The reality of education in America is that it's an expensive tickbox. It verges on being a racket. While you don't want to be the lone rebel being crushed under the wheels of the machine, if you can avoid becoming indentured to the government with a student loan then do yourself a favour and choose not to waste money on education you can just teach yourself.

This is a dangerous thing to say without any qualifiers. It depends on the industry, economic conditions in your area, type/size of company you want to work for, etc.

I've known a couple individuals who had the skills and 20+ years of experience who lost jobs at floundering companies and weren't able to find anything relevant due to a lack of a degree. In both cases, they had a few interviews that were basically "Wow, you're a great fit experience-wise and it like you've worked with the same technologies/processes we use here and some we're hoping to go to. Oh, except we can't hire you for an engineering role unless you have at least a BS. Would you be interested in an hourly maintenance job?"

Although sometimes there are legal requirements. Like a lawyer in a law firm, don't know how it is in the US (probably the same) but here there's no way you can practice law and represent someone in a court without a master's legal degree. And starting your own firm requires a degree above that. Although you can start a legal advisory firm without it.

I appreciate you may still think that legal requirement is madness but I can imagine there are some jobs where you want a government to accredit a university's degree, as a form of consumer protection and regulation. For example say a doctor, or a financial advisor, you may want to have 'audited' and given some level of quality assurance, which is essentially what government-accredited degrees aim to prove.

What would be madness is if that same government did not try to accommodate for people with degree-equivalent experience to get their experiences accredited with a formal degree at no-cost or low-cost. For example if you're a self-taught engineer who, due to work experience, could actually finish engineering courses without going to any classes because of self-education, then you ought to be able to (after demonstrating said experience) pay for the mere administrative cost of examination (i.e. $50 per exam) and take all examinations in a year for less than $1k and get your degree. Without spending years, going to classes, and paying tens of thousands for teaching you don't need and won't make use of.

This isn't always easy but separating examination from teaching in schools is something I think we haven't explored enough. You can do a GED or GMAT without enrolling in any classes, and just taking exams, and if self-taught or skilled by experience somehow, then the test is just an accreditation of your skills. Yet we don't have equivalents for advanced degrees. It's not easy to set this up of course, but I think we ought to try more. Although for legal professions it exist, the bar exam afaik doesn't require you to ever have gone to law school, if you happen to be able to take it due to e.g. working in a legal office and somehow picking up everything in an assistant role.

I graduated with under $30K in debt from a state school (with a number of merit scholarships and some but not extensive parental help) and paid it off my second year out of college. One need not take on heavy debt (don't you love the rhetorical phrasing, though? Indentured!) to go to college, and I tend to think that self-styled autodidacts discount the social rounding and educational breadth available at any good university.

If you're going to be indentured, then at least indenture yourself for an engineering degree. $30k isn't hard to pay off within a year or two of full time employment, and even $100k-$150k in debt isn't infeasible to pay off in a short amount of time (shorter than it took to accumulate) if your degree qualifies you for a well-paying low-stress engineering position at BigCo.

Do you think that your assertion about not taking on heavy debt will remain true? Debt continues to rise, as does the cost of tuition. If more students seek out the cheaper state schools, or the cheaper community colleges beforehand, the cheaper state schools are going to raise their prices to deal with the increase in load.

$100k-150k is an extreme outlier from people who made the extraordinarily poor decision to attend expensive schools which weren't prestigious enough to provide adequate financial aid.

Now imagine he has to go to university full time (the fact full-time is rarely upheld says something about the economic difficulty of spending full-time on school). That means you spend all your disposable non-leisure time on school, either going to class or doing readings, homework, research. In other words: not employed.

That means right off the bat for a 4 year university you're spending $48k, while your income is 0. In other words the mere opportunity cost of a 4 year university instead of working full-time, is nearly $50k.

Then add to that the average tuition annually is $9k at a public local university. (private avg is 3x that, and out of state is 2x that. So the $9k figure is below average, basically the average of the cheapest option). Even with a 50% scholarship you're still looking at roughly $20k in tuition for the 4 years. Then add some for books and such, but whatever let's make it $20k. You're now at $70k.

