At 17 I thought I wanted to be a sport journalist or shoot rockets into space. Turns out I had zero interest in the path to ESPN and am terrible at chemistry. Sure looking back I can totally see that computers made all the sense in the world but I didn't recognize that then. If I had bypassed college and just started working to get to one of those paths I saw for myself who knows where I'd be. This is not to say that college is the only place where you get this freedom to explore, but colleges, especially good ones certainly encourage you to explore other options.
I think ideally your last year of high school would be nothing but career exploration, but failing that I recommend most teenagers go to college even if they think they know what they want to do.
But besides the area of study / major I loved the college experience of being forced to be away from the sheltered environment of home (although college is sheltered and restrictive in it's own ways). Being able to recognize thought patterns and impulses that I always grew up with felt like being able to see new colours that I never knew existed.
Also being able to make friends - I don't take this for granted.When you are in an environment where you have 10x to 100x the number of people you went to high school with, it is much easier to find someone/ somoe group that you can gel with regardless of how many ever quirks you have. After all these years, my best friends are still the ones I made in college - not the ones before nor the ones that came after.
At the very least I'm grateful to my college education for making me less of an overconfident asshole who thought he knew it all, while at the same time boosting my confidence in other ways.
I understand that in many countries like the US, the exorbitant cost of uni education might make what I said look like nice-to-haves and luxuries but I'm happy for a change to be born in a place where I could afford to have this experience (while recognizing that many will not be privileged enough to experience even this :( )
I was generally a straight-A student leaving high school but lasted six months at university before quitting. I distinctly remember much of my career decision was based on a single sentence description of the engineering degree flavour. I had good entrance scores but wasn't interested in medicine or dentistry. The description mentioned computers and design which were two things I enjoyed, but in reality it was more about designing computers rather than with computers. Had great teachers and parents but don't recall being steered by any of them on my selection.
Not sure what the answer is, but I imagine it involves more flexibility in that process (rather than prerequisite courses that start to narrow in at age 15) and more guidance.
At one point, we were given a large book - an index of jobs, basically. We flipped through and laughed at "cheesemaker" and "crane chaser" but there was not much about areas of interest or one-on-one with counsellors. Is a high school teacher really going to be best positioned to coach their cohort (with varied interests) on what direction to take?
It has given me enough PTSD as a young person that despite all the evidence and stories of success or barrier to entries, I personally wouldn't choose that path and I have had a poverty driven life my early childhood so I am aware of how it is. It is better. Buying a bottle of sodium nitrite or jumping from a tall building doesn't cost much or require years of mental fatigue.
Although there are certainly more factors than school behind this. School just amplified it.
Some young people do evaluate all the risks and potential of backfiring it. They live in fear of it but no one cares about why.
It's fine to be emotional from a whitelist of decisions you can take but it's not fine to do that for school or college.
There is no safety net for these students in most places. Even if there is, I bet most parents are wholly unaware and know how to handle the situation.
There are no in-person learning places, resources whatsoever. All of them half baked. A lot of open source or coding/cs initiatives now a days require you to be a student at some college. People selectively filter out those all the time. Great! They have plenty good enough reasons to do this but that doesn't mean I have to see them in the good light because it does say that I am worth less because I wasn't willing to be a punching bag for longer.
Young people also tend to bully others about this more than the adults.
If someone asked me whether they should go to college or finish school, I would totally yes if they are fine.
But if that person had a terrible experience, driven to taking anti depressants, mood stabilizers and being on shit ton of anxiety pills out of that. I would tell them to quit after reconsidering the consequences. It's cruel people think otherwise. If all you could have is suffering and all people say it gets better, it's cruel bullshit because they aren't in the same situation. Anyone's reaction to their finger burning down isn't to wait for it to pass or follow the protocol on how to put out the fire or treat wounds unless they have been extensively taught. It's to panic and take the most emotionally rational decision they can take to protect themselves which sometimes might be different from what you should have done. Would you blame that person?
What you say is true, but it is a real luxury to do this at university rates.
Despite how much success/failure/I learn I endure, college name matters... a lot. I snuck into Nuro's open house last year and found they exclusively invited Harvard/Stanford/MIT students (I can say this because I was a minor at the time of signing their NDAs)
College name matters, especially when you're starting out (which can impact where you evenetually end up... whether its working for a startup or working at a cool VC firm) In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now.
Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.
> Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents.
Haven't we already seen that this mindset is exactly what plagues academia with the most recent Admissions scandal? I mean parents of Wealth use that to leverage their children getting into that system to further entrench it and admissions offices use that to base their admissions on more than anything else.
I'm beyond the University Model, I have gotten to do some of the coolest things in my career not even mentioning I went to University and only based on merit and networking--though most assumed and asked loaded questions that reveal that I had indeed gone. But none of them asked for a transcript, as I don't even know where they are at this point.
I went to a low-tier (but highly applied to) CSU/UC, that has/had strong Research History, but saw it was all mis-allocated to serve a series of career academics with clout and had no real purpose other than to keep up the with 'publish or die' model and fluff their CVs. We as undergrads often had to work with broken lab equipment, limited class availability that prolonged your graduation date, and other budget cuts and this is was in an impacted major! As a student from the 2008 financial crises I don't envy what your time will be like in a STEM in this environment, frankly.
I dislike University for the horrible unforgivable debt loads it places on young people, but I HATE it for the waste of Human Capital it ultimately creates. It does occasionally offer some amazing discoveries but that seems more consequential than it does like the intended purpose; you need only see how University takes it's inflated share of researcher's grants and are legally allowed to take any and all IP from the research done.
You're free to do as you please, and you seem like a bright person so I hope its a full scholarship, but please understand that its disheartening to see what was supposed to be your most intellectually formulative years be wasted on such a horrible and corrupt system. Especially because as even before going in you understand the substance of the degree can be learned elsewhere and it serves no real purpose besides a form of perverse virtue signalling to HR.
