Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-somethings.
> 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult”
Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adult. In fact, any learning or training is about investing in the future. Any investment is about current sacrifice (time, money, etc.) for better future returns.
We could also ask the same question - and it was asked, by prior generations - about 12 year olds, who could become adults and work in coal mines. People used to get married at that age too. In Judaism, 13 year old males technically become adults by completing their Bar Mitzvahs (obviously an ancient tradition). Were they better off? Was our society better off? Is there some benefit to achieving adulthood sooner?
Taking it further, kids who lack effective parenting, either through accident or neglect, often grow up fast. And lacking that time to be kids, to learn and explore and grow themselves, costs them for the rest of their lives. I grew a lot in high school and college, and I would have missed so much if I had to be a full-fledged adult then.
The argument that prior generations lacked college educations and therefore future ones have nothing to gain, or that it's an insult to prior generations to say there is something to gain, seem very flawed for obvious reasons. It's wrong that so many people in Bangledesh, who are just as able to grow and benefit, are denied the opportunity and those benefits.
Let's keep building and improving a world so that they, like so many others over the last several decades, become the first in their families to benefit from college.
I’ve heard of others talk up the college experience, but I fail to see what’s so special about it. What exactly did I miss in my development? How exactly am I different (besides having a 4-6 year head-start in the working world)?
Parties and friends are also made outside of campus, in the adult world. Working a job at a young age and having to be responsible for yourself builds life skills early. Some of which, my college-educated friends are still having trouble building well into their 30’s. I know some that are terrified of “growing up”: they keep earning degrees or still in their 2nd masters program, accumulating debt that is clearly unsustainable. Many are in fields that inside the sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia look nothing like what actually happens in the real world, and they are in for a very rude awakening when that house of cards comes tumbling down.
Every time I meet someone who went to college, if you’re in the same job as them without having a degree, the default response is “but I got the experience”. Part of me thinks this is some kind of rationalization so they don’t have to accept the fact that they might have just been swindled and could have just as easily did what I did and get the same outcome.
I went back to school after a decade of web development, and learned a ton. I think I’m a much better developer than I would have been had I learned only what I thought I needed for my job (could be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am). I’ve also worked with plenty of people without degrees who were better developers than me, but to a person, I think they would have greatly benefited from a broader theoretical foundation than what they built through self directed learning.
One thing you should think about is that rationalization likely applies to you just as much as it does to the college educated people you’re talking about.
I was in the college is useless boat before I went back and most of it was rationalizing my choices—plus a bit of feeling inferior.
It’s one thing to decide that college wasn’t the right decision for you (and maybe it wasn’t). It’s another entirely to write off everyone who went as suckers.
Yes, having dedicated time to focus on learning was great. But I was effective at that because I'd already learned to, well, learn, on my own, by homeschooling the latter half of high school (where I'd study, take CLEP tests).
College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means (and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it, ideally in the confines of that job, like an apprenticeship in the trades). Many of the other purported benefits (social, etc) are BS.
The main benefit I can think of outside of that dedicated study time is being forced into more of a cultural milieu than I had experienced prior. I think that is important, but I also think that entirely depends on the school, just as it depends on the job, so I'm not sure that's entirely a college benefit so much as a "get into the city if you're living somewhere suburban or rural" benefit.
Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.
As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.
That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.
> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.
Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.
> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.
Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?
Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.
Of course it’s possible, but the number of people who have the discipline/inclination to get through a degree’s worth (or even a significant fraction of a degree’s worth) of education on their own is very small. Small enough that if the reason you’re skipping college is because you think you can/will learn everything they can teach you on your own, you’re most likely kidding yourself.
With self directed learning it’s also shockingly easy to develop huge blind spots that you have no idea you have.
> and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it
I’ve personally benefited a good deal from taking the year of physics I was forced to take, despite no job having ever required it.
The same goes for all the papers I had to write in non CS classes.
Regarding the assertions: Of course, one anecdoctal experience says nothing about a population, and in the population, career and other outcomes are far better for college graduates.
We are all by not knowing what we missed and, as you say about others, to rationalize our choices. Framing the question - always the most powerful mode of argument - by saying someone meets the standard (i.e., you are happy in your life), so why do something else, makes any possible alternative useless. What good is a winning lottery ticket either? But the question is, what are the different sets of outcomes from each alternative choice? Each alternative, such as college, makes us better off in some ways, worse off in others - and that includes impacting things that the other alternatives don't touch.
