A major benefit of college is a baseline of domain knowledge that will serve you in your professional career, but indeed, that’s also a major benefit of a technical program. The real disconnect is that college is also (or at least is supposed to be, or has traditionally been) a schooling in the liberal arts. Four years spent learning to think critically about society and culture as well as one's area of specialization, and to express oneself in the marketplace of ideas.
Which is just something many people don’t really care to do. And that’s fine. The problem is trying to get everyone interested in it, denying the fact that many lack interest and aptitude, and then diluting the experience for everyone while saddling the next generation with decades’ worth of debt.
College isn't just about jobs. I studied philosophy, got two diplomas in it and now I write software for a living. Do I regret it? Of course not. I learned a lot in college. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about learning, other people, and the world. I'm glad I didn't waste those four years learning computers, something I was much better able to do on my own. Yes, if the only goal is to learn job skills only, most colleges and most majors shouldn't exist and they certainly shouldn't be pursued. I know it's hard for the author to fathom, but there are other reasons to learn. Many people enjoy learning and it improves lives in many immeasurable ways. It's so shortsighted to look at a college education as simply a path to better jobs that may or may not exist. Frankly, it's a stupid, small minded idea that seems to be pervasive in America's culture of stupidity. Isn't our society stupid enough without people railing against higher education? Perhaps if more people could attend college, if the costs weren't astronomical we'd have a better, more educated society and culture instead of the stupidity that dominates. That's reason enough to encourage people to go to college, let alone all the personal reasons mentioned above.
Am I tired, or was that comment nothing but ad hominem? Perhaps you should take the high road next time and assume that I am just stating my own opinions, not trying to argue with anybody.
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However, as you're egging me on, I will rebut your flimsy argument, the crux of which is this anecdotal beaut:
"It just seems unlikely that there's 'very little' that the computer science program gave to the developer. It certainly doesn't match what I've actually seen in-field."
If that's all you have to lean on, I don't understand how your comment was upvoted so much. Absent in your analysis is a thorough inventory of what college gives you: While it provides new opportunities for learning, it also does not provide things that you get in the working world, such as
* Business sense and professionalism
* Assuming you don't live at home, a sense of independence: Knowing how to take care of yourself at 22 when everyone else is just figuring out is a huge advantage, believe it or not
* Documented experience
* References from others with working-world experience
On the other hand, there are indeed negatives of going to college. To me, the greatest one is the massive time drain: I work in the day, go home, teach myself more, read history, learn chess, and basically provide my own education. This is not by design, but rather, by my nature. It's unfortunate that so many take education to be the exclusive realm of educational institutions.
Sitting through lectures and working to verify for your professors that you are learning, to me, is a waste of time, when I know damn well if I've learned it properly. If I haven't, and it's important, it will show quickly back at work.
Oh, and college costs tens of thousands of dollars.
I often see people pointing out that college has other pros other than just teaching people technical skills, which many can learn from other sources.
My 2 cents: College has also many cons. Apart from the monetary issue, college forces talented people to learn things way more slowly than they could, in a much less efficient way than its possible. College also forces you to go through some very uninteresting classes. Some people would argue that this good, since in the "real world" that is often what happens. I don't like this line of reasoning: that is part of the problem. You shouldn't do what you don't like, and college shouldn't teach you that. From a biological point of view, college is the most productive time in your life.
Should we really be forcing (and by that I mean: should the people hiring engineers require a degree) people to sit through slow, sub-optimal, boring classes during their most productive years, in the hope that they get used to being unhappy most of the time?
College may be good to some people, but it may also hurt a lot of talented people, who waste their valuable time and become used to the fact that its ok to be unhappy with what you're doing. It's not.
While I agree that college is a poor substitute for vocational training or an apprenticeship, I think it can provide a great benefit. For most, college is a stepping stone to being an adult. You are now making more decisions for yourself, meeting many new people, hopefully living with your peers instead of your parents. At the same time, college provides a fairly structured environment, go to class, study, take tests, have summer break, and do it again. This is similar to high school, but you have a lot more control. The college will help when you want it, but unless high school, they are more willing to not give a damn when you don't give a damn. With all this, there are all the generals that everyone hates. These are phenomenal. I wish I spent more time learning about history, languages, psychology, communication, and art (well I got that education by marrying an artist).