Now imagine that the average student loan interest rate is around 5%, on the average of $70k for 4 years. And then consider that $1k living expenses is relatively low, and $9k tuition isn't atypical.

So we're now getting close to $80k without the rounding errors and we're not living any amazing lifestyle here at $1k a month in living expenses to pay for rent, insurance, food etc, on a 50% scholarship.

The fact that studying full-time actually entails for most people spending part-time on school, and part-time on work, to offset this financial picture a bit, says something about the economic feasibility of simply dedicating years of time to nothing but study. But even then with a part time job making a few hundred bucks (e.g. $10 an hour flipping burgers 2 full days out of 5 working days a week gets you to $160 a week pre-tax extra), a lot of that goes straight into a modest fun lifestyle above your $12k a year expenses, like a spring break, a college trip, or a semester abroad.

Anyway I don't mean to say that $80k is typical, as you said it's much lower, the average nowadays is actually $35k, nothing close to $80k let alone $100-150k. But I think it's important to appreciate that it's just $35k because of concessions, which means for example not going for certain studies cause it'll be way above the average (e.g. medicine at $100k+), or not dedicating yourself to education because you need to spend 2 full days working part-time besides your studies (some of which you simply have to put in the numbers or you'll certainly fail) while not burning out doing this for years in a row.

So I do believe the $35k figure may diminish that the financial burden of college is a lot harder than the number indicates on face value. To exaggerate what I mean with an analogy it's a bit like observing an extremely dangerous area and seeing very little crime and concluding 'the crime rate is low', when underneath it may hide the fact that people stopped going outside, that the city became unliveable because of this and that there's actually huge problem. In the same way I'm seeing in my own environment many of my peers spend more time working than studying, while enrolled, still graduate with tens of thousands in debt, just for the piece of paper but without having had the ability to fully dedicate multiple years to their craft. This obviously isn't the outcome we want, and represents a huge waste.

Are you in software now? if so, how'd you roll into that? Thanks for sharing :)

In actuality, I think even that statistic s overstated because it's the average debt of students with debt when 3/10 students graduate debt-free. Taking into account those with a debt of $0, the actual average debt is closer to $20k.

> This obviously isn't the outcome we want, and represents a huge waste.

Speak for yourself. I personally think it's entirely reasonable that people should work at least part-time to pay for their education and it's been happening for generations. I've personally worked full-time for most of university and definitely think it has enriched my education a lot more than joining some silly clubs or a sports team.

And I wouldn't dismiss "silly clubs" or sports teams in terms of turning out well-rounded individuals, which is the entire point of a university to begin with.

Didn't you? I thought I made it clear in my post. My post wasn't about the level of debt (as I referenced in the post, it's $35k for 2015), it's about the financial burden of studying, which may look not so significant when you see $35k debt, but hides the notion that it's because college students do more than we expect of them.

For example, where I live we have 36 weeks of college. (I've read in the US it varies, but can be 30 weeks, e.g. when you have semesters of 15, or trimesters of 10 weeks). But let's say 36. Also we have 1800 hours of studyload here (i.e. european study credits are valid and recognised everywhere in the EU, and they're about 30 hours of studyload each, and you need 60 per academic term, or 1800 hours).

So now we're looking at 1800 / 36, or 50 hours dedicated to education per week. That's how our education is planned and designed. Again it doesn't mean students practically put in that time, but that's the design, which means if they do less than that, then there are consequences.

Then you add the fact that there is variation among studies, some are easy and you can get away with spending less than that without affecting your learning, some end up harder than average (often the studies we want to steer people to) and can require more than that base level figure of 50 hours.

Then consider you need to work 2 or 3 days extra part-time, and we're looking at a ridiculous burden on students. And you still end up with tens of thousands in debt, going up by $150 every month due to interest alone, on average.