You're defining the question as if college benefits are social life and speed of acquiring adult life skills and responsibilities. If those are someone's aims, I'd agree - don't go! College is about critical thinking skills, knowledge, and learning skills, which last a lifetime. Are your thinking skills so good that they can't be improved? Do you have nothing to learn? Not me. How do improve those things? Imagine studying with an expert who not only guides you in what to study, but explains the works based many other works, context, etc.; answers your questions regularly, person-to-person, in their office and via computer; pushes you to see dimensions and angles that you didn't know about, and to do it at a high level; and reviews your understanding and gives you feedback. And then it would be great to do that with others studying the same thing. And if the study needs it, if they provided other resources: A huge library of other works and every reseach paper ever written (along with experts in each field that help you discover excellent, relevant materials); labs with specialized equipment; etc. etc.
If college didn't exist for learning, it would be too good to be invented.
Also, don't you want to learn about yourself, the world, etc.? What you read on the Internet is so far removed from the quality of knowledge, it's laughable, and it's tragic.
> I know some that are terrified of “growing up”
> sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia
These are well-worn stereotypes. People inside and outside school have trouble growing up; handling a college workload is no joke - much harder than early jobs, which often are 40 hours and not challenging (many service jobs). And academia is no more bizarre than other industries. You should see what goes on in SV or on Wall Street if you want bizarre.
Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.
With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).
Did I use that word right?
I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.
I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.
Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.
I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.
I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.
There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.
We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.
> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.
Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.
The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.
I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.
> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes
That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.
And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'
In the original post I replied to, you said:
>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!
I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.
A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.
An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.
But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.
But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it is the other "main function" but ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more. I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college. College gives a clear path forward for years, each time you're admitted into a program. Give that up and what do you have? For the people I know, the answer to that question is a minimum wage job outside of their field of study.
It's discussed all the time, for decades.
> I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college.
Many people have trouble moving forward, regardless of college.
But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.
My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.
on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we need import so many STEMs from overseas, the culture smothered STEM from K-12. K-12 is anything but success IMHO.
middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color...high school students must show how caring they're to the community or everyone must be some leader somehow while the truth is that they can barely take care of themselves without parents' caring, for academics nowadays SAT/ACT/school-ranking/etc are either racism or unfair...I will stop here.
A road to hell.
Meanwhile many jobs are trying to sell themselves not through a TC that would let one hit these markers, but through football tables, pizza parties, drinks and other social outings. Not to hate on fun activities, but it sure does feel like trying to keep young adults in a perpetual student lifestyle when you keep the booze but not give them the wage to advance in life.
There are plenty of young adults who want to grow up, meeting a ridiculous amount of resistance.
Today those jobs are held by adults, expecting to be able to raise a family on it. Teenagers rarely have jobs, their first job waits until after they graduate from college.
Let's not cover up bad systems because a few individuals rise to the artificial challenge and bite through.
For various reasons (safety regulation, emissions requirements, minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, insurance outpacing inflation, cash for clunkers etc…) it’s now almost impossible to afford a car working a few hours at McDonald’s.
There’s also far more fast food restaurants per capita than there used to be, and food service/retail make up a larger part of the economy in general.
To top it off, the age of the average American has increased almost 10 years since 1960, so there are just fewer kids to do the jobs.
We sure had fun shredding tires with it. I was lucky to survive the accident that terminated it.
I remember at 18 signing up for 5 years in the Navy. I'd say that is pretty adult. If it isn't, you should consider contacting your senator about raising the age of enlistment.
The ones that do sign up, though, grow up fast.
All the more reason to contact your Senator. Lower the drinking age or make the age of enlistment higher. Adult enough to decide to become a sacrificial pawn, but not adult enough to drink a beer.
More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.
Suffice to say we didn't get along.
What was his public reason for doing so?
Apparently, I was pretty obnoxious in high school. It took me far too long to learn this. (And to learn when not to speak my opinion.) I would have been well served if I had swallowed pride and asked teachers (and peers) for some perspective on how my attitude was, frankly, self destructive.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9tk0jw/w...
my kids are still in k-12, nothing has really changed for them though.
A good interpretation of humans generally is 'giant baby monkeys', in that we have curiosity and openness consistent with juveniles but not with most adult animals.
>on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest,
This doesn't bear any resemblance to my experience of a not-so-special US public school in the 2000s.
I'm not saying your comment is without valid points, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on your attitude about childhood.
It persists into the professional space, just look at how infantilizing Silicon Valley became, trying to turn the workplace into a playpen complete with propeller head hats.
Instead of playing foosball and gaming online, we should be playing cards and drinking like previous generations?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-dependency-ratio-old?...
Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.
Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.
Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.
And as a side note, > high school students must show how caring they're to the community
I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.
my high school kids told me they are aware of those sensitive gender subjects at middle school and they feel it's more frequent these days.
Google will show you some data points, e.g. Gen Z (from 1995+) has close to 20% claiming to be LGBT+. Things changed a lot.
I'm neither a liberal or conservative, I consider myself independent.
