
Elon Musk says college is ‘for fun’ and not for learning - danso
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/elon-musk-says-college-is-for-fun-not-for-learning-echoing-thiel.html
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adingus
"“You don’t need college to learn stuff,” he said. The value is “seeing
whether somebody can work hard at something.”

He added that “colleges are basically for fun and to prove you do your chores,
but they’re not for learning.”"

I tend to agree, more so with tech than with subjects like medicine. I think
institutions will catch on before long that degrees are not all they have been
cracked up to be. We need a less costly method to prove people can follow a
deadline and collaborate with others.

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8bitsrule
Maybe that was true for Elon. But if you apply yourself, and challenge
yourself, and broaden your horizons by exposing yourself to a wide range of
learning ... IE, get what you've paid for ... then college will help in in a
multitude of ways, not just professionally but socially and in daily life. And
you'll be prepared for life-long learning, regardless of your applications.

~~~
craftinator
And you'll get that sweet degree, which is really what you need to get a
decent job in the current market!

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finnthehuman
This story is better titled "Gen X-er has very Gen X opinion." Which should
tell you immediately that it doesn't matter what was said, it matters who said
it.

But that brings us to the question: why is CNBC reporting this luke-warm hot
take from that person? Nobody needs more ammunition to argue that kids these
days are just faffing about. That's been the default stance of the over-forty
set for millennia, and millennials have put any doubt to rest.

It's not because Elon Musk pointed anything out. He didn't. It's because he
doesn't have a solution for the problems with post-secondary education. (Well,
maybe he does, but CNBC sure as shit didn't quote him on that part.) It's very
safe to have a mainstream opinion and when the guy the media tells you is a
genius repeats your mainstream opinion back to you, then you get to feel smart
for having a boring opinion. That warm and fuzzy feeling distracts you
noticing the article stops there. You're diverted away from wondering why: if
you can see the problem, then why the fuck isn't the article even thinking
about the solution?

Yes, I know the article pretends to get at substance. But that's a con.
Pointing out the hypocrisy that Musk's own companies want Bachelor's degrees
isn't sticking it to him or advancing the conversation; it's confrontationally
agreeing with him. If the author thought degrees actually mattered, they'd
argue the point that the kind of work Musk is hiring for does demand a degree.
Not highlight the seeming contradiction.

And of course the writer thinks degrees are worthless, they have a Master's
but spend their days reporting on pedestrian ramblings from Musk.

~~~
cafard
> Nobody needs more ammunition to argue that kids these days are just faffing
> about.

Well, I think a lot of them are. I don't think this (just) because I'm a
crabby old guy. I think this because so very many of my classmates in college
40+ years ago were just faffing about, and because college enrollment has
increased out of proportion to the population. A hell of a lot of my
classmates seemed to have come to the school (not a great one, not necessarily
a terrible one) to work out their late adolescence in a reasonably safe
environment a comfortable distance from home.

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xmzx
I disagree. I learned so much more in college and it opened me up to various
fields I would have never even thought of. I had truly no idea about
sociology, psychology, or philosophy before entering university and needing to
take them to fulfill my general education requirements. Those classes opened
my eyes up more to this world than anything before or after taking them.

------
motohagiography
College today is mainly for equipping people with the necessary conceits to
sustain bureaucracies. It’s tribal initiation. Competence and excellence come
from somewhere else.

~~~
antipaul
“The necessary conceits to sustain bureaucracies”, well put! “Bullshit Jobs”,
anyone ;)?

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remir
Would HR at Elon's companies hire people without college or university degree?

~~~
Tenoke
Yes, he recently advertised that they'll even hire ML engineers without a high
school degree if they are good.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-
amp/news/el...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-
amp/news/elon-musk-says-you-dont-need-a-high-school-diploma-to-work-at-tesla/)

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new_realist
If your parents own an emerald mine, like Elon’s, yes, college is for fun.

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stunplay
Depending on major he really isn’t wrong.

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xiaolingxiao
It depends no the college you go to. I went to the same university as Elon
Musk, there was a heavy emphasis on social grooming, talking the part, looking
the part, and just in general exposure to the wealthy and their values. Most
of this came in the form of out-of-class activities and, yes, parties. In
other colleges things are a bit different, so the value may shift the other
way.

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aaron695
Can we not extrapolate on one off the cuff sentence Elon made.

He's not fact checked by god like Jesus was.

He can make awkward remarks that don't express what he's trying to say well.
He is human.

He didn't say they were _just_ for fun either. We can't even get his one
sentence right.

------
levi-turner
> Despite Musk’s skepticism, many of the open job listings at SpaceX list a
> bachelor’s degree or higher education as a basic requirement.

