

Fuck college education, start minding your own business instead - damir
http://damirhorvat.com/articles/22/2009/1/Fuck-college-education,-start-minding-your-own-businness-instead

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lbrandy
Wow. Just wow.

The purpose of college isn't vocational training. It never was. My college
education is not, was not, and never will be "a piece of paper". That's just
plain ignorance. The kind of ignorance that just might get cured by someone
who cared enough to get a decent college education.

~~~
vaksel
You don't go to college to expand your mind...you go to college to get a good
job after you graduate.

Or at least you are supposed to. The problem is that in our society, the
college degree has become a commodity. You are supposed to have one, even if
you really don't need it.

Someone getting a CS degree, paying $80K is an investment. Someone getting a
Communications degree, paying $80K is borderline retarded, why? because
they'll wind up working at the Gap after they graduate making the same 25K/yr
that they made before going to college, except they lose 4 years worth of
promotions and raises.

Yes college is not vocational training...but if your degree won't help you get
a better job...then you are just pissing a ton of money away. Someone working
at the Gap should not be $80K in debt.

Actually, vocational training now a days is probably a better investment than
a college degree. A plumber won't get outsourced, and will still make as much
money as a programmer.

~~~
swombat
_You don't go to college to expand your mind_

Speak for yourself. I went to college to expand my mind, meet interesting
people, and learn things I would never have learned by myself. I am very happy
that I did so, even though I barely use any of the actual Physics that I
learned, in my daily job.

I will add that I learned far more than just Physics at university. I learned
that there were a lot of extremely smart people out there. I learned about my
limitations (cramming only gets you so far). I learned about my abilities (few
things seem that incredibly hard after a physics degree). I learned how to
learn new things (there are many ways to learn). I learned how to behave in a
wider variety of environments than I had been exposed to previously. I learned
that even amongst very smart people, there were things I could do that no one
else could. I learned that if you make the right connections, you can benefit
immensely. I learned many more things, far too many to list here.

What went in was a naive, uncouth, slightly ill-mannered boy, what came out
was confident, friendly, approachable go-getter.

Perhaps your university didn't expand your mind. If that is so, it is
deplorable, but might be the fault of either the university, or yourself. But
certainly you should not generalise your unfortunate case and assume that
everyone had your poor experience of university.

~~~
vaksel
Expanding of the mind is extra. Would you have gone to college, if there
wasn't a big bucks career at the end of the tunnel to repay you for the
investment for the $80-160K and 4 years of your life?

~~~
swombat
Absolutely. I didn't go to university for the big bucks career, I went because
I wanted to learn more Physics.

------
wheels
Ooh, this meme again! Now, everyone line up and form teams and repeat your
arguments from last time!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=275258>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115158>

I think this one does win a prize for being the least articulate version of
the three. ;-)

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DarkShikari
This seems like a classic troll blog--write an extremely inflammatory headline
that vastly overgeneralizes the subject, knowing it will annoy a whole lot of
people.

It's a great way to get your blog posted on tons of social media sites and
jack up your ad revenue (or, in this case, get more people to see your
portfolio).

Hacker News should be above falling for this sort of thing.

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Mystalic
As I just posted on your blog:

I'm sorry to be harsh, but you're completely off-base with this rant.

"College Education is a Waste of Time"

Just like anything else, it's how you utilize that education. I built
relationships with VCs, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, media, and many people
who have been helpful and will continue to be helpful later in life. I built a
company while in college. I lived my life while in college. People can't help
but hear me out because of my specific college affiliation and my
accomplishments there.

Everything's a waste of time if you don't know how to use it.

"College education is just a piece of paper"

No, it's not. It's a series of relationships, friendships, and knowledge that
people can and do use. It's a door opener. VCs already know a lot about my
qualifications when I walk into the room. The only person that can devalue
that "piece of paper" is you.

"What is there after college?"

Whatever you want to do. I took the entrepreneurial path, not the "salary"
path you generalize with.

