I once spoke at a conference for teens, where I was literally the only pro-college speaker. My original talk wasn't even about college; I made up a talk on the spot after hearing how anti-college everyone else was. Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup.
Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college.
College isn't for everyone, and it's definitely a broken system. However, it's about more than just about the classes -- spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.
Bill Gates is not a good example of a college dropout. In his own words:
"I didn’t leave college because it wasn’t suited to me. I left college because I thought I had to move quickly on the Microsoft opportunity. I had already finished three years and if I had used my AP credits properly I would have graduated,” recalled Gates, “I am as fake a dropout as you can get.”"
> Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college.
Zuckerberg is not an example of why one should go to college. He is an example of the difference between college as-an-experience[0] and the diploma that one gets after graduating. In some fields, a diploma is important if not required, similar to a certification, and in others it isn't. If you want to go to college, it's important to know exactly what you want to get out of it, if the diploma itself has little value in se in your field.
Unfortunately, I think these two points are oftentimes conflated, to the point where some people completely write college off as having no value, when a more appropriate conclusion may be that college has value whether or not you receive a diploma.
Zuckerberg is also an awkward case because he effectively did do a very traditional liberal-arts degree, complete with learning to read and write Greek and Latin, and extensive study of classical poetry. He just did it earlier in life, because he went to a famous private boarding school, the Phillips Exeter Academy, which followed that model of education. He's definitely not the product of some kind of modern technically-focused vocational education: Phillips Exeter is not exactly a "learn-to-code camp" place.
The problem is that increasing costs mean that college-as-an-experience on its own, without also picking up a diploma that employers value sufficiently (and which you will quickly put to use to get a better job), is somewhere between "not worth it on balance" and "financial suicide" for an increasing proportion of US students.
> Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup.
Huh, I hadn't heard that one before.
I do think there's a particular subset of the startup sector, mostly focusing on web, MVPs, and business-model innovation, which has a negative view of academic-anything, whether it's formal education, academic research, even CS as a subject. But it's also worth noting that that isn't the whole of the technology business! Plenty of startup founders not only graduated from college, but even went to grad school (graduating from grad school seems less important than spending a few years there). A number of high-profile startups were formed by grad students or professors as spinoffs of their academic research. A few technologies that were either developed in academia, or are direct derivatives of stuff the founders developed in academia, include PageRank, Mathematica, SPARC, PostgreSQL, Matlab, etc.
To be fair, the drop-out-of-HS talk was from a High Schooler with a "startup", who had dropped out for a well-known (but not YC) incubator. So, he was biased (and unexperienced).
> spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.
It depends on the school. Most colleges aren't exactly an intellectual environment where people talk about singularity and high tech over lunch. I'll have much better luck finding a qualified cofounder just living in the Bay Area and going to meetups than at your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford.
There are pockets of intellectualism at any college, but the truth is that American culture is just not very intellectual, and among the business elite there's a pronounced antiintellectualism. You're going to find more philistines than intellectuals at any college in the U.S. and, yes, that includes the top ones. Technology people aren't an exception to this. The old Silicon Valley nerds had at least an interest in history and literature and art. They weren't experts, but they agreed that it was important. The new business-oriented pseudonerds? Narrowly specialized in one technical field ("social graph logistics") and complete ignoramuses about everything else.
Does that mean one shouldn't go to Harvard or Stanford? Of course not. It's great for the resume and there are a lot of connections to be made. But if you think that you're going to be discussing high intellectual concepts with most people meet-- or that the people bringing the connections and the people with high intellectual interests will have any overlap whatsoever-- you'll be disappointed.
"Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college." I think their paths are so extraordinary that they shouldn't be mentioned in a career conference! it would be very naive to use them as an example for one's own career choices.
And they still went, and they still benefited. If anything, that's just an argument to still go to college, do something amazing while you're there, and drop out when it becomes a huge success, which I don't think anyone would disagree with.
If anything that's a great argument for college. College was so helpful for them and provided such a great environment, that they didn't even need to stay there for the whole 4 years.
