It would have also helped if the article said what degree/how long it takes (BA, MA) and what the investment cost for the degree actually is (provide median or something). A typical BA takes 2 years and is in the ballpark of 50k$ on the lowish end (I heard that as a low end average for in-state public schools). Had I invested that fictional amount at 7.8% since universities are "free" here I'd have about 225k...yay

Do you mean 4 years? It's extremely rare for someone to get their Bachelor's in fewer than 4 years.

Unless otherwise specified, US publications tend to assume "college" = 4 year bachelor's degree.

[1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...

Yeah, not really. There is a huge difference between reading a book by yourself, and reading a book then discussing it with a room full of other intelligent people + a knowledgable teacher.

This whole "self-learning is just as good!" is ridiculous. If it was, it would already rule the world. People trust accreditation for a reason.

You have a PHD in drama? Good for you. I'd rather watch a high school drop out like Leonardo DiCaprio.

You have a PHD in computer graphics? That's nice, but once again a dropout beat you to it. He currently leads Oculus Rift.

Marketers? Salespeople? Businesspeople? Authors? Seriously... try to name even one at the very top of the game who became that way through formal schooling. It's not easy.

Sure, maybe the top 1% is self-taught (probably not, though, you're just selecting for your point). How about the next 15%?

The examples I gave should make it incredibly clear that people can and do learn enough to get to the top of their fields without going through a formal process. It doesn't mean that you will. It doesn't mean that there are no fields with rigid credential requirements. It does mean that no formal body controls education, only schooling and credentials.

>"Sure, maybe the top 1% is self-taught (probably not, though, you're just selecting for your point)."

Another thing to think about is that with or without credentials in their past, at the very top everybody is self-taught. No business school on earth can teach Zuckerberg exactly how to set Facebook's strategy. He's got to make his own curriculum.

I can google questions, I can read discussions that take place between other people, I can chime in, I can be replied to.

I would probably find it more useful to be able to read all the TOP QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS from all the Roman History 101 discussions around the world, than just whatever came up in my class. Being able to sort by global best as opposed to local loudest sounds very useful.

I think this is the same for other "liberal arts" subjects too. Take linguistics -- from what I know about some of the linguistics concepts that pioneer translation software, speech synthesis, natural language processing, etc., linguistics is hardly "fluff" and requires some years of deep study to be an expert at.

The Economist's monetary chart is solely based on supply vs. demand.

In many subjects, I think extremely gifted autodidacts are pretty rare. No matter whether its the STEM subjects or the arts or anything else, I think most people benefit from an environment where like minded peers can bounce ideas off of each other.

When I look at Wikipedia's list of autodidacts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts

I know this is just a sample, but at first glance, the list of autodidact scientists and engineers certainly seem to be of comparable size with artists / musicians / etc.

EDIT: I will add that I agree with other above posts, that one of the biggest barriers for the modern autodidact scientist / engineer is that it is really hard to home-tinker with certain concepts. You can program at home very easily. You can make circuits and robotics at home. You can even "group buy" small order electronic bare boards from contract manufacturers with all the difficult-to-hand-solder parts already taken care of.

It is nearly impossible, however, for a home tinkerer to get access to $100K scopes, electron microscopes, GCMS / NMR machines, or any other "big equipment" of this nature that you can think of. Heck, depending on what you are doing, you probably even risk a run in with "the law" these days from tinkering in certain sectors of hobbies like home chemistry or home biology.

To me, that's pretty much the barrier for non-college STEM in a nutshell.

A better example might be that philosophy/law require broad and deep contextual knowledge of prior thinkers and extremely strong logical skills. Even having trained in formal logic as a software developer, I sometimes struggle to parse philosophical arguments, even when laid out plainly. Yet, even that is still a comparison on the same plane as STEM when ultimately these fields come with different sorts of complexities. Apples and oranges.

It's not that the subjects are lightweight fluff, it's that the students are disproportionately so. STEM is fairly objective, so it's comparatively hard to hide your lack of depth.

But if you just want to go to college as a social signal, and a ticket to 4 years of parties, then arts and humanities will offer you a place of comfort. Not every professor for every class at every university; but at pretty much any university you can find some kind of lazy path through the arts/humanities departments.

There are a few reasons for this:

* Many professors / TAs use classes as a political platform first, and an education platform second. If you just tell them what they want to hear (a slightly avant garde kind of progressive liberalism will do the trick pretty much anywhere), you get an A or B.

* Based on the title of the course, huge mobs of lazy students will sign up assuming that it's easy (this is never a serious STEM class). The professor then adapts the grades so that a lot of them pass, because otherwise there will be a revolt.

* Universities like to provide "a path to success" for pretty much all of their students who are willing to put in even small amounts of effort. If they can't tell the difference between a concerto and a sonata, then the counselors can take them out of music theory, and put them in "post-modern ethno musical studies".

And humanities disciplines are quite dissimilar as are STEM disciplines. Philosophy is generally fairly rigorous and difficult, communication is often not except when it encompasses fields like journalism, etc.