I’m a significant proponent of college attendance for social and educational reasons, but even with that bias, I don’t agree with “necessary for 95%”.
Nobody ever asks me what college I attended. Nobody cares.
Nuro for example had this open house that exclusively invited Harvard/MIT students (i snuck in) and I'm sure there's a lot of similar opportunities that are open to kids in these colleges.
In the long term, I'm sure it'll fade away, but starting out matters as to where you will end up (whether you go to X startup or get to work for X VC)
As far as undergraduate degrees go, most universities teach you the same thing, the only difference is that some universities are more selective in who can attend than others. I learned the same material at the University of Canterbury down at the bottom of the world in New Zealand as what undergrads learn at Stanford.
I guess it's a bit different if you live in a country where there's competitive university entry, in New Zealand most universities simply require that finished high school to enter, you pick you university for lifestyle reasons (usually either because it's close to home or because you want to escape home). I've discovered that here in Australia there's much more of a hierarchy of which university you attended, as admissions are much more competitive. I guess that's what happens when you have 6 universities in the same city.
I never graduated and I was an idiot. Stay in school, kids.
Usually this is a good sign you do not want to be an employee there.
As a recruiter I never looked too serious for credentials, knowing myself going through the college only for that piece of paper at the end, working full time and knowing a lot more from the job than what the other students learned. From my former class in college I think I am the only one practicing IT, the others too other directions, including one that was a quite successful music band leader.
Compared to their university-attended coworkers, the straight-to-industry folk were far more likely to cargo cult design patterns, languages, and frameworks.
If your codebase follows a well-recognised style and pattern, it becomes a lot easier for new hires or contractors to get on their feet and start productive work than if you have some kind of brilliant idiosyncratic codebase that takes 3 months for a new hire to get their head around (as was the case when I joined my current company).
I am not a job. I am not a career.
I learned two important things at university that I doubt I could have picked up otherwise.
1. I learned how broad knowledge is. I learned about things I did not even know I did not know about. Some of these things I learned in classrooms. Most I learned outside of classrooms, either through interaction with my peers or by accident while researching something unrelated in the library. Sometimes by hacking on the school computers. In high school I learned that being smart is bad. In university I learned there are people who value thinking.
2. I learned how to organize my time to complete tasks I had no personal interest in, how to force myself to work despite my dislike of team mates or organizers, and to finish by deadlines. I only wish I had learned these things before my 6th and 7th years in university, but alas.
You don't need to go to university. We will always need garbage collectors and street sweepers, and remember, anyone can write bad software. Vendors continue to try to make it easier to do so.
This is why so many Americans view university as an elitist institution :) I agree about high school. High school is why I decided the education system was not for me (right or wrong, it was just a horrible experience).
I learned #1 while cold calling businesses to sell phone systems. You have to talk to people, make friends, and genuinely understand why companies operate the way they do. You can learn how large the world is without sitting in a classroom.
I learned #2... well in every job I've had.
What I feel I missed by not finishing university was the time to deeply understand a single subject. But then again, I was taking classes all over the spectrum. Maybe I was never meant for a deep understanding of a single subject.
OTOH, as far as recommending non-traditional paths, I wouldn't for my kids. I am extremely self driven. I never realized that most people are not this way.
I myself didn't graduate, because the allure of starting a company was too strong. Here I am 20 years later advising people with degrees. If you are dedicated enough and creative enough (in the hacker kind of way) you can become skilled in just about anything you want.
However without a degree there are doors that are closed to you. For example the UC system will not even consider you for an MBA if you don't have an undergraduate degree. Don't even bother applying. Other private institutions will consider you but you need to be absolutely exceptional to get in.
I use that just as one example. People with a degree (especially a good degree) can stroll into an opportunity that I have to work 10X harder to to get. That said, once I'm in I tend to outperform my peers simply because I'm used to a world set on "hard mode" at all times.
Another thing I'm lacking are the deep friendships and connections that people who have a degree seem to have. That, to me, is the biggest loss from skipping a degree. Despite significant effort I don't seem to be able to make that part up.
“The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love
There is another entrance to grief, a second gateway, different from the gate connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community.
These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament—we chronically sense the presence of sorrow, but we are unable to truly grieve, because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief.”
“The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive
There is another gate to grief, one difficult to identify, yet it is very present in each of our lives. This threshold into sorrow calls forward the things that we may not even realize we have lost. I have written elsewhere about the expectations coded into our physical and psychic lives. When we are born, and as we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection. In short, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred. As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land “Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth.” This is our inheritance, our birthright, which has been lost and abandoned. The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.”
- Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
The tech industry generally rewards those who can self-teach (tech is constantly changing), self-organize, and put in the effort.
A lot of people say university helps build a professional network.
Well anything you put put 4-8 years of concentrated effort into will help build a professional network. And if you go the route of internships and jr. level roles, you'll be paid while you do it.
A couple of points:
- going to college has nothing to do with whether you can write good software. Even CS grads do a ton of learning on the job, and lots of great developers started as hobbyists or came in from unrelated fields.
- Going to University doesn't guarantee you a good job. When I waited tables, I knew busboys with masters degrees.
- You can get hired (even for senior / principal level roles) without a degree. The degree doesn't mean you are good at what you do, and so it's often not a factor in hiring.
The exception is junior positions which are easier to get with a degree, but this discrepancy vanishes after you break into the industry.
The US spends ~3.5% of GDP on non-tertiary education and ~2.5% on tertiary education. If what you are saying is representative of the general population, it means there is a massive unjustified waste of resources.
If all you want to learn is programming and to a lesser extent computer science then I guess you don't really need to. However if you want to learn science, medicine, law, mathematics or any other real subject then of course you should. Plus if you want to have fun meeting new friends, getting wasted, and meeting sexual/romantic partners.
