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.