
Thinking too highly of higher ed - igonvalue
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/peter-thiel-thinking-too-highly-of-higher-ed/2014/11/21/f6758fba-70d4-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html
======
igammarays
A little while ago I would've agreed heartily with Peter. Now, as a "born"
software engineer with a decent portfolio (now age 21) recently frustratated
by a fruitless job search, turned down again and again (I believe rightfully
so) because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.

A good college degree (especially in STEM fields) provide the basic foundation
upon which to innovate. Our industries have gone so deep, and we are standing
on such giant shoulders, that anyone who is going to take it further must
first absorb the century or so of knowledge created so far on the subject.
Even in Computer Science, the next innovation is not yet another WhatsApp,
it's more along the lines of Counsyl (a dna-sequencing app), where a person
without the knowledge-foundation equivalent of a degree simply would never get
started with _the idea_ of making such software, leave alone actually building
it.

And I say that as a self-taught software engineer. Yes I can probably build
the next Snapchat on my own. But even then I recognize the huge gaps in my
knowledge due to being self taught, especially low-level stuff like kernels,
bits and bytes, and fundemental details of cryptography and security. Not to
say anything about the "unknown unknowns" which I certainly have because I
never followed a structured path on the subject.

And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now, after spending years in
industry and freelancing.

~~~
jasode
You've got 2 different concepts about college mixed up in your post.

 _> because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ._

This is an issue about "credentials" & "signaling in the marketplace"[1], and
not possession of actual knowledge.

 _> I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, [...]
which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the
subject. And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now,_

This is an issue about attaining knowledge. This is a _separate_ issue from
"credentials". All the topics of computer science that undergrad students
study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available. Course syllabus, textbooks,
and not to mention the vast resources of wikipedia, etc. If anyone wants to
learn CS, he/she can study it. There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a
college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge. This is why hiring
managers complain that many compsci graduates do not have actual programming
skills.

I suspect the main thrust of your post is about the _credential_ which is very
defensible especially if you have aspirations for certain employers that
absolutely require that piece of paper.

[1][http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html)

~~~
_delirium
> All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford
> and MIT are publicly available.

That's certainly true, and the same for mathematics or physics or philosophy
or any other subject. But I've met _very_ few people who have on their own
actually done it, working through the material you'd cover in a 4-year degree
(let alone going on to cover graduate-level work). Not zero people, just very
few. I've met many more people who've worked through the equivalent of a _few_
courses of material (e.g. have self-studied SICP), but that's a much lower
bar.

Of those people I know who have done so, most are mathematicians. Could be
random draw of who I know, but math does seem to draw autodidacts who go all-
in and teach themselves the equivalent of a 4-to-6-year (or more) course of
mathematics.

~~~
shanemhansen
It's true that learning the contents of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming or
Concrete Mathematics is easier in a class environment, but that's not the
whole story. I'm a self taught software engineer. I actually find it fairly
easy to compete against CS grads. A shocking number of them don't seem to pick
up much CS during their 4 to 6 years in school. I've talked to countless grads
who can't describe the differences between a process and a thread. They can't
explain how they might implement even a naïve hashmap. I've had to spend an
hour explaining to a colleague (a cs degree holder who was also the son of a
cs professor) how amortized constant time append works in dynamic arrays.

For reasons I don't fully understand a cs degree does not imply cs knowledge.
Grade inflation? Maybe they weren't given enough story problems?

When someone asks me about a concept I'm unfamiliar with, I don't have the
excuse of that not being part of the curriculum.

~~~
atmosx
First, there's a reason top-class students get better jobs. Not always, of
course, but most of the times.

Second there are concepts that if you don't deal with them every day, you lose
a your grip around them.

Third (and maybe most important), maybe CS was a _good degree to have_ in
terms of opportunities but wasn't their passion. You can't compete with
_passion_. There are people who read _this_ and _that_ book only to acquire
knowledge of a very specific domain out of pure passion about the topic at
hand. You can't compete with those. These are the people who usually can make
combine sources, spot errors, think outside the box for obvious reasons.

ps. I remember an instance when reading the Cryptonomicon, where Waterhouse -
one of the main protagonists - was thinking that the fact he was at Princeton
university in the 1930's was nothing special. He thought that in this place
there was just a _bunch of guys_ who knew _one thing or two_ about maths and
that was all there was to it. Later in the book while almost being drowned
inside a German submarine, the only thing he could think of, was how to get
his hands on a German strong box he came across. When he was healthy enough,
he spent ~ 6 hours in a row trying to open the damn thing. When he did open
the strong-box, he was almost depressed because he didn't really give a sh _t
about what was inside. He wanted to know how thins German strong-box worked
and if it can be reversed, somehow. Now that he knew that, there was nothing
appealing about this strong-box. Not even the contents. To a pure
mathematician like he_ really* was, there was nothing appealing in
implementing something, once you _understood_ how it works. Now, how on earth
can you compete with a guy like that? :-)

------
trg2
Last summer I took CS184 Startup Engineering. It was a free Stanford Computer
Science Course on Coursera, taught by Balaji Srinivasan.

It was about 10 weeks long. There were ~100,000 students enrolled. It was
free. And it was, far and away, the most valuable thing I've ever done in my
life. It was an order of magnitude more valuable than my 4 year undergraduate
education at the University of Connecticut.

Since taking that course, I've pushed hundreds of code commits into the Airbnb
codebase (I work on the online marketing team here). They're small pull
requests , and I'm rarely ever writing anything from scratch, but the number
of engineering hours I've saved by being able to write my own PRs is extremely
valuable.

