I think colleges just do a terrible job of actually saying what they do. The purpose of an undergraduate education isn't the simple transfer of knowledge, it's more about "learning how to learn." The thing I've noticed about the self-educated is that they are absolute experts in the thing(s) that they're really interested. It is rare indeed to meet someone whose intellectual curiosity takes them to the places that a simple undergraduate education will.

In college you were exposed to philosophy, literature, and a host of other things. That self-educated guy generally knows a lot about quantum mechanics, but has never bothered to read a classic novel or has never heard of Kant. All of those things form the basis and experience that allow you to learn from the world around you so much more efficiently.

I don't think college is broken, I just think the expectation that college is somehow a four year skills-training institution is fundamentally flawed.

My viewpoint on this has definitely evolved over the last decade. At 22, fresh from dropping out of college after my junior year, I would have written the same thing. A decade of experience has taught me the value of what I learned in college.

It's equally rare to meet someone whose undergraduate education takes them to the places that a simple undergraduate education will. I'm 23, so I have plenty of friends and coworkers who are just recently out of state schools, and the vast majority sure as hell don't remember the classic novels that they might have skimmed over the course of two weeks, three years ago. I generally can't detect that they know anything at all that they didn't know in high school, outside of their major.

Which is why I intentionally used the word "exposed":) I can't really recall very many specifics from my world literature classes either. However my psychology class taught me that the exposure to those novels and their concepts informs my decision making in some small way even today.

Wait, so you believe that your world literature classes inform your decision making because your psychology class told you so?

I'm somewhat ambivalent on the question of whether my liberal arts education actually made a difference in my life, but "because I heard it in psych class" would be at the very bottom of my reasons to believe so. If you're going to hold the opinion that a liberal education teaches you how to learn and informs all your future decision-making, hold it because experiences have corroborated that, not because you read in a psych textbook that that's how it's supposed to work. Textbooks do lie, y'know. ;-)

Otherwise - well, you haven't really learned how to learn, have you? If the point of a liberal education is to make sense of the world around you and form your own opinions, and you're still regurgitating things you read in a book, that liberal arts education has failed.

I'll respond in two ways.

First of all, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

However, yes I do take much of what I've learned at face value. After all, it would be foolish to take years of expert research and toss it out because I personally didn't conduct it. Unless it runs wildly counter to my personal experience, I have no real reason not to trust it as the best scientific explanation at a given time. Thankfully my personal experience most certainly corraborates it.

There is a world of difference between healthy skepticism (consistently questioning scientific theory through empirical observation) and doubting for doubting sake. I haven't personally verified that the earth orbits the sun, but I'm pretty sure we have that one right after all.

OK, I agree, for what that's worth.

The perception that "IT'S ALL AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET" is a strictly CS thing. Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free.

Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could have gotten through the high end math without a lot of help.

Would you like a self taught doctor over one with a degree?

> Would you like a self taught doctor over one with a degree?

The degree is for his/her own benefit. What I care about is whether the doctor is smart and well-informed.

No, I don't think that earning the right to use the suffix "M.D." means that the doctor is well-informed and knowledgeable.

Nope but it is some form of metric that you can use to judge the doctor's capability.

With a self-taught doctor, you just have the questions that you ask to help you judge. With a doctor who's been through school, you have both your questions and the fact that he/she has been through what has been set out by the school issuing the degree.

Can the self-taught doctor apply Bayes's Theorem correctly, unlike doctors with degrees? Is the self-taught doctor a fan of evidence-based medicine? I'll take them.

>Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free.

Here are 5 freely available introductory calculus books.

http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/03/04/028253.shtml

I don't think anyone is claiming that there aren't freely available resources for learning the basics of other fields, so this isn't much of a counterexample.

Free graduate-level graph theory book that I found when I was interested in graph theory: http://diestel-graph-theory.com/basic.html

> Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free.

Areas differ, as always. There's an amazing amount of philosophy out there for free, for example. (I was recently impressed to see how much of Sextus Empiricus was available, and works on the Pyrrhonian skeptics in general.)

"It's all available on the internet" might be almost true if you consider P2P and rapidshare likes.

This is extremely naive. I could insert almost anything for 'college' in your first sentence and it would be "true."

But more than that, I think you're grossly underestimating the value of four years of collaborative work with other smart students and professors. I honestly don't see any way to get a half hour of a math professor's time, every week, for three months, without taking a course in mathematics at a university and going to office hours.

It may be that you think it is too expensive, which means it's not worth it. That's fair enough. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that college offers nothing that you can't obtain somewhere else.

I have read about the "getting education for free somewhere else," but I don't understand. I have had taken classes from absolute experts in certain fields, met with them personally and picked their brains to understand their way of thinking.

I welcome "continuing education" opportunities that would give me exposure to such varied academic disciplines once again. How would you purport to achieve this?

Get involved in a field that you're passionate about, and start contributing back. Experts take note of passion, because it's so rare. Most of them are continually on the lookout for up-and-coming talent that's genuinely interested in the subject.

I really liked patio11's response to a similar such Ask HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182552

Even if you think university will teach you absolutely nothing, you've got a one-time offer from society that we're going to subsidize anything you do for the next four years and not have any expectation that you'll work for a living during that time. This offer is essentially only good once. Take it.

I keep reading this on HN and it's blatantly untrue.

Just one example of many from my college experience: one day after my Digital Devices class I described a concept to my professor that I was having trouble with. I was a poor student and couldn't afford a logic probe to do my own experiments with so I figured I'd build one with the parts I had on hand.

He then spent the next 2 hours carefully deconstructing my design, showing me why it didn't work, how I could force it to work, and in the end what a much better design approach would be.

In the 20+ years since, for all the time I've spent on BBSs, Usenet sci.electronics.* , and now web-based electronics forums, I have never seen anyone provide the depth and breadth of understanding that I got that day (OK: one person on Circuit Cellar comes to mind). And bear in mind that this not an isolated incident -- I made sure to get my money's worth by asking my share of dumb questions :-)

Sure, we all try to help each other online and some of us are pretty good at it. But at a good school professors are expert, paid to teach and love doing it, and have both the time and the motivation to do so. Random strangers online seldom have either and very rarely have both.

Can colleges do better? Absolutely. But to claim that you could "get it all for free somewhere else" so completely misses the point that it's frustrating.

I agree that cost of college is too much - but you're not forced to go to a private or out of state school. In-state colleges are not terribly expensive, especially considering how many scholarships are available.

As for getting the same experiences by not going, that's just silly. Sure the information is available online but it's not the same as actively participating in a lecture.

The other thing that isn't the same is the external validation- or failure. Most people who are learning on their own don't have the same hard deadlines and pressure to perform at a particular level. That pressure pushed me to work harder than I ever would have on my own; and that's the case for almost everyone, even autodidacts.

Come on, I'm sure Wikipedia holds office hours on hard topics right?

I spent a lot of time banging my head against the book (that you can buy from Amazon) and Googling, but eventually you run into things that only a professor's lecture, office hours, or your fellow classmates will teach you. That is what you are paying for. If you haven't run into that, you aren't taking classes that are hard enough or you are a genius. And even if you are a genius, you likely still struggle with hard topics sometimes.

This is why I would love to see colleges move to a hybrid model, where they handle the things they're good at -- office hours, discussions, providing a community, that sort of thing -- and use the internet for stuff like delivering canned lectures.

In my experience, the socializing you do at industry gatherings is vastly different from the socializing you do at college. There's something to be said for hanging out in a venue where nobody wants anything from anyone else.