Steve Jobs never graduated college. I would still take his opinion on education. This is an argument that can be logically debated without having to go to credentials.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory. -- Leonardo da Vinci

Want to take advantage of being able to spend four years learning from some of the best minds in every field of human endeavour? Four years set free on hundreds of possible courses, millions of available books, and hundreds of professors willing to answer (well-posed) questions about their work? It's easy to go into a Bachelor's and come out knowing a lot of great stuff.

On the other hand, if you want to put the minimum of energy into getting your Bachelor's degree by picking the easiest subjects and doing the minimum of work to get through them then, yeah, you can come out of the university without knowing much at all. That's partly the university's fault (they really don't flunk nearly enough students nowadays) but mostly your own.

"But", you say, "couldn't I just spend four years in the library and learn all that stuff anyway for slightly less (once opportunity costs are taken into account) money?" And the answer is: probably not. Books + lectures + professors will teach you much better than books alone. The big enemy when learning from books is not the stuff that you don't know, it's the stuff you think you know that's wrong, because you misunderstood something the first time (it happens to all of us, sometimes books are unclear) and never got corrected on it. (This is why you'll find that the internet is full of self-taught physicists who are disproving relativity or thermodynamics because they've misunderstood some aspect of it).

It's telling that many of the folks who are pushing the "we don't need no education" meme are programmers by trade, since programming is one of the very few skills that you can learn effectively on your own by reading books. Why? Because it's easy to know when you're wrong: it'll result in your code not having the desired effect.

I would say that programming is one of the few high-paying professions that many can break into without certification. There are a lot of skills that can be learned via self-study if one is willing to go beyond books, but the problem is one of certification.

Living in Beijing, I regularly meet people studying Chinese on their own as well as those with 4 year degrees in Chinese, often from prestigious schools. Most of the best speakers I've known have been hobbyists who are interested, rather than people who simply followed an academic track at an institution. However, with no certification, it's a bit tough for some fully bilingual self-taught people to get the nice translation jobs. I won't name any names, but I've seen some high profile work done very poorly by a PHD who had credentials to get it.

Other than foreign languages, writing in one's own tongue is also not largely linked to an expensive 4 year university. Neither are business, popular music or theater. I would also say that math is largely vulnerable to self-study. I've made considerable progress in the visual arts just from my own efforts and youtube.

Other than extremely expensive research sciences what else requires a university to learn effectively?

You say that so dismissively, like Universities only have a little bit of that kind of thing.

If the average quality varies that much, we should be paying a lot less for it.

High prices (in general) imply a level of quality. They don't necessarily indicate quality, but you're not paying a lot for no reason. If the quality from a BMW was highly variable the price would need to decrease to account for that level of risk. In education the student takes all of the risk and pays a high price for it.

The challenge is that many people bring exactly this consumerist attitude to tuition, which then ruins the signalling capacity of the price. "If it's expensive, it must be good." That pushes up demand for enrollment and increases the selectivity and reputation of the university in US News, etc. The university therefore has an incentive to keep tuition high. Unfortunately, then students and parents think, "I'm paying so much for this degree, I should (get A's/not flunk out/...)" [1] Professors who grade rigorously are evaluated harshly; since most instructors aren't tenured, there's no incentive for them to make classes challenging. Then many employers use the earned degree as a crude signal of diligence, since what was actually learned is likely irrelevant to the job at hand.

Finally, most families send only a handful of children to college, and there's a significant lag between when graduates and the evaluation of the "success" of the degree. There's no way tuition can accurately price the variation in outcomes with all these inefficiencies.

[1] http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/

http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=argumen...

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Leonardo_da_Vinci

Edit: I retract that last bit. Quoting someone isn't necessarily arguing from their authority. But it almost certainly isn't Leonardo.

The words are more important than where they came from. I don't have much respect for authority in the first place. I would just rather spend more time debating actual arguments than arguing about credentials.

RE: Leonardo - Well until we find out who said it, I'm attributing it to him. I don't throw away theories until they're disproven.