I think the bar for mediocrity is much lower in the humanities, but the bar for top-notch excellence is much higher. When two students complete an exam correctly, they are both great students who wrote down the correct answers as instructed. When two students write papers, you can actually tell that one of them is genuinely brilliant.

From my experiences, the rest of the STEM field doesn't take the social science parts (psychology, athropology, economics, political science) very seriously or even consider them STEM on a colloquial level (even if "officially" they are).

Oh well. I guess colleges want money, and they will find a way to make their customers happy.

As a teenager in India, most people took Arts, Humanities and commerce(No economics, but accounting) because it was widely believed to 'light fluff', course work easy to get through. And you could get a 'Bachelors' title next your name without much work.

Among science people these subjects was what we believed losers took, because they couldn't study anything better. Which was to some extent true. I studied Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology. I would typically get to sleep 5 hours a day. Apart from the main exams, we had to study hard for engineering entrance exams. Compare this to some one who studied history or accounting. You can't exactly compete with someone working 3 times more harder than you, in a area which is vastly more economically valuable.

I'd also point out that if for the sake of argument that was your primary goal at college, college is a very cost-ineffective choice. There's plenty of non-college ways of doing that, for way less money, since it's something that business people have to do routinely. Even if it means taking languages courses from the local community college on the side... I'm not aware of much evidence that major colleges teach the courses all that much better or indeed even differently for languages.

Also, I think people are fundamentally missing the comparitive here. My claim is not that learning humanities is "easy". Nothing worth doing is easy. My contention is that it is easier to learn math, engineering, and science in school and study humanities on your own that to learn humanities in school and then try to break into math, engineering, and science on your own.

And as I watch the conversation flow here, bear in mind I do mean "math, engineering, and science" here and not just "programming". Which is easier to do on your own, learn Japanese from scratch enough to get a relevant job, or learn biochemistry from scratch enough to get a relevant job? (Note we're also discussing "learning Japanese" as an extreme in the humanities but I consider "biochemistry" an average sort of what I'm talking about.) And part of my "easier" also encompasses the fact that life is a lot easier when you have a job and a paycheck. Someone who actually has leisure time due to not working two-and-a-half jobs and who is much more relaxed about paying off their loans will find it easier to spend their leisure time learning things.

In the real world that's a completely wrong way to look at the purpose of life and education, but in the small minded narrow constraints of the article its actually "correct".

A side issue is outside bubble areas, every low paid service industry worker has a liberal arts degree and they guarantee the ROI of self taught foreign languages or liberal arts will be zero. A guy looking for employment who merely is a lifelong expert on Japanese will never get hired if the competition is ten baristas, bartenders, and real estate agents all with bachelors or masters or PHDs in Japanese Literature.

However, to argue that a young person of modest means should study the humanities is just cruel. If your family and connections aren't going to set you up as a company vice president or send you to the legislature, your job prospects are dismal.

You would be surprised how much you could learn on your own!

My case it was german. I was so fascinated with the german language, and germany as a whole, in part I must sadly admit because I was such an avid fan of WW2 history. I actually tried to go the traditional route, and I hated it. I noticed one time some germans playing counterstrike and other MMORPG's I was playing. I got to know them better, in part because of their extreme delight in my ability to say a few things in german. Then it turned into ventrilo/teamspeak sessions, which then turned into me wanting to read actual german books, then it went on to learning about Otto Von Bismarck, German Reunification, the East/West cultural divide, watching foreign german films such as Der Unterfall, Das Leben der Anderen, Good Bye, Lenin!, effects German engineering such as Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler and von Braun, which led me down the path of looking into german businesses, especially the ones that are here in my own home state (which are many), it was so much fun!

edit: I realize you qualified it with 'business' people, implying they won't see the value of learning the other things, but since business people is a large group (of which I myself can be considered a part of) I imagine there are others like me.

I've been learning some Korean in my spare time and I feel pretty confident in my assessment that being in a college course would both be easier and see me make more progress more quickly.

My good friend has a PhD in Chinese, (yes that is actually a thing), and he attests to the fact that he didn't grok the language until his travels and studies there, being immersed.

Now typing this I realize we may be debating across each other, because even if you believe you can learn on your own better, or having structured courses is better, the real answer is none of it sticks unless you fully immerse yourself in it, self-taught or not.

You might be able to reach similar levels of language proficiency without the courses but the biggest problems are 1) finding hours and hours a day to drill writing characters and other mundane aspects of learning 2) guidance from an instructor who can tell you whether things that look/sound right are. And also I think a university course also gives you a survey of the literature and culture of that language and insight into it that would be hard to acquire on your own.

Also how long have you been studying languages? I ask because I am curious if you think that the web, and later, apps, like Duolingo for example, can make a huge difference versus the pre-web era of language learning. Pre-web, I would agree with anyone that yes it would be extremely difficult to learn a language on your own unless you had traditional schooling. But today there is nothing a traditional course in German could give me that I couldn't get from Deutsche Welle, for example (but I also realize there isn't a 'Deutsche Welle' for every language).