Out of curiosity, I asked a few of the recruiters at Airbnb what putting CS184
on my LinkedIn means. I explained to them what it was, how much value I got
out of it, and how much value the company got out of it. I showed them the
course, and the certificate you get when you finish. Everyone had the same
answer: "It doesn't mean much".

My bias is, online education still has that "University of Phoenix" stigma.
How valuable the course actually is still doesn't seem to mean anything yet.
Maybe, in general, that's correct. Maybe most online courses still suck. But I
can very much verify that life-altering, immensely valuable online courses
exist.

This idea of online learning and more specifically, credentialing, looks more
like it's a social engineering problem rather than "knowledge delivery"
problem.

I've been geeking out on institution-agnostic credentialing and accreditation
for a little while now. If you're interested in this space please get in touch
with me - email is in my profile.

~~~
throwaway5752
From the perspective of a recruiter, simply listing that course has zero
predictive value for a candidate. It's too easy to fake/cheat. The value is
demonstrated by what you do with - like what you say about creating your own
PRs, etc. Hopefully that will be demonstrated by your professional references
and career advancement.

~~~
djc14
Isn't this a Catch-22 though? In order to show that you can contribute PRs to
the codebase, you must first get hired to AirBnB. And in order to get hired,
you must first show your ability to contribute.

You mention that a way to show ability to contribute is through "professional
references and career advancement", but doesn't that also first require that
you get into the company first? For the former, you need work to find
colleagues who can give meaningful references, and for the latter, you need to
enter the job first in order to advance in it.

Am I missing something? Is there any way to get these jobs without first
getting the (dubious) credential from universities?

------
300bps
Computers saved me from having to go to college. Graduated high school at the
right time in 1990, became a computer consultant at 17. Started my own
consulting company at 20. Started a small ISP at 24. Sold it at 26. Started
working for corporate America and have worked as a software engineer in
finance for the past 18 years. I wouldn't change a thing about my career or my
self-taught path.

It all worked out well which is good because my parents couldn't afford to
send me to college. But they did have the foresight to save up and buy me a
Commodore 64 in 1982.

~~~
XorNot
Computers are the only reason I have a job right now, despite being in a
country with subsidized (effectively free) tertiary education.

Turns out basically nothing I did in university was remotely applicable to my
current actual job. Though I suspect it's more a comment on my country's
industrial priorities than anything else, but it does make me incredibly sad
for US students.

~~~
jrerm
After getting a job in the industry, I feel my university years were pretty
much wasted. Very little, if not zero, knowledge I got in the university has
been needed in my day to day job. I'm becoming more and more convinced that if
you don't attend some of the top universities or don't wish to stay in
academia, universities provide very little of value in the software world.

------
WhitneyLand
The poster below is correct, the credential is valued more than knowledge and
this is what is holding people back.

Why do most elite schools refuse to bestow online degrees for anyone who can
complete identical coursework with rigorous test proctoring?

It's not about cost. Forget about the lower marginal cost of online students,
in most cases elite online degrees are not even allowed if students are
willing to pay full price.

There is also the argument that the experience of being on campus and closely
working with peers and instructors is an integral part of the credential. Yet
that can't be the reason either or else a simple solution would be to offer
"on campus" and "online" versions of a degree to clarify what has been
achieved.

The biggest reason not to offer online elite degrees for all who can complete
the work is to maintain prestige for the institution. Artificial scarcity is
used against students the same way it is used by luxury brands such as Ferrari
and Hermes hand bags.

Any why should this change? No one at these institutions would benefit
including alumni who have already made it into the club.

It's prioritization of brand above the betterment of society through
education.

------
lettergram
It's interesting, but Capital One recently changed their requirements for the
software developer role from:

B.S. required required

to

High School Diploma, GDE, or Military service required[1]

While I worked there, they decided to make the change because, "software
development can be learned anywhere." It's interesting to see the change in
corporations and makes me feel they are really trying to make a change.

[1] [http://jobs.capitalone.com/virginia/software-
engineering/job...](http://jobs.capitalone.com/virginia/software-
engineering/jobid6287953-senior-software-engineer-\(ai\)-jobs)

~~~
nmrm2
Disclaimer: I'm happy Capital One changed their hiring policy. It's their
reasoning -- not their policy -- that worries me. What worries me is that the
attitude that "Software development can be learned anywhere" might coincide
with not treating software development as a serious and mature field of
engineering.

Investment banking, the practice of law, many parts of medicine, and bridge
building can also be learned anywhere. None-the-less, we demand practitioners
of these trades have a foundations in their respective fields.

To be clear, I am perfectly happy using software written by an expert at the
craft who taught him/herself the foundations of computer science and software
engineering.

I am far less happy using software written by a graduate of one of these
"learn to code" 12 week workshops. Especially as anything more than pure
implementation work ("implement this spec to the letter") on anything serious
(such as the core infrastructure for a bank).

Security is hard. Reliability is hard.

It's incredibly ironic that the current administration invests hundreds of
millions/billions into cyber-security while simultaneously calling for less --
not more -- training in software engineering.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>I am far less happy using software written by a graduate of one of these
"learn to code" 12 week workshops... Security is hard. Reliability is hard.

Sure. But the graduates of those workshops don't get jobs working on security
and critical infrastructure. Rather, they get hired as junior programmers and
are given small-scale projects where they can continue to learn and grow under
the guidance of more experienced developers.

Besides, the code school graduates often have critical subject matter
expertise in their former fields. For example, when I need a programmer to
build an in-house system for a marketing team, I'd be much more willing to
hire a former marketing specialist who completed a 3-month code school than a
fresh computer science graduate.

~~~
nmrm2
My point was just that, on balance, colleges -- especially elite ones -- tend
to produce the "highly skilled engineer working on critical infrastructure"
type of CS practitioner, not the "in-house data munging app" type of CS
practitioner.