And jf I appear to be cherrypicking the second half of your post, it's because thr first half is cherry picking itself - I'll venture that fields where you Do need university stamp of approval such as medicine and law are becoming rarer and fewer compared to fields and professions where there are valid or better alternatives.
This is not to say education isn't needed and awesome, or even that structured, guided, formal education isn't needed and awesome. But north American universities (and I'm an alumni of a good one) have lost their way and are far from the most efficient or effective method these days.
You mention medicine and law as fields were you need to go to university, but you forgot also the vast majority of research. I think some subfields of computer science, because of their youth, are still the wild west and it is possible to do research in them without a PhD (like the author of the article), but even in those it's hard. In math you definitely see almost no research at all being done by non-PhDs, probably the same is true in various sciences.
Fair enough. I spoke from a European perspective where it is in many places not at all that sort of financial consideration.
> But north American universities (and I'm an alumni of a good one)
If that were so then would you not be an alumnus or an alumna?
Sorry.
But I'm biased towards going to uni, since I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university.
You are, of course, doubly fortunate.
> the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs
The hypothetical awakening of a person's intelligence is a battle against much more dominant social conditioning. And then students self-select for narrowness of perspective in a programme. As you note, the job market and consumerism are fatal stages of later conformity.
There is always the chance that some discussion or chance meeting will awaken a mind. But it seems far too accidental, assuming a society with libraries and recognised need for genuine public discourse.
In many economies, university isn't unconditional. It has become so expensive in some cases that graduates carry heavy debt for decades.
Does a person need to go to university? I would say that a person is better off reading at the library and seeking serious discussion rather than seeking credential-rewards in the edu-bubble. The shoddy mess should be rebuilt to make it a better deal. On-line learning is the only way I can see this happening.
But as you go closer towards research those people start falling off.
Professor: If you think computers are fast now, it'll blow your mind that back in the 60s the NSA has computers running at 1000.
Me: 1000? You mean 1000 megahertz?
Professor: No, 1000.
Me: facepalm
I'm still paying off those student loans.
Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification.
This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance to writing JavaScript for a living.
This site is very US-centric, which adds a huge monetary component to this decision. That makes this an entirely different question compared to a country where higher education is free.
I also think that software development is a field that is quite friendly and attractive to people switching from a different career or field. So you have the related, but still distinct discussion about whether you should have a CS degree specifically to work as a software developer.
If I was 18 now I don't think I would go to university. I mentioned this to my father a few weeks ago and he supported this decision.
I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom. Maybe there are some out there, but I haven't met them.
But it goes further. What strikes me is not only an anti-university sentiment, but also a strong anti high school sentiment. I've been surprised by the number of comments from people who are obviously smart and diligent enough to be programmers, but for whom high school was a disaster. And it occurs to me that this does reveal that education is not serving everybody equally well.
So, even though I value my university education, I'm still interested in hearing how others have experienced it. However for students, my advice is that you have to find the thing that makes college worthwhile for you. If you go in with a cynical attitude, that it's just "signaling" or "networking," then you are likely to be blinding yourself to the other kinds of opportunities that it presents.
I am honestly jealous of the people who say they valued their university experience. I really wish I could have enjoyed formal education that much.
My life was funded by the ability to walk into software development jobs. If I were born 5 years later, I would be a different (probably non-functioning) person.
I think the vast majority has technically learned maths and physics outside the college classroom. The teaching quality I'm getting at my university isn't the greatest (bar a few exceptions), and I find myself regularly going to Khan Academy or 3blue1brown to understand a concept better. This is learning outside the classroom!
In a lot of ways, I find universities to be assessment centres and certificate issuers. Not in all ways of course, certain aspects such as labs, coordination of group projects, someone to ask questions to get back to you instantly, are all things which cannot be replaced in any circumstance. But when it comes to the dry theoretical stuff, I'm not sure why I would go to a lecture if I know I can get a better quality of teaching somewhere else online.
Of course this is only true for a few subjects (maths and entry level physics/engineering). I unfortunately have to rely on the lectures provided for the more specialist modules I'm being assessed on (such as heat transfer and chemical engineering principles). This is mainly so that I can comply with the teacher's specific assessment criteria and the terminology/definitions/textbook/ordering they use. I may be able to find heat transfer explanations somewhere else online, and they probably would explain things better, but they wouldn't help much when it came time to use the terminology that the lecturer expects you to use during an assessment, or if you're expected to use the equation sheet that the teacher made for you and expects you to use.
In fact, I will go one further. Almost all self-taught physicists I have met are kooks - bonkers crazy conspiracy theorists.
I often hear people say that a university education teaches nothing useful, that it's just learning to take tests, that the course material is irrelevant, that it's just for networking and signalling, etc.
I suspect they both a) selected the wrong major and b) went to the wrong university.
You are almost by definition an edge case.
Also at my former company there was a principal computer scientist who was quite proud that he didn't have a university degree; I didn't work with him much but he was obviously fairly accomplished, career-wise. So that worked fine for him.
Most people are not like that, though; even though in theory you can study everything by yourself nowadays, I find that in practice people who didn't go to university often tend to have a fairly narrow & shallow field of expertise ("narrow" = don't have experience with many different things/ often focus on one language and a few sets of related technologies; "shallow" = they often don't understand too many layers of abstraction, and get completely lost if they need to go too deep). This is perfectly fine at the start of your career, but as years go by (like, 20years in, when you're still only mid-career) I can't imagine this working too well; unless maybe you switch to management?
Obviously if you just want quick vocational-type training, you don't need university level education. But then you should not be the one having problems with procrastination or self-discipline either. Most students in universities are there because they would not study or learn difficult or uninteresting subjects if left on their own. You also need to learn to communicate verbally and in writing with your peers. Knowing stuff but not being to able to communicate and work with others leads directly to low level jobs.
In this sense the biggest value of a degree in hiring is just the crude proxy it is for IQ and conscientiousness. That being said, I've never interviewed anyone without a degree, but then I've never seen a candidate without a degree either. I have hired people whose degree is completely unrelated to the role, because they demonstrated the ability and interest to learn something outside of what they studied at uni.
