I think there are a few additional aspects to this than just a simple anti-university sentiment.

This site is very US-centric, which adds a huge monetary component to this decision. That makes this an entirely different question compared to a country where higher education is free.

I also think that software development is a field that is quite friendly and attractive to people switching from a different career or field. So you have the related, but still distinct discussion about whether you should have a CS degree specifically to work as a software developer.

The monetary component has become important in the UK as well.

If I was 18 now I don't think I would go to university. I mentioned this to my father a few weeks ago and he supported this decision.

It’s weird in the UK. I think framing it as a £50k (ish) loan is bad but also the loan structure is bizarre. It’s basically a tax on being a graduate which for some reason is higher (over the 30 years you have it) for people who make a medium amount of money than for people who make a smaller or higher amount of money.

Ultimately it doesn’t particularly punish people for getting a degree which isn’t worth much because if their degree isn’t worth much then they are less likely to have to pay much of the tax. And I think people are still statistically better off going even if you take the tax into account.

I find it weird because I can’t work out what it is trying to punish. At least with income tax there are arguments that better paid people are able to contribute more and so they should. But with the student “loans” it seems like it’s trying to discourage people from getting a degree which confers them a moderate advantage in income. It doesn’t seem to discourage degrees that are in some sense not worth the government’s money. I guess one way to look at it is that they wanted something that looked like loans but wasn’t burdensome and also had an interest rate that wouldn’t go to 0 if the base interest rates were very low and that’s how we ended up with the system.

It’s also means tested which seems fair but I think can be quite hard for the families on the various boundaries.

I was going to make the snap judgment that HN happens to be popular among computer programmers, an occupation that is fairly unique in terms of providing lucrative indoor work without strictly needing college training. Many of the programmers of my generation (graduated high school in 1982) have little or no formal training in programming.

I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom. Maybe there are some out there, but I haven't met them.

But it goes further. What strikes me is not only an anti-university sentiment, but also a strong anti high school sentiment. I've been surprised by the number of comments from people who are obviously smart and diligent enough to be programmers, but for whom high school was a disaster. And it occurs to me that this does reveal that education is not serving everybody equally well.

So, even though I value my university education, I'm still interested in hearing how others have experienced it. However for students, my advice is that you have to find the thing that makes college worthwhile for you. If you go in with a cynical attitude, that it's just "signaling" or "networking," then you are likely to be blinding yourself to the other kinds of opportunities that it presents.

High school was a total disaster. I talked my way into the co-op program, and got an internship at a security company. I was only taking 4 classes my senior year. I did go to college for almost 12 weeks, but it wasn't working out.

I am honestly jealous of the people who say they valued their university experience. I really wish I could have enjoyed formal education that much.

My life was funded by the ability to walk into software development jobs. If I were born 5 years later, I would be a different (probably non-functioning) person.

>I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom.

I think the vast majority has technically learned maths and physics outside the college classroom. The teaching quality I'm getting at my university isn't the greatest (bar a few exceptions), and I find myself regularly going to Khan Academy or 3blue1brown to understand a concept better. This is learning outside the classroom!

In a lot of ways, I find universities to be assessment centres and certificate issuers. Not in all ways of course, certain aspects such as labs, coordination of group projects, someone to ask questions to get back to you instantly, are all things which cannot be replaced in any circumstance. But when it comes to the dry theoretical stuff, I'm not sure why I would go to a lecture if I know I can get a better quality of teaching somewhere else online.

Of course this is only true for a few subjects (maths and entry level physics/engineering). I unfortunately have to rely on the lectures provided for the more specialist modules I'm being assessed on (such as heat transfer and chemical engineering principles). This is mainly so that I can comply with the teacher's specific assessment criteria and the terminology/definitions/textbook/ordering they use. I may be able to find heat transfer explanations somewhere else online, and they probably would explain things better, but they wouldn't help much when it came time to use the terminology that the lecturer expects you to use during an assessment, or if you're expected to use the equation sheet that the teacher made for you and expects you to use.

I think part of your argument about learning from Khan Academy or 3blue1brown is highly predicated upon being in subjects that are widely known and studied, particularly introductory mathematics/physics/engineering. I personally cannot speak for physicists, but I imagine it is similar as follows.

