
College Is Much More Than a Means to a Higher Salary - koblenski
http://sam-koblenski.blogspot.com/2015/06/college-is-much-more-than-means-to.html
======
maehwasu
1\. List (very real) benefits of going to college. 2\. Repeatedly refuse to
engage in any sort of analysis of whether those benefits were justified by
their cost by using phrases like "I can't even put a price on those
experiences." 3\. Claim that college is worth every penny.

"College is just a means to a higher salary" is a strawman. The real question
is whether the other things it brings are worth tying yourself down in heavy
debt for most of your working life.

Also, if a big reason to go to college is motivation you can't find anywhere
else, how completely f __*ed will you be when you enter the real world heavily
in debt and unable to learn new things without paying an institution thousands
of dollars per month to motivate you?

~~~
madeofpalk
> "College is just a means to a higher salary" is a straw man.

I've always wondered about this. Does having a degree lead to higher salary?
Or is it that the types of people who go to collage and get degrees are more
naturally inclined (for whatever reasons) to get paid more?

It seems like a pretty 'basic' and fundamental question, so I'm sure there's
been studies/research on it before.

~~~
downandout
Despite the Silicon Valley's somewhat undeserved reputation for breaking with
tradition, at least having attended a top university is so close to being a
requirement in SV that it might as well be. Try getting a job at a top-flight
SV company without a degree, or even with a degree that wasn't from an Ivy
League school...you'll find it nearly impossible. There are exceptions to
every rule, but if you don't plan to work for yourself, you'd better either
have a decade or more of solid, demonstrable experience that yielded
exceptional results, or have a degree from a top school.

~~~
madeofpalk
Yeah so I think that's where I see things differently over here in Australia.
While 'degree leads to higher income' is still a common belief here, I don't
think that there's that requirement to have a degree, let alone from a top uni
(like you mentioned in SV).

Although I'm still relatively early in my career (23 years old) - Lacking a
degree has never been a problem for me and I've still ended up in a pretty
well paid job.

~~~
chad_oliver
New Zealand seems to be similar, with the added bonus that we only have a
handful of universities so there is no distinction between 'good universities'
and 'the rest'.

~~~
Mandatum
You'll find HR consultants for pretty much all big companies and govt (incl
Fonterra, TradeMe, GCSB, IRD, Frucor, to name a few) will throw your CV in the
trash if you don't have a degree. Luckily in this country it's much easier to
get your foot in the door through meet-and-greet.

Want to meet a developer from Xero? Tweet 'em. No luck? Ask somebody you know
if they know someone who works there, likely they or someone they know does.

------
1971genocide
Nonsense.

The best knowledge that I have retained over my educational "career" has been
self taught.

College partially helped dictate the direction but why should I be paying
100,000 grands for just directions ?

The best learning also happens when you are not stressed out due to "shame,
external pressure". Or in my case financial and parental pressure.

I remember reading studies done recently that found out that students are more
stressed out than people locked up in prison.

How is this fair ?

Khan Academy's lectures on cryptography, physics and chemistry helped me
through high school and college more than any other source.

To the author of the blogpost : Stop whining about having to listen to young
people's doubt about college when you have no clue what society is putting
them through.

~~~
learc83
>but why should I be paying 100,000 grands for just directions

You don't have to spend anywhere near 100k for college, and the vast majority
of people don't.

The average in state tuition and fees at a public university is $9,139. Some
kind of assistance is available to most people--the Pell Grant is income based
and many states have Scholarships. Georgia (where I went to school) has the
hope scholarship that covers around 90% of tuition and fees for high school
students with a B average and close to 100% for students with a 3.7.