So perhaps part of the opposition to university is due to the (possibly incorrect) feeling that it encourages people to think of it as "this is the period I do my learning", whereas some alternative to university might better promote people to develop a habit of lifelong learning. I.e. maybe people have been jaded by the experience of interviewing/hiring people with degrees from good universities who just spend all their spare time consuming media.
Which is not to suggest attending university is a bad idea, given its value as a signal, just that it doesn't seem ideal for developing the habit of lifelong learning.
I have two bachelors' degrees, one in Mathematics, and one in Japanese. Those two programs were night-and-day in terms of rigor.
The mandatory "general education" classes were an absolute waste of time, and accounted for over a third of the cost of my college education.
It would have been more productive to spend that money on Pokemon cards.
The reality is, for a lot of people, university is massive waste of time and money. It largely was for me. We would be better off following the German model, with tracks outside University for professional workers and artisans.
Moreover, there are some excellent self-taught programmers out there, who work in the industry, and learn the mathematics and the physics and all the rest because they are passionate about the subject.
I'll take that kind of drive any day of the week.
same story.
We were required to take a breadth of courses first year that helped create a well rounded foundation to my studies in software which I value greatly.
I can tell many people in the field have never looked past the technicals to think about how computer science connects to the world at large and it's a shame because there is a lot to learn and much wisdom to be gained by taking a holistic view.
Some of my favorite courses were sociology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, biology (I did switch majors) not to mention classics and astronomy.. They gave me a very rich insight into the philosophy of thought outside of software and I've always applied my learnings to corporacy and professionalism.
Not all universities are like this and graduates while technically proficient graduate wholly unprepared for the realities of social programming because let's face it software is a social medium in the truest sense of the word and university work with its emphasis on solo work i.e. individual performance and occasional groups (which are invariably one person pulling all the others' weight or someone bossing everyone until they give in) as well as emphasizing marks as the primary metric serves very little utility in preparing people for the real world and even co-op programs serve only to reinforce the stereotypes rather than disrupt them.
High school dropout here, no uni degree, I can write more than just JS thanks. I know C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, ruby, Typescript, Go. I know DDD, SOLID, TDD, and AOP. I have forgot more about Linux than most people will learn in a lifetime and I did all of it without attending one uni course. I come from a poverty background, grew up in a trailer park, got fucked up on all sorts of drugs and didn't do well in school. Some time in my early 20's I had a revelation that I was nobody and I was going to die poor and alone if I didn't get my act together. Sadly with my piss poor grades there was no way I was going to get a scholarship to pay my way through college, my family just made enough that I couldn't get finaid easily either. So I decided to wing it. I looked in the newspaper for high paying jobs, decided I wanted to be Systems Administrator, and looked up the skills required to be one. Did I get a sysadmin job? Hell no, I worked my way up from Help Desk to PC Tech, to Network Tech, to Systems Tech, to Systems Admin, to DevOps, and then to Sr. Software Developer, I'm now a Principal Engineer.
Here's the deal, I know bright people who made it through college and I know stupid people who made it through college, but I also know bright people who have worked their way up from the bottom, like myself. I've been working my way up since 2003. My personal opinion is that Uni is not only not for everyone, but that perhaps some industries, including software engineering, may work better on the guild system than in a class room.
I can with certainty say I did not have everything I needed to go off and have the best possible career. Not all of us were born into that type of situation.
I would not have become an economist without going to college and taking an economics class to fulfill a requirement. It was so right for me that I even got a PhD. Needless to say, that would not have happened if I had stuck around to take over my dad's excavating business or the family farm. [Edit: I was a licensed sewer and water installer before I graduated high school, so I was in a better place than a lot of high school grads.]
During undergrad, I was worried about the ~40k in loans I took out to pay for it. However, I was able to pay them off fairly soon after finishing up, and would never have been able to attend without the federal loans that did not require a co-signer.
Mmm...how do measure that? I think it's balanced. I suspect that the majority of the folks that comment have at least an undergraduate degree. Even the ones who argue that the degree is not of great value..
It's hard to put into words, but university was a unique experience for me that was instrumental in helping me grow to become the person I am today. Finishing high school and then going to a coding bootcamp for a few months before joining the workforce just wouldn't have provided that space for me to "discover myself", for lack of a better term.
That's not to say that everybody should go to university, although I definitely benefited from it and don't regret it at all, I was definitely railroaded into tertiary education by my parents and teachers. And that's not to say that university is the only place where I would've experienced the kind of personal growth that I did. I have plenty of friends who went into trades and completed apprenticeships (actually more than went to university), and most of them don't regret doing that either.
You wanna go to university to be a coder/designer? Don't do it.
You wanna be a researcher/scientist/politic/etc? Yeah, go.
P.S. I obtained a degree.
I enjoyed college but, I very quickly understood that its only purpose wasn't to enhance my education as I sat through multiple classes that were nearly identical to previous all because I had to check a box. And generally I felt classes moved to slow and would have been much happier studying on my own, but courses often forced my attendance. Though I am a bit unique in my ability on that admittedly.
You apparently didn't learn to have a better look at those things at the university, it might surprise you some time.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Please don't create side accounts to break the rules with, though, because doing that will eventually get your main account banned as well.
In the end, I did choose to go to university. I will be working part-time to pay about 90% of it (including housing) which means I'll have practically no debt. The main reason for me to go, was that I don't want to de a developer for the rest of my life. I think that having a degree will make a eventual career switch a lot easier.
Nowadays in a hiring position, I don't care too much about the degree, but I do look more for commitment to something. The interview is an indicator of socialization as well and the deciding factor of wanting to work with someone.
Middle class Taiwanese family of white collar parents. Went to undergrad, dabbled in a few side projects and dropped out to work at a game company, a startup as an employee, and my own startup, in that order.
