> Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".
"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.
And there's also real value in the ability to polish a piece of writing (for technical people) or a cursory understanding of the technical work that goes into the product (for business/marketing people).
Edit: In general, conflating students with customers leads to messed up conclusions and backwards priorities.
>"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.
So then it is possible to learn about your ignorance without college?
Edit: more broadly, I don't think it's wrong to say "college teaches you what you don't know!", but it is misleading. Life teaches you unknown unknowns.
The structure of a university is not uniquely suited for teach you that; its comparative advantage lies in teaching knowledge that you just can't learn in practice because because of the theoretical background needed to piece together the big picture. That's not the same thing as unknown unknowns, and to whatever extent it teaches those is not because it's uniquely optimal to teach them.
Of course. In another thread I called this the Einstein fallacy, and in pervades discussions of higher education in the US.
It's far more likely that you'll know what you don't know (and how to learn it) if you invest two years of time learning enough about other fields to know where you need to consult an expert.
(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying? I'm willing to bet many of those people both had college degrees and also "wasted" a hell of a lot more VC capital than the cost of a degree. College is not a panacea for unknown unknowns (it's not a panacea for anything), but those are illustrative examples of how not knowing something can cost a tremendous amount of money and opportunity.)
edit re your edit: I don't think the value of depth in a technical area is really up for debate (except for maybe in CS where some people seem to think there's nothing more to software engineering than low-throughput CRUD apps). Even the article concedes that point. The question is whether the rest of college is useful. We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.
>(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying
It was a case of people learning unknown unknowns outside of college.
>We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.
I didn't say that it's a bad mechanism, just that it's not especially better than the kind of learning your pick up in life normally (eg the startups you cited), without blowing $50k in opportunity costs per year.
"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.
And there's also real value in the ability to polish a piece of writing (for technical people) or a cursory understanding of the technical work that goes into the product (for business/marketing people).
Edit: In general, conflating students with customers leads to messed up conclusions and backwards priorities.