In addition almost everyone qualifies for student loans. And if you take out
more than $30k or so (I forget the exact amount) you can qualify for income
based repayment where you pay back only 10% of your discretionary income
(Income - 1.5 * Federal poverty level) for 20 years.

~~~
jlarocco
That's almost exactly what I was thinking.

Anybody with decent grades can get into the local branch of their state
school, live with their parents/friends, and graduate with minimal debt. It's
not as sexy as going to a big name school and living in the dorms, but it's a
lot smarter in the long run. It's especially true in a field like Computer
Science, where it's so easy to impress people with results. To most people a
degree from MIT means a lot less than a profile of impressive projects, and
the projects don't cost an arm and a leg.

------
learc83
I've seen this debate from both sides. I worked as a self taught programmer
for about 7 years before I went back to college.

College forced me to learn the all the (seemingly) boring parts of Computer
Science that I'd skipped over while teaching myself. Some people have the
discipline and drive to spend time proving that an algorithm is O(n^2) or that
a grammar isn't regular--most do not.

My CS degree filled in so many holes in my background that I didn't even know
I had, and most of the other self taught programmers I've worked with weren't
too different from me. Many times this is the difference between spending a
week banging your head against a wall, and taking 10 minutes to realize your
particular problem was solved 50 years ago.

------
conradev
> If someone doesn't have the motivation to get through college classes, it's
> unlikely that they'll have the motivation to learn on their own with online
> videos and exercises.

If you don't have the motivation to learn something, then I posit that you
haven't framed the topic in the right way. I like this quote from Feynman:

> "I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you
> go into it deeply enough."

The only way I'm going to put in the effort to learn something (really learn
it, not just pass the class) is if I find it interesting in some way. I'm sure
that awesome professors are great at framing topics in the right way, but I
can also see myself doing that.

For example, 3D graphics. There can be a lot of tedious math and programming
involved, but if you can master it, you have the ultimate ability to visualize
anything you can think of.

------
zf00002
Author doesn't get into it, but the quote at the top from a HN comment briefly
touches on why I went back to college.

I just graduated at 41 years old. There's not a clean, easy single reason why.
But it involves some bits of pride and shame. I'm the oldest of all the
grandkids in the extended family and had been the only one who hadn't earned a
degree. Lost one of my grandmas a few years ago and I wanted to make sure my
other one could see me get there. Also I wanted to do it just to prove to
myself I could finish something I started over 20 years ago.

Money ain't everything.

~~~
SixSigma
That's like my story. I dropped out of CS degree and spent 20 years working on
some great self motivated projects, I've had CGI videos on Mtv including one
for a #1 charted band (not the song I did), taken a company from $250k
turnover paper based business to $1m+ by computerising, started an ISP.

But when I reflect: "no degree" always rankled, especially when I was hanging
out with MIT grads at conferences. It definitely opened doors to them that
were closed to me. I have heard "I could get you a semester of research in my
lab if you had a degree".

So here I am at 46 doing a BSc and am lining up my doctorate. Dr SixSigma has
a good ring to it.

------
tsotha
While what he says is true, if you're taking on a lot of debt you _have_ to
consider whether you're going to be able to pay it off and how long that will
take.

"How much can I expect to make after graduation" was something people always
considered, but the recent steep rise in tuition has made it more of an
overriding question.

~~~
learc83
They have an income based repayment plan where if you borrow over a certain
amount you only have to pay 10% of your discretionary income (Income - 1.5 *
Federal poverty level) for 20 years.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That's quite a burden, right up there with a mortgage. Back in the day I paid
off my student loan debt in 3 years, then my wife's in one more year. And we
went to Stanford. Things have gotten way out of whack.

~~~
learc83
>That's quite a burden, right up there with a mortgage.

That's nowhere near a mortgage at the income levels where it makes sense. If
you're stuck in a crappy job making $30k a year and you're single, it's about
$100 a month.

If you're making $60k and you're single, you could definitely pay off the
average $30k loan in 3 or 4 years (assuming you live somewhere where 60k is a
decent income).

And If you're making $60k and you have a family of 3, you're payments are
going to be about $250 per month.

Obviously the cost of college has gone up a good bit. Mainly due to an
increase in the number and cost of administrators and a decrease in state
funding.

However, it hasn't gone up nearly as much as it seems when you realize that
most people aren't paying the sticker price after you factor in federal
grants, state scholarships, and university scholarships.

>And we went to Stanford

Right now if you go to Stanford and your parents make less than $65k a year,
you get a waiver for tuition and room and board. They also waive tuition for
students whose parents make less than $125k a year.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
If you're making 30K you don't have a mortgage. 100$ a month for life is a
significant fraction of your disposable income, and it never ends. ITs very
much like a mortgage.