Learnings: found out I knew very little, and the branding/network/advice I could get from school would save me from reinventing the wheel over and over as a unvetted/newbie entrepreneur. This is hugely important and people don't assign enough value to it. For things where you need someone to hire you: you need to convince them somehow, and getting that piece of paper helps cover their butt and makes their life easier. I went back to school to have a bit of optionality.
Graduated and was planning on doing grad school. Spent first quarter basically playing D&D and League and barely scraped by academically, spent a few weekends hanging out with fellow Burners at a theme camp and collaborated on a few projects. I dropped out (for good this time) and pursued them -- all of them failed in the next 2 years, but what was useful was that I learned who were the good cofounder/advisors and how this kinda opaque process worked. Hit both a good startup as an advisor/early employee, then cofounded a cashflow business that I then bought out and proceeded to run for a decade.
Learnings: Knowledge and network are filled with plenty of opportunity costs -- and there's ways to make it both as a generalist and a specialist... ideally you can optimize for the intersect of what you want and what the world wants, and that ends up being the hard part. My own path was largely unplanned and opportunistic -- by hanging around an area of opportunity long enough and being ready I was able to access enough things to mildly succeed (didn't hit the stock jackpot, but I have a reasonable business).
Back to the question: the article answers it in the first few paragraphs - it depends on the person but is usually the "harder way". I only took the path because I had the priviledge/luxury to chase what I wanted, despite the vague expected value.
The way I see it, altough I learned a lot in uni, it's basically a "VIP" token to get yourself a job. And that's sad. Lots of companies will hire physics and math grads _just because_. They think they have "problem solving skills" - let me tell you - there are a tonne of STEM grads that do not have these skills (putting it politely) but get hired anyway.
This is an urgent view.
The post-hoc justifications of people who either didn't go, or people who did go but want to believe their other accomplishments are more defining - are not valuable to someone who has the means and opportunity to make the investment. The more arbitrary and meaningless having a degree seems, the more important it is to actually get one, because without one, you are subject to the even more arbitrary and meaningless barriers that it will otherwise unlock. You don't know them because you don't get to them until 10y+ after you graduate. A "degree," is in effect the degree of trajectory for the compounding rate of the value of your experience to others, where you don't see the effects until much later.
Look at the rate of occurrence of non-degreed people above a certain level of financial success, property ownership, executive management, assets, and opportunity, and then compare them to the very long tail of the hundreds-of-millions other non-degreed people you are in a labour market with. The distribution of that curve looks a lot like lottery winners. Given outcomes are exponentially distributed, should you make an investment, or just play the lottery? Get a degree, or always work for people who have one when you don't.
People who think education is mainly about skills and training don't understand what education is. Suffice it to say that a degree is a strategic investment. If you don't know what that means, I recommend investing in your education.
The reasons to attend college are more than moneymaking. Social networking, maturation, shared experience, opportunities to expand your knowledge beyond online tutorials, college offers many interesting experiences that going straight to work will not.
It's of course a very nice story that they "dropped out of school", but the truth is more nuanced than that. For example Bill Gates and Elon Musk had school as a backup plan in case their business would fail.
So it's not that they dropped out of school to pursue their business, they suspended their school for their business, and still had it as a backup plan. Very different! If their business wouldn't have worked, they would continue their school (which at that point was already an investment, 3 years for Bill Gates if I remember correctly).
Yeah there is some serious selection bias there -- Bill Gates' dad was a wealthy lawyer who sent his kid to a private school that had it's own computer systems in the 70s; Jobs lived down the street from one of the founders of HP, etc.
> You don't know them because you don't get to them until 10y+ after you graduate.
I think it's actually much quicker. A degree matters most for your first few jobs after you graduate, and your first few jobs matter a lot for your career.
I started my profession programming career at 18, but went back for a CS degree at around 30. I did notice a difference in the quality of job offers that I received since getting a degree. Prior to my degree, I only ever received job offers from smaller places. Immediately after receiving my diploma, I managed to get a really well paying job at one of the largest tech companies in my city.
There's no way of knowing how much of an influence my degree had on this, but I suspect it was critical. This particular company hired people without college degrees. All of my subsequent jobs have been with companies would be out of reach for me without a degree.
Times are definitely changing, especially with the rise of bootcamps. And my anecdotes can't be extrapolated to everyone, but I do think there is still value in technical degrees from a university, even for CS.
Required classes for a CS curriculum I reviewed were: discrete math, data structure, algorithm, computer architecture, programming language, operating system.
1) You don't actually want to do the work to finish a degree, 2) your only options are to get an extremely mediocre degree, or 3) you will have to go into savage debt to get a degree.
Then there are the exceptional folks who could do well anywhere (who, presumably, would also be the high-flyers if they went to a university).
For everyone else, getting a decent degree should almost be a no-brainer. It will be useful. HR will like it, pretty much forever. The "lost years" of work experience will rapidly converge to insignificance (a point that seems lost on the folks who think that it's only university degrees become less significant as you get older).
You can do a range of subjects - some of them, shock horror, not narrowly vocational (a lot of the discussion here seems to imply that the sum total of what we should learn after high school somehow begins and ends with "programming and computer science"). Further, you can do these subjects at a much higher level and with greater intensity than the whole "hey, I read a couple books on Philosophy or did the first level of Duolingo in Spanish" or some such.
It should be a pleasant time where you get to try some new activities, meet a lot of people - maybe including a life partner, but maybe just good friends and some "early-adult romantic" relationships (which IMO are likely to greatly increase your chance of learning what you really want and how to get along in the real grown-up world).
The whole tertiary sector is pretty messed up right now (even pre COVID), so buyer beware. Don't do a crappy degree.
Programming is one of the few fields, that isn’t packing boxes of frozen fish, where a career without a degree is possible here, and even on that field time is running out for people without degrees because so many young people have been getting them for the past decade.
