Again, I’d like to emphasize that I personally have greatly enjoyed my time at the university, and have learned a lot of extremely interesting things. It’s just not the learning you get that is responsible for correlation between higher education and life outcomes. I recommend Bryan Caplan’s book “The Case Against Education”.
This is an exceptionally bold claim. Sounds dubious.
> Finally, many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field, which suggests that whatever people learn in their degrees doesn’t really matter all that much.
No it doesn’t. For that to be true you would need to demonstrate that, say, having an engineering degree does not influence likelihood or magnitude of success in engineering careers.
In reality there are likely going to be many recipes for success. Nepotism or social skills is one. Learned Competence is also one. Dumb luck is a third. The fact that you can succeed without such things does not mean such things are worthless
>...many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field...
This sounds a great deal like transfer learning. Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.
You need to talk to lawyers and doctors too. Lawyers typically know jack shit about the law outside the fields they practice in. Doctor education varies greatly between countries. For example, in Poland medical school is whole 2 years longer than in the US, and the students have to learn all Latin names of all possible bones and muscles in the whole body. Every doctor will tell you that it’s absolutely useless in their actual practice. Do the two missing years make US doctors 25% worse? Clearly not, doctors forget most of what they learn anyway. It’s not like your rheumatologist remembers symptoms of all those rare internal diseases they had to memorize for the test.
Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.
And engineering students, especially from top programs, typically are great at that, but not because they learned it at university, but rather because you need to be really smart to get into and successfully graduate with science or engineering degree.
Many people in western countries these days, especially the smartest and best educated, have extreme hard time accepting that innate differences in cognitive ability is a real, observable thing, and consequently their models of reality are deficient, because they put the causation on wrong factors.
It is not a trade, nor is it career-prepping with the exception of a handful of programs (engineering, nursing, accounting).
So in your case, depending on your field, your education was designed to give you a basic understanding of the fundamentals that you will need and the critical thinking skills that will allow you to alter those fundamentals into something workable for the project you’re doing at Google or Facebook.
Edit: I once spoke to a MechE graduate from MIT. They held internships at one of the Big Three automakers. During our conversation, I asked explicitly: what do they teach you at school? engine design? safety harness mechanisms?
They said, “No. They teach us the foundations of engineering.”
You could ask the same to a law school student. Do they teach you the law?
No, they don’t. They explain the law to you and encourage you to apply the law under your own discretion. They do not give you simple A, B, C answers to a case. The example of “John murdered Steve, but Steve was a slave and John had a contract of borrowing Steve. Is John responsible for Steve’s death or is Steve considered property under federal statue — as he’s a slave — and therefore would not be protected by standard of care?”
As you can see, no true education gives you direct cause-and-effect answers, unless specifically those mentioned in my above paragraph.