Why do people keep on using Zuckerberg as an example? Facebook was a social network for college students. If he hadn't gone to college, why would he, and how could he make a website for college students?
Thankfully we have another, wiser tech giant to push back against the bad advice of Thiel and Altucher, who seem to think that what happened to them - effectively, winning the lottery, even if they are talented - ought to happen to everybody.
>Schmidt vehemently disagrees. “The economic return to higher education over a lifetime produces significant compound greater earnings.” It’s true, on average, economists find that college raises wages by about 15-30 percent. Despite the debt, it’s a wise investment for many students.
>When asked about the difficulty in paying for college, Schmidt was adamant: “I appreciate it’s expensive and we need to fix that,” he said, but “figure out a way to do it.”
College is expensive because we tell kids that it's going to be this huge windfall so people "figure out a way to do it." The problem is that it's a correlation/causation argument that's turned into an out-of-control feedback loop.
College graduates traditionally earned far more because fields that needed a degree were higher-earning. College degrees are absolutely useful for some fields, and, in fact, I lean toward the argument against college being weaker for the more technical fields like typically get discussed here.
But the real problem is that we've been telling kids that the only way to do anything with your life is by going to get a four year degree, and as a result we have more graduates and employers are starting to require four year degrees for jobs that have traditionally -- and should be -- vocational in nature.
As a society, I think it's absolutely insane to expect these sorts of jobs to suddenly begin creating more value, and thus have higher compensation, simply because the person working it has more outside education.
My stance is that we need to sort this out now before it gets any worse. We need to destigmatize vocational education. We need to realize that while some form of higher education is almost always a good thing, a four year degree is complete overkill for many.
Schmidt really needs to segment out that "average" rise of 15 to 30 percent.
1. A few fields clearly need education, like medicine or law. Break those out separately.
2. Getting admitted and graduating from college is a strong signal of your employability. Even if college adds absolutely nothing to your skillset, it can increase your value. (Think of getting a perfect score on the SAT.)
3. Being able to put off earning for 4 years is partly a signal of your socioeconomic status.
4. It ignores the people who try to attend college and fail. They are left with debt, the opportunity cost of wages for their time in, and no degree to show to employers.
This is separate from the fact that as we have pushed more people to get better degrees, employers have simply increased their job requirements, so you need a college degree to be an office manager. A credential race is a zero-sum game for society as a whole.
This is a little off-topic, but back in high school, there was a vocational education program clearly considered to be somewhat remedial, tailored for those who had no hope of going to college or otherwise having much success. (Poor minorities, in other words.) Students would spend about half their time in this program, and half their time with the rest of the school. I was not in it, but I eventually learned that the brightest students in many of my classes were in this program. Stigmatized as it was, it worked, and quite well. In fact, it was probably better preparation for college than the regular-track courses (which were actually meant for people who might go to college).
I don't pay much attention to education policy (one can't spend time on everything), so I'm not too sure what lessons ought to be drawn from this.
I don't know of any data indicating that college "has become a lottery."
Life is a lottery; no one is guaranteed health, let alone financial stability or success. College is part of life so it can't guarantee success either.
But in every study I've seen, people who complete college are more likely to achieve financial stability than those who do not. So, if it is a lottery, it's one that is biased toward the student.
Something else to consider: I'm not sure about the data from the USA, but in Canada, the university enrolment rate is 50%, but the graduation rate is closer to 25%. It is clear you can push large segments of the population into college, but that doesn't mean they will be successful at it. Is that still a gain for the individual and society?
I didn't graduate high school or college. I make plenty of money and have a great career. I just got lucky, huh? Rolled the dice and had my life created for me. Did school teach you this false dichotomy?
So you have a sample size of one and you think you can draw conclusions from that? Sounds like maybe you should have gone college, or at least taken a stats class on Coursera... ;)
Literally no one reasonable is saying that it is impossible to be successful without college, that is clearly false. What they are saying is that it is more likely that someone will be successful if they attend college. For every Gates or Zuckerberg there are 100,000 kids who didn't, or couldn't, go to college and regretted it.