And that, I'd think, has consequences, and I already mentioned that I see and saw this among my peers. I saw people who spent more time working than studying. I saw people pick easy majors so that they could get a degree without having to dedicate more than normally considered full-time on just studying, and then work besides it. I saw people simply choose not to study. And all of these things likely reduce the debt figure to $35k. i.e. I think if we made university 100 times more expensive, the debt figure wouldn't change radically, not even by 10x, because people change their choices.

And yes I do think the things I mentioned above are a waste. I'm not saying working a job is a waste per se, you're misunderstanding. I'm saying spending more time working than studying (not in an office by the way, we're talking about a cafe or nightclub for most students where I live), choosing an easy major, not studying because by design your studies require you to spend 50 hours, and you can't manage that while also working). That's a waste.

And then it pays off to do a bottom-up analysis, the costs and opportunity costs of studying are $80k on a 50% scholarship? And people end up with just $35k debt? Then you can wonder how that affected their studies, if they needed support from parents etc.

> I personally think it's entirely reasonable that people should work at least part-time to pay for their education and it's been happening for generations

Oh to some extent I think it's reasonable. I think you'll also agree with me to some extent the work-next-to-study we require of some isn't reasonable, and that for some it is a waste, for some it does negatively affect their education, for some it does create burn outs and depressions and suicide, for some it does prohibit them from studying all together, and that the $35k figure makes it look as if student financial burdens aren't all that bad, more than it should. That's my point and I think we can agree on that as much as I agree with your point that some part time work is reasonable, and can often be very beneficial.

Yes, you learn to use words like "autodidact" instead of "self-taught."

Some feel this helps them to stay "well practiced" at going through recruitment/interviewing, gives them a good reason to keep their résumé up to date, expands their professional network, gives the potential confidence-boost of being offered a position then declining it, and so forth.

I've also noticed as I start working with people who have their Masters and some with PHDs that people take me seriously. It's like... I must know what I'm talking about. How else would I still be here?

I don't even bother applying to companies that do that anymore as it's counter to my whole "make a personal connection at the company to apply" philosophy.

If you're actively involved in doing this stuff you're going to be able to find the work you want. It's easy. You just contact the people working on it and tell them what you're going to do for them.

And on a certain level I think there's definitely a spite involved here. I know that going will permanently invalidate me from attributing my success to anything else, and it will help empower these institutions to keep intruding into lives and charging people outrageous fees through what is essentially a collectively enforced racket. Going will be existentially painful, so I'm avoiding it for as long as possible.

So, basically, what I'm saying is that on the one hand working in industry will give you important skills that are hard to learn anywhere else. You need to learn to read and write code, and you have to learn idiomatic ways of programming, and you have to do a lot of it. You need to learn how to work with others and how to effectively prioritise work. You can't learn this at school. On the other hand, you will be in an environment which may stunt your growth because it is often dominated by people who think that being able to write code is the only valuable thing a programmer needs.

School is an academic environment with (hopefully!) a focus on academic goals. You will need these things to claw your way beyond the mediocrity that pervades our industry. It's not that you can't learn it anywhere else, but it is often hard to understand what is important and what isn't unless you can surround yourself with people who have an academic focus.

I would gouge my eyes out before I would go back to school again, but I am very grateful that I did go. I encourage you to either go to school or devote yourself to finding alternative means of learning all of the academic things you will need. Doing it by yourself is much more difficult, but by no means impossible.

Definitely part of the roadmap. The sort of person you described here:

>The number of times I've run across people who said things like, "Statistics is a complete waste of time", and then "benchmarked" their app by running it once...

Bugs me immensely. One of the barriers I've had trouble piercing, and that wouldn't really go away in a more traditional academic context is how to learn the 'language' of math used in academic computer science papers.

