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0 pointslurking_swe1y ago0 comments

That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time.

Further, some high school graduates (like myself at the time) literally don’t know HOW to learn on their own. I thought I did but college humbled me, made me realize that suddenly i’m in the drivers seat and my teachers won’t be spoon feeding me knowledge step by step. it’s a really big shift.

If you were the perfect high school graduate, then congrats, you’re like the 0.01%! And you should be proud (no sarcasm). This doesn’t describe society at large though.

For the very few that are extremely motivated and know exactly what job they want, i do think we need something in between self guided and college? No BS - strictly focusing on job training. Like a boot camp, but one that’s not a scam haha.

The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce. It’s also one of the best times to date, but that’s another story.

Completely agree that the cost of college in the US is ridiculous though.

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bumby1y ago

>The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce.

I don’t know how generalizable this is. I remember reading a few studies trying to assess if Ivy League education was really more valuable that a state school. The result (IIRC) was that it only matters for students who came from the lowest economic strata; the authors presumed it was due to the network effect. But that also means the network effect was negligible for the majority of students.

tcmart141y ago

I used to work for a guy who had his engineering degree from Harvard. I was out of the Navy, got a job but also had a GI bill and was looking to go to school for engineering while working full time. I asked him his advise. Pretty much he said is to go to a state school. The only real benefit, at least for engineering from Ivy League, is the network, which can make getting the first job easier. Otherwise the course work is the pretty much the same.

sigmaisaletter1y ago

"A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own."

I think you underestimate how bad some high schools really are.

spiderxxxx1y ago

>That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time.

Citation needed. There's great books out there that provide a lot of guidance down a particular path. I'd say a lot of them do, and I can't imagine online learning sources would be worse. There's online communities for learners for specific subjects that are full of people offering good advice.

lurking_sweOP1y ago

I don’t have the time to provide a citation, my apologies.

I’ll leave you with this thought though. Of all the professions, tech is probably the one where this is the easiest to do. There are many companies that don’t require a bachelors. For most of the last 15-20 years tech was in a “boom” cycle, and yet the vast majority of software engineers I met DID have a bachelors degree.

Why? If it’s as easy as “pick up a book”, then why didn’t more people take that path? I think very few people have the drive and discipline to accomplish a full career prep on their own.

If your hypothesis was true, wouldn’t tech be mostly filled with self-taught engineers?

tpmoney1y ago

I would argue that while tech is the easiest to get into without a degree:

1) The cultural zeitgeist around higher education (at least in the US) is and has been "you must go to college and get a degree". It's been over 20 years since I dropped out of my first university. I'm doing just fine, and yet to this day, I will be asked by older members of my extended family if or when I'm going back to "finish" my degree, or whether my company will offer tuition assistance to help me go back. If you graduate high school these days (and for at least the past few decades), the expectation is that you go to college and get a degree. And if you're going to have to do that anyway, you might as well get the degree in the field you want to go into.

2) As a corollary to that, while new / younger companies might have set aside the degree requirements, the big tech houses definitely still preferred them and having the paper was still a leg up in the hiring and recruitment process. And even in companies without an explicit preference for a degree, it's often listed as a requirement on the job posting. "BS or Equivalent Experience" is easier to match both as a candidate and as an employer if the candidate has the BS as that is an objectively verifiable fact.

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