And yes, I am quite certain that you did get lucky. That is not to say that you didn't work your ass off, or that you aren't extremely smart and clever, but you almost certainly also got lucky in some ways, just like the rest of us.
Well, first, I don't have a CS degree. Second, I don't see myself as servile, and I don't see how pointing out the logical and statistical fallacy in your comment indicates that I'm somehow "servile". I mean, maybe I am, but your comment is still just anecdotal evidence from which no conclusions may be reasonably drawn.
It depends on what you want from college. For me, I got almost nothing from the "getting in" but a ton from actually "being there" (in fact, I liked it so much I went back after a few years). One of the problems I see with the debate about college is that people have come to view college as a purely economic investment.
If you are totally self-interested and simply looking to make money, then sure, YMMV. But from a social standpoint, college has great value beyond the economic value it produces for individual students. For example, forcing large groups of young people to come together in a (at least somewhat) scholarly environment exposes them to new ideas and cultural norms and produces adults who are better able to handle diversity and change.
By "signal" I mean the social/professional status gained from mentioning that college on your CV. "Went to Harvard" and "dropped out of Harvard" mean nearly the same thing: Harvard.
Signals are important, when someone needs to make a decision like "should we interview this person" because they have little else to go on.
I understand the concept of a signal, my point is just that there is more to college than creating signals (or even "education", however you define it) for the individual students. There are social issues involved that, in my opinion, carry a much greater weight than most people seem to assign them when discussing higher education.
The point is, on average you will fare better with a college degree than without. If you pick 18th century Russian literature as your degree, well that's a different story...
People always want to give literature students a hard time. But do you know where they end up by the numbers? One answer, law school... they love to read old incomprehensible stuff and are obsessed with research. I'm in software development I make a good living, my significant other makes way more than me... what did she study in undergrad...
What if instead of being able to get a CS degree, degrees in engineering were required to be spun around a topic. So that you left college with a degree in "Mid Nineties Adventure Games".
On the surface you might examine this course of study to be completely useless. Very few adventure games exist any more. But to spend 4 years trying to truly understand the topic you would have to learn to code to see how that code interacts with visual and artistic objects to understand the history of the business model and examine ideas of story and context and finally to understand why the industry moved passed it.
No one would expect that you would go out and build your own game, but in that course of study maybe you discovered that there was a piece you were good at , the code and that in understanding it through the vehicle of something you were interested in you found a passion for a profession.
Would you say that people with that degree that went on to work at X big startup were doing it because they had no other options?
No you would say "wow she's a brilliant coder.... and a little weird if you get her talking about adventure games"
Maybe the realities are that we need to make CS, that is basically vocational training, have a little more liberal arts to it.
I'm not sure were you went to school, but at most schools the complaint is that CS doesn't have enough vocational training, i.e., there's too much math/theory not enough programming/engineering.
> a little more liberal arts
A 4 year CS degree in the US requires about 2 years of general education, we get plenty of liberal arts in that time.
>Would you say that people with that degree that went on to work at X big startup were doing it because they had no other options?
Yes, I would. I don't think an adventure game degree would make you very marketable. Just like a Russian lit degree doesn't make you very marketable. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with a Russian lit degree, just that for the average person, a bachelor's degree in Russian Literature isn't going to land you a job. That doesn't mean you won't find a job, but it won't be because of the degree.
I'll point out that I had 90 hours of a history degree before I switched to CS (I originally planned to go to law school).
You keep back treading in your own argument. You can't argue that CS isn't vocational training and then say:
>I don't think an adventure game degree would make you very marketable
If the goal of further education is to gain a degree that shows specific marketable skills then it is by its nature vocational training(even if you feel like you got more theory than practice). Just because you go to a school with "University" in the title doesn't change that.
> You can't argue that CS isn't vocational training and then say:
Yes I can. Being vocational and making you marketable are orthogonal.
A math degree makes you very marketable--you can't argue that a math degree is vocational.
A computer science program isn't designed solely to teach you to be a professional programmer. Computer science to is designed teach computer science. Some people use that skill to be professional programmers, while some people go into research.