Sorry if this is going further than you wanted, I am just trying to get different perspectives and it seems like you have a good grasp.

I started studying in middle school. I haven't tried the online stuff you're talking about. I'm not sure that they would be just as good.

If while you are there, and are aware of any similar websites like that for any other language I would love to know!

Nonetheless, I have achieved a level of fluency and especially literacy in Mandarin that puts my Japanese of that time to shame and I have no formal credential backing it up.

You don't need formal classes to become fluent in a language. If you'd like to learn how some very successful language learners have done it, check out http://lingsprout.com/experts

However, if you have two interests then gathering credentials in the one which can make more money is probably a better investment.

Of course, all of these numbers are complicated by "salary of graduates" versus "salary of graduates employed in field".

Whereas, my understanding of the S&P is that you don't have to work 40 hours per week for it to give you returns ;). So, if you had your college money as cash you could put all that in the S&P, then work full time without a degree to then, most likely, have an even higher ROI. Of course, most don't have the significant cash for college lying around.

Unfortunately people aren't generally in the habit of handing out low-interest loans to recent high school graduates with no assets so they can invest in the S&P.

I mean this seriously. One of the bigger advantages of college as an investment is that you can get favorable interest rates on purchasing it. Though perhaps this advantage is minimized by the relatively poor tax treatment of college returns (ordinary income vs. capital gains).

>it's on the short list of exceptions, not the rule.

As an example, I've fiddled around with circuit design. I'm not good at it, but I can make some basic stuff.

It feels a lot like fiddling around with linux early in my career, and I'm not seeing any obvious point where it suddenly becomes more difficult to learn the skill.

It's just a bit harder to get into, and a bit harder to get on-the-job training/mentorship.

In terms of pure theory, I can see what you're saying but a lot of STEM curriculum includes lab work that's hard to replicate for an auto-didactic.

For applied sciences like biology, electrical engineering, applied physics (not theoretical physics), the universities will have expensive equipment that students can use in their lab assignments. Biology students examine specimens in $20k microscopes, physics students schedule time on multi-million dollar particle accelerators, and engineering students working on high speeed GHz digital circuits can use $100k Agilent scopes. Some universities also have specialized and very expensive labs with robotics and virtual reality rooms.

The humanities graduate wanting to "reinvent" himself/herself as a "electrical engineer" can buy the same college books and watch hours of youtube videos about circuits but the lab work is really hard to replicate. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of self-taught electronics engineers out there... there are ... but most I've seen learned it first as children and added to their hobby and knowledge over a decade. That's a very different learning trajectory than a 30-something trying to self-study physics without a particle accelerator in his garage.

Also, the STEM students have access to professors and their professional networks into businesses. Their recommendations opens doors for internships. This is another form of "real-world" lab work to strengthen the acquired knowledge.

Computer programming is unique in that it's a STEM that self-learners can get very deep and practical in -- without expensive lab equipment.

Something interesting to think about is as a hobbyist I'll be buying that $100K scope at a hamfest or off ebay in about 10 or 20 years for basically the cost of shipping. Then at home purely as a hobby I can entertain myself cheaply and endlessly doing stuff that was cutting edge in 2016, which is still going to be an enormous market in 20 years.

There are two problems. One is that companies like to think they're cutting edge. So gaining expert level skills on, say, late 70s high speed TTL is not interesting to hiring managers. The second problem is companies that like to think they're cutting edge, almost always are not, unless they're household names. Everyone knows google uses go and python but "the rest of the real world" runs on perl and cobol, like it or not. Oddly enough the hiring managers often don't know how far behind the times they are, so you get the equivalent of an interviewer bragging about the EE equivalent of planning to implement CVS someday soon, or trying that newfangled agile design methodology someday, not knowing their plans for the future are already obsolete in the market. Half of companies are below median, after all.

TLDR is there's a lot of posing in stem, and at least some of the people doing the loudest posing are actually doing stuff right out of 1975, if not earlier. Usually because if something makes money there's no need to fix it solely to strike a stunning pose. In public of course the image will always be that theres no way we couldda dunnit without that $500K budget, partially to intimidate competitors, partially to appear more powerful, mostly just traditional neophilia.

Seems like you answered your own question.

Part of my point is that there really isn't a sharp dividing line between "college" and "self-education". If you're going to college and not also using it to do a lot of "self-education" you're really wasting your time, for instance. But programming seems to have a fairly solid track for moving from casual hobbyist to full-on professional that I don't witness in very many other disciplines.

Why not carefully pick which things you're going to use the "college" on, bearing in mind that there's also no magical "YOU SHALL STOP LEARNING NOW" barrier that gets thrown up on college graduation day?

I really don't know how I would have learned to use radiation detectors or export-controlled nuclear reactor modeling software without institutional access to those things.

This isn't really true. You can't really have any kind of art career, for example, if you don't go to art school. Meanwhile, tons of companies will happily hire whatever chumps code bootcamps are churning out.

This can't possibly be true.