
Stop telling me to go to college - jwarkentin
http://www.teknically-speaking.com/2013/07/stop-telling-me-to-go-to-college.html
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hobs
You could entitle the post "stop telling me to do something I don't see the
value in."

I don't have a degree, and work exclusively with people with degrees, and they
complain bitterly about the costs associated with education and frequently
comment that I was the lucky one.

Do what works, don't worry about choices you could have made(you didn't make
them!). If a degree looks like what you need to take it to the next level, do
it, otherwise, who cares?

~~~
jwarkentin
You missed the point of the post. It wasn't about how I don't like people
telling me to do something I don't see the value in. It was about people
dogmatically asserting the necessity of a process which has been fed to us by
society without reason. Yes, college is great for some people; but society
today has almost turned it into a religious thing. We're told "you have to go
to college to get a good job" or "you have to go to college to be successful",
essentially "you can't be smart without college". That's what I don't like.
Many people instantly look down on you or assume you are less-intelligent if
you don't have a degree.

Maybe you haven't had the same experiences, but I've definitely had the debate
with quite a number of people who religiously insist that I should go to
college, but can't reason with me why.

~~~
userulluipeste
The academic education has two purposes:

1\. To instruct you in a systematic manner. You can do a good job by yourself
but for someone else who might depend on your knowledge and experience, it is
easier to trust an institution to do that than to trust one to do it by
oneself. There is the inherent risk of erratic learning. There are reasons to
prefer having a guide or a mentor. This is not to refute any of your
arguments. You may find free mentorship, your autodidact ability might be of
high quality and the academic institutions may as well violate the trust of
the benefiting parties - both future employers and future employees.

2\. To asses in the end the quality of your enlightenment. Because the
academic system's interests depend on this, it might be a faulty process. For
one, the competition game and the perceived self value/image involved in this
is driving the education prices like crazy (which is not like the other
competition-ruled areas, mind you), and for other - the "propaganda" that is
meant to keep the high demand for education, sadly regardless of its quality.
Yet, the value assessment is a hassle into which many employers do not want to
get involved. This is what maintains artificially the value of a degree.

The academic system has its dirty game and you were smart enough to reap its
promised benefits without being played. Congratulations! I am sure you'll find
a way to deal with the after-effects of those who didn't.

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steverb
I was in a similar situation, except that I saw the need to get a degree so I
could get past the HR checklist. I was able to do it in four years while
working full time and managed to leave college with a whopping $1500 in debt.

I think it was worth it for me, because it opened some career doors that would
have remained shut, and I learned some things that my self-education had
skipped.

On the flip side, I don't require a degree when hiring developers. It's nice
to have, but to be quite frank most developers that didn't learn to code
before they started college are generally (there are exceptions) not the type
of people we hire.

I'm convinced that if you were to drop one of my people on a desert island,
they'd build a computer from scratch and be programming again in 6 months.
It's just what they love to do, and that's what we look for.

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kobot
Going to college made me realize that I wanted to study computer science. If I
had never gone to college I may have never known that. I agree that it's
totally possible to educate yourself at home, but for some people (like me)
who had no idea, college is a great place to access those resources and
network with people in the field.

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aet
Another alternative would be to attempt a degree part-time, which might reduce
the financial/time burden. I just realized this comment might be violating the
title of the post. Oops

~~~
jwarkentin
As I mentioned in the beginning of my article, that's what I did. It took me
about 30-40 minutes to get to school in the mornings. I had classes from
8am-1pm. Another 50 minutes or so to get to work. I would then work until
about 10pm. I would go home and take care of the things I needed to for life,
go to bed, get up at 6am and repeat. I didn't have much time for homework or
study and I was sooner going to sacrifice my school work than my job. Luckily
I realized the futility of the process.

~~~
aet
Sorry, I didn't catch the 'some' college part. It's too bad you couldn't find
a way to reduce the commutes. Classes 8-1pm sounds like a full load. I was
thinking about 1 class at a time.

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muffinator
So brave

~~~
rfnslyr
HN is not Reddit.