> Just because you go to a school with "University" in the title doesn't change that.
"Universities" do have actual job training programs, where they help you become certified members of a profession, and even require short term apprenticeships. Nursing and teaching are 2 of them. Even those degrees however require 60 hours of general education, which separates them from what are commonly called "vocational" programs.
So yes I can say that the general education requirement means that a degree program at a University is automatically not a vocational program.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing about. Your first point was that your SO's Russian lit degree was at least partially responsible for her making a lot of money.
My point was that a Russian lit degree by itself is not worth very much, financially.
If money doesn't really interest you, or you have enough already, or you are planning on some kind of post-graduate education, then a Russian literature degree is great.
However, if like the vast majority of students, you are in college for financial reasons and only for 4 years, Russian literature is a poor choice.
Keeping in mind I only brought this up because the OP seemed to imply it was a completely useless degree with which I disagree.
My point is and has been that there are a number of skills gained from studying say Russian literature that are highly useful but not immediately obvious.
If you identify a few skills required to succeed in that area of focus and look at them through the filter of a specific profession, in this case being a lawyer.
You can see how rightly applied the study of a seemingly narrow field can prepare you for a more general one.
>A math degree makes you very marketable--you can't argue that a math degree is vocational.
not sure how recent the data is but that point doesn't really hold its just something you are throwing out there based on truthiness. Math majors are, maybe, at best reasonably marketable, and well within the margin of error of say history majors.
But I agree with the thought that a math degree is not vocational but is more like Russian history in this regard.
>if like the vast majority of students, you are in college for financial reasons
Besides the fact that this is a fallacy of composition if this statement were true, then all students would study electrical engineering(per linked data).
>You can see how rightly applied the study of a seemingly narrow field can prepare you for a more general one.
Studying Russian literature to prepare you for a job not involving Russian literature is the most roundabout way of preparing yourself for a career I can imagine. Given the opportunity costs (as well as the direct costs), I highly doubt it's worth it financially.
Again, if you're goal isn't money, then Russian literature is great.
>Math majors are, maybe, at best reasonably marketable, and well within the margin of error of say history majors.
That's not true at all. Look at that chart again. Math majors ranked 18th by starting salary History Majors are 30th. If you sort by salary mid career the difference is even greater--math majors are 10th, making over 20k a year more than history majors. If you look at 90th percentile mid career salary Math majors are number 4.
>But I agree with the thought that a math degree is not vocational but is more like Russian history in this regard.
How then is CS vocational? Because you take a few programming classes? In many programs (like mine which split off from the math department about 10 years ago), you take more math classes than programming classes (5 total required programming classes out of about 40 unless you specifically took more as electives.)
>Besides the fact that this is a fallacy of composition
How is that a fallacy of composition? Most students are going to college so that they can make more money. Therefore any given college student is likely to be in college so that he can make more money.
If that is the case Russian literature doesn't make much sense.
>if this statement were true, then all students would study electrical engineering(per linked data).
First, where did you get electrical engineering from, it wasn't the highest ranked for any of the columns?
Second, not all students choose the optimal path to reach their goals. That doesn't mean it's not the optimal path.
In addition most students aren't prepared for the math involved in engineering. Engineering is also much more time intensive than most other majors and has an insanely high failure rate.
Law school has been the fall-back for moderately smart liberal arts students, but law school has gotten the crap kicked out of it over the past decade. It's no longer a "well, I guess I can do that if I can't get a job in literature" plan.
> Law school has been the fall-back for moderately smart liberal arts students...
So what happens to the "smart" liberal arts students if the "moderately smart" go to law school and the "not smart" presumably get jobs flipping burgers? Or were you just casually insulting people who decided, for various reasons, to study fields other than engineering?
Not insulting, just stating an engineering degree is more likely to be in demand and pay living wages vs. a liberal arts degree in an esoteric subject with little demand.
I studied literature, and guess what? I have less trouble with office politics than my peers, because I spent thousands of hours learning how to research and deconstruct a piece of writing to understand hidden influences and intents.