And it's the former that there is a critical shortage of.

------
ForHackernews
This is nice and all, but Thiel does the exact same thing with his
fellowships: winnows a crowded field and bestows highly-visible laurels on a
few already-talented selectees.

After reading this article, I'm still not sure what his alternative plan is.

> Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out
> for yourself.

Great advice for a 17 year old.

~~~
jswinghammer
Is there any need for a "plan"? Ultimately having a default option being
college is obviously not working all that well for a lot of the people going
down that route (dropout rates are high and finding a job in your field isn't
a guarantee).

The "plan" would be to take an honest look at yourself and decide what sort of
career makes sense for you. That might mean you go to a trade school, it might
mean that you go to college, it might mean something I can't think of right
now :)

The worst advice is saying just go to college and it will all work itself out.

~~~
ForHackernews
> The worst advice is saying just go to college and it will all work itself
> out.

That employment and wage statistics say that's actually better advice than
"don't go to college and it will all work itself out."

------
SCHiM
With the risk of coming across as a jerk or arrogant, and also admitting that
I have assisted with interviews but have never worked in an HR department:

In my opinion HR departments are just lazy or understaffed. A real face-to-
face interview with the candidate about the subject you're hiring on is almost
always enough to see if a potential candidate has 'got the goods'. And without
going to deeply into a discussion about what is and isn't a good interviewing
strategy: Ask questions to see if the candidate knows what he/she's talking
about. As how a person would react in situations you've come across. Examine
the his/her responses with what you'd have done, ask your colleagues what they
think after the interview. In short, just talk to your candidate, engage in a
discussion.

Yes it's impossible to interview each and every single candidate. But, really,
a college-degree-filter is not the way to go. A majority of the people will
learn important lessons in college (and some won't), but sometimes it's the
people that chose another way that prove the most valuable for your company.

------
karmacondon
A college education is like money: It has value because we all agree that it
has value. And like money, it will retain its place in society until we all
decide to use something else instead.

The system of higher education isn't going to change because people have too
much invested in it, and that investment can never go bad like the housing
market or tech stocks did. College graduates will talk about how much they
learned, the networking and social experience or of being exposed to new ideas
and ways of thinking. It isn't possible to question the value of those
intangible benefits, or to prove to someone that they could have gained the
same things through other means. So the system perpetuates itself.

To be honest, it seems like an unbreakable cycle. Well off kids go to college,
get jobs and move into management where they hire other well off kids who also
went to college. MOOCs, community/online colleges and vocational schools are
emerging as additional options, but most of the decision makers at major
institutions attended traditional four year colleges and expect the people
they work with to have done so as well.

It seems like the best way to control the cost of education would be to make
employers responsible for paying for it, instead of the students. Then market
forces would come into play. If a business had to choose between paying $120k
to send someone to Harvard or $20k to send them to a state school or community
college, then they would have an incentive to evaluate the difference in
quality of education and training from the respective institutions. Right now
all of the financial risk is placed on students, and businesses get to pick
and choose who to hire with relatively little consequence.

Obviously the system isn't going to change any time soon, if ever, no matter
how many opeds the washington post publishes.

~~~
whichfawkes
I would say that a more plausible solution (than somehow making businesses pay
for the education of the people they want to hire) is to push actual
accreditation off onto 3rd parties.

Imagine there's a trusted business who makes the tests and certifications, and
anytime you wanted to hire someone, you'd check to see if they had the
relevant certifications. Maybe this person self-taught themselves everything
they needed to pass, maybe they went to a cheap institution to receive formal
training for the certification, or maybe they went to an expensive one.

Colleges could no longer be more expensive just for the sake of being
expensive, the colleges who could educate people to better scores would be
worth more. Similarly the testing/accreditation companies who could better
differentiate potential hires based on their actual ability would be more
trusted by the hiring companies, and would be able to command higher prices.

------
mrdrozdov
The article is not anti-college, it's against blindly going into college.
Thiel is proposing that you decide what is the best for your future. If you
want to build a company that provides ephemeral messaging and not much else,
perhaps college isn't for you because there is little you can learn there that
you can't learn on your own. If you want to build something that indexes large
amounts of data in ways that were previously not doable, then college might be
a good choice because you can do research and have your work reviewed by a
community of people more interested in pushing the bounds of human knowledge
than creating a business. My latter example would apply to a very small subset
of existing companies.

The reality is that when you are at the stage of deciding whether you should
do college, you have little idea of what it is that you want to do so it's
difficult to reverse engineer your education against your potential career
path. For this reason college seems like a good default. It's insurance (as
was mentioned in the article, but in a different light) against realizing that
your career path would benefit from a degree but you did not get one. It seems
like a useful strategy may be to help young students discover their careers at
an earlier age, or at least to enter the workforce before deciding whether
college is for them.

------
OmarIsmail
My problem with Thiel's logic is that he doesn't go far enough. If you've
spent the past 12 years in the traditional education system you're ill
equipped to forge your own path. If instead you've been figuring things out on
your own for pretty much you're entire life, then by the time you reach
college age you'll have the tools necessary to make the right decision for
yourself.

I believe (and would love to see research around) that learning is a pull
model. Traditional education works on a push model. This fundamental
incongruence wastes decades of a person's most prime learning years. That's
not counting all the other ills that come with the artificial environment of
restricting immature people to interact primarily with other immature people
(bullying, ostracization, self-confidence issues, depression, etc etc).

The model I plan to use with my own children is incredibly simple: do
something productive 8 hours a day, every day. The set of productive
activities is defined solely by their ability to justify why it's productive.
That combined with good nutrition, emotionally supportive household, physical
security give the building blocks and raw ingredients that will allow a person
to achieve their full potential.

------
vph
This is a biased if not myopic view of higher education. To Peter Thiel, the
best route for a high school graduate is to go to Silicon Valley and do a
start-up. While that might be the best option for a very few, it just doesn't
work for a general public.

Beside, this article started with "higher education", but never even touched
upon what that word meant. It's higher education, it's education. By and
large, college provides the best environment for young people to meet and
learn from professors and from their peers. The college experience is a very
special experience for learning. College is not just an investment of how much
money you put in and how much your salary will be after you get out.

Even if Bill Gates and Zuck Markerburg dropped out of Harvard, I am sure they
learned a lot while being there, and perhaps beyond what they probably were
aware of at the time. Bill Gates for example coauthored a paper with Cristo
Papadimitriou (a giant in Computer Science) while at Harvard. I bet Bill had
great opportunities to meet and learn from many great people while being
there.

------
hackuser
Thiel:

> it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in
> place

Not at all. It implies a future where people are more productive, produce
more, and earn more. It's not just an implication, but fundemental economics.

> a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into
> conformists

College is not a zero sum competition; everyone can be winners and get
degrees. Also, most people complain that college encourages too much non-
conformity. I've never heard, and it certainly wasn't my experience, that
college creates conformists.

> Is higher education an investment? Everyone knows that college graduates
> earn more than those without degrees.

The focus on earnings is very narrow. Increasing your knowledge, your
understanding of the world, your exposure to ideas, and especially your
critical thinking and other cognitive and intellectual skills, helps you in
every place in life where those things in apply. Not only as an employee, but
as a citizen, a member of your community, a member of a family, as someone
managing your own affairs, as an autodidact in your learning after college,
and as someone seeking a fulfulling life.

