A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it.

My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)

Within a couple of years of starting my CS degree, I was far better at programming than every hobbyist programmer I've met. I didn't have many opportunities out of school. I was from a poor country town that topped the state crime statistics. I know my mum hadn't finished high school and I don't think my father did either. I joined the military, got a trade and went to university at 30 as a single father working full time. University changed my life for the better, gave me a lot of tools and made me much more valuable.

I can’t imagine I would have developed the concept of LTI systems outside of academia (EE), nor realized how much of signal processing tasks can be deconstructed to just convolutions or correlations, but these modes of thinking have proved powerful in my early career and especially as a hobbyist.

When in the workforce one can pick up a skill/s, from a technical institutes or college extension programs. These programs focus directly on educating for an area focus with relevant industry experience and problem sets.

Reasons are more than I can cover in one post - gatekeeping is real, very super real in most well paid jobs. Nobody hires new accountants, managers, electricians, architects, any kind of engineers, and many more without school. Nobody is going to give them expertise coming from job required to grow. Not all jobs are learnable just from online tutorials and books. You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.

You were lucky and seemingly very talented. That is great, but not a usable advice for maybe 95% of the folks. I don't like how things are, but currently they are like that all around the world and there is no change coming soon.

That's not really the primary problem I think, I gladly would. But what I would like even more is an entity (probably a company) that has enough assets that if something goes wrong with the house I can get compensation from them. And this company probably isn't going to hire that guy. That's where the actual problem is.

This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.

The point is, it's silly to condemn the value of college by waving around employment in a company that is well-known for recruiting from top-tier universities.

Computer science is still a young field with low-hanging fruit everywhere, all you need is a very bright person who knows the basics to make meaningful contributions on cutting edge projects because the "cutting-edge" isn't that sharp yet.

It's not just them either, there are tons of non-FAANG jobs that pay very well and do cool things, that recruit recent grads. There isn't even consensus in the industry that further education is valuable; sometimes people don't even trust those that go this route (I think this is a bit harsh, but it's due to bad anecdotal experience).

Straight out of college, I was hired to write code in a language that didn't even exist when I started college. Why? Because those companies rely on students learning more than just "language A". They want quick-learning generalists who can pivot to any tech or language if there is a need. And I can safely say, I definitely learned all of that stuff in college, and I am very thankful for the very solid understanding of CS fundamentals that have carried me in the industry over the years.

The very best case for the non-college trajectory which is that you were able to work on real, cutting edge problems from your entry into the workforce and had the discipline to learn the important parts of CS fundamentals required to work on them.

The very worst case of college education - doing only the required for the degree, no side projects, industrial placements, or advanced topics.

Yes, a good autodidact doing genuinely interesting work is going to be a more valuable contributor at 22 than someone who has spent the last four years doing a CS degree by the numbers. That's not a good example because those are two different people. Many people who enter the tech workforce at 18 may spend years doing paint-by-numbers business applications using a single set of tools, those people aren't going to FAANG jobs.

While focusing on developing marketable skills should be the top priority of students, there are a lot of other values that a college experience provides.

College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect.

Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.

College also increasingly ties in industry experience with in-class experience as companies are only willing to take on interns that are currently studying at colleges they're partnered with. Not to mention the way people use it as a networking opportunity and a chance to try out new things before having to dedicate themselves to a career they might despise.

Democracies depend on voters who are lucid, informed and rational. Modern technological civilization provides so much, and in very abstract ways, that it is non-optional that people be able to understand, or know they don't understand, massive swathes of broad-reaching ideas and concepts. Because democracies say "choose a candidate to represent you on all these things".

And you genuinely believe modern colleges provide this?

To the extent that viewpoints not part of the accepted doctrine are presented, they are presented poorly and without passion.

I think that’s exactly right. Reading primary sources is much more complicated than reading undergrad-level sources: you need to read not just the source, but enough supporting material to understand the context the source was writing in, competing movements and how they were viewed at the time, etc. You simply don’t have time in a one-semester course on, say, political thought in the 19th century, to dive into the details of any one particular movement, be it abolitionism, women’s suffrage, or anything else. The scope of these questions is enormous, and whatever primary sources a student is likely to find will have tremendous selection bias, because the student won’t even know what sources they’re ignoring or what context they might be missing.

Part of the professor’s job in undergraduate courses is to give the lay of the land. And if an enterprising student decides to put in the primary source work, to not let that one student derail the conversation into hyperfocusing on a single topic, while hopefully also preventing the student from getting hopelessly lost.

Or George Mason U's Mercatus Institute, headed by Tyler Cohen -- one of the larger investments in schools made by the Koch Bros. There are lots of others.

The academic bubble has grown and shifted over the years, this is evident to most people i know who can peek outside their academic circles. Academia is slowly moving itself to irrelevance

...depending on both the student and the career.

Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working.

But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.

Not mine. Went to two Universities - both taught students to regurgitate what lecturers taught. Anything beyond that meant low marks.

That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)

Getting a college degree requires one to work with large amounts of information. Even if you retain none of those facts and figures later in life, you can still retain facility at working with information. And that is much more important to long-term success than how much you memorize.

While I think those types of classes should still exist, they shouldn't be used as an artificial financial and time barrier to getting a decent job.

If this weren’t the case, just hire people who dropped out during senior year for a wonderful discount. They got 7/8s the education!

For example, I learned how to conjugate verbs in foreign languages, and algorithms with O(n) vs O(log n) in computer science.

Then later in a foriegn country I expanded my my vocabulary. On the job, I learned about version control, how to read other people's code and how to fix bugs.

The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you.

This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.

This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as:

* How well students retain information

* How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom

* How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute

* How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population

* How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch.

And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.

The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.

But does the job really require a degree in order to do it, or is it only the employer that requires the degree, as a filter, because now they can get away with it as a result of the oversupply of college degrees?

Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

This is starting to happen in retail too. Thanks to self-checkout machines, there are now more employees in the pharmacy at a local CVS than in the rest of the store combined.

Suppose that people with a degree are significantly less likely to quit shortly after you've spent a lot of money training them on your equipment, regardless of whether what they studied in college has any application to the job. If you have to pay the person with a degree a lot more money then maybe it isn't worth it just for that, but if everybody gets degrees and there is an oversupply such that there are more people with degrees than jobs that actually require them, now maybe you can get someone with a degree for a low enough price to be worth requiring it.

> Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

That's just the signaling value again. They're not looking for someone with knowledge of GAAP or materials science or economics, they're looking for someone with the proven capacity to earn a degree by studying those things, because it implies they can also learn to run the machines well.

If not as many people had degrees then it wouldn't be worth paying the premium for one of the people who do, and then people who are going to be machine operators don't have to burn four years of their lives and incur significant student debt just to engage in signaling behavior. Instead the employers would have to bear the (lower, but unsubsidized) cost of more attrition as a result of not having the degree to use as an early filter against low quality employees.

Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.