Learning to program and the basics of math (I am calling anything less than abstract algebra basic math) and the basics of computer science theory (automota, grammars, etc) was worthwhile, but I have met enough self taught programmers that I don't think college is that special in this regards. Other industries might be different, especially more formal engineering ones like EE, but I could be wrong. No, all the other bits that rounded me out helped me the most to be who I am. I am not just a programmer and college helped that.
the idea that literally everyone should go / would benefit from going to college is definitely wrong and harmful, but there are some special things about college for those who take advantage.
college is probably the only time in your life that an entire team of domain experts will be obligated to take time out of their day to meet with you and answer your questions, however silly or low-level they may be.
as a professor, college is one of the only places where you can get paid to work on things that not only have no near-term value, but likely will never have any practical value at all! (I guess this could also be an argument against college...)
I do think there is a problem with the way people understand college. outside of a couple majors (ie computer science), college should really be considered something like a luxury good. it isn't economic in the sense of dollars, cents, and balance sheets, but something that has it's own intrinsic value for those who take advantage of it (a distinct minority of undergrad students).
disclaimer: I think I am one of these people who college is mostly wasted on. I don't go to office hours, participate in clubs, or really do anything other than really good work on programming assignments and cramming for exams. I'm mostly in it for the piece of paper.
College is probably a great thing for some people, but it's been oversold. It's not the destination, it's just one way of getting there.
One reason why it's so easy to sell, is that college is a near universal experience for the middle and upper classes, and being an expensive experience, people credit it with much of the personal growth that happens in one's early 20s. They also credit it with making them good at their field.
"I really learned how to think in college"
"I really learned how to be apply myself in college"
"I really learned computer science in college, which wouldn't have happened if I went via some other path.
etc.
It's far too painful for most people to think "I could have been an equally skilled person if I'd spent that time doing something else".
I come from a long line of people who've succeeded without going to college. When I tell people I've known for a while that I dropped out of a community college they usually seem stunned and surprised that someone could actually have a reasonably intelligent conversation with them (and be a decent engineer) without that history.
My experience is that you can read books on the humanities, and CS, and get work done AND not kill yourself in the process. Maybe the road is a little longer in some ways, but you also come out of it without debt, and you get the benefit of having a very different set of formative experiences than your peers.
The article is written from the perspective of someone who has not enjoyed the benefits of a college education: The premise is that at ~17 years old (or any age), people know what to learn and how to learn it.
Good college educations require a diversity of classes so students can learn from and about the incredible diversity of valuable ideas and knowledge. The belief that you already know what you want and can dismiss the rest is ignorant and arrogant (usually one follows the other). If you believe that, you most need a college education -- open-mindedness, an intellectual humility, and the desire to seek challenges to your ideas are hallmarks of the well-educated and are major benefit of good college educations; the more I learn the more humble I become! As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."
College has requirements regarding what and how you learn because they know more about it than you do, and would be shortchanging you if they did otherwise. Does a good developer let clients design their own solutions or let them choose bad ones? The educators are experts in their fields and in education; they have experience with thousands (at large universities, even millions) of people getting educations, research on learning, and much more. What do you know about it? I'm not saying that their ideas are all correct, correct for you, or shouldn't be challenged, but it's foolish to discard them wholesale.
The DIY hacker myth is exciting -- people will do it all themselves -- it's the old American rugged individualism. People who follow it limit themselves to their own imaginations, rather than the combined imaginations of a university full of smart people (including fellow students). You can't even imagine what you don't know; if you are dismissing whole fields then you are not even looking.
College is not for everyone, but that's a meaningless truism used as an excuse. The more intellectually able and curious you are, the more an institution full of very smart highly-educated people, experts in their fields, willing to spend months teaching you, waiting for you to walk into their offices and ask them questions, should appeal to you.
There’s more to learning and the life of the mind than how much money it can make you. College shouldn’t entirely be a STEM trade school. Creativity and innovation require cross pollination and I bet if you look harder you find plenty of studio art majors and linguists and English majors doing just fine in the modern world. We can’t all be engineers but we can all learn to apply ourselves across disciplines and that works both ways. The problem seems to be that people believe that college is the only ticket they need and that they don’t need to apply themselves further or continue learning and adapting.
I know a lot of the comments here are from the lens of money input (as a cost, to pay for education) and output (as a return, on the investment, in the form of a job / career).