~~~
jroseattle
> It implies a future where people are more productive, produce more, and earn
> more. It's not just an implication, but fundemental economics.

College degrees do not correlate with productivity. The earning power of
degrees is almost entirely driven by proximity and access to higher-paying
jobs. Productivity simply has nothing to do with it.

> College is not a zero sum competition; everyone can be winners and get
> degrees.

I believe Thiel is arguing that college experiences are becoming a cultural
binary -- either you have a degree or you do not.

I read Thiel's commentary as: if you're a zero in that system, you lose out on
future opportunity; and to become a one in that system, you need to conform
(in the manner of social norms.)

~~~
hackuser
> College degrees do not correlate with productivity. The earning power of
> degrees is almost entirely driven by proximity and access to higher-paying
> jobs. Productivity simply has nothing to do with it.

I'm surprised to hear this. What is it based on?

------
glesica
I was all ready to come back here and strenuously object to this since I
really can't stand Peter Thiel, but after reading it, I agree with him (about
this one thing). College, or any particular career field, isn't for everyone.
I especially agree with the idea, and I've seen this in a couple places now,
that college is just the final round of a long zero-sum tournament. You mess
up early and you'll probably never win, regardless of actual talent or
"merit". This seems like a broken system.

On the other hand, how do we do better? Massive companies still need hundreds
of thousands of workers? How do they find them without college admissions
offices providing signals? Hiring is a massive problem, as we can probably all
agree, that isn't going to disappear just because people start skipping
college or attending alternative institutions. How does a "nobody" 18 or 22
year old prove his or her value without a letter of admission or a diploma?

~~~
d357r0y3r
> College, or any particular career field, isn't for everyone. I especially
> agree with the idea, and I've seen this in a couple places now, that college
> is just the final round of a long zero-sum tournament. You mess up early and
> you'll probably never win, regardless of actual talent or "merit". This
> seems like a broken system.

This is a really important idea for the public to understand. It's not simply
a class thing either, which is how it's typically portrayed (e.g. "you just
want college to be for rich kids and poor kids can learn to be plumbers at
community college"). It's more of a "how is a person's brain wired up" thing.

I was an amazingly mediocre student, but I've been very successful in
industry. I think it's because in school, the curriculum is set in stone -
you're just consuming it. There's no opportunity for self actualization. In
"the field", you will have opportunities to drive real solutions and even
innovate.

> How does a "nobody" 18 or 22 year old prove his or her value without a
> letter of admission or a diploma?

Usually side projects and a kind of radiant passion. If you can point to some
solid code you're written and you sound passionate when you're talking about
the technology and the job opportunity, many interviewers will sense that.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I don't even think it is a "how is a person's brain wired up" thing. I think
it is a college instruction caters to a subset of the set of available
students. Which is kind of the same thing you said, just couched from a
different perspective. I guess some people think it is the student's fault
because they failed to conform, and others blame the college for failing to
adapt to a multitude of different students.

------
11thEarlOfMar
If you are looking at college as an investment, here is some interesting data:
[http://www.payscale.com/college-roi/](http://www.payscale.com/college-roi/)

Moreover, it's very difficult to be admitted into an Ivy League school. It is
also very difficult to recruit graduates from Ivy League Schools. They are
rare: In 2014-15, 1.8 million bachelors degrees were awarded in the US [1].
Roughly 20,000 of those are from Ivy League schools. That's about 1%.

Hence, even sought after employers like Apple employ more students from mid-
tier schools like San Jose State than top-ranked schools [2]. So if you are an
Apple recruiter, the bulk of your recruits come from a University that is
ranked 38 out of about 130 -regional- schools. It is not even ranked
nationally.

The notion that if an applicant is not admitted to a top-ranked school, they
are going to wind up a janitor, is simply false.

