters, while working as a security intern. My employer paid me to finish my degree online.
> But if money wasn't an option, most people aren't going to pick staying at mom's house age 18-20 like they're still in high school.
With the money I had saved from jobs in highschool for the expensive university I chose I was able to put a down payment on a starter house.
I guess some people may like "the college experience," but to me it was a huge scam. I saved myself from over a hundred thousand in debt, was able to purchase a house which has appreciated over 70%, earned an associates and bachelor nearly for free, and was able to work, earn money, and get promoted for the years I was in school. The "social and personal development" you supposedly miss out on can be supplemented by just getting involved in your community, and was way more real and beneficial than the general bullshit that college kids get into.
I would recommend everyone do 2 years CC and 2 years university instead of 4 years at an expensive uni, and this is coming from someone who thought the 2 year CC and 2 year uni was embarrassing and wouldn't even consider it in highschool
While your (completely valid) points address the economics of college, it misses the connections and friendships you make through college. It's the best way for most people to be thrown around thousands of people to find and build their community.
All that to say, if the economics of college were better, even I (mid-career) would consider going back for a couple of degrees to continue expanding my community.
Plorkyeran claimed that college is about more than a diploma, which you responded to by saying that you learn things on the job that you wouldn’t learn in college. My retort was that colleges are incredibly diverse, and enable many conversations and experiences that simply wouldn’t all happen in any other single place, and the best you can do is to tell me that people are still interesting after they graduate?
I’m sorry, but the constitutional law scholar, the electrical engineer, the chamber singer, the neurobiology review editor, the congressional staffer, the south asian dancer, the ancient babylonian historian, the photographer, and the basketball player aren’t going to all be sitting at lunch talking about the lecture they just listened to about Kant with their venerable philosophy professor in any job I’ve ever heard of.
Yes, there are interesting people everywhere (in the supermarket, for instance, or at a rock concert or hiking through a national park). That doesn’t mean that the college experience can be easily replaced anywhere else I can think of. Which is not to suggest that college is essential, but only that it has value beyond certification or specific curricula.
> ... they're more fun to deal with once their goal changes from "Continue getting financial aid / parental aid" to "Do something that pays well."
Both of those sound like awfully boring goals. I’d be pretty disappointed in any friend of mine whose chief ambition in life was to make lots of money.
"It is a time for many kids to get out on their own and learn to be independent."
College is completely unnecessary to do that. Going out and living on your own does that just fine! And if it's the time to make connections & socialize & party, then not going to college, living in your own place and doing a ton of social things will achieve that way better than college, for a significantly cheaper price. Hell, it will cause more people to do that, since they would be less likely forced to stay at their parents place in order to afford college.
Also I found it difficult to socialize and make friends in college vs. high school. People are focused on their classes, math & comp sci. people are not the most social types, and unless your in the dorms, it's difficult to make friends.
I would argue for many people the value of a college education is not so much the education. Fraternities/sororities/equivalents, for example, are often seen at some schools as more important to social mobility + marriages and more exclusive than the schools themselves– mostly in the South, but also at some other schools, say University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Not just, those, of course, really but any shared activities+clubs for practically any niche– college could be considered one of the last places where everyone has normalized openly seeking groups of friends based on common interests, to the point most throw extracurricular fairs at the beginning of every year. Not saying those don't exist after college, but finding e.g. a truffle mushroom foraging group is a lot harder in your 30s if you've never met anyone who does it before.
That mirrors my college experience, but I'll also point out that people who don't go to college usually don't just sit around on the couch all day doing nothing. They have experiences too, and meet other people that they would never have come into contact with had they gone to college, and often have jobs or other experiences that are much more varied than their college-educated peers.
I think the bottom line is that it doesn't actually matter whether you go, it matters that you make a decision and follow through on it, and that you make a decision based on your life and not the desires of your parents, teachers, the Internet, or society at large. Yes, not going may shut off some opportunities and experiences that you could have, but there will be other opportunities and experiences that fill that void.
Talking about "college" as a mere experience, drained of its knowledge value, reduces its significance to being a social club of sorts. You make friends, you signify some kind of status to potential superiors, and so on.
I don't think many people take this kind of mercenary view of college outside of the Bush family, and maybe it's a more realistic view, but that's the perspective that seems to be in play when the question is whether it's "worth it."