Interesting that you say that. I taught English for 5 years in Japan (without an education degree, so I suppose it's kind of related to the conversation ;-) ). I did a considerable amount of study on language acquisition. Although I find the research "sketchy", the work of Stephen Krashen is very compelling. I tried to apply the principles in my classroom and in my own acquisition of Japanese. I found it to be quite enlightening. (Fair warning: Krashen's work has a following that pretty much thinks "This is the way it is -- for sure!" and are trying to prove it. On the other side are people who think he's definitely wrong. As in many fields of psychology, it is hard to build good studies, so people mostly shout at each other ;-) ).

Anyway, if you are interested, take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

In a nutshell: There are 2 types of learning: learning and acquisition. Learning is about remembering stuff. Acquisition is about being able to use stuff without really thinking about it (i.e. it comes unbidden to your mind when you see a reference).

A good example of the difference is reading. Take a look at an English word:

Apple

When you read it, what came to your mind? What thought process did you follow to get there. Now if I told you that in Japanese sakana=fish, inu=dog, ringo=apple and then write:

Inu Sakana Ringo

How does your thought process change? Now go back and look at the English word I wrote earlier, but this time try not to remember what it means. Can you look at the word and not read it? How difficult is it? Now look at the Japanese words and try not to remember what they mean. Can you notice a difference?

I hope you can. That difference is the difference between acquisition and learning. With English, the meaning comes unbidden to your mind. With Japanese, you have to actively try to associate the word in your brain with the reading -- even if you can remember that meaning already.

Being able to look at something and instantly recognise it, or to have it spring to your mind automatically when you want to use it requires acquisition. So when you speak English, you don't sit and plan the grammar of the sentences that you want to say. You have a thought and the English just shows up in your brain. In fact, it shows up so conveniently that you can actually use it as part of your thought process (i.e. thinking in English). When you get fluent in another language you can do the same in that language.

Finally, I get to the punchline. I have been told by some people that mathematics works the same way for people who are fluent in it. It's just another language and they can think in math because they have acquired it.

How do you acquire a language? That's the $64,000 question. According to Krashen, acquisition is a function of input that you can understand. Output seems to be unnecessary (although, personally I find it helpful even if it is unnecessary).

It's a difficult topic and I've already typed too much, but if you would like to try something, this is what I did for learning Japanese. Do not memorise vocabulary or grammar. Do not try to reason the whys and wherefors of the system. Instead memorise exemplars of the language. Just an example sentence for things you come across that you don't know. Make a flashcard (spaced repetition software is useful: http://ankisrs.net/). Read appropriate level material and keep making/memorising cards for anything you don't know.

The memorisation builds a fast lookup table that allows you to work out your own comprehensible input. Then by reading, reading, reading, reading, you get lots of comprehensible input. Finally you can test whether or not you have acquired the input by trying to produce output.

Hopefully this will help you with your math.

Not particularly, thank you though that was interesting for orthogonal reasons. I already knew the role of memorization in language acquisition and have actually seen quite a bit of that advice on HN prior. (As a further point of evidence for the importance of memory in cognition, notice that Jon Von Neumann had an eidetic memory. I suspect that being able to wholly memorize something at first glance would assist massively with being superintelligent.)

The problem is finding clear examples of what things mean in the first place, or understanding symbols. Mathematics has no standard language of description, and like a natural language it is highly context based. From an outside perspective it is difficult to figure out what is an established concept I should go read more about and what is being introduced as part of the problem for this specific local context.

Moreover there is strictly less mathematics text involved than there is English text, so the training corpus is smaller.

FWIW, I went to university in a large city outside of the US and basically never went to class, worked in a research lab the whole time, and spent a lot of time partying. Still, it was a stressful time and I have a lot of regrets, but I can't blame the environment ... I chose to live the way that I did. Ultimately my life isn't so different now than it was then except I make more money and I figured out the stress thing.

Other people go to tightly knit schools in small towns that provide a comprehensive 'experience,' or play sports and hang out in frat houses. Perhaps this is what you think college is like for everyone. Trust me: it isn't. Choose what you think will work best for you (hint: location is the most important factor) and make it work.

I also believe University costs too much for many, and that textbooks are an outright scam.