What has become skewed is the perception of the value of elite schools. Since
perception drives price, the price of attending them has skyrocketed. The
4-year cost of Harvard is now $234,000 [3] vs. San Jose State at about
$100,000 [4].

And schools like Missouri University of Science and Technology present the
better ROI.

[1]
[http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372](http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372)
[2] [http://www.wired.com/2014/05/alumni-
network-2/](http://www.wired.com/2014/05/alumni-network-2/) [3]
[http://www.harvard.edu/harvard-glance](http://www.harvard.edu/harvard-glance)
[4]
[http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/Applying/Cost_of_Attendance/](http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/Applying/Cost_of_Attendance/)

------
tikhonj
It's interesting how many people seem to read this as an argument that college
is no good for anyone as opposed to the more reasonable college is _not good
for everyone_. Many people end up in college not because it is a good fit but
because it's the default thing to do, because people assume you're a complete
failure if you don't and because it's artificially required to have most good
jobs. The number of openings that require a college degree—but don't care
which one—makes this abundantly clear: businesses are using it as a signal
that's entirely independent of _what_ you learned.

I've always been curious, and a little disturbed, at how inflexible a college
education is for something supposedly universal. People are different and need
different things from their education, but everyone gets the same sort of
classes at the same sorts of medium-to-large institutions. If you want
something less oriented around classes or smaller and more personal or more
specialized or more hands on or not forced into digestible quarter- or
semester-sized chunks, you're completely out of luck.

But if this doesn't work, it's apparently a problem _with you_ , not with the
system.

And then, of course, we turn around and feign surprise when college prices go
up as we artificially drive demand through the roof.

I personally valued the college experience I've had so far... with the
exception of most of my classes. What really worked for me was doing research,
taking graduate courses, learning on my own, interacting with other students
and a bunch of external things like working part-time at a startup. But
there's simply no other way to get into research, even though many seem to
agree that the overlap between strong study skills and research potential is,
at best, limited.

I'd like to be doing research now and, false modesty aside, would be entirely
capable, but it's very difficult outside the inflexible system. It really
doesn't need to be.

In hindsight, I would have loved an alternative. But, as far as I know, that
alternative does not exist and, if it did, I would not have known about it in
high school. The only other choice would have been going to a small liberal
arts college, which has more classes and less of everything I actually liked.

The pressure to go to college is too high. The worst part is that the pressure
itself is not irrational because of the irrational way the rest of the system
is set up.

------
sytelus
I'm fairly depressed by this continuous attack on getting higher education by
Peter Thiel. Previously he famously offered students money to drop out of
college. This is especially scary considering his sphere of influence and
amount of money-power he can throw in. Why someone as smart as him would do
this?

To me it looks like he has got it all wrong here: Higher education is _not_ an
investment. It's _not_ a preparation to get a job. People should not be
considering higher education as a way of getting lots of money in future.
Higher education is an opportunity to delve in to subject that you dreamed
about all your teenage life. Did you wanted to become astronomer? Physicists?
Mathematician? Painter? Were you interested in learning why biggest wars in
history happened? How our ancestors lived 10,000 years ago? Do you want to
build airplanes? If you asked these questions and were intensely interested in
some subject, higher education is a tremendous gateway to do what you love for
rest of your life as opposed to possibility of becoming millionaire first and
_then_ do all these things. No one should be persuaded to be turned away from
it. Not everyone needs to be in rush for making million and retire before 30.
Some people wants to do what they love to their last dying day. Not everyone
needs to be startup founder either. As Guy Kawasaki said, jobs are for rest of
your life (even if you are "boss" \- it's still a _job_ ), education is just
those few early years when your brain is hungry and eager to absorb
everything. Your best years should be spent in studying something cool and
worthwhile rather than selling underwears and rental apartments to people. You
should take advantage of it. I consider advising youth to drop out from their
selected area of study with a lure of making millions in startups a sin.

------
Ologn
Going for my bachelors, most professors said we would have to spend at least
three hours of study time for every hour we spent in lecture.

Splitting it up another way, that is three years of studying on my own, and
one year of lectures.

If I had decided to forgo a bachelors, if I wanted the same level of knowledge
as someone with a bachelors, I'd have to spend the same three years studying
calculus, discrete math, theory of computation, graph theory, algorithms, data
structures, databases, assembly, C++, Java, paradigms of programming
languages, AI, graphics etc.

So really a bachelors is just one more year on top of that. Plus the extras
you learn from the professor in class, or after class, or during office hours,
or hanging around with other students.

While theoretically an autodidact can study the same as a college student,
they generally skip over pushdown automata and Gödel numbers and L'Hôpital's
rule and go right to learning things such as Ruby and its methods, without any
theory. Some progress can be made initially, but the lack of a base of theory
usually causes problems at some point.

You can get into a good local public school like Berkeley or UIUC or Georgia
Tech for a decent price. You can apply for Pell grants, work/study and so
forth.

During go-go times, you can often get work without a degree. During downturns
like 2001 or 2008, suddenly everyone is laying people off, and the market is
flooded with job applicants, many with college degrees. This is when you
really need a college degree, especially if you have a family. You don't want
then to be the time to realize you need a bachelors. Even if you get work
again, you'll be juggling a full-time job, wife, kids, in-laws, plus your
night/weekend classes and studying, in addition to whatever else you're doing.

------
brudgers
There is a danger in taking Thiel's plausible general observation and applying
it to specific vocations. The obvious example involve surgeons installing
heart valves, lawyers preparing trusts, and engineers designing pacemakers.

In software, the term "engineer" is roughly meaningless without anchoring to a
specific context of company culture and/or an individual's experience. That
someone can be called a "software engineer" with no formal training and six
month's industry experience doesn't change the fact that designing a procedure
keeping a process out of NP is not a natural talent.

