

Is College Obsolete? - Alex3917
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/04/is-college-obsolete.html

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tokenadult
I'd have to agree with the basic premise of the blog post.

<http://learninfreedom.org/School_obsolete.html>

There are a lot of institutional protections in the legal system for colleges
(as sources of mandatory credentials for many occupations), and a great deal
of preferential funding of colleges. But many learners can learn as much or
more outside of college as in it, and as long as learners can find gainful
employment without college credentials, colleges will be under pressure to
justify their continued existence.

After edit:

pg's thoughts on a closely related subject:

<http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html>

~~~
Alex3917
Interesting posts. I actually wrote this over three years ago, but somehow
never got around to actually publishing it on my blog. It seems kind of cliche
now, but I thought it was well-written enough to be worth posting.

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Avshalom
Ever notice how it's never the physicists, petroleum engineers, mathematicians
or organic chemists making these claims? The "Formal Education Considered
Harmful" meme seems to come solely from coders and the occasional
entrepreneur. Which to me says something more about the state of software
engineering than about college.

~~~
rmaccloy
Almost all of the occupations you list require graduate degrees to practice
professionally; two of them are primarily practiced in academia. Most of them
are hard-science degrees whereas CS is at least partially a liberal art. (The
exceptions to this where CS-related degrees are issued as BSs are most notably
issued at the most well-regarded colleges for CS, as far as I know.)

Although the average CS program is pretty terrible, the underlying
differentiating factor is that doing practical CS work is cheap and easy (the
same thing that motivated internet entrepreneurship); additionally a large
part of the literature is directed at 'lay practitioners'. Doing (advanced)
physics or chemistry is neither cheap nor easy, and it's pretty hard
(impossible, AFAIK) to do pure professional mathematics outside an academic
setting.

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lsb
NO! It's thousands of intellectual and social bonding experiences happening
among the minds that will shape the next two generations. The density of the
network means that you can collaborators easily, and that's the benefit of
college.

College might be an onion in the varnish, so to speak, but when you talk about
"I went to Harvard", you're not talking about visiting the buildings, but
being part of the great intellectual conversation, and that's the key point.

~~~
tokenadult
About 2,000 students per year are admitted to Harvard (of whom 1,600 or so
enroll). There are a few other colleges that offer Harvard-level quality of
intellectual conversation. Some plainly do not. At what level of college does
the return on attending college for intellectual conversation not meet the
cost of attendance?

And why can't people have great intellectual conversations without attending
college, as some people do here on HN?

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bkbleikamp
I just graduated from college in June 2008 with a BSBA in Marketing. I am now
the lead UI designer for a major Rails site. Based on just that, yes, it's
obsolete. I am not using my degree in any official capacity and it cost
$60,000.

But while I found it easy to write off my degree and what I learned in college
when I graduated as unnecessary, at least initially, I have found myself
recalling lessons I learned in class more than a few times.

1\. A lot of hackers and tech people look past business and marketing as the
boring part of running a company. It's not, it's actually one of the hardest
parts. It's easy to believe that "if you build it, they will come" but most
successful software is the result of good marketing and good business sense. I
learned a lot about this in school and I am glad I learned the basics where
mistakes didn't cost real money.

2\. While it may not have been necessary to attend school to read and discuss
cases, it helped a lot. Working through marketing problems and understanding
business with a group of like minded people helped it all click faster. Much
like discussing technology issues on Hacker News can help make sense of
everything faster.

------
spaghetti
College is not obsolete. High school is definitely obsolete. My guess is at
least 8/10 people posting here had miserable high school experiences. We spend
4 valuable years marching to and from classrooms, sitting all day in a daze
just to be momentarily jolted awake by an obnoxious bell. I think the high
school experience has massive room for improvement (has it really changed in
the last 50 years?).

------
thismat
Why the big fuss over college anyway? I didn't go to college, but I've always
wanted to (I just kind of jumped into a career and it hasn't slowed down
enough yet to do so).

People learn differently, let's just accept that college is a good environment
for people who are not the most motivated or skilled self-learners.

Obviously when you're talking about the more elite and hard-sciences, it's
definitley something you'd want as a hiring credential. My uncle is an
engineer working in a nuclear power plant, I'm pretty sure it'd be a bad idea
to hire him if he didn't have the engineering degree to show his dedication
and skill (not saying you can't be that good without the credentials, but
there isn't a large room for error in that position, better prepared and safe,
than a radioactive toxic avenger).

Edit: It's all a personal choice in the end anyway, pretty subjective topic
wouldn't you think?

------
hc
"Things got bad when credentialism surpassed education as the primary function
of college. If you want evidence of this, consider the criteria for the US
News & World Report college rankings: Peer assessment, student selectivity,
faculty resources, graduation and retention rate, financial resources, alumni
giving, and graduation rate performance. Notice anything missing?

Are colleges not ranked in order of how much students learn because that would
be impossible to measure? Or is it because no one cares?"

if you think about it, this doesn't make sense. the us news college rankings
are used by high school students and their families to select colleges to
attend, not by (most, i assert) employers to select employees to hire. they
list credentials of colleges, not college graduates. so they are not evidence
that "credentialism" is a function of college at all.

employers care about the difference between schools in regard to what their
students learn---and these differences surely exist---and they assess schools
with this criterion using empirical data they gather from interviewing and
hiring people.

~~~
Alex3917
"the us news college rankings are used by high school students and their
families to select colleges to attend"

That was my argument. Students don't choose their college based on how much
they think they will learn. And so colleges have no incentive to make sure
they do.

No one cares if students aren't learning, not the students, not the colleges,
because learning is no longer the point.

~~~
hc
i don't believe you have shown that how much students think they will learn
doesn't play a role in their college choices. they choose based on the
information they have available; the criteria you mentioned contribute to an
idea of how effectively schools can teach students. alumni giving/financial
resources, for example, allow schools to buy better faculty and equipment,
which make students learn better. graduation and retention rates are evidence
of a decent educational environment.

sorry to directly contradict you on this, but i also don't believe this was
your original point. you were trying to show that a degree serves mainly as a
credential. students may select schools on the basis of their rankings, but it
doesn't follow that the rankings are the motivation behind their selections.
to use an analogy, i may use reviewer ratings to select a computer to
purchase; it doesn't follow that i select brands _for_ the prestige of owning
a computer rated 5 stars by cnet.