One of the most valuable parts of a Engineering/Mathematics Degree (Both at the BS and the MS levels) is that of the upper division elective courses for specialization. At research universities, these classes often contain lots of information/techniques that can't be found in a textbook, let alone in a youtube video. At best, there might be a very cursory blog post, or a collection of research papers that you really aren't ready to explore on your own. Often, these classes result in final projects which can be expanded into research papers or portfolio projects with the professor teaching the class, both of which are valuable learning opportunities for the student and effective signaling mechanisms post-graduation.

These classes are where the real technical value of a college education is found.

In addition, there a quite a few classes which are offered if not required for such Engineering/Mathematics students which are pretty difficult to approach on your own and surmise in a short period of time. For examples, I point towards Analysis 1/2/Complex, PDEs, Dynamics, and Probabilistic Robotics.

I personally got a lot from my undergrad, I (and this may only apply to me) strictly would not have succeeded in learning all the topics I did if my only motivation was my personal learning in my free time, particularly in the short time horizon I did. The pressure cooker (cough engineering school) I went through was very formative, built a number of professional/personal connections, and taught me almost all the personal and professional skills I have.

This is just my 2 cents though.

I don't think Khan Academy or 3brown1blue are a replacement for upper level math and physics courses. Khan seems to stop at calculus/statistics and not dive into any of the proof based math. I'm not sure on 3brown1blue since I haven't watched very much of him.

> I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom.

In fact, I will go one further. Almost all self-taught physicists I have met are kooks - bonkers crazy conspiracy theorists.

My experience is the same.

I often hear people say that a university education teaches nothing useful, that it's just learning to take tests, that the course material is irrelevant, that it's just for networking and signalling, etc.

I suspect they both a) selected the wrong major and b) went to the wrong university.

And I suspect that both of you got technical degrees and work in technical fields.

You are almost by definition an edge case.

Are technical fields really an edge case?

I suspect going to a university is helpful in most STEM related fields. In anything medical or law related you don't even have to think about getting a job without a degree. I don't see how anyone can compensate an economical or business study by doing project on their own.

If anything I think IT is an outlier, because not going to university and learning the subjects you would have been taught on your own might be a valid option.

I was commenting to the argument that college teaches nothing useful.

Law and medicine are the poster child for credentialism, you are forced by law to complete the degree to work, even if most law and medical professionals will tell you, work has nothing to do with college.

They suffer the “driving license problem”, having the title says nothing about your competence.

For instance, pretty much everyone has to study trigonometry, but very little people actually need to know trigonometry to do their job. In that sense technical fields are an outlier, because knowing trigonometry actually matters to your career.

I can't speak for lawyers, but MD education is very relevant. Maybe other MDs can chime in, but at least once a week in practice I use something I learned once in medical school (which was a LONG time ago :) ). Now a 4-year undergraduate education could have been trimmed to ~2-3 years i'd say.

Not at HN, where this is discussed, and also not considering that the article being discussed is hosted on a github page.

An outlier in terms of the people who go to college

I believe most degrees are awarded in STEM, with biology above all as the most awarded degree. Not much of an edge case.

I've worked with a guy that didn't finish his studies (started working out of university/ during 1st year and completely neglected it until they expelled him). He was surprisingly good though as in he had a solid theoretical foundation, knew the inner workings of a compiler (this was relevant for the project we worked on) etc.

Also at my former company there was a principal computer scientist who was quite proud that he didn't have a university degree; I didn't work with him much but he was obviously fairly accomplished, career-wise. So that worked fine for him.

Most people are not like that, though; even though in theory you can study everything by yourself nowadays, I find that in practice people who didn't go to university often tend to have a fairly narrow & shallow field of expertise ("narrow" = don't have experience with many different things/ often focus on one language and a few sets of related technologies; "shallow" = they often don't understand too many layers of abstraction, and get completely lost if they need to go too deep). This is perfectly fine at the start of your career, but as years go by (like, 20years in, when you're still only mid-career) I can't imagine this working too well; unless maybe you switch to management?

I think the sentiment is very U.S. specific. The US seems to have higher education system with some peculiarities. They have the best universities but also some shady ones and it can be expensive.

Obviously if you just want quick vocational-type training, you don't need university level education. But then you should not be the one having problems with procrastination or self-discipline either. Most students in universities are there because they would not study or learn difficult or uninteresting subjects if left on their own. You also need to learn to communicate verbally and in writing with your peers. Knowing stuff but not being to able to communicate and work with others leads directly to low level jobs.

