That's about it, though. You actually can learn all those things yourself, you just have to be pretty disciplined about following some sort of course or text, including the weird things that you have quite figured out are reasonably big.
You also won't actually know anything other than the outline once you're done. They throw so much at you and it seems detailed while you're studying, but you need to actually work with a field for a while to really understand it. You'll have the index though, and that's pretty useful for future reference.
That said, I'm now at the point where I'm close to looking at colleges with my oldest. Value/cost is very much on my radar. 20 years ago, you could go to college to "find yourself." You could explore a lot of ideas/careers quickly without the pressure to spend all the money. That's not as true today.
Can you reproduce the opportunities university gives you on your own? Yes, but it's very difficult.
Seems like with inflation, need for graduate studies, dating markets etc. that adolescence is lengthening. Whereas you would have been kicked out of the house to figure it out at 18 now we stay with parents longer...
(I have a 4 and 2 yr old myself)
No, not with Covid. Without in-person classes, you don't meet anybody and you don't learn anything more than with a $2.50 in late fees at a library, what Good Will Hunting talked about.
When you're in high school, everybody tells you to go to college. Teachers, guidance counselors, most adults. So, you just plan to go to college. Nobody is telling you "consider learning a trade," or "consider traveling", or "consider that you can write books/program computers/start businesses without a degree". Sophomores and Juniors in High School are often not worldly or mature enough to ask these questions themselves, and nobody is revealing to them the complexity of the first big, life-changing decision they'll have to make. Or, at least they weren't in my town in the 90s, maybe it's different now.
The trades are often romanticized, but overrated in their ability to reliably provide a middle-class standard of living. There will always be some trade that is in high demand and can therefore offer a middle-class salary... but within ten years, it will be flooded by new people, and that will end. (This is the case unless there is a strong union in place and it stays strong.) That's just how the labor market works. The selling point of an advanced education is that it provides insurance against labor market fluctuations, since you're hired for something other than your commodity labor (in theory). That's no longer the case these days, but that's a problem with our society, not our schools.
As engines of social mobility in the US, colleges aren't great--they're expensive, often very elitist, bloated due to runaway administrative costs, and usually staffed by researchers who consider undergraduate teaching to be their fifth priority if at all--but they're still better than literally anything else our society has in place. Our laws are written by millionaire Boomer scumbags, our businesses exist to ratify an existing hereditary elite as meritocrats while being hostile to actual meritocracy, and our culture is thinly-veiled capitalist propaganda. Our colleges might get a C-minus, but that's still ahead of the F that everything else in this country gets.
I'm curious where I would fit into your opinion of all this. I'm a high-school drop out with 1.7 GPA (ended up getting a GED eventually), but I've been in tech/software dev for nearly 17 years now. Whether it be job offers or ability to perform well in my role, the lack of college hasn't been a barrier at all. I currently work in a FAANG and usually outperform my peers and haven't had any problems getting offers for management positions. I got into software dev because of my love for video games. I have an average IQ and I'm not gifted. You say "almost everyone", but there's nothing special that sets me apart from "almost everyone". What are your thoughts on that?
At one time, every student at most colleges had to take "Rhetoric" 101 and 102, where those things were taught. You only have to look at modern social networks to see that they're not being taught anymore.
Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree? Because the british said so many centuries ago is not a good reason. Neither is "what about the profits of colleges".
We put up with 12 years of random but generally useful things forced on us. Once we decide a career as adults, information not directly useful to the job we will be working should be optional.
Not to mention the financial burden and lost time in a person's prime years
- Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation
- Find sexual mates
- Find platonic mates
- Learn many disconnected things
- Learn many connected things
- Learn to take criticism in the open
- Learn to render criticism in the open
- Engage diversity
- Engage similarity
- Discover the value of value
- Make mistakes in the open... recover
- Watch others make mistakes in the open... help them recover
- Learn to how to think
- Learn the history of thinking
- Become a robust citizen of the universe
- Learn you are much smaller than you thought you wereOn the other hand:
> Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation
One of the things you don't learn in college: Not to talk like that.
The same can be accomplished with a year of travel and a year of internships/apprenticeships.
Also I think at this point it’s safe to say that a college environment does not in any way shape or form engage diversify. It tends to be a monolithic culture that is hostile to contrarian views that may disrupt may d disrupt the status quo.
University is beneficial for access to laboratory infrastructure that you otherwise couldn't obtain on your own without incurring significant cost. A good - albeit extreme - example is the nuclear reactor at Reed College. University also provides you with resources to ask questions on observations or thoughts around what you experiment with in the lab. It's a great sandbox and gives you flexibility to determine what you want to do in life before you fully invest into it. This is only true to the extent in which you're not pouring thousands of dollars down the drain at college to learn you just wanted to weld shit together. Conversely I think trade school is where you've discovered what you want to do and you go learn how to do it with peak proficiency in a controlled setting.