In the same way that plans for a homeowner's kitchen remodel don't require an
architect's seal has no bearing on the requirements for a hospital emergency
room remodel, amateurs are fine for bridal consultant landing pages but not
for self driving car control systems. There are problems that require
professional judgement not just a technical opinion.

~~~
karmacondon
It's worth pointing out that almost none of the work in the examples in your
first paragraph is done by someone straight out of school with only a college
degree. Surgeons, lawyers and engineers typically go through years of on the
job training before they are allowed to install heart values, prepare complex
trusts or design pacemakers. Which says little about the value of the college
education, other than that it serves as a filter before someone can receive
the hands on training and mentorship that is critical to performing those
tasks.

If surgeons/lawyers/engineers say "I'm only go to offer an apprenticeship to
someone who went to school for eight years like I did", then that's fine, it's
their choice of who to invest their time with. But it doesn't prove that a
traditional four year education is a necessary prerequisite to being able to
do any of those jobs.

~~~
brudgers
Proof and necessity are logical constructs. In the messy real world we deal
with judgement and experience. The burden is on those who want contrary
judgements to be given weight to point to experience and rationales that
justify its acceptence, e.g. to reason from sound statistical evidence.

It's not enough to say, "Hume proved we can't really know anything about the
world of things." The claim is not that the current system is perfect. My
claim is that the system is better than the alternative for certain vocations
and that engineering is one if them.

------
cafebeen
While the article suggests a few roles for college, including "investment",
"consumption", "insurance", or a "competitive tournament", it makes no mention
of personal growth. Most kids have no idea what they want out of life at age
18, and college is a place to be safely independent and start figuring that
out.

------
mitchi
College degrees are similar to a car. The more it costs, the better you look.
But you cannot buy a "used" college degree... Europe is even worse, they are
getting master degrees to have an edge over other bachelor engineers and they
compete for low paying jobs as well. A very easy solution to the college
degree arm race is to have employers not discriminate using the name of the
school. Perhaps it could be a law to hide the name of the school from the
résumé. The only thing that matters is the person applying for the job and his
skills, not the school he went to. The name of the school could be a forbidden
thing to ask, until after he is hired.

~~~
tim333
You could theoretically switch to a system where there is a standardised
national exam at degree level in subjects such at computer science. Then
instead of paying lots to go to a fancy college you could learn inexpensively
and still get as impressive a qualification. Dunno if it's a good idea. In the
UK there are standardised exams at 18 so if you get 3 As at A-level people
know your bright regardless of where you went, in fact it's probably harder to
do that at a rubbish school. At university level though you don't have that so
a degree from Oxford is probably going to be valued more than one from
Bedfordshire, say even if the grades are similar.

~~~
mitchi
I like the exam idea but it's not really the best way to test the skill of a
person. You wouldn't hold an exam for the best painter or the best sculptor. I
feel like computer programming (and related jobs) in general is similar. If
you watch the TV show Better Call Saul (strongly recommend), you see him in
the last episode learning that his own lawyer brother doesn't want him working
at the same firm because he did an online law school, instead of going to a
prestigious law school.

It is a very very ugly mentality.

------
the7nd
I buy into Thiel's ideas on higher education. I created a startup out of high
school. It failed and I went to college the next year. However, the startup
taught me more than I have learned in my first two years of school. Many of my
CS classes are simply a rehashing of what I already know. In my experience,
Thiel is mostly right. It is possible, easy, and cheap to educate yourself and
turn it into startup. The problem is it requires a great deal of luck and
savvy to turn the college-less path into a sustainable model.

------
ryanx435
the obvious unasked question that article doesn't quite get around to either
asking or answering is, if not college, than what? the article waves off this
question by saying that there is no single solution for everybody. it's as
good example of a non answer as I've ever seen.

my guess is Peter Thiel 's real answer, the one that he doesn't want to say
too loudly, is that he wants more and more people to go be entrepreneurs. to
be the next gates, jobs, or Zuckerbergs. this is great! let's all start our
own companies! let's have every college student drop out, start a new
business, and we can all ride the rising tide of technological advancement
together!

except you can't have everyone be a ceo. not everybody should be! the founder
isnt a lone hero, holding the weoght of the world entirely on his shoulders!
they still need the engineers, the marketers, the insurance salesmen, and all
the other trades and skilled workers that make our economy work. we cannot
forget that it is the middle class that does the vast majority of the day to
day work that keeps everything humming along smoothly.

college is certainly an excellent path to get to these sorts of careers. it's
a great place to learn the skills necessary to be an hr rep, or an fda
regulation expert, or a general manager of a restaurant, or a journalist, or a
lawyer, or any of the other of thousands of middle class jobs that everyone
forgets about because they are boring and unglamorous.

the honest truth is that, for a majority of the population, college is a great
decision.

~~~
endzone
except you don't learn how to any of those jobs at college. a college
education is not even a necessary precondition for success in those roles. i
think you've largely missed his point.

thiel is surely smart enough to recognise that the economy will always contain
a diverse range of companies and roles within those companies. but there are
better ways to train the population if we can only get beyond our fixation on
certain credentials

------
hmate9
i would say that university is more than just a place to learn. It prepares
you for actual adult life.

Most 18 year olds are not ready to go straight into work and I'd say they are
definitely not ready to start a startup (remember, general case).

At uni you learn a great deal but you also benefit from being eased into adult
life with internships, mentorships, you have tons of opportunity to network
too.

------
johan_larson
The problem is that employers are incredibly insistent on a college degree
(sometimes ANY college degree) as certification of basic cluefulness.

We sometimes have applications to our entry-level software developer jobs from
people with two-year software development diplomas from community colleges. My
manager won't even look at them. He absolutely insists on a true college
degree.