However, I wanted to take a step back and offer a different perspective. College does more than teach one a trade. It should, ideally, help the student become a better citizen of their own culture, of the world, and of their community. College taught me deeper empathy, and different kinds of empathy, it taught me more about literature, history, cultures, anthropology. There is so much today that could be improved if, for example, philosophy was a core requirement of every CS curriculum.
Outside of coursework, It taught me how to make friends, and how when I did bad things, I would lose friends. In a way, it is a continuation of high school except with the training wheels off, with all the consequences of adulthood to be tasted for the very first time.
I know it is a privilege to say this, and it is why I am such a huge proponent of free education, but to miss college is to miss more than some academic study in a field. It is to miss a whole chapter of life. To go from high school to labor, without that sweet blissful blend of freedom, stress, and discovery feels like a life not fully lived.
I would love for everyone to experience this, so from this personal perspective, I find that this framing (of money), on the whole, a rather negative thing.
I really liked learning in school. Many of my intellectual interests today would not be so if I didn't learn, for example, a bunch of stuff about linguistics. I don't know if a college education is worth its cost these days, but I think there is a lot of value in it.
There will always be time to work, and to be good at your job. School can be more than that. Pretty much everyone shits on college these days, and I certainly understand why, but this shouldn't be looked at as anything other than conventional wisdom at this point. It's not a cutting-edge take or anything of the sort.
I studied aerospace engineering at college. I think it was great.
When faced with a large amount of work to do, it's easy to dismiss it. It's not so easy to actually do it. When I realised that (unlike high school) I actually had to do work to pass (and letting down extended family by failing wasn't really an option), I managed to work out how to apply myself to things that I didn't necessarily enjoy. Interestingly, when you actually apply yourself to a course what once seemed like a pile of uninteresting work to slog through starts to become interesting.
I've had plenty of courses that I wouldn't have learnt about myself. It's not until you force yourself to spend a semester studying something that you realise just how useful it can be in other areas of your life.
It was only really the last two years of my degree that I went from sort-of enjoying it to truly enjoying it. Sometimes there's a bit of a slog to get through before you can do interesting things. Engineering degrees (and probably computer science degrees) are like that. You have to learn the (often dull) basics before you learn the interesting things. The author makes the mistake of assuming that their experience (one year of OK performance followed by a year of not going to classes) is indicative of the college experience. That's not necessarily true.
Beyond academics, I got so much out of college in many ways. The ability to spend a year studying in another country, the wide range of people I met, the opportunities that I had to work with lots of people on interesting projects. College isn't just about going to classes and doing exams.
My degree didn't cost nearly as much as the authors one would have. I don't think I would have paid $40,000/year for my degree. However, there's plenty of options that don't cost that much that offer the same (or similar) teaching experience. I completely agree that college isn't for everyone, but I don't think the author really addresses why. What the article really says is that they didn't apply themselves very well to hard topics that they weren't interested in. Unfortunately not everything is instantly fun.
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.
Educational institutions aren't exactly the same as businesses. For instance, how many teenagers actually WANT to attend high school? Looking back I can honestly say I learned some important things in high school (but then again, I took every AP class available to me and then some).
Colleges and universities have an interesting niche to fill. A broad-based liberal arts education isn't just a tradition - it's actually a useful tool that can help with whatever your main task is in life. I am a computer scientist by trade and by degree. My degree taught me very little I wasn't already aware of as far as computer science is concerned. The most mind blowing thing was learning Scheme, which led me to learn CL, and start looking at other functional languages. However, my degree also taught me about art (very important for a CS person IMHO), literature, history, philosophy, biology, mathematics, physics, and more... I have hobbies outside of CS mostly because of my degree. Most importantly, I can draw inspiration from other disciplines, because I understand the basics of many disciplines.
Too many people expect colleges to provide only directly relevant instructional material. This is not what college is for. If you only want to learn a specific trade, go to trade school. College isn't going to get you a job, it isn't going to feel immediately useful, especially when you are young. I had the advantage of slowly getting a degree over 8 years while working full time. It was hard, and the first few years I whined like everyone else - but then I started to see how becoming more intellectual gave me a leg up in business and in CS.
Colleges don't give the students what they want, because most of them haven't a clue what they want or need to prosper in the long term. College isn't job training.
I understand where the author is coming from, yet, perhaps because he is constantly surrounded by well educated individuals, he failed to point out the unmeasureable benefits of going to college. When a person is exposed to the diversity of different people normally found at a college their view of the world is expanded. This generally increases their empathy and broadens their humanity.