I'll end it there, but the point is, you have it completely wrong. Nothing's a
waste of time if you build meaningful relationships, knowledge, and happiness
during that time.

~~~
lbrandy
College is more than just a networking opportunity. College exposes you to the
vast world of ideas that you didn't know existed. It's a well established fact
that the more incompetent someone is, the more confident they are in their own
competence. This can be directly applied to knowledge. The more ignorant
someone is, the more confident they are in their expertise.

College is the place you go to that educates you enough to realize how little
you know. How little you will ever know. A college education is what turns
people from ignorant and arrogant into basically ignorant but humble and ready
to learn some domain well enough to be truly considered an expert. It gives
you a lifetime of ideas to explore in detail, when time permits. This includes
both the ideas of your professional domain and its neighbors, but also the
domains of the general public good (like economics).

This post ignores the broader issue. It pretends the purpose of college is
friggin vocational job training.. as in.. you decide when you are 18 what job
you want, and then you train for that job, get that job, and work at it the
rest of your life...

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cosmo7
Bad spelling and foul language. Is this a parody?

Reminds me of "two years ago I couldn't even spell engineer, now I are one."

~~~
jwesley
Yes, I can't resist saying that maybe with a college education you could spell
rudimentary words like "business".

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mojuba
Fuck business, go get some education and become a decent Homo Sapiens.

~~~
alecco
A non-exclusive cheaper alternative:

    
    
      * Travel.
      * Read a *lot* (borrow books, use libraries, read online.)
      * Write some.
      * Make something happen be it for money or just to help someone else.

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ideamonk
Well... as far as my college is concerned, yeah it does eat up a big chunk
(8am to 4:30 pm, on 3 days a week) of my 24 hrs, plus till 3 years of 4 year
course I need to study chemistry and physics along with core subjects, and
surprisingly environmental science too is pushed into CS here, 4 credits
(highest) for env. science... and chemistry shares same 3 credits with other
topics like OS and Algorithms. I wonder why my education system fails to see
the importance of less load on students and giving us free time to experiment,
self-learn and spend more time in understanding what is important for us.

Plus a semester in my college has 5 tests, so every month we are really
busy... its really hard managing time like this !

Imagine a student whose parents can't provide funds due to some reasons, how
can he ever self finance or add some independence/comfort to his life!

While my friends in foreign universities do find great part time opportunities
and free time to work some side-projects, this kind of scenario is majorly
lacking in India :( most of my classmates just concentrate on getting 9+
gpa,don't even care to look at whats going on in the world outside... since
grading is competitive, this creates a pressure on one and all to be at a nice
position compared to those who give 24x7 to mugging based syllabus and never
ever dream to achieve any self earned practical experience which I believe to
be the best form of learning.

The case is not the same in premier institutes in India such as IITs, NITs and
BITS. Getting to those colleges is achievable only after beating a huge crowd
of super high IQ people. This can't be possible for everyone, anyways my point
is the private institutes are really messing up with our lives as in case of
my college due to outdated ideas and thoughts of people who run it. Major
issues for my college are discipline which translates to -

1\. no use of laptops in the hostel for first 2 years of college....

2\. Uniforms on 2 days a week.

3\. ban on jeans and tshirt

4\. no cellphones

5\. no girls and guys hanging out

6\. not getting treated like adults even when we are 20 years old...

7\. many more like hostlers standing till 3am as punishment for making some
noise on the last day of 2008

Now that really makes me think, my college is stopping me from getting rich
and advancing in my own views! I could've learnt so much more if I was in a
college that is run by people who are more broadminded and understand how
education and knowledge are different and respect what Einstein said in "On
Education" and aim for a better advanced society for future rather than
creating huge crowd of people with zero creativity, experience and almost
ditto common skills.

The best some screwd up colleges can do for people like me is relax the
timings and test, syllabus load and let me have some college/life/fun ratio.

BUT COLLEGE EDUCATION IS NO WASTE OF TIME EVEN IF THESE STUPID ADD-ONS ARE
ATTACHED TO THE ONE WHICH I GET :)

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dan_sim
I'm totally opposed to that. You just can't burn steps like that. What do I
learn in high school? Almost nothing. So, I should never go to high school and
"start my own business" and make money. That's complete nonsense.

There are plenty of things you can learn in college. If you know nothing about
nothing, you'll have to start your business AND pay someone else to do the job
because you can do nothing. This is starting with a handicap.

And... college is fun! You don't have to be an adult as early in your life.

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mdasen
Part of the issue is that many places use a bachelor's degree as a screen for
employees. As a token that gets you past one turnstile in the job hunt, it is
worth a ton!

It also takes a certain type of person to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone has
that instinct or motivation.

I'm a big fan of ideas to change the way post-secondary education is done.
Right now, it's expensive, time-consuming, and undertaken when you don't know
what you want or need. However, right now HR people just love that BA and that
BA puts you in a certain class (beyond work or money, but in terms of
associates/friends). And people are willing to pay up for that. How do you get
the HR industry to start valuing alternative modes of education and
experience? Our universities have a reputation built over hundreds of years -
if not for educating people, then for screening intelligence.

It's a wonderful essay, I guess I'm just cautious and would want more social
change around the issue before I felt comfortable following this path.

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strlen
Life isn't about getting vocational training for money. At the least, an
education (university or not) could teach you that there are ways to state
your point beyond using "fuck" in the title of a blog post: if you're talking
about "selling" yourself, you may start off by not being insulting.

Second, if you're _just_ talking about vocational training and job
preparation, a college degree in some field and from some schools can show
that you have the capacity for approaching a topic with mathematical rigour
and know the fundamentals of Computer Science (as opposed to fashionable
frameworks and APIs). There are many other ways to do that - but a college
education also buys you a great deal of free time (something that hackers in
college probably won't realize until they're done), exposure to smart people
and new ideas; finally it's a chance to fulfill other intellectual curiosities
(take courses in other sciences, history, philosophy, so forth).

Third, starting your business does not conflict with going to college. More
often than often than not, I've seen people who have never attended a
university (as opposed to attended and dropped out when they had something
more compelling) simply take full time jobs right away, usually in systems
administration or web front-end development.

Both of these are essential and great skills to have (especially in a start-
up), but you can't build a product on that expertise _alone_ : you can build a
web design or systems administration consulting shop, but consulting won't
(usually) bring you an exit.

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lhorie
I think the flaw in the argument is the author's generalization of anedoctal
evidence as if everyone was the same. Medical schools is not pointless.
Getting a degree because many employers require it (as opposed to being stuck
in customer service roles) is not pointless.

There are many ways that people can make the most out of their degree, and
many ways to waste it as well.

It's very easy to dismiss something as being useless, but ironically,
entrepreneurship is about doing the exact opposite: finding and exploring
value where others see it.

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tom_rath
As a undergraduate bonus, one might learn an additional verb/adjective/noun to
use when expressing one's dissatisfaction.

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cianw2000
Really? The things I learnt at university were priceless - even though it was
economics it just gets your brain trained. And it's a signally device - you
have a good degree from a good uni; people flock to you.

