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?
> "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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
I got an offer from a famous SV company and I went to a mediocre public university.
I don't have ten years of experience, and I don't think I'm particularly exceptional. I think you're just being more pessimistic than is warranted. SV is definitely not a perfect meritocracy but it's not exactly France circa 1788 either.
My buddy Tom and I went to the same college at the same time. I graduated; he didn't. We've worked at 7 different companies together over 20 years, at essentially the same level. Sometimes I get hired and get him in; sometimes the opposite.
But I have to admit my graduate credentials get me the interview sometimes, and that's what gets us in. So not having a college degree can be a bar to entry. A very real problem.
The question should also be asked, "Or is it a Keynesian beauty contest?"
Or my preferred theory, which is that you have to put up with a lot of bullshit in order to get a degree, and you also want to hire employees that can put up with a lot of bullshit in order to get necessary work done. The kind of smooth-talking folks who can convince you to hire them without a degree might be naturally suited to sales... which is one of the few fields where you don't need the degree anyway.
"tying yourself down in heavy debt for most of your working life"
Considering the typical adult entering the workforce today is going to have a career on the order of 40-50 years until retirement I don't think the typical 10 year repayment period of a typical college loan qualifies as 'most' of your working life.
Agree. There was this great demotivational poster that summed up my belief. Where is it...ah:
http://despair.com/collections/demotivators/products/motivat...
MOTIVATION: If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.
My motivation comes from a wellspring of desire to know. Desire to master. If someone needs another human to be that source of motivation, then they are already doomed. Degree or not.
Sometimes I worry a tiny bit that if we manage to pin down the exact lifetime dollar value of college to $X, the market will happily adjust the price of college to ($X-1)
"Sometimes I worry a tiny bit that if we manage to pin down the exact lifetime dollar value of college to $X, the market will happily adjust the price of college to ($X-1)"
I don't know if the debt load is all that heavy with student loans. 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.
If you are stuck with a crappy low paying job, that means that your only paying 10% of any income over about $18k (for a single person).
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.
>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.
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.
> I remember reading studies done recently that found out that students are more stressed out than people locked up in prison.
I'm curious which prisons were used in the study. High security? White collar? Food and shelter are provided for inmates. Students, on the other hand, have to make tuition payments, rent payments, figure out where every meal is coming from, work in groups for grades, deal with exams, ever changing project requirements, etc.
> College partially helped dictate the direction but why should I be paying 100,000 grands for just directions ?
In general, I agree with your sentiment: the best learning is done when you aren't being pressured by anyone other than yourself to do it, and at this point the sticker price for college is well out of wack of any value it could provide to students who aren't able to use the credential it provides to line up a high paying job or who aren't coming from very well off families.
I do think, however, that there are things that it is hard to teach yourself, and that a college or college-like situation (i.e. where you have a few months to study a small set of subjects without regards to your immediate output and in the presence of other people who are studying those subjects) is probably going to be the best or only environment for providing.
The first thing that I think it's very hard to teach yourself is how to approach problems in a field at a high level. For instance: I doubt I would have been able to get myself to my current proficiency (roughly 'beginning phd student') in mathematical proofs without a lot of work with a professor and graders. The material gets to a point where it becomes too hard to approach with your current mental toolbox, and I found that I usually needed some guidance if I was going to get myself to the next 'level' persay.
The other thing that I found valuable and think is hard to find outside of a college was learning what problems fields other than your own find interesting, and how they approach those problems. I found that some of the most valuable experiences for me in college were taking upper level courses in subjects I didn't have a lot of experience in, particularly when those courses largely consisted of reading papers/books that were aimed at other scholars in that field, with a professor giving us context to the conversation that those papers and books were part of and a classwide discussion of the ideas presented. What I got out of those courses was an understanding of how ideas developed and what tools fields would draw on and apply to supporting or refuting those ideas. That was incredibly valuable to me because each course like that which I took gave me an entirely new toolbox for looking at the world and what's in it. (Sometimes I also wasn't super fond of that toolbox, and that was also enlightening.) This approach to learning wasn't confined to the soft sciences/humanities, either, although it seems to kick in sooner in those fields: graduate computer science and math seminars use an almost identical model.
I think both of these can largely be categorized by "it's hard to teach yourself how to think."
I think the first example is something where I at least needed the help of an instructor and grader to really grok it. It's things like that which I think you need some sort of college setting to really truly learn.
The second could maybe be moved to online courses, and I know some OCW materials have that kind of feel to them (particularly for graduate courses) but I think it would require a different approach to the courses. Online courses often seem to focus on imparting the material, rather than about teaching about the process of how the material came to be. The courses involved a certain amount of discussion that was (sometimes) just as valuable as the actual reading and surrounding clarification that I don't think you'd get at all with most of the current iterations online courses.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 $125k a year.
If you're making 30K you don't have a mortgage. 100$ 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.
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.
If you're stuck in a crappy job making $30k a year and you're single, that works out to about $100 a month--many people pay that much for their cell phone bill. I don't think that's particularly burdensome.
If on the other hand you make you get a better paying job making $60k your payment will be about $350 a month, and you'll pay off the average student loan debt (close to $30k) in about 10 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a good point. I couldn't stand the lectures in the few edX courses I took, but the slides and notes could be more beneficial. Although, I tend to prefer the better continuity of books when reading, and there are tons of great books out there. Of course, getting through books takes a lot of intrinsic motivation while Coursera or edX courses may provide the extra motivation that will help more people get through the whole course.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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?