You just don’t get the same exposure at a trade school or through an apprenticeship. Perhaps the real solution is that colleges should offer training in the trades. You’d benefit from classes on how to run a business and do taxes and accounting if you’re in a trade and want to start your own business.
And just because the direct access to the knowledge is not retained, doesn’t mean the residual knowledge is completely lost. If I never learned Calculus I’d have no idea where to start if I wanted or needed to pick it up again, but because I did, I have a much easier time refreshing myself.
As a programmer, I jump from language to language often. When I haven’t used a language in a while I forget a lot of it, but once I start using it again, I recall and pick it up much faster.
So, while those researchers proved that if you don’t use it, you do indeed lose it, they failed to see if a quick refresh of the material proved their skills more than someone that never learned the skill at all. I’d imagine the results would be as I’d expect and those that previously learned it did much better than those that never learned it.
And finally, the author touched on what is more directly the issue. College ciriculiums are simply not well designed. If more majors were designed like engineering as his example, their would be more useful and their for used knowledge acquired during a students years in college and therefore more skills would translate into their field.
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
This idea that there's something special about four years of the much longer process is a bit silly.
The idea is that a, colleges move to you places you'd never be (I have friends at NYU and Dublin who absolutely are getting more out of the locale than they are anything else), and b, because college is specifically made so that people can learn, you'll attract a purer blend of people, all of whom are interested in learning.
For the most part, that latter point is absolute bullshit. College has become so psychologically mandatory in the United States that people go to college whether or not they're truly interested in learning. And while I love the idea of liberal arts learning, and while hopefully if I stay I'll learn things I'd never thought to learn otherwise, the fact of the matter is that as colleges defocus themselves, there's less of an emphasis on really bright people who are going to blaze through early college to get to a meaningful level. In my classes, I'm learning to program in Processing and Scratch, for instance: one is a kid's language, for crying out loud, and for the other, I can't see the point of using Processing rather than Java. In my other classes, I'm learning to use Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, both programs that I have a good deal of familiarity with. It's an absolute waste, and my professors absolutely realize this, but they have no choice because other kids don't know a thing about programming, and the course that I'm in makes these classes absolutely mandatory.
As for the kids being enlightened and focused: don't get me started. At the time of this writing, one kid is in trouble because he brought tons of kids to his house and they threw up and now he's refusing to apologize to his parents because, as he puts it, "I'm in college. This should be expected behavior." Same kid told a real knee-slapper about stealing four thousand dollars while working at a Target. I mean, it makes for an amusing story, but it's despicable. And I'm in a pretty top-notch school, for what it's worth.
No, people who are really fascinated in learning nowadays tend to try and be practical about what they know: I'd bet that the brightest people of college age are doing things like trying to create start-ups, or at the very least trying to earn a living with the skills they've got.
I went to college for four years but didn't graduate. Today I'm having a great time coding and sys adminning in nyc. I enjoyed college times, but there's no way you could con me today into thinking it was at all necessary from an economic perspective. I think of college as a luxury good spot, not as an economic investment. So I kind of agree with you on one hand, even though I have a softspot for college. Point is this: college has positives, but an efficient way to spend 4yrs developing skills is not it.
> If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons
This is patently false. Colleges compete and advertise based on their job placement rankings. Just a few years ago, law schools were sued for misrepresenting their employment statistics.
Whatever ideal, romanticized version of university and college experiences are touted, the reality is that they are marketed to parents and kids as the way to a better lifestyle.
Sure, "Liberal Arts" are largely about enriching the mind, but that doesn't change the fact that very, very few people can afford the luxury of going to get a 4 year degree just to "expand your horizons".
People have a hard time separating the value of an entrenched institution from whether it's a good value. More school is often good, but that doesn't make it a good deal.
Every time the discussion of cs degrees comes up here it's followed by an avalanche of people saying how college gave them this and that and then a story about the one idiot they used to work with who didn't go to college.
I went to two years of community college and have never had student loan debt. I've worked on harder problems than many cs grads have. I've gone farther and actually retained more knowledge. I got a great deal taking the path I've followed.
Which is just something many people don’t really care to do. And that’s fine. The problem is trying to get everyone interested in it, denying the fact that many lack interest and aptitude, and then diluting the experience for everyone while saddling the next generation with decades’ worth of debt.
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