~~~
mrdrozdov
This is 100% not true. My employer would have preferred that I dropped out of
school after my internship to join full time rather than complete my degree. I
have a handful of friends that chose to not complete school and then found
jobs later. Also, there are a lot of companies (particularly startups) where
recruitment does not involve dropping a stack of resumes on a managers desk.
You can directly contact existing employees and propose how you'd be a good
new employee or intern, and if the match is there they'll likely give you a
chance.

------
foolrush
>“Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the
losers and turns the winners into conformists.”

So the Bahaus was conformist. Strikes me as a myopic opinion of someone that
hasn't studied the history of art movements and schools.

>“The same kids would probably enjoy a wage premium even if they spent four
years in the Peace Corps instead.”

“Would probably” is telling of privilege here. Perhaps Mr. Thiel would
probably do well to study some post secondary sociology or anthropology?

>“But what if higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive
tournament?”

Curious how many HN people have degrees outside of their career. Was it
relevant to your worldview? Is it possible that higher education isn't mired
in capitalist competition?

>“Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t famous because of the
similar ways in which they left school. We know their names because of what
each of them did differently from everybody else.”

Seems to me that at least part of the formula here, if he is choosing to cite
these people, is to be white and male. Many would do well to skip higher
education and perhaps chase that.

>“You need to figure it out for yourself.”

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no
anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live
in.”

------
return0
I see his point about the Ivy privileges (really knowledge is so available
nowadays, that nothing justifies the blind respect that people award them).
But if college is the default religion what is the alternative, no education
at all? I would like to see an alternative to having to spend early twenties
learning stuff.

~~~
wcummings
Doesnt that make college a fantastically expensive summer camp?

------
amelius
The term "higher education" is completely wrong. Education is not a strict
total order, so one cannot speak of "higher" forms of education.

For instance, if I learn to speak French in school A, and if I learn to solve
differential equations in school B, then which form of education is "higher"?

~~~
dragonwriter
"higher education" is a term of art that refers to the same thing also
referred to as postsecondary education, e.g., in US terms college/university
education. Insofar as the relation to the common use of "higher" alone is
inspired by a presumed total order, it is the chronological order in which
various types of schools are attended in the normal course (in modern
practice, this is less than perfectly strict.)

------
CyberDildonics
I think a good start to solving this problem would be to come up a basket of
statistics of alumni while comparing that to the cost of the school and the
cost of living while going there. It would be far from perfect, but you can't
improve what you can't measure.

------
namanbharadwaj
>Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out
for yourself.

Discouraging high school graduates from going to college is just bad for
society. Entrepreneurs are essential, but I would argue that the most profound
advancements in STEM fields come out of universities. Those advancements tend
to be in highly abstract fields (e.g. physics, math), where there is no
immediate applicable benefit, but there may well be one in the future.

Students should go to universities to gain a theoretical foundation in STEM
fields -- that's how we find young researchers. And those who decide that
research isn't for them will nevertheless gain a strong intellectual
foundation that is hard (but not impossible) to acquire otherwise.

~~~
untilHellbanned
I work at the intersection of many STEM fields at a prestigious university. I
think very little important research is coming from universities anymore. The
paper publishing factory, again credentialing, has taken over. I think we need
a renaissance in STEM but strongly believe this will happen outside of
academia.

~~~
Jimmy
How do we get around the issue of funding though? A lot of innovative projects
come out of universities because governments give them money without expecting
an immediate return on investment. How can we create a non-academia system
that has the resources to take on big, risky ventures without that system
becoming isomorphic to academia?

------
jfasi
Thiel makes some interesting points, and I don't necessarily disagree with the
substance of what he's saying. However, I'd like to offer a reframing of the
college debate that goes beyond the views put forward by Thiel et al. with
regards to higher education. I'd like to break offer two points regarding
higher education.

 _Firstly_ , Thiel argues that society suffers when high-caliber people go
through elite colleges and take positions at conservative organizations in old
industries. He implies that society would be better served if more of these
people went off to do startups or other cutting-edge organizations.

My rebuttal to this is: lots of elite college-trained people are going to
startups. There is no system barrier between highly-trained (if somewhat
conservatively thinking) people and cutting edge stuff. In fact, some of the
most elite MBA programs are taking note of the interest among their students
and creating programming specifically to help them enter that realm [1].

Also, what's wrong with highly trained people going into management consulting
and investment banking? If talent gravitates toward these industries, it's not
because peoples' training made them useless for any other purpose, but rather
because of standard economics: people have a right to want to get paid.

Furthermore, I'd argue that Thiel is mistakenly conflating lack of sexiness
with social damage. General Motors and JP Morgan are not startups, and few
starry-eyed undergrads would dream of a mid-tier leadership role in such an
organization over founding their own billion dollar company. But what's wrong
with having competent and well-trained leaders in charge of these companies?
They might not show up on the covers of popular entrepreneurship magazines,
and they might not be the first do something sexy and innovative, but these
sorts of companies do deliver a tremendous amount of growth and innovation to
the economy. GM's size and distribution clout makes it as viable and worthy a
source of innovation as, say, Tesla, and there's nothing wrong with training
people to lead those productive if boring machines.

 _Secondly_ , on the topic of Obama's push for more higher education, I
believe Thiel brings to the argument a Silicon Valley/disruptive innovation-
centered view on what is actually a different problem. Thiel argues that
talent is best allocated to new industries because they are the ones that
produce "black-swan" type economic innovations. This may be true, but I think
it fails to discuss a more systemic issue.