I also believe a broad post-secondary education is a wonderful thing to have, and that if you can do undergrad full time (doing a real "job" as little as is required to supplement a beer/computer fund), you'll find that having your full time "job" being to learn new things and meet new people is an amazing gift. Throw in the opportunities of studying abroad (that I didn't take advantage of - do it in the first two years) and University is a great experience.

Sure, we can say taking a Film Study class is a waste of time, but I can tell you from experience that years later, you will look at things in film a little different than before. Would I have sat down on my own and studied film techniques, types of lighting, angles, etc...? Probably not. Does it apply to my career? Well, not directly, other than making the mind think about things a little different.

Without those CS classes forcing you to learn Binary Trees, Shortest Path, Circular Queue, Algorithmic Proofs, etc... how many would sit down on their own and learn them? Probably very few. Will it apply directly to a job? Maybe. It really depends on what type of job you have. Simply "programming" or "developing", then probably not. Engineering a system, then those Priority Queue's probably come in handy.

A lot of arguments settle on the basis that [1]University doesn't teach you anything you couldn't learn already, and/or [2]it doesn't teach job skills.

1) Of course it teaches things you could learn on your own... but would you? It's unlikely.

2) Of course it doesn't teach job skills, University is not a Trade School.

The big take away from University is that it's an experience that enriches your life. It's unlikely you will notice it immediately, but it will impact your life in a positive manner. University shows commitment, and accomplishment.

As a thought experiment, imagine the same college degree was available: 1) tuition free, with an additional $20,000 / year given to you for living expenses 2) tuition free, with no living expenses 3) at a tuition cost of $100,000 4) at a tuition cost of $1,000,000 5) at a tuition cost of $10,000,000 and so on

'What you get' in the degree would be the same in each case, but there come a point where 'what you pay' would be too high in relation to 'what you get'.

I've spent half my adult life living abroad and have met many people foreigners in many countries including the US who have gotten great visas without a college degree. And money isn't even the only way.

Becoming an expert at one's field is also a great route to a visa, and it pays a whole lot better than being just another person with a degree. For certain fields, a college degree is required and the gatekeepers are inflexible. For those in fields where success is more easily observable—sales, direct response marketing, entrepreneurship, novel writing, programming, pop music, etc—it's better to save the money and spend the time on actually mastering the craft and its business rather than on collecting credentials.

@eshvk: I know multiple foreign nationals without degrees who have held engineering or even engineering leadership positions at YC companies.

You may be either talking about an O visa case (or H1B with all kinds of evidence that the person has irreplaceable qualities, which is difficult on its own right, basically you need to prove that you are as worthy as college graduates). Neither of them are easy. Sometimes even if you are covered on The New York Times you don't make it.

Don't just throw these things online as if it's easy to do this just because you saw some YC company do it. If you look around there are tons of other much more talented but unfortunate people who couldn't make it and had to go back to their countries.

These types of misinformation literally hurt people who are not knowledgeable about the matter. I can sense you have no idea about this just based on how you write about it. Are you a foreigner who have gone through the US visa application process? If not, don't say it's easy.

- Most (all?) work visas in the United States require a degree in the field of specialization.

- The "buying green card" program requires one to invest at least a million dollars and create at least ten jobs for two years before you get one. [1]

[1] http://www.uscis.gov/eb-5

Without an degree you have to prove yourself harder for every single little thing (resume, visa, job applications, etc.).

Skipping a degree in CS is just making things harder for yourself. Best case scenario you'll just spend that 4 years working up your salary to what you would have had in the first place with a degree.

If the options are 4 years making okay money or 4 years likely accumulating debt, after which you're at the same income level either way, why would anyone in their right mind go to college?

I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, I just think that that's not the best way to highlight it. For example, college is quite useful for the connections and career placement assistance.

I can only speak to my experience, but most of my friends in college worked while they were in school, and eventually got decent paying internships their junior and senior years. I think most of us had to take out loans, but I know I was able to pay mine off less than 2 years out of school, and I think most people did. 4 years in school isn't necessarily accumulating a lot of debt. And it wouldn't surprise me if the person with the CS degree still enough extra money to account for student loans.