Do you use email in your job? If so, the ability to read and write well is a useful skill. This is a skill you can hone at even a mediocre college.
The problem isn't that college isn't worth doing, it's just too fucking expensive. The amount of debt we are asking people to assume is simply too great.
College isn't all that expensive. Private and out of state college is. There's a prejudice that you have to go to Stanford or Harvard or whatever to do well in life, and places like Google have perpetuated this problem for a long time by not only just hiring people who went to the more expensive options, they've only done job fairs and hiring outreach at these places. It's a vicious cycle.
So people who could be spending $40k on their local state university are spending $200k just to get a crack at a place like Google. $40k over 4 years is not that much, and the earning potential of people after that more than makes up for it.
And then guess what? Google, in a moment of stark reflection, looks at the data and realizes that the performance of the few folks who went to the cheaper school and still managed to get hired is about the same as the folks who sold a kidney to get through <preferred tier-1 school>.
This image, that you need to get into a top-20 school to make it in life perpetuates all the way down into high school and it needs to stop. Kids need to focus on just getting into college, not getting into an Ivy League school, and companies need to start hiring from the local state universities, not just the approved list of top schools the founders went to.
I agree with your general point, but Stanford and Harvard in particular aren't great examples, because for many people they're considerably cheaper than public universities, if you can get in. Both schools have pretty generous tuition reductions, all the way down to fully waiving tuition plus paying you a stipend for living expenses, if your family makes below about the 60th percentile of household incomes. Even up to about the 80th percentile they may still come out cheaper than a public university. Harvard has a sliding scale between 60th-90th percentile, where 60th percentile pays nothing, and 90th percentile ($150k/yr) pays the full "sticker price" tuition.
The schools that are really expensive for people from the middle-ish of the income distribution are the private schools that don't have as lavish endowments as Stanford and Harvard do, who therefore offer much less generous reductions, generally only need-based aid to considerably poorer people, not circa-median-income people.
Not quite true - the expensive private schools will make sure to suck you dry as much as possible before filling in the rest. One of my colleagues while I was in grad school mentioned to me that he went to Princeton for undergrad, and the school pretty much took all spare $ they could, even his inheritance once his grandmother died.
I went to an Ivy League school (not Princeton), and I looked at most of them when considering which schools to apply to.
As of when I applied to college, all the Ivy League schools committed to meeting 100% of "demonstrated financial need"[0]. Princeton was the only one (IIRC) that offered all its financial aid in the form of grants (no loans). In that sense, it has the most undergraduate-friendly financial aid process.
HOWEVER, "demonstrated financial need" is a murky term, and I have seen it be abused in practice, at all of these schools. An unfortunate consequence is that it can create a "doughnut hole" - the burden often falls on people who are just above the line that the school draws for financial aid[1].
This can hurt the middle class families who have enough money not to qualify for the same level of financial aid, but not enough to pay for the college without significant financial pain[2].
Of course, the schools often have little incentive to solve this, because the "significant financial pain" that these families feel takes the form of either private student loans (which the students pay for later), or subsidized federal loans (which are subsidized by taxpayers).
So, costs keep going up and up. I saw a graph recently that compared the tuition (and also tuition + other expenses) of private education compared to inflation, and it was staggering.
[0] They all also have an agreement not to provide any merit-based scholarships (only need-based).
[1] It's usually stepwise, not a single line, but the same idea holds
[2] The "demonstrated financial need" can also be very easily abused by the affluent. I know one student who received very heavy financial aid, despite her family being incredibly well-off. I can't remember, but I think they structured their assets and income on paper so that it looked like their daughter was an "independent" payer. She received close to a full ride, while her parents had enough money to regularly write 5- and 6-figure checks to their pet charities.
But if the founders/companies are selecting for people from top schools, regardless of whether or not that is rational in itself then it still makes sense for students to try and go to top schools.