As few as fifteen years ago, American manufacturing represented a
significantly larger portion of the economy, with a hiring demand to match
[1]. As recently as two or three decades ago, a high school-educated person
could live comfortably and securely on a manufacturing salary. Our economy is
currently dealing with a decline of well-paying work for relatively low-
skilled labor. We're transitioning from a work-based economy to a service
economy where intellectual skills are most valuable.

The economic study establishment sees this. Obama sees this. Cast in this
light, the spike in college tuitions is not the irrational bubble that Thiel
attempts to portray, but rather a natural and unavoidable consequence of
millions of people suddenly realizing that their futures depend on skills that
until now only private colleges have been able to give them. Economically,
subsidizing higher education is a natural response. Culturally, placing higher
value on higher-tier educations is a natural consequence given the fact that
simply having a degree is no longer by itself a marker of intellectual
exceptionality. Hence the spike in demand for prestige.

The only way this country is going to transmute the legacy of its fantastic
economic power from the twentieth century into correspondingly fantastic
economic power in the twenty-first century is by successfully making a
transition to a knowledge economy. People know this, and they're reacting en
mass. Money is being poured by the bucketload into higher education. Radical
experiments are taking place in education technology. Traditional institutions
are rethinking themselves. This change is already in progress, and it's clear
the solution is more focus on education rather than less.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2015/01/03/business-school-startups-
entre...](http://fortune.com/2015/01/03/business-school-startups-
entrepreneurs/)

[2]
[http://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/documents/Pierce%...](http://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/documents/Pierce%20and%20Schott%20-%20The%20Surprisingly%20Swift%20Decline%20of%20U.S.%20Manufacturing%20Employment_0.pdf)

~~~
topkai22
Great post jfasi. One thing I'd like to add is that most HN contributors are
not the type for whom college is as valuable. We are passionate about a
remunerative subject. Most of the people I went to high school with are not,
there passions lie in their children, music, sports, volunteerism, or other
worthy endeavors that aren't going to pay the bills. They went the "default
path" of college and got jobs in law enforcement, business administration,
real estate, and such.

For the vast majority of college graduates, the degree credential is a great
signal that they can be trusted to work independently, retain knowledge, and
deal with a large institution. While I certainly think we need a solution to
the spiraling cost of university and would like the 18-22 year olds who are
not actually interested in a liberal education to be productive with that
period of their lives, we have to acknowledge the signals that completing
college send are much larger more than an understanding of a body of
knowledge.

------
michaelochurch
College has a specific and peculiar consumption pattern: almost everyone is
under 25. This doesn't _seem_ weird because it's pervasive and we're used to
it, but it is. How many other things are only for a narrow age range of
person? And how often is that an endorsement? Usually, it's the opposite. When
it comes to culture, if the only people who like something are under 20, or
over 60, that usually means that it sucks because things of quality are
enjoyed by people of all age ranges. (Not necessarily uniformly. _Most_ people
born before 1955 didn't like Nirvana when their music came out circa 1990, but
at least some could recognize the talent and creativity.) College, for as
overhyped as the experience is, isn't really appealing to people over 23. Some
will go, later in life, for the education (which is quite valuable, if you pay
attention) but the overall product (which is what people pay $160,000, usually
of their parents' money, for) isn't of interest by that age.

Advanced economies seem destined to breed immaturity and extended adolescence.
You see it in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. It has to be that way,
because the dirty secret of them is that there's low demand for workers and
the only way to look like there is full employment is to delay adulthood (and
hasten retirement, which is welcome if it's elective and wealthy retirement
but horrible if it's age discrimination and despair).

We put people into college because most of them have no hope of getting jobs
(at least, jobs appropriate to their social class) otherwise. Widespread
college is the most socially acceptable way for (a) young people to stay out
of a working world that doesn't want them and that they'd be too immature to
handle, (b) middle- to upper-class parents to transmit connections and status
under the guise of "merit"\-- in reality, it's more complex than that, since
academic success is a combination of factors _including_ merit, and it's this
illegibility that allows the ruse to work-- and (c) people to be fully
enculturated into either their native social class, or (in fortunate but rare
cases) the social class that society "corrects" them to inhabit when a lower-
class child has proven extreme merit.

This is not an easy problem to fix. College has become a private safety net
for middle- to upper-class children while they get to an age and level of
intellectual maturity that will make them acceptable to the modern economy.
It's a socially acceptable way for these kids to sit out of that game for 4
years, under the supposition (which I think is right) that the experiences
that they'd have without college would be so negative as to be detrimental.

Peter Thiel's advice, in general, is bad. It applies to statistical outliers,
perhaps. Even then, I'm not sure that I agree. But given that the social
purpose of college (at this point) is to handle this problem of labor
oversupply, the "fix" of asking young people to go directly into the workforce
isn't going to work. It's just going to flood the labor market even more.

~~~
ccallebs
I agree with everything you've said except for the conclusion. I think Thiel's
point is that it doesn't have to only apply to statistical outliers. It only
applies to them _right now_ , as the culture surrounding higher education is
very ingrained in the developed world.

Also, I agree widespread adoption of going straight into the workforce could
affect unemployment numbers tremendously. But for most people, the current
"fix" is to have an institution babysit young adults for 4-5 years while
allowing them to accumulate a mortgage's worth of debt. At least with the
unemployment numbers the weakness would be more visible.

Disclaimer: I'm not advocating the abolition of college as an institution, but
I've seen too many people graduate with no marketable skills (and no job
prospects). I would argue that for most people, it's not worth the price of
admission.

~~~
endzone
most people do not have the aptitude to benefit from a traditional college
education. this is not a controversial statement if you've attended an
average, fairly representative high school