Snarky reporting at its best.

\----------------------------

At it's core, Musk looks to be claiming that college isn't required for
learning (trivially true) plus an implicit claim that people waste time in
college where they could be productive. Fair enough. Seems like a silly
proclamation to make but there's a class of people who like to make these
claims. Suspiciously these people tend to be the folks who are uniquely
driven, but that's just my bias, I suppose.

\----------------------------

I do think a lot of this sentiment from Musk and others in this thread come as
a result of a pretty naive way of looking at learning. For illustration
purposes, let's go with a story.

When I was in high school, I fell in love with the band Rage Against the
Machine. Because I was a curious sort, I listed out all the books listed in
the linear notes of _Evil Empire_ and tried to read as many as I could. I have
a distinct memory of sitting on the floor at my childhood home with a copy of
Stephen Jay Gould's _Mismeasure of Man_ and a dictionary. I was smarter than
average, I guess, but I really was floored at just how many words in that book
I didn't know. I may've made my way through 1/3 or 1/2 of the book before I
was too exhausted to continue.

In college, I studied philosophy. For whatever reason, I fell in love with the
subject and exclusively focused on that in college. Well, that love lasted
until roughly senior year when I realized that I had fallen out of love with
the subject and had zero interest in pursuing the subject as a career. That
really sucked for me since I had put all my eggs into one basket. I hadn't
really focused on taking courses which provide hard, technical skills which I
could leverage into easily acquired job opportunities. It also sucked that I
graduated in 2007 and while the full on financial crisis hadn't hit just yet,
the easy throws were there so I had a hard time finding a job. I luckily got a
job at an academic library and moved on with my life focusing on developing
the skills needed for a long-term job.

The sense that I had squandered my time in college was a malignant wound on my
psyche and I would've been sympathetic to the views that Musk and others hold
now. One day when I was shelving books in the stacks, I happened upon Stephen
Jay Gould's _Mismeasure of Man_. I remember reflecting on the memory of me in
high school and picked the book up to see, almost on a lark, whether it was
still mystifying to me. I scanned a paragraph here and there as I flipped
through the book and was absolutely shocked. Those words which were barriers
to the high school version of myself? Easy. I knew them. Not only did I know
them but I knew the historical backstory and context to the topic that Gould
was presenting. I knew the pro arguments, the con arguments, the responses
each side would have to the cons. I couldn't believe it.

Ever since that experience, I've been left with a fairly firm belief that we
just do not have adequate ways of quantifying learning when it comes to the
liberal arts _. It isn 't tangible. We can't easily do tests to see if people
can communicate more clearly. Whether they can analyze arguments. Whether they
have a cultural context to understand why people believe what they believe. As
a consequence a certain set of people love to disparage the whole enterprise.
It's really unfortunate since it seems pretty self-evident that those skills,
that awareness is extremely valuable, both to the individual and to the
society as a whole. It's fair for someone to disagree on the merits and I am
sure there are thoughtful people who do, but the larger belief that this
experience inspired is a humility when it comes to casting aside things which
aren't easily measurable. That cynicism has stuck with me and has proven to be
extremely valuable in my professional life since the KPIs and measurements
which organizations love to fetishize are those which just so happen to be the
easiest to measure.

_ Yes, Gould was a biologist. Yes, that book was about evolutionary biology
and certain specialties in psychology. But the crux of the book was a really
in the liberal arts sphere of things.

------
planetzero
Unless you're going to college for engineering, math, the sciences, or to
become a doctor, college really isn't for learning.

It's for having fun and to some degree networking. If you can join a
fraternity/sorority, your network will most likely get you a job right out of
college.

I knew a guy that had jobs in the tech industry lined up after college for
nothing more than knowing people in his frat.

He was running his own business and had very little hands-on experience and
wouldn't have lasted a week at most of these jobs.

I, on the other hand, had at least 5 years of experience at that point (not to
mention the decade prior to this of writing software as a hobby) and had to
work pretty hard to get my first job.

Somehow, it doesn't seem fair. But it taught me that networking is equally or
more important than experience and skill.

~~~
tlb
That's generally true. But you don't have to join a fraternity and bro down
with people to build a network that'll get you jobs. Writing articles,
publishing open-source, going to industry conferences, etc. are probably more
effective.

~~~
luckyscs
No way, I didn't even join a frat but the idea of suffering/making memories
together builds a much higher trust network than publishing work online. It's
much better to have a drink and network than to network over impersonal
channels of communication. Networking is about building trust. That's
sometimes through displays of confidence, but better displayed by time spent
and demonstrations of alignment inngoal/loyalty.