From my perspective, somebody who has not attended university but still learned everything they need to do a dev job well has demonstrated something really important：the ability/motivation to learn new academic things in their own free time. So many people seem to completely stop learning once they leave university. I work in HFT, where things are constantly changing and people need to be at the top of their game to stay competitive, so the ability and willingness to keep learning new things is vital for success, as the majority of what makes a quant-dev successful will be stuff they learned on their own/on the job, not stuff they learned in uni.

In this sense the biggest value of a degree in hiring is just the crude proxy it is for IQ and conscientiousness. That being said, I've never interviewed anyone without a degree, but then I've never seen a candidate without a degree either. I have hired people whose degree is completely unrelated to the role, because they demonstrated the ability and interest to learn something outside of what they studied at uni.

So perhaps part of the opposition to university is due to the (possibly incorrect) feeling that it encourages people to think of it as "this is the period I do my learning", whereas some alternative to university might better promote people to develop a habit of lifelong learning. I.e. maybe people have been jaded by the experience of interviewing/hiring people with degrees from good universities who just spend all their spare time consuming media.

Which is not to suggest attending university is a bad idea, given its value as a signal, just that it doesn't seem ideal for developing the habit of lifelong learning.

My university education was... varied.

I have two bachelors' degrees, one in Mathematics, and one in Japanese. Those two programs were night-and-day in terms of rigor.

The mandatory "general education" classes were an absolute waste of time, and accounted for over a third of the cost of my college education.

It would have been more productive to spend that money on Pokemon cards.

The reality is, for a lot of people, university is massive waste of time and money. It largely was for me. We would be better off following the German model, with tracks outside University for professional workers and artisans.

Moreover, there are some excellent self-taught programmers out there, who work in the industry, and learn the mathematics and the physics and all the rest because they are passionate about the subject.

I'll take that kind of drive any day of the week.

To be clear, being self-taught doesn’t mean they didn’t go to university. It could be that their university experience put them in a better position to self-teach.

> for a lot of people, university is massive waste of time and money.

same story.

Yes, as a Canadian attending Canadian university the most important learnings happened outside of the program stream and in many cases outside of the classroom altogether.

We were required to take a breadth of courses first year that helped create a well rounded foundation to my studies in software which I value greatly.

I can tell many people in the field have never looked past the technicals to think about how computer science connects to the world at large and it's a shame because there is a lot to learn and much wisdom to be gained by taking a holistic view.

Some of my favorite courses were sociology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, biology (I did switch majors) not to mention classics and astronomy.. They gave me a very rich insight into the philosophy of thought outside of software and I've always applied my learnings to corporacy and professionalism.

Not all universities are like this and graduates while technically proficient graduate wholly unprepared for the realities of social programming because let's face it software is a social medium in the truest sense of the word and university work with its emphasis on solo work i.e. individual performance and occasional groups (which are invariably one person pulling all the others' weight or someone bossing everyone until they give in) as well as emphasizing marks as the primary metric serves very little utility in preparing people for the real world and even co-op programs serve only to reinforce the stereotypes rather than disrupt them.

> This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance to writing JavaScript for a living.

High school dropout here, no uni degree, I can write more than just JS thanks. I know C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, ruby, Typescript, Go. I know DDD, SOLID, TDD, and AOP. I have forgot more about Linux than most people will learn in a lifetime and I did all of it without attending one uni course. I come from a poverty background, grew up in a trailer park, got fucked up on all sorts of drugs and didn't do well in school. Some time in my early 20's I had a revelation that I was nobody and I was going to die poor and alone if I didn't get my act together. Sadly with my piss poor grades there was no way I was going to get a scholarship to pay my way through college, my family just made enough that I couldn't get finaid easily either. So I decided to wing it. I looked in the newspaper for high paying jobs, decided I wanted to be Systems Administrator, and looked up the skills required to be one. Did I get a sysadmin job? Hell no, I worked my way up from Help Desk to PC Tech, to Network Tech, to Systems Tech, to Systems Admin, to DevOps, and then to Sr. Software Developer, I'm now a Principal Engineer.

Here's the deal, I know bright people who made it through college and I know stupid people who made it through college, but I also know bright people who have worked their way up from the bottom, like myself. I've been working my way up since 2003. My personal opinion is that Uni is not only not for everyone, but that perhaps some industries, including software engineering, may work better on the guild system than in a class room.

I grew up on a farm. Went to a school in the countryside the first eight years. Went to high school on the Standing Rock Reservation.

I can with certainty say I did not have everything I needed to go off and have the best possible career. Not all of us were born into that type of situation.