Of course that's assuming the person in question is pretty smart (and they better be if they're considering skipping college) and can get at least some kind of financial aid or scholarship money. It's also assuming they're not insisting on a big name school.

And besides, that really just deflects my point by saying "well it's not that much debt".

In IT in Australia, I've never had a problem with lack of degree, and I'm doing pretty well for myself - getting paid a decent amount of money in a place I love working in. I'm involved in a hiring process for new developers and I cannot remember the last time we've looked at or considered their educational background.

Wouldn't the best case scenario be more like founding Apple, MS or FB or becoming the president of YC?

For some, the opportunity cost of investing time/money into an education prevents them from learning more through some alternate means (i.e. starting your own company, apprenticeship with key individuals, etc.), and may lead to more economic success. Probably not true for the vast majority of people, but definitely true for some.

Unless your degree is in the hard sciences, we all know what college entailed; for most of us it was a four years of fun, and the worst day in college was better than working? Hell--I never wanted to leave!(That was before it got so expensive though.)

I sometimes over hear recent graduates in gossip groups(usually after a few cocktails) go on and on about their degree, and college accomplishments; If my upchuck reflex is not irritated--I listen a bit, and ask myself, "I couldn't imagine paying them to do anything?".

That said, if you can swing it; go to college, and I guarantee when you look back, it will be the best years of your life--for the majority of you. While I'm on it--don't let upper division classes scare you. I found them no harder than lower division courses. If for some reason you find yourself wanting to drop out, get a four year degree in anything! Anything! Go to a notoriously easy college like Santa Cruz, or Chico State and get your degree in Spacing Out?

Why, because too many of the idiots out there still think a bachelor's degree is important? Oh, and they love to quote that worn out statistic, that I can't even write anymore. I guess it's still true--so finish and get the diploma? I have a weird feeling federal bankruptcy laws might change in the future, and student loans might become dischargable?

One other thing, that person in college you kinda take for granted--that guy, or girl who you sometimes wonder, "Why do they put up with my antics?"; are not hanging out in bars waiting for you to graduate with open arms!

Personally I feel like this is misguided and probably triggered more around self-validation and feeling clever. (worry about scale when you need to, etc...)

However, they are looking for a very specific type of college graduate. Merely having a degree with a good GPA is insufficient for them. It must be a tier 1, name-brand institution.

Also, at that age you really don't know what you may want to do with your life. At 19 I seriously considered dropping out of college to go full-time at the startup I was working at. At 25 I decided I wanted to get into a different career entirely, one where a college degree was required (as is the case in pretty much every white collar profession besides programming).

I think this is a societal issue rather than an education issue.

We're so quick to encourage people to achieve a degree in whatever makes them happy, even say Art History or Medieval European History, knowing full well that the prospects of gaining a decent paying job after school is practically zero.

How does that Art History major repay a $30K student loan when they can realistically only get a $30K a year salaried job?

Should't we as a society encourage people to major in things that will pay off in the end? Or instead deny loans to degree programs that statistically are turning out far too many candidates for a very small field (leading to massive unemployment for that degree program)?

It'd stand to reason that you could make that much, if not more, than your friends because you have a technical degree. I know this is more about having a job than not, but the technical degree would also improve your chances vs. your friends

Yeah that's my point. The jobs those chose were open to (very talented people) who studied any degree - Computer Science, Theology, whatever. There are thousands of well-paying and very well-paying jobs that are similarly open to any degrees.

Thinking about it from a different angle, how does a CS major repay a $30k student loan if they were under pressure to choose a lucrative major, hated programming to the point of never getting good at it, and couldn't conjure up the motivation to compete with the kids who were in it for fun?

In addition, for a lot of kids, a technical major isn't an option because they don't have the math background.

Now, do they major in art history anyway? That's a whole 'nother ball o' wax.