As someone who is happy they went to college despite it not directly helping get my current job, I believe it was valuable in that it made me more open to new things, better at developing relationships, and exposed me to different points of view. Worth the financial cost? That’s certainly debatable, but it was ultimately my decision to go and keep going.
Sometimes a person needs to go to college in order to understand why it might not be relevant for them. By simply touting that college is useless as a fact seems too far-fetched for me. No one is born with an ability to assess going to college as it is today. It's all social conditioning. To that end, college is useful. If it can teach you something about yourself then the 2 or 3 semesters were not wasted time or money.
I don't know. To some extent I do agree with you that the social experience of attending university can be very valuable in ways that aren't easy to measure. But part of the reason for that is that university is pretty much the only socially acceptable way for 18-22 year olds to move away from their parents for the first time and spend 4 years burning huge amounts of money hanging out with other 18-22 year olds. And I mostly agree with the article's claim that "Most students attend college in order to get a better job with a higher salary," or at least that's the core reason why it's generally socially acceptable to attend a university. What if there were other socially acceptable ways for 18-22 year olds to hang out with peers, and get exposure to various fields of study and potential career paths, that had significantly different ROI factors than traditional universities?
Not that this is super relevant to the article’s thesis, but regardless of necessity… people still like going to college. People will continue to value a college education because people continue to value going to college.
People like going to the state school and rooting for the big football team they grew up adoring. People like going to prestigious institutions and feeling like they’re achieving things that others are not. People like meeting hundreds of new friends every semester, partying on the weekends, learning constantly, and living in an environment outside of the control of their parents/guardians for 4 (and often more) years before the necessities of adulthood demand more effort and action.
College is fun and gratifying for millions of people, so it’s not crazy that the world continues to give it “artificial” prestige
Yet many people leave college with few connections and little networking ever done. So by your standards anyone without those social skills should consider college as a total waste of time and money. College: only worthwhile for extroverts.
I personally can't remember anyone that didn't go to college tell me that its not worth it. Either they say its not for them, they don't like sitting in a classroom, or they were faced extraordinary circumstances where they decided to pursue an opportunity.
> And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're hypocrites
I would accept the argument of a college educated individual if they actively discouraged their children from attending university. Telling strangers on the internet is easy, but with your own children you have skin in the game. To me that's more telling of their true beliefs
I always advise people to separate college into its components like you would everything else, than make a cost-benefit analysis.
The components of college are as follows:
1) Information you'd learn and the structured environment for learning it.
2) The degree you get at the end
3) The people you'd meet
4) The social events you'd attend (parties)
So the questions is - is this "college package" worth the time and money you'd invest? and "Is there another way to get these components for higher quality, less money, and less time investment?"
Since you say you can learn on your own, I think (1) The Information you'd learn, is not worth college. Especially in tech, you can learn all these things better online.
In web design and development, no one cares what school you went to - they only care about your portfolio and experience, so (2) is definitely NOT worthwhile.
You'll definitely meet cool and smart people in college, but you can meet even cooler and smarter peopler elsewhere I'd argue. Problem with college is that most people are just loafing around in a fantasy world with no consequences. In my personal experience, the people I've met in my post-college life have provided more value to me. And my college friends who are providing value now are only doing so because they are outside of that college bubble where you just drink beer and chase girls all day.
Finally for (4), if you really wanted to do the whole college social life - there's nothing stopping you from doing it for free. Just lookup the social events online and show up with a good story. Sounds weird to most people, but then again, most people go to college and live uninteresting lives. Entrepreneurs are NOT like most people, so who do you aspire to be?
College and "place-based education" as Bill Gates would call it is archaic. Information is extremely cheap and mostly free, and connecting with mentors and people you want to learn from is also much easier.
As someone who attended an elite university education for a bankrupting sum of money, I have a bitter view and am obviously biased, but I'm sure most entrepreurs agree that with this last point that learning and connecting is available for free to anyone who works hard to get it
I went to a top-tier 4-year university, and did develop several life-long friendships, many of which have led to introductions to other people, which have further increased my social and professional circles. It'd be easy to say if I hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have that now, and, well, that's actually true... but it's missing the point. I'd still be me, and I'd still have the same drive to meet people and take advantage of opportunities. My life would be different, certainly, but I doubt it'd be less socially fulfilling.
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