But that is my country, here you’d be absolutely crazy (or perhaps challenged in some way) to not finish an education.
I’m from there and I never finished my degree. The reason was that I took some time off to travel, found a job during this time and I simply have not been back since. Almost a decade now.
Only recently have I looked into finishing it off through online courses but even then it is hard to motivate myself, not once have I been asked for it. I even ask recruiters and they also say I don’t need it to be hired (at least: Singapore, UK, Thailand, Sweden) and I’m talking about major companies. I can’t speak for countries other than where I am employed but here I am not underpaid due to lack of degree.
I did go through 3 years of university and I do agree that the experience itself is useful (even though it might seem otherwise at times).
(Edit: to be clear I’m working in software development)
I did a 2 year technical diploma program and went to work as an electronics technician. I was good, got promoted fast, started fixing a lot of mistakes the degreed engineers were making. I got pretty far without a degree but eventually hit a ceiling because credentialism was strong at the company. So I went back to college, a good private college, paid for by my employer. It was hard, because I was working longer and longer hours since I was good and they counted on me, while taking classes part time. The classes I took taught very little and did nothing for me except that finally getting my degree I could break through the credentials ceiling.
So...if you are going to work for a company that values credentials then you need the degree and I think it is better to go straight from high school to college instead of doing it the hard way like I did.
I'm not sure this is a real thing unless you're, say, Richard Branson. I also can't really imagine many circumstances in which you're doing something non-traditional and you can't just pretend you don't have a degree by neglecting to mention it... and if you've already reached a level of "significance" in a non-traditional thing where someone might actually check, well, you've probably already done better than most.
There is also downsides, like the fact it is a job at the end of the day, and that comes with politics as well as technical challenges.
I'd again make the decision (over University) in a heartbeat.
Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.
The entire point of the article was that if you have something better to do than university and good reason to believe you can actually do it you might at least consider it. Also, three to four years of foregone earnings are a powerful reason not to go to university if you’re already capable of earning a living in your chosen field. That is very far from zero reasons, especially when you consider the professional development you can fit into those years if that’s something you value.
> Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.
When you’re 40 no one but bureaucrats is going to give a crap what university you went to, compared to your actual accomplishments. If all you’ve got is side projects on GitHub no one will care whether you went to Oxford or University of Southern Florida or dropped out of high school. Actual accomplishments
As for career development - 3-4 years of career development "forgone" isn't really that much relative to the sum total of an entire career. One could just as easily say that when you're 40, no-one but bureaucrats is going to give a crap whether you have 19-20 years of experience or 23.
There are always exceptions - the whole "dropped out of university to found X or invent Y" thing - but 95% of people's actual accomplishments (as you so excitedly put it) are going to be a bunch of 'turned up, did pretty good' lines on a resume. All other things being equal, I'll hire the person who passed university-level calculus at a good school, thanks.
Source: am 42 with no degree, and I’m surprised when my CV makes it through HR filters, because it’s so rare.
I got a lot of socializing at both companies, got to hang out with guys my own age and guys older than me, got to have some fun (maybe not as much as my peers in university), got to grow up, etc.
I think university back in the day used to mean a lot more, and I would have enjoyed it, but now it's so watered down cause everyone goes, and political / cultural movements have made the university programs require much more effort and much less thought
Just my 2 cents
Edit: also, to add to this, at the same time I also learned a lot of stuff completely outside of the domain of software through books on my own. philosophy books, history books, sociology books, etc. etc. I really liked that I was able to carefully select the authors and books and topics to the ones that grabbed my eye.
edit 2: oh ya! i also got a lot of fun socializing at the bootcamp too.
University was so much more than learning how to program a computer so that I could get a job, I knew how to that that before I started. Almost none of what I learned at university I've ended up using in my career. But it was good to scratch that intellectual itch, I enjoyed learning what I learned, which is why I chose software development as a career, even if it isn't knowledge I use in everyday life. It was also an opportunity for me to move to a new city and become an independent adult and grow as a person, while meeting and socialising with people I would've never met had I stayed in my home town or even moved to a different city to attend a coding bootcamp.
I've always enjoyed construction work though (electrical and other), sure it's not intellectually stimulating, but it's rewarding. Sometimes I actually regret having such an intellectually demanding day job, after 8 hours of work often I'm too mentally drained to do what I want in the evening. There's also a certain sense of satisfaction from seeing your physical finished work that you just don't get as a software developer.
Working as an industrial electrician would be more my kind of thing, performing maintenance on machinery, programming PLCs, that kind of thing. Repairing equipment requires a lot of the same mental processes as debugging code, I enjoy doing both. It's a good cross between physical and mental work. The money is very reasonable, up to $50 an hour.
The academic side: the opportunity to study in depth a subject you love or that will be useful to you, from (hopefully) great academics of the field.
The social side: meet people who might become your friends for life, or your future spouse. Have a rich and intense social life before career and family take over.
The networking side: meet people, whether students or academics, who will be useful to you in your future career.
The extra-curricular side: student journalism, debating, politics, music, drama, sports etc. Follow your hobby like never before. It might even become your career instead of your major.
Obviously the four are not disconnected. But you can probably only go all in on one or two.
But then the cost. You need to decide whether it is worth it for what you will get out of it (that being some combination of the four areas above).
A) it's a great time to get a broad education, learn from experts in many fields
B) it will most likely affect your compensation throughout your life. Yes, you can find jobs without it. But if you limit yourself to jobs that don't care about a college degree, you will find your options limited. I may not care, but I know that the CEO of my company does, and that will likely affect your bonus and/or salary.
Yes, there are some people whose technical skills are so good that it's obvious to the world. But most people don't fall in that bucket. Whether it's true or not, a college degree will make people _think_ you are better.
I’d argue that in the current economy where global mobility should be an intentional goal of any education, they (most African universities) pay negative dividends in both power in their name and quality of education. I’d rather spend my tuition on online courses offered by MIT and Stanford. So, should I go to the university? In order to be able to answer, we should ask, which university. The answer is a definite yes for the top 100, maybe until the 1000th, and a no after that: there are non-university institutions that can give you the higher quality signal you need.
