
Is College Obsolete? - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/04/is-college-obsolete.html
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ajdecon
Is it just me, or does a "college is obsolete/failing/just plain sucks"
article hit HN about once every week or two? And most tend to assume the
target industry will be IT or web-based, ignoring fields like engineering or
non-computer science where it's much more difficult to do online-only
learning.

This instance of the college rant does make one interesting point about online
interconnectedness as a useful way to bypass credentials. References and
personal connections are certainly becoming more important as connectedness is
easier to achieve online, and small professional communities become more
tight-knit. I'm not sure how much effect this will have on credentials, but I
do think it will dilute the networking advantage of highly ranked schools.

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sbt
I've noticed this too. Along with the everlasting nature/nurture debates. I
think there are two reasons why people on HN (myself included) like pulling
higher education into question.

1\. People in CS realize that the field is changing rapidly and that their 50
year old professors are somewhat losing touch. This contributes to the feeling
that one could just as well work and autodidact.

2\. People in CS are notoriously bullshit averse and realize that higher
education is riddled with social prestige and research projects that are of
little value but sound sophisticated.

I would be interested in what others think of these two points. Thanks.

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ajdecon
I can see some merit in those points, but mostly only because computer science
as an academic field and the jobs real-world CS majors do are fairly
disconnected at the moment. Most of the "50 year old professors" I've met are
nowhere near losing touch with the bedrocks of "computer science": information
theory, computation and algorithms, etc. But they probably don't know much
about the rapidly-changing landscape of Internet technology, and there are
good arguments in either direction whether they should.

I know people who've gone the autodidact route in CS and they do just fine,
but I do notice it leads to a particular kind of snobbery _against_ higher
education because they learned everything online, so why can't everyone?
Trouble is, a fairly high fraction of human activities don't lend themselves
to that kind of learning. And some of them, like green energy technologies,
are even the kinds of things some startups want to get involved in. Higher ed
becomes pretty damn necessary in these cases.

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cnlwsu
"71% of college graduates are unable to read proficiently"

huh? according to the link they cite: <http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/kf_dem_edu.asp>
looks like college graduates are amongst the best.

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slpsys
He also changed the link (while I was writing a comment). It now points to the
general NAAL site, instead of that graph, so that you'd have to dig through a
wad of information before discovering the link doesn't back up his claim.
Bunk.

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hack_edu
This, coming from a blog titled Six Month MBA...

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mattmcknight
The fact that people use colleges as a source of credentialism doesn't
actually change the structure of classes themselves. So, to claim that
colleges are obsolete because of the futility of using the knowledge of which
one a person graduated from as a shortcut for actually assessing their value
to your enterprise isn't effective...well, that just doesn't make follow.
Maybe credentialism is practiced too much, but surely there is more to college
than that. A well structured school will ensure that you learn something in
the process of achieving that credential.

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aswanson
Not sure, but this meme has certainly entered senescence.

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verdant
Is a college degree an absolute indicator for expertise? Of course not. But a
college degree is hardly going to be made obsolete by the internet. Networking
has always been an important part of getting a job, perhaps more important
than any other one factor. The internet can certainly help networking. But I
don't believe you can equate networking on the internet with having a degree.
The degree points out particular things about you to the potential employer
(that you can stick with and complete a degree program, for instance) and I
don't think that necessarily equates to "someone vouching for you"

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RK
Summarizing quote: "And they haven't just failed abstractly or in general.
They've failed me personally."

Interesting logic.

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tsally
I can't believe a user with over five thousand karma submitted this. What the
hell. Flag this garbage.

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dschobel
so now we've had the end of college, twitter, google, the free world, MBAs,
etc. etc. etc.

the blogosphere seems to be on an existential kick of late.

must be the bad economy.

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ruslan
College is amust! Dixi.

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sachmanb
no

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yummyfajitas
yes

[edit: just to win the inevitable continuation of this argument, yes infinity
+ 1!!!]

~~~
knieveltech
I voted this up because it's no more useless than the comment it's responding
to which isn't getting voted down.