~~~
likpok
Another thing: It's easier to get a good job/find good people at a good uni,
because that's where the good people are. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

In addition to that whole "education" thing they have going there.

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ideamonk
College is a big lesson in time-management for me, these days i'm trying to
figure out ways to maximize the time I spend on side projects and work besides
managing good grades at college which eats 12 hrs a day.

Its gradually leading me to a routined life where I plan each day and loads of
sticky notes find their way on my wall :)

hmm... what about learning to collaborate and organize events, we can't do
that so easily, schools and colleges provide excellent opportunity for that!
:)

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CalmQuiet
Well college _can_ expose you to good communication practices... For example:
remembering to spellcheck or even to proofread -- the latter helping with the
impression you make by adopting conventional presentations (like "business")
rather than idiosyncratic ones (like "businness") -- with possible benefits
for coding as well? ;)

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jfarmer
Is there a word for when you improperly generalize your personal experience to
the whole human race?

My time at college was excellent for a number of reasons, and where I am today
is a direct result of decisions I made while studying there.

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trapper
Fuck all education. Start your own business instead of going to preschool

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jscn
For a guy who is apparently so pro-business, it's instructive to see another
post on his blog about how to pirate books (the post doesn't even involve an
interesting technical aspect, it's just "google for a pdf"). Apparently he is
of the opinion that people should pay him for the product of his business, but
he doen't need to pay other business owners for their products.

Perhaps a little education might have given him the critical thinking skills
to see the problem with this position.

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ivanzhao
apparently he doesn't know how to REALLY learn in college yet (but it's fairly
tricky nowadays you have to admit)

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kuvkir
the link doesn't work, redirects to kleko.si :((

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TweedHeads
I agree. Don't waste time and money in college. Start your own business. But
keep yourself learning all your life. Online, business and management skills.
Offline, social skills, the power of word.

New times we're living, adapt and evolve.