I don't disagree about the rationality of students aiming for those schools. But it's a vicious cycle. The complaint that "college is too expensive" is only true if people only go to expensive colleges. But "college" in general isn't really all that expensive. Some colleges are, and the problem is that this has been where top-companies have been traditionally recruiting from. My assertion is that if top companies stop using "expensive schools with gamed USNews rankings" as proxies for "places to find good employees", then students won't feel as much need to go to those overpriced schools in the first place.
That's true, but this particular problem is not representative of the value of college in general.
I would have no objection if Peter Thiel and others were saying "hey maybe it's not worth all that debt for you to go to a top school." But that's not what they are saying. The message is "college is not worth it at all."
And Thiel might be right that some people don't need college--and those are the people he wants to fund. But that is a tiny tiny slice of humanity.
Do we really want tech to be like pro sports or music, where millions of kids make bad life decisions because they assume they'll make the big time? If Jay Z told high school kids they don't need college because they can become hip hop superstars like him, you would probably mock him. But that is exactly the same as saying that kids don't need college because Zuckerberg.
> I would have no objection if Peter Thiel and others were saying "hey maybe it's not worth all that debt for you to go to a top school." But that's not what they are saying. The message is "college is not worth it at all."
And if that's not a reflection of the SV reality warping bubble I don't know what is. If it's not Tier-1, you may as well not even bother because no-name state school is the same as a G.E.D. in this world view.
Didn't Zuckerberg attend Harvard?
I think that part of the appeal of these elite schools is the filtering system that you have to go through in order to be even offered a place there, very high grades and extra curricula achievements.
It wouldn't surprise me much if "Dropped out of Harvard" is better to have on a resume than "Graduated top of class in community college".
But isn't that kind of the problem? Somebody like Zuck doesn't bother finishing, but FB culls mostly kids who graduated top-tier.
And Dropped out of Harvard probably is better than graduated top of class in a CC, because these aren't fully comparable places. I'd much rather hire a person who finished their education in local state school than the person who couldn't be bothered with 4 whole years in one of the most competitive admissions schools in the country.
Thiel has been pretty open that he has more of a political problem with higher education: he thinks it turns people left-ish, and therefore he sees it as an obstacle to the advancement of libertarian politics in the next generation. I'm not sure whether it does or doesn't help people's careers is really the main question for him.
... then it still makes sense for students [who specifically want to get into the startup scene and/or want to get a shot at very specific employers] to try and go to top schools.
That's not the same as saying it makes sense for all students across the board to try for those schools.
It's nice to have options especially with the most presigeous companies and I don't think it's just the startup scene.
In the UK it's not uncommon for the top universities to have more potential employers turn up to a careers event than potential employees. That's a nice situation to be in.
Overall, for society, it's always better to have an education.
But if the price goes up, it means you won't get the education you might want, so you'll get something less expensive, but if you go for it, it's hard to say that might suit you, and if it doesn't, you will lose interest and drop out.
It's always better to keep on, but if you get an education because of economic pressure, it has its ups and downs. It fulfills the concept of supply and demand, but not your dreams.
I don't think education, like healthcare, should be applied the principles of a market. And again, education is a very tricky social problem to solve.
You want it, but it's not distributed in the best fashion.
Education and college aren't synonymous. People are learning to avoid college because it's just one inefficient method of education: it requires a large investment of time, a monumental investment of cash, and very often doesn't provide satisfactory instruction. You're not asking me, but I would say that contemporary colleges are less about education and more about unloading debt on students.
Especially now, when you can cover a lot of ground on your own. As a programmer at least. And I'm not even talking about MOOCs, but other resources that are available to a lot of people for either free or for a fraction of the price.
Are there any studies available on the difference in career earnings of grads vs non-grads in the same career? I don't doubt that a random college graduate earns 30% more over their lifetime than a random non-college graduate, but what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without?
>what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your question, but the way you phrased it, there's already some survivorship bias -- the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter; this ignores people who don't have a degree but want to get a job in programming.
> the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter
Very true. Its all about signaling (hence "or equivalent experience" although I believe that to be bullshit; each year of experience should count as 2-3 years in school).