I would not have become an economist without going to college and taking an economics class to fulfill a requirement. It was so right for me that I even got a PhD. Needless to say, that would not have happened if I had stuck around to take over my dad's excavating business or the family farm. [Edit: I was a licensed sewer and water installer before I graduated high school, so I was in a better place than a lot of high school grads.]

Agreed! University enabled me to leave the trailer park in the Midwest that I grew up in and now have a comfortable life. It is possible that this could have happened without university, however learning how to think/work through hard problems and the friends/networks I made have paid large dividends.

During undergrad, I was worried about the ~40k in loans I took out to pay for it. However, I was able to pay them off fairly soon after finishing up, and would never have been able to attend without the federal loans that did not require a co-signer.

> The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me.

Mmm...how do measure that? I think it's balanced. I suspect that the majority of the folks that comment have at least an undergraduate degree. Even the ones who argue that the degree is not of great value..

The most important things I gained from university weren't vocational knowledge or my degree. I don't use most of what I learned at university at my job and never will, and beyond putting it on my resume, and after my first grad job no employer has actually looked at my degree, it's a requirement on plenty of jobs but I could absolutely get away with lying about having a degree with no real consequences. I could definitely do my job without having gone to university and I'm not a JS dev building misc CRUD apps (not to belittle people who do that for a living).

It's hard to put into words, but university was a unique experience for me that was instrumental in helping me grow to become the person I am today. Finishing high school and then going to a coding bootcamp for a few months before joining the workforce just wouldn't have provided that space for me to "discover myself", for lack of a better term.

That's not to say that everybody should go to university, although I definitely benefited from it and don't regret it at all, I was definitely railroaded into tertiary education by my parents and teachers. And that's not to say that university is the only place where I would've experienced the kind of personal growth that I did. I have plenty of friends who went into trades and completed apprenticeships (actually more than went to university), and most of them don't regret doing that either.

It all depends on your goals. Is it to earn a decent living? I know millionaires who never went to university. They started a practical, blue collar business, and enjoyed that path. Is it to experience a broader culture? You could do the 100 Rabbits approach for a lot less money, and get something more interesting out of it. Is it to learn from one of the best minds in a particular field? University is probably the best fit.

I'd say money isn't very relevant here. Uni can give you better start, but all depends on you.

You wanna go to university to be a coder/designer? Don't do it.

You wanna be a researcher/scientist/politic/etc? Yeah, go.

P.S. I obtained a degree.

I inherently believe that this is a U.S.-centric thing as a few commenters mentioned. Specifically a degree in the U.S. is held as a way to advance your career prospects first and it's value is often marketed as a trade off of get X dollars in debt but make Y dollars more in your career on average. So a lot of that attitude becomes I am taking this class to check boxes to get a piece of paper which says I'm worth more in the job market. I am a graduate student but understand the jadedness, especially because I had to retake virtually the same class multiple times because it wasn't "as rigorous" for this specific major as I changed majors a few times (and had to get one of those approved for a different major). But because a lot of people see it as a way for getting a better monetary outcome college in the U.S. is often treated more like a vocational school I feel so the extra "B.S." one has to go through feels like a particular waste of resources.

I enjoyed college but, I very quickly understood that its only purpose wasn't to enhance my education as I sat through multiple classes that were nearly identical to previous all because I had to check a box. And generally I felt classes moved to slow and would have been much happier studying on my own, but courses often forced my attendance. Though I am a bit unique in my ability on that admittedly.

A lot of people’s first experiences living outside of their parents’ homes is a transformative learning experience, college or not.

Exactly.

I did a CS degree in the 1980s which I'm still very happy that I did (the fact that it didn't cost me a penny probably helps) - but I do think that CS is irrelevant to 95% of development jobs.

Yes and it's also a really cool human experience

> you are the part of the problem

Personal attacks on HN are not allowed. Please don't do that again.

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> I will explain why.

But you didn't.

I do not think that the fact that there are many people who can make a wonderful job without having gone to any university implies that there should be an anti-university sentiment. I think academic careers are necessary, not for everyone, but all that people working without any studies are building on the work done by lots of academics. That should be respected (by the way, I don't think it is not, but if it generally is not I think that it is a problem).

People say things like "I've never seen anyone without a good education do it well", which can only mean they live in such a bubble that they didn't get to meet any. That's certainly possible, but "I live in a bubble!" is nothing to be proud of. Such proud but ignorant proclamation is the reason why there is anti-university sentiment.

> It also enables me to do my job, I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well.

You apparently didn't learn to have a better look at those things at the university, it might surprise you some time.

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