Really? Let me ask you a few questions, then. When was the American Revolution? What are the electrically charged parts of an atom? How does central banking work? How do red blood cells bind to oxygen?

If you will only accept as fact information that you have personally verified, you will know a very small collection of facts. The sensible thing to do in many cases is to appeal to authority: the collective opinion of experts in a field.

Heck, even in one's own area of specialty, one can't know everything. I can't personally evaluate every possible programming language or database in the world before choosing something; I take a clue from common opinion and narrow my search from there.

Really, this is one of the things that makes civilization possible.

Yes, Steve Jobs is a real-world success. He obviously did not feel the need to finish the college, and took a deliberate decision to do so. His opinion on education certainly would have a different angle and substance that would be worth hearing.

But that is because of the reasons stated earlier he is qualified to opine on the subject matter, the same cannot be said for everyone.

PS - I did not read the article so cannot judge, how qualified the author is to make a opinion of this matter. But the comment is generally applicable, anyhow.

I may defer to experts on radiation in Fukushima, but education is a philosophical argument. Even the experts aren't really experts on it. Can we describe the difference between good and bad teachers yet? Not really. Degrees do not protect anyone or any institution from criticism.

Jobs said he wanted to finish college, but couldn't afford it. He's definitely pro-learning. The author was too. Our society is getting very defensive about an educational system that is failing its citizens.

I do not imply to say, "Everyone should drop out of schools, because steve jobs did, and see.. he is successful". My thoughts were more along the lines of, "Even though we have our belief's, lets hear this guy out, because he is successful and _smart_ and _took a decision_ on the subject matter, and we might learn something interesting from his observations on the subject matter."

She would be making the appeal to authority, except she doesn't even bother to do that. She just appeals to common sense ("you don't have to be an economist to... etc").

Edit: perhaps I should say any of her good points are overshadowed by (and mostly unrelated to) the blatant exaggerations and generalisations.

"Our higher education system largely fails to educate... It’s nothing less than a deep institutional, cultural, societal and indeed humanitarian crisis."

Really? I could have sworn that I learned a bunch of stuff about physics and pure mathematics in my four years of intensively studying physics and pure mathematics, but maybe I'm just crazy.

College offers the opportunity to do what you did and work your ass off, but most have no such desire.

One of the "great successes" of Indiana education lately (scare quotes to denote its Potemkin aspect) is the satellite campus in the city in which I live of a certain state university, which has recently been augmented with a new satellite campus of, um, another certain land-grant university. (Hi, Mr. Google, nothing to see here.)

Party of the first part itself has never been much to write home about (and that alone would back up the grandparent), but party of the second part in particular is shamelessly exploiting the lack of a viable local economy by selling degrees with the promise of "careers". The people in that program are utterly disinterested in learning anything at all that someone here at HNN would consider an "education" (after all, they just want jobs; they don't care how, and if someone will sell them a job, they're happy to pony up the money, but they don't see why they should go through the rigamarole of learning math and stuff) - and they will be graduating with a degree in engineering from said Indiana land-grant university which is rather well known for its engineering program. (That is, the commodity they're selling is - for now - worth it.)

I don't want to get too much more specific or even identify my source of information, but let me assure you that - even though I don't consider this universal in American education - I do consider it probably rather typical, because if Indiana is doing something, I know damn well we didn't originate it.

The people going through this program know nothing about math or engineering. Nothing. You probably think that's hyperbole. Let me assure you that it is not hyperbole; they know so little math that you would honestly not be able to accept that a member of H. sapiens is capable of knowing so little math. They're simply paying for the piece of paper that they're told will get them a job, and nothing more. If too many in a class fail, ways are found to make sure that those students still get their credits. The paramount goal is to sell degrees, no matter what, and to present the facade of dynamic growth.