I have no college education, and dropped out of high school in 1999/2000 to pursue my career. I had to sell myself hard to get in the door, but once there, I've never been asked for a degree after my first job (junior admin->senior admin->built/sold webhosting company->managed hosting division for consulting company->data taking for LHC->director of technology->news network startup).
I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime where companies value experience more than a piece of paper when the amount of experience is <5 years. The whole education process, at least for the technology field, should be revamped towards apprenticeship.
>The whole education process, at least for the technology field, should be revamped towards apprenticeship.
Disagree, at least in the case of developers, and possibly ops/sysadmins. I simply don't want to work with people who don't understand the basic underpinnings of our work. I expect my co-workers to understand things like the relational model and relation algebra/calculus, SQL, OOP, DRY, writing reusable libraries, the OSI stack/model, some basic data structure/algorithms (trees, searches/sorts, graphs, Djikstra's algo, TFIDF, etc), complexity analysis, some basic design patterns (pub/sub, consumer/producer, MVC, DI/IOC, and various other Computer Science and Software Engineering concepts. I haven't learned the most abstract stuff in my time in industry thus far, and I certainly don't think most devs/engineers have either. We learn things like frameworks, languages, platforms, and sometimes a design pattern here or there, but the basic underpinnings were all learned under formal study in a university CS (and sometimes math) program.
In the end though, maybe this is just my subconscious "elitist CS grad that wants to believe his time in university was worth it and well spent" speaking.
> algebra/calculus, SQL, OOP, DRY, writing reusable libraries, the OSI stack/model, some basic data structure/algorithms (trees, searches/sorts, graphs, Djikstra's algo, TFIDF, etc), complexity analysis, some basic design patterns (pub/sub, consumer/producer, MVC, DI/IOC
The stereotypical 18-year-old nerd has at least some high-level understanding of _all_ of this from web sites, magazines, pet projects and now from MOOC's. As a teen, you may not get things right the first time and move at a relatively slow pace but refactoring code in different languages and learning from various online resources add up over the years. At least a few fresh high school grads get full-time programming jobs at respectable companies.
> "elitist CS grad that wants to believe his time in university was worth it and well spent"
Efficiency isn't all-or-nothing and I think open credit-granting exams would make college much better (disclosure: I'm in France where the situation is much worse than in the US).
I would genuinely like to meet this high school grad you speak of, because only the most talented of students in my freshman year even knew a fraction of that stuff. Maybe MOOC's will change it, but not before the "learn to hack on javascript" classes aren't most of the offerings. The only theory focused course I've done that seemed good was Stanford's DB course. Hopefully the Georgia Techs and Stanfords of the world can change that soon enough.
> algebra/calculus, SQL, OOP, DRY, writing reusable libraries, the OSI stack/model, some basic data structure/algorithms (trees, searches/sorts, graphs, Djikstra's algo, TFIDF, etc), complexity analysis, some basic design patterns (pub/sub, consumer/producer, MVC, DI/IOC
Want to grab coffee? I only have a GED (and I'm OP), but I learned almost everything you commented about in your post from on the job experience or learning on my own time.
I also spent 4 years building/selling a startup instead of spending time getting a degree. The education I received doing that is priceless to me.
Nothing you described can't be learned with time and online resources; none if it requires one on one time with a professor, nor a lecture hall.
I suppose if you've got some idea you're relentlessly devoted to enacting, you'll either end up learning this stuff or failing. The real problem is when you're someone like me who is long on technical chops, and short on actual business ideas. I just don't see where all this stuff is going to be taught in an on the job training kind of environment. Kudos to you for learning all of the above yourself to build your business rather than in school.
> I suppose if you've got some idea you're relentlessly devoted to enacting, you'll either end up learning this stuff or failing.
I agree with this.
> The real problem is when you're someone like me who is long on technical chops, and short on actual business ideas.
Its not about technical acumen, or about business ideas, its about the desire to learn and grow beyond what you already know. Its very, very hard to select for people like that. You have to tease it out of people over time, and few of us have the time needed for that.
> I just don't see where all this stuff is going to be taught in an on the job training kind of environment.