I have lost track of the number of candidates I interviewed (and voted to hire!) who couldn't answer questions about their completed coursework, but could give in depth rundowns of the inner workings of something like embedded system software because of their extra curricular work.
After a while, I could notice trends from universities that were actually teaching their students incorrect information, providing the negative dividends you were talking about.
It's sad and frustrating. In an African context I think you're spot on that self taught candidates have often used their time more effectively.
I often think the biggest difference between a graduate and non graduate is three years. As an 18 year old there is no way I would have been able to withstand the culture for another three years at IBM without it significantly affecting me (positively or negatively), but at 21 I feel much more mature and ready for a career. In many cases, does University just function as a waiting room in which young people can mature?
And the opposite is true. If I were 18 now, I'd probably go to university. Back in the day, I had my reasons not to go, and when the time came to reconsider it (mid 20s), it felt much harder to justify.
But now I live in relative comfort, and I would have to stop working and generating an income. I have savings that could tide me over but when the choice is a home for a future family or a university degree with questionable worth it's a tough ask.
I can't imagine having dependents and going back to work.
Of course everyone is going to chime in and say that you don't need to do university full time, but, you do. Notwithstanding the mental exhaustion that comes with our jobs but also I believe it to be unlikely that you'd be able to get into the right mindset to be creative, social and learning deeply.
I sincerely believe that university is a thing that you can only do at a certain point in your life, and I'm passed that point.
Do you really want to be engulfed by a male-dominated IBM/Google monoculture for 4 formative years?
I don't see why "male-dominated" should be a problem. Statistically, I would even probably have more shared interests with them.
1) Dealing with college admissions is literally one of the most frustrating things I have ever done. The IRS has given me less run around than most college admissions I talk to.
2) Money. It all comes down to money. I'm having a very hard time justifying the cost at the end of the day.
With that being said, if someone comes up to me and ask me if they should go to college my answer is absolutely.
It's never been very hard to find jobs, and my pay is above average for the UK (it's £60k).
Programming is pretty easy to teach yourself and it's a super employable field right now. Programmers are in so high a demand no one seems to mind if you don't have any qualifications.
Would things have been better if I'd gone to university instead? Who knows? But it's super possible to be a programmer without going.
So, I can only recommend to find out what kind of person you are. But tbh, even though I got a degree that is unrelated to CS, I'm glad I went to university. I would had been a very different person without that experience. And in the end of the day, you will have to work for a veeeery long time (well, at least that is the reality for the most of us). So, what are 3-5 years spent doing something that gives you the opportunity to experience stuff you won't be able to find at work (well, except for the sunk cost, but I reject to think about education in this way)?
Software Developer? Not really. FAANMG SWE Job? I won't risk it if I'm not famous with 10K other people applying.
You can have a perfectly good and valid life as a human on earth without having set foot in a university. When you decide to attend a university, you always do so at the expense or other perfectly valid things.
I think everyone should go if they can, and simultaneously I think three- and four- year degrees are too long for most people. We need to establish a program to get degrees in shorter installments, say 1.5 years each.
In other words, tech companies should seriously start considering hiring people with Associate's Degrees (or equivalent) where applicable, to turn this degree into a real viable option. I can take anyone with a brain from zero to working coder in 1.5 years of full-time study, including the maths.
I can't speak for other fields, but for tech I'm pretty confident this will be great.
Anyone should be able to sacrifice a year and a half and a reasonable tuition to be able to get the college experience. I think we can make it much more accessible.
I had been doing software development for 4 years and I figured I'd rather work with that than automation and electronics. I had a side project(game) that was earning some money.
Note that this was in Norway so I could have (and still can) go to university for free.
My girlfriend ended up getting a masters degree in software development and is currently working in a consultant firm. She's currently tanking another masters degree in entrepreneurship, mostly for fun.
I've always doubted my skills, but after helping her out every now and then I've realized that 10+ years of experience really can't be matched by going to school.
On the other hand I've also learned that university is a great way to kick off your learning. Some things they're learning are things I often ended up with too, on my own, with trial and error. At least I really understand why some things are what they are because of it.
I started very young and was quite successful with my first project. People has spent thousands of years(combined) actively using my first project.
But even though I have done well, I still feel like I'm taken less serious than those with a full education, cause I've just created a strange game.
I'm considering going to university now just to get cheaper insurance and the degree, but I don't expect I'd learn a lot of new things. But I do enjoy fiddling with stuff, so it might be fun.
Do I regret it? Not really. Am I worried? Slightly, if it all falls down then I need to get a normal job or come up with something else.
Would I recommend it? If you're really driven and are already seeing signs of success, sure, give it a shot.
A lot of people go to Universities hoping to find themselves and never do.
I'd however recommend going to a country where education is close to free to get a degree, even if it involves losing a year learning the local language...
Obviously, YMMV, but I find absorbing any theory-heavy knowledge alongside my day job extremely hard, whereas I can very easily more practical skills as a I work.
Unfortunately, the problem is harder. How to weight the possibility to reach the state of the art, and participate in moving that state of the art, against rather tangible possibilities or short- or middle-term gains in practical projects? The first option may lead to better long-term wins overall.
It's a hard choice for teenagers, who aren't always able to even formulate the problem.
I'd err on the side of getting education in all cases, while avoiding making somebody particularly rich in the process, as that's an indication of flaws in what I'm getting.
The company I work for is currently hiring. As the hiring manager I have repeatedly said I don't give a damn about college education (myself not having come from a CS background in college) and repeatedly the CTO has shot me down and told me that we need to hire someone with an undergrad CS background.
So here is my pithy statement: There are two paths - you can either have a CS degree. Or you can know someone and get the job that way (which is, how I - and others on the team who don't have CS degrees - got the job). Sometimes even if someone on the inside is rooting for you.
Anyway, I already had fulltime position working as software developer since the age of 17 (it was a bit of necessity, but I also like it very much) and after finishing my highschool diploma I decided to not apply and continue working.
I went to study CS at the age of 23, while still working fulltime. Being a bit older and more experienced, but also time constrained changed my perspective a bit. I was in there just to get knowledge that I decided are relevant for me, there was close to zero time to be spent on social time or taking some filler classes that might be interesting.
I spent three years in university, taking all the classes that sound interesting to me in areas of math, compilers, machine learning and computational logic. At that point I depleted the pool for both bachelor and masters classes and for the rest of the time I would have to go through fillers and decided to quit without graduating.
I am glad about both of my choices: both having break between high school and university and quiting early. I feel like spending time in university is very valuable for both professional and personal growth and everybody should probably took it if they can afford it, but I don't think that this is your only valid choice.
It should be ok to spend few years wandering around to find what you want to do with your life instead of spending rest of your life paying for debt you acquired just because you can't see any other viable path.
That being said, a PhD is probably only required if you wish to go into teaching.
In France yes. We are still very much into Ivy League (Grandes Écoles) schools, they really look good on a CV in a large company.
Sure, some startup may not care but it depends where you want to work. Look at the CVs of large French companies boards and you will see a lot of the same schools.
In Germany having a higher education title is great or important. Your PhD counts.
But yes, you do need to go to university, a good one. And you need to graduate.
If you could change the way the university tech you, what you would do?
Imo education should be a lifelong thing: available at any time, part time or full time, on-demand; for example, new requirements come up at a job and you need new skills? grab a course. want to enter a new subfield? grab a few relevant courses. got interested in something new all of a sudden? grab a course and see if the interest doesn't wane. laid off? consider taking the chance to study full time for a few months and pick up some new skills or plug holes in prior knowledge.
It should be based more on voluntary interest ("I want to learn this thing!") or actual concrete need ("business is looking for someone with skill X and person Y looks like a good fit but they need to study a bit") and less on the idea that you sit through courses and exams and demos in exchange for points that eventually buy you a piece of paper..
University (or, rather, education in general) should be with us through the entire life.
There are open universities that sort of go in this direction, but the last time I looked at them, it felt like they're still rather structured around getting a degree and all the bs that goes with it.
What I would add to college curriculum today is a good project management course, up to PMP level; also for CS, an equivalent of ITIL foundation.
For CS the biggest gap I see in fresh graduates are testing and performance and a more solid foundation on RDBMS: even in the era of NO-SQL and HADOOP the starting point is still understanding RDBMS.
When I was in University, I didn't really appreciate that it is mainly about cachet. Yes there are great experiences, you meet great people, you can be inspired, it opens your mind, you can do great work, but the thing that gets people in the door, and the thing that Universities are primarily selling, is cachet. It's interesting seeing how Covid19 interacts with this. Lots of people must be worried that their university cachet will be tainted by pandemic restrictions if they are the in the 'class of 2020'. This could be one reason for the massive number of students deferring.
So if the cachet matters to you (and your future employers), yes you should defintiely go to University, there is no substitute. There are also some jobs you can't do, or even really comprehend, unless you go to University (medicine, dentistry, civil/mechanical/electrical/aerospace/chemical/environmental engineering). In one sense these degrees are worth paying for up to a point, because it actually takes a lot of effort, facilities and equipment to offer them.
2&3: I knew a guy, his father had sheep, plenty of them. He never bothered with Uni. He has been studying/training on seminars regarding agriculture, animal care, etc. He is set for life. He will never sit on a university theatre and keep notes. He does use technology (I remember how he was shocked when he discovered YouTube videos that exploded his mind and knowledge).
He picks up the phone and speaks to vets, he talks to agriculture specialists, he watches seminars, he gets better. He stays on top/ahead of things. He never spent 1 (pick your own currency) on University, housing, (Uni) books.
He stays in touch with his peers both in his country and abroad (he was taught English early on and how he sees the value of that investment).
I see him though being a guest lecturer in a Uni, to speak as a professional on this/his industry, speak on his part of the supply chain, what he would expect of "Education" to provide for him (his industry) in the future, what he would like to see people do for the promotion and progress of his industry. But pay for classes? Never.
So.. 2 & 3 :)
Edit: typos
That's easy in the first year or so. It's harder to get proof that you're as smart as your professors. If you are Robin Williams and a Juilliard professor tells you that he has nothing to teach him, by all means fuck off and do your thing. Otherwise, chances are that you should stay in school.
Almost all knowledge (and more) can be learned for free on the internet nowadays. I'ts only for a specific category of professions where a degree is mandatory. I never expect a great professional to have a degree, because the real defining quality cannot be learned at a university. You cannot express what you are not. You cannot become an Einstein by doing 5 years of university, but they love to make you believe that shit.
I am not against higher education at all, but the term 'degree' is pretty worthless if you want to measure mastery.
My work experience has been design Engineering, which is a low 6 figure job. I also live in an area with an old industry that's getting Engineers outsourced.
I'm considering a comp sci degree so I can get into embedded, or electrical engineering, AI, or pretty much any 180k/yr job. I'm okay with taking a pay cut for a few years.
University degrees are, fundamentally, a mark of status and patience: “this guy had enough money and willpower to sit through years of drudgery, so it’s safe to hire him to do the same for us”. After a few years nobody cares what the degree was actually about, particularly in IT where everything gets redone every few years.
>Only hire computer scientists
>I don't have relevant work experience (which means taking a 60k/yr web dev job to begin my career?)
>My projects are good, but I need to contribute to open source projects.
The reason for the degree is to get access to high quality programming jobs rather than 60k/yr web dev. Not to mention, I imagine I'll learn everything about security and algorithms which I'm sure are weaknesses.
Either you are an employer or an employee, make your choice.