The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves. When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right! With power has come all those things - not a commitment to truth, but disdain for being made to learn anything. God I hope the next generation doesn't follow or accomodate us. And to this day, some people I know in the prior generation still don't understand things that are normal to us now as adults, because we grew up with them. I know some that won't wear blue jeans because they see jeans as a symbol of a challenging culture.
They say progress happens one funeral at a time! :)
The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.
> We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember?
Who is “we?” Millennials, as a group, are the good kids compared to baby boomers. They have less sex, do less drugs, etc.
> How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too.
Our parents started down this road of self expression and denying the realities of life. Mostly they sobered up after the drug binges of the 1960s, but left millennials poorly positioned to handle the real world. We are lucky to live in a society our grandparents built, because I don’t think we could build that society again today.
> The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves.
The realities of human existence don’t change so fast. The basic mechanics of American life aren’t much different today compared to 1989. If people are rushing past the comfort zones of their parents, that means they’re increasingly living in a delusion detached from reality.
> When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right!
People’s brains don’t fully develop until they’re 25. So if you believe the same things now as you did when you were young…
I thought the data was based on surveys of how people identify themselves, which only shows that identification has changed with time. Maybe fluid gender identity is a stage of development that has been denied before; who knows? Why do you have to tell these people what to do with their lives?
Self-expression is denying reality? I don't know what that means, what one has to do with the other. One way of looking at it is that what is inside you is part of reality; you are part of reality. Anyway, you are criticizing middle schoolers for denying reality?
Again, why do you have to tell them what to do, what to feel? Who are you to do it?
> ...
The rest is mostly your self-expression, not some objective reality. You are welcome to it, of course.
Nah, no on is going to isolate you for being good at math. Literally, that does not happen. Isolation of kids that cant fit it does happen and some of those are good at math. But, the "being good at math" part is not what gets them isolated. It is the other stuff and behaviors, roughly in the "poor social skills" (may include "have hard time being assertive about own boundaries") that gets you isolated.
There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.
This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.
While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.
In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.
We're already doing a pretty terrible job educating people and it shows. How much worse does it get when its outsourced to the 'community'? Communities in the US (and everywhere) are fragmented, class stratified, religiously bound structures that we have seen the detriment of when it comes to civic participation. Just check out the IG page of any former evangelical or mormon female.
A secular democracy requires education and time to participate in civic and civil society. That education must imho be grounded in not just how to think, but also the history of humanity. Otherwise we are signing ourselves up for a return to much darker days.
1. They complain that they have to cook
2. They complain that they have to do laundry.
3. They complain they have to iron their clothes.
4. They complain they have to tidy up the apartments.
5. They mostly care about sports, movies, and if they're not religious, getting drunk. Of course, that's not necessarily true for those that go to top universities for their PhDs, but those are the minority, in any case.
6. They boast about how great it was that they didn't take humanities in their undergrad. Talking to them, it's also clear they have little understanding of the arts.
I've also met some very responsible, intellectual Bangladeshis.
There are problem people in every society.
What generation? In my parents' generation, a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
I think there is a relative amount of middle class wealth left that hides the fact that many modern jobs do not pay middle class compensation anymore. There are a lot of house poor people that might have the trappings of middle class life, but they're on life support.
In many places, to live a middle class lifestyle from 40 years ago would require young workers without assets to earn six figure incomes. Even in "affordable" places, incomes required for a middle class lifestyle are approaching six figures, as well. I'm certainly not one of those people who think STEM is the be-all and end-all solution to anything, but STEM jobs often put workers in the six figure income range.
> a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
While I agree that wages haven't advanced outside of a the very few, secretaries aren't a good example. Computerization has made most of those skills obsolete.
This is just middle-class religious belief. And a good one, because middle-class professional people have to reproduce themselves every generation, so they have to center credentialism or fall to working class or poverty.
If you're born rich, it's easy to die rich; if you're born poor, it's easy to die poor; if you're born middle-class, remaining middle-class is a battle for credentials.
The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.
Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.
I learned so much, I cannot imagine having only the knowledge and intellectual skills that I had from high school.
Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university.
University felt extremely intellectually restrictive to me. You were given a ton of material that you needed to learn at a surface level to pass tests. There was little room for exploration and deep understanding within courses.
Most of the material did not seem like it was going to be useful for me. I don't like learning for the sake of it, I prefer to try and focus on usefulness.
Why do I need to learn about how to draw structures in isometric and oblique or understand CPU registers when I have absolutely zero interest in those things and never want to do that kind of work?
Because "foundational knowledge" or something, even though the vast majority of people will never use the vast majority of the knowledge they learn. I've asked my friends who completed degrees how much of the information from their degree they use at work and it's practically nothing.
Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.
In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!
From my perspective most faculty add very little value, so in terms of learning and exploration there's not much point in paying boatloads of money to attend when I could go