I want to stress at this juncture that this is not the DeVrie Institute or some other commercial educational organization - these are well-known, fairly well-respected, state universities. They're not Harvard, but the engineering school in particular is a good one, especially in aerospace. The degrees they are selling are good names. But they're selling them, cash on the barrelhead. I remember perfectly well when a new president was hired at Party of the First Part University with the motto of running the school like a business, and this is the result.

Now, I'll grant you none of this is data, it's anecdotal, from an anonymous source, and hopefully not too easy to Google, and I've omitted worse allegations that I believe to be true - I live here, after all, and know these people, and I can't prove any of it. But it's all too real. If you want to deny it, fine; that's certainly your right. But OP is far more on target than you seem to be comfortable with.

Do you disagree with my claim? It may be a generalization, but by no means an overgeneralization.

Hacker News users aren't exactly a representative sample of the population anyway (generally educated, probably middle class or higher and if not middle class, we probably have above average drive ambition).

Secondly, just because someone passes classes doesn't mean they're educated. I had friends who pumped and dumped for tests and couldn't remember any of it the next semester. Other people learn outside of school and we have no way to measure or give credit for that.

Clayton Christensen talks about the disruption of Harvard Business school in his book -> http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustainin...

You can't compare everyone to an 'elite' anyway. It's statistically unfeasible. We need critical thinkers who have a thirst for knowledge. Some people don't have the latter. Especially people who think they are already educated. Those are things we need in our society and a degree doesn't guarantee that people have them. Although we wish it did.

This might be an unfair representation; there is, of course, intrinsic value to many people in pursuing a career that they're passionate about, and it's becoming increasingly the case that college is seen as having instrumental value. In the minds of many, though, college is still seen as more inherently valuable, and the arguments against going to college are just making us more and more capitalistic, at the expense of culture, education, and whatnot.

Observing the dialogues over the last few weeks it seems that the participants all define being "educated" differently. But they are not establishing their perspective before stating their cases.

In other words, folks aren't declaring and initializing the variable before proceeding with their functional logic.

Overgeneralization = The source of this ire seems to me to come from the idea of "hey, it wasn't long ago that a degree could guarantee me a job. Now not so much. Let's posit why." Although, I seem to remember that was the tone of the movie Reality Bites some two decades ago. So clearly, this isn't the first education bubble.

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...

Let community colleges serve their purpose. University studies should be for serious students capable of academic work.

I brought up my score in this because it's the comparison most relevant to me.

I'm sorry, are you under the impression that you were a smart twelve-year-old for some reason other than that you happened to draw some good cards from the gene pool? Feeling superior to others for being smarter is like feeling superior to others for being better-looking or having richer parents. It's just dickish. (edit: or perhaps I should say it's normal, but best kept to yourself lest folks think you're a dick)

It's my opinion that university admissions are way to lenient

If you are going to play the game where you mock those whom you consider to be intellectually inferior it's best to master the difference between "to" and "too" first.

I'm actually not trying to mock others. I simply believe that university standards should be a lot harder because schools could teach many subjects a lot faster and the investment of time and money from the students would be much better spent.

Regarding "to" versus "too" - I was on an airplane with a fair bit of turbulence so I'm surprised that's my only mistake.

I got a lot of downvotes for what I said and granted I could have said it a lot better, but a system where every individual goes to college is completely broken unless university bound students are much better prepared in terms of critical thinking ability, mathematical ability, reading/writing skills, and study habits than they are today.

From the provided citation, it seems that the 75% SAT score is 1200 without the new writing section. That would be 200 points above the standardized average, which means that your point that most of the school exhibits poor academic performance is patent bullshit. It may not be MIT, but Linfield College surely has its place and it is certainly not your place to throw your weight around like you're Scott Aaronson and claim that the college is incapable of academic work. Go out and do something worthwhile instead of insulting strangers.

For the record, I have not taken the ACT but I have taken the SAT, the GRE and the Stanford-Binet IQ test. My scores on each were high enough that they render the tests virtually meaningless when it comes to measuring my "intelligence." They have no more measure of "intelligence" than my golf handicap or mile time have of my "athleticism."

All sides are just as vulnerable to this.