Anyway, folks aren't bellyaching about $100 a month. Student loans are costing
millions of Americans many times that for 20 years.

~~~
learc83
>If you're making 30K you don't have a mortgage.

True, but that's probably the case regardless of whether you have a $100 a
month student loan payment.

> 100$ a month for life is a significant fraction of your disposable income,
> and it never ends.

It's not for life. If you haven't paid it off in 20 years, the rest is
forgiven.

>Anyway, folks aren't bellyaching about $100 a month. Student loans are
costing millions of Americans many times that for 20 years.

The income plan is for people on the lower side of the income scale. The
standard plan is only 10 years. If you can afford that, you'll be done in 10
years.

If you can't afford that, it's unlikely that you'll pay "many" times $100 a
month for 20 years because what you pay is directly proportional to your
income. And anyway, $100 a month for someone making $30k a year is basically
an equivalent burden to $350 for someone making $60k.

Sure there are exceptions--people who took out enormous sums of money to live
on campus at an out of state school. The solution is to got to either go to a
state school and don't live on campus, get scholarships, or go to a school
with a large enough endowment to waive most of the cost.

------
StillBored
Frankly, I think 15 years out from school the most important thing I got was
the 1 line on my resume that says `BS Computer Engineering`. Everything else I
either have forgotten because it wasn't applicable to my daily life, or was
basic enough that a few months in the "real world" would have either taught it
to me, or I have since moved far beyond.

But, that one line keeps the door open when I need to look for jobs. I have an
ex-coworker with similar skills, experience, etc. And when looking for
positions I get about 2x-3x as many callbacks as he does. HR departments seem
to throw his resume away, and the only thing we can think is that it must be
the lack of degree.

~~~
louthy
You have the raw end of the deal, not him. If an HR person can't make a
judgement on whether a candidate is good or not other than by their
qualifications (or they're actively marking the individual down when they have
the experience but not the piece of paper), then the chances of the other
employees at the company being chosen poorly is high.

If he got no interviews whatsoever, then it'd be a cause for concern. But it
seems to me he's got a more optimal list of possible future employers.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not quite fair. HR people have a huge number of applicants. They need
something to winnow down the field. They could choose white males, or blue-
eyed females, or athletes, or anything really. And still have a pretty good
cross-section of candidates, some with skills.

So they choose college degree, for (somewhat) defensible reasons. And they
interview those that pass the filter, and choose 'good fits'. Which is what
they'd have done if they had used any filter at all.

------
joelgrus
I personally never had the motivation to work hard in college. I always
assumed this was a personal flaw. Years later, after I'd completed a large
number of Coursera courses, I realized it was because college was _boring_.

(edited to add) I should also note that the Coursera lectures themselves were
pretty boring -- the innovation is that they provided slides and lecture notes
so that I didn't have to sit through the lectures.

~~~
bphogan
No, college isn't boring. Lectures are boring. And they're boring because they
can't rely on students to read the textbook so they have to tell you what's in
the textbook.

The best teachers don't lecture. They facilitate discussion or present a
problem and give you feedback while you work through it. You watch some videos
outside of class and you come to class to be assessed.

But that's hard work. Lecturing for an hour 3 times a week and giving a
bubble-sheet test is easy for the teacher, and easy for the student.

~~~
nightski
Well, the other problem is similar to all schools. Students are at varying
levels of competence. I finished many labs in 10 minutes which took the other
students a full hour and a half simply because I already knew Java/C inside
and out. Same with lectures where I was already familiar with the material.

~~~
bphogan
The question is why were you in the class if you already knew the material?
People like you should be able to get credit for what you already know if you
can demonstrate it.

Unless of course you're just looking for a GPA and need the easy grade.

If the school just made you sit there because reasons, well, yes, that's a
huge problem. A problem which is being rectified all over the US.

~~~
nightski
I actually did skip several math classes (calc 1/2) by taking exams. There was
a limit to how much you could skip though as they wanted you to earn the
degree.