As I previously mentioned, I think apprenticeships are the way to go (apprenticeship/internship sort of environment, with acceptable pay). This is how I hire and train DevOps/Systems-Network Admins; I bring people in with 1-3 years of Linux experience (or even no experience if they show the desire to learn), and I teach/coach.
> Kudos to you for learning all of the above yourself to build your business rather than in school.
Thank you. We all take different paths. Some days I wish I had had the resources to go to college (MIT was my first pick, but couldn't for family reasons).
If you're ever in Chicago, coffee is on me. Email in profile.
Degrees come with their own survivorship bias. Every level of the education system seeks to filter out those who are less capable in certain areas. This makes the "college graduates earn 30% more" meaningless, because most people are not capable of succeeding in college in the first place, and whatever causes that probably also prevents them from succeeding in the workplace, statistically speaking.
I think where the parent was going is, if you took two people who are equal in every single way, except for one acquiring a college degree, how would their lifetime earnings differ?
Would be interesting to see one, but my own view is that geography may play a bigger role.
I know people without any college degree at all making > $80k in software (in lower COL areas), and others with degrees making anywhere from $50k - > $100k.
There are probably some correlations, but income seems pretty decoupled from college degree in the software field (moreso than in other fields). Pure anecdotal observations though.
What makes you think people will hold the same career their entire lives? Or that that is even a desirable goal?
A major advantage of college is that it teaches people how to learn, analyze, and reason generally--skills which make it easier for them to change careers later in life.
On the spectrum of college students, the lower economic end is where the viability of such expensive higher education comes into question. Statistics describing the entire population do not support an argument relating to this subset. Not only that, but the closing strawman of "all you care about" is unrealistic. If only it were as simple as deciding to "Go to college" then I don't think this discussion would be taking place. Eric Schmidt's words are great for those who do have a choice, but to everyone else, he's out of touch.
Zuckerberg and Gates did not skip college, they dropped out of college. Big difference. Even Steve Jobs, who I'm not sure ever actually matriculated anywhere, spoke glowingly of a college calligraphy course he audited--and was a huge proponent of education, including college.
Jobs did matriculate at Reed. He was allowed to hang about and audit on campus for quite a long time after he formally dropped out, though.
The problem, though, is that increasing US college costs increasingly rule out going to college to find yourself and maybe leaving without a degree. An increasing proportion of undergraduates must graduate in a timely fashion, with a degree that employers care for, or else they'll be crushed by undischargeable college debt for the foreseeable future. Obviously this wasn't a risk for Gates or el Zuck, but they're increasingly less typical in this.
Problems with college is not only HIGH college tuition fees but also number of years wasted in the institution. If you are 'self motivated learner' then you can learn on web. This is especially true for software courses. Other courses like electrical and mechanical engineering might -still- need college education as colleges have requisite infrastructure for those fields.
Postgraduate courses like (US) law school and business school are much further gone though; undergraduate ones aren't as bad, yet at least. If Eric Schmidt had said that law school was worth it I think his audience might have been incapacitated with laughter.
Funny... just read this article today: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/ca... with the notable quote,
"...recounting an exchange with one software CEO who avoids hiring candidates with advanced software engineering degrees since they are likely to expect higher wages."
And anecdotally from what I've seen... there seems to be a push lately to crowd the potential pool of job applicants in a couple of fields.
More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications.
> More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications.
Except actual certifications attached to MOOCs generally aren't free.
Its interesting to note that even a ton of the Thiel fellows, while dropped out of college, came from prestigious colleges before they accepted the fellowship. I have a friend here at MIT who accepted the Thiel fellowship, and I dont see how she would've ended up getting access to cutting edge biological research if she wasnt here, and being at MIT was certainly a plus for the fellowship application, a pure signalling effect.
Such pricing on higher education is not a scam, it's a rip off. No matter what Eric Schmidt says, these prices are just crazy. People should not go in debt to gain education.
Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college.
College isn't for everyone, and it's definitely a broken system. However, it's about more than just about the classes -- spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.