Yes, I had to take a bunch of classes that I wasn't interested in, but there's also no way that I would have been able to cram in all the math and compsci that I wanted to into 2 years. Especially as not everything can be learned concurrently. Like I said, I could have started working after the first two years, but I would have never gotten the depth that I did if I had stopped there.
The reason is exactly because people with CompSci already do not study enough philosophy, ethics, sociology and hence do not have any idea that you have to think about the consequences of the tools you build on society. Or do great evil.
It is optional. You just can't get a bachelor's degree without doing that, because that degree indicates completion of a broader course of work than you're interested in.
Bonus: auditing classes is usually cheaper.
In Europe (AFAIK this is very broadly true) you're expected to have covered these in high school, and university is for focusing on a single field (and its prerequisites, so lots of math in engineering fields, e.g.)
Learning how to actually write code was something you were pretty much expected to pick up by yourself - most of the CS classes had requirements to do a personal project which was a large part of the marks for that class. Absolutely no way could any graduate from that course without having produced multiple applications in everything from assembler (6502 and 68000) through to Pascal on a mainframe (yuck) and C and Prolog on Unix minis and graphics programming in C on Atari STs - which was great fun.
I loved it - although I did make a bit of a mess of my first year, but you just had to get through that - no impact on my final degree.
Edit: I should explain - Scotland so first degrees are 4 years rather than the 3 years of the rest of the UK.
Sure, like Bowie. Or Prince. Or McCartney. Wait..
When you start to play with a higher caliber of musicians, it becomes an expected threshold. I think its a bad analogy but it kind of is true the better you get. Still bad analogy
A handful of people won the lottery, therefore everyone should play the lottery?
"I don't read music or write music, none of us do it in the Beatles. We did some good stuff though."
The 3 examples I listed are also probably the most well-known artists who have not studied theory, all 3 of them have said at various points in time that they can't read sheet music (and therefore definitely do not have a formal musical education). Funnily enough I _can_ read and play sheet music, and you do not see me drawing massive crowds..
While a good ideal, the speed of change makes that difficult for universities that simply operate on a longer timeline than the current industry.
To use the bowling metaphor: there isn't a right way to do software as well-known as bowling well. When you go to find that foundation, you get CompSci fundamentals (which are a solid foundation) alongside a bunch of industry best practices that appear to be changing really quickly. Software certainly isn't only about CompSci fundamentals.
The Javascript scene has slowed (for the better IMHO) but it's a good example of a drastic change of styles/techniques over a short time span. Plus we have new languages that are doing new things that may not be taught in undergrad courses.
Even if you zoom out from a single ecosystem like JS and look at the major styles - OOP, functional, procedural - that has changed pretty quickly too. OOP is not necessarily the "right way to bowl" any more than procedural or functional is.
My conclusion here is that the theory of peak practice is very difficult to apply to writing software, however, it probably works with purely CompSci stuff (which can be practiced in any language). By contrast, this theory applies well to bowling, because bowling well is a much slower moving, more well-known target to work towards.
Yeah, this cannot be a smart move. $100k doesn't even cover the annual salary of a dev. Good luck starting a business or any initiative with that. Advertising is so expensive these days, along with everything else. I would rather put the $100k in an index fund anyway. Thiel had 2 big successes, those being Facebook and PayPal, everything else he says or does has dubious or is wrong, whether it's bitcoin or imploring kids to drop out of college. College is worthwhile because the median is higher in terms of success, income. Focusing on the outliers who drop out of college ignores that the median is lower.
How easy it is to brush aside two of the largest tech successes of the last 20 years!
Also the notion that only democratic governments were overthrown by the Arab spring makes no sense. Ben Ali was pushed out in Tunisia, Mubarak ousted in Egypt etc. If those governments are "democratic" there were nominally only - the "presidents" ruled from 1987 and 1981 to 2011 respectively, and jailed (and tortured) the opposition.
This strongly depends on the college. The more exclusive/prestigious the college, the better the network.
I almost don't believe the author. It feels like you're lying to me.
College is more than collecting merit badges.
0 I should know, as I have 3
This whole thing is a dangerous, scummy lie. Millions of people drop out of college, and most of them don't end up founding billion-dollar companies. Why do they drop out? They can't afford it, they don't have the social support, they get sick, they lack the preparation or are too young for it... all sorts of causes. It is not glamorous. It is not a sign of great ambition, nor is it taken to be such. It is usually a case of failure (that may or may not be the person's fault) and, in the real world, failure hurts. Sure, dropping out of Harvard to found Facebook is a winning play, but most people don't have those kinds of options and can't afford such a major misstep.
Peter Thiel's anti-college push is something even worse. Our education system in this country isn't as good as one might want it to be. It's expensive, often elitist, and of dubious quality (even at prestigious schools) except for people with outlier levels (outlier among those under 25, at least) of self-motivation. All that said, it's the one component of our society that still kinda works and that still, in some privileged subsections, is run by people with decent intentions. It's the last bastion of meritocracy left. Perfect meritocracy? Not even close. But if a professor played favorites as brazenly as an average corporate manager (65% and "culture fit" = A+/executive fast track; 97% without "culture fit" = C/"Meets Expectations") his life would be made hell. Getting "screwed" in college means studying your ass off and making a B, due to some tricky question on the final. Getting screwed in the corporate world means losing your income--possibly, your housing and your reputation as well--over the smallest infraction or none at all.
Education is the one component that's left in our society where a working-class person can outperform his social "superiors". This is the real reason why royalists and rightists like Peter Thiel want to destroy it. Think we lack social mobility now in the US? We do, but scrapping the colleges is going to make it worse... so keep that in mind every time some Silicon Valley asshat says that formal education is a waste of time.
I say the same thing about the SAT. Is it flawless? No, of course not. It picks up a number of cultural or socioeconomic factors with no correlation to true ability. However, without it, though college admissions are going to become more socioeconomic, not less.
When I was in college, I had to enroll in a course called "Structured Systems Analysis" for my computer science major. It remains, to this day, the most boring course I have ever taken. It was essentially a crash course in business for software developers: we discussed topics like software estimates, methods of team management, and company mission statements. It was slow, stultifying, mind-numbingly-boring information. The professor was actually great, but there was only so much he could do with the material. I fell asleep studying for the final - literally. And I was the kind of student who read textbooks for fun.
This is a common experience: finding the most boring class also to be the most applicable one on the job. The jobs are what's broken, not the schools. I find it sad that software estimation is taught at all in schools. See, I'm a believer in the liberal arts education in the classical sense: liberal, in this context, means an education appropriate to a free person (as contrasted with servile arts). Real computer science is a liberal art, but giving estimates (or, say, doing user stories) is a servile art.
The problem with our society isn't that a liberal arts education is outdated or elitist, so much as that our society has very few positions left in which a liberal arts education is actually useful or appropriate. Colleges are forced to take one of two options, neither free of ugliness. One is to dilute the program with servile skills like writing user stories to make graduates more employable in the strata of jobs they'll actually be able to get; the other is to give people an education that wildly overestimates the quality of job positions that will be available to them. (As I said, the liberal arts education is designed for free people, but how many people really are free of the labor market? I'm a leftist, so I'd like to see this addressed, but I'm not holding my breath.) I'm not surprised that a course focusing on software politics turned out to be more useful than any of the others, but it's sad that this was the case.
Other than that though, it's hard to justify the price tag.
Cultural inertia is the only thing keeping the current university system alive, everything about the tenure track and how graduate students have to work is broken as well. The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern workforce to maintain a modern economy , so it fails miserably
By what metric is it failing? Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce? What is your emphasis on “modern” referring to? You clearly have strong feelings about this, and I’m curious why, but your comment doesn’t clearly communicate why you feel this way, nor give much evidence to back up the belief that education is broken and that fixing it is easy. Where is the evidence that education could be more efficient? What does more efficient mean? Are you talking about financial cost, or time & effort spent learning, or something else? If it’s “easily replicated” more efficiently then why hasn’t it already happened?
the trillion dollars of student debt that can't be paid off because many degrees don't produce real economic value to justify the cost of education. Having millions of people waste years of their lives and massive amounts of money is a failure.
>Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce?
because I know the history of the university system and it's barely changed in centuries
>If it’s “easily replicated” more efficiently then why hasn’t it already happened?
because the government subsidizes it with trillions of dollars so there is no incentive to change
If anything, the problem with the US education system is that it was designed to do that, and does it well.
Low-income public schools have metal detectors and a significant police presence. Show up a minute late to class (the bells were put there at the request of industrialists) and you'll lose points. They're treated like possible future criminals. High-income public schools have open campuses and forgiving attitudes toward late work and adolescent mischief, but still have lots of rules about when people can do what. Prep schools have guidance counselors that tell you exactly what you need to do, and who will start setting you up at 14, to get into whatever undergraduate college you choose--they train you to expect to be handed everything you want by society.
Whether it's by design or emergence, the system funnels people into socioeconomic strata that neatly correspond to the one they were born into. In the middle class, this means they get an education that is by-and-large competently delivered and that offers a little bit of autonomy but does not, in general, reward creativity.
The average middle school, with its stultifying rules, its emphasis on memorization and busywork, and its reward/punishment systems, is great training for the median industrial job. High school, with the culture of status-seeking and social pettiness, is great preparation for the white-collar corporate world. College trains people for the kind of job that would have been available to them fifty years ago; but in today's economy, all the decent opportunities are spoken-for.