------
rdudekul
Author is making biased observations, probably based on his experience.
Parental pressure, peer pressure, shame are all wrong reasons for going to
college to get a degree. The lectures I watched on Khan Academy, Coursera or
EdX beat almost all lectures I attended at college. For me there isn't a "big
difference between watching a video online and actually being there". Many
times I learned more from watching Youtube videos than attending lectures at
universities/colleges. Hands-on learning courses on codecademy or codeschool
are much better than in-person corporate trainings I attended, that companies
I worked with spent thousands of dollars on.

~~~
tjl
Most of the Coursera and EdX lectures are actually college lectures, just put
online.

I know as a TA, it can be hard to answer some questions via e-mail, so I'm
assuming it would be difficult to do in a web forum as well. I once spent
several e-mails trying to explain something to a student and after failing,
asked them to come to my office and explained it in five minutes in a way they
understood. So, while there might not be the difference for a lecture, it's
the things around the course that can make the experience better.

I know Khan Academy has some problems (at least in the past) with some of its
material. One example is discussed in,

[http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/12/khan/](http://www.leancrew.com/all-
this/2012/12/khan/)

I can verify what he's saying is correct as I used to be involved in teaching
the same material.

I first learnt C++ in an in-person corporate training session and it was
excellent. I think it all depends.

------
mkbrody
As someone who dropped out of college and had to cope with the consequences, I
often think if college is worth it for the typical use-case in HN discussions:
an ambitious & hard-working American citizen < 24.

While there's plenty of edge-cases in that definition (esp. the orders of
magnitude over-represented college dropout billionaire), indubitably I think
it is worth it for the vast majority of people for these two reasons:

1) The majority of society (aka the people who work in HR) still thinks it's
important. Being the guinea pig (or crusader) isn't fun. While people like
Peter Thiel, who graduated from Stanford 2x, pontificate about the
outdatedness of education, note that before becoming a billionaire he
leveraged his education to earn serious money and experience in respected
careers that unanimously goto college graduates: finance & law. This gave him
the financial foundation & creditability to invest in Max Levchin and
ultimately run PayPal.

The same opportunities are not offered in our society to people who graduate
from top 10 universities vs drop out from the average American university. The
latter will have to prove themselves 5x more to compete for the same
opportunities - whether it is jobs, capital, co-founders, or even dating.
Theres nearly no statistically likely argument where dropping out leads to
better outcomes for the typical HN user over the long run across almost any
metric.

2) Wait till you want to change careers or move into senior management to earn
more money. Want an MBA so you can double your salary for the next 25 years?
Want to become a teacher or a professor? How about a lawyer. Great, now take a
bunch of classes with 18 y.o. know-it-alls and earn zero money for 4 extra
years of undergrad tacked onto grad school when your opportunity cost is
literally $500k (just for undergrad).

I fought the good fight, and the lesson is it's generals and politicians who
win wars, not soldiers.

------
xacaxulu
And in many cases, it isn't even a means to a higher salary. Often it's a
means to a lifetime of debt.

------
bphogan
This article focuses a lot on lectures.

And lectures are dying. Modern teaching methods are trying to phase them out,
as the Internet is really good at giving you information. The educator's role
is now a facilitator.

"Guide on the side, not sage on the stage", or so it's been said.

And that's how it has to be - that's the only way a college can compete.
Because the online lectures you see are just captures of regular lectures. You
don't need to go somewhere and pay money to watch someone talk.

The value the professor adds is in assessing your work. And if classtime can
be used to do that, or classtime can be used to let you practice, then there's
the advantage.

------
smokeyj
Diamonds maintain their value thru strict control of the supply enabling them
to serve as a symbol of status. Processes that threaten the control of
artificial scarcity represent an existential threat to the value of the
diamond industry and diamond holders. Draw parallels at your own will.

------
adrianscott
It's not a binary decision of college or "no-college"... It's a matter of
considering the "space" of portfolios of other experiences you could assemble
for potentially greater value (including non-financial value) at lower
expense.

------
sonabinu
How much are you willing to push yourself? Will you try multiple ways of
solving something till you really understand it? Motivation is key. Some find
it years after college, some find it while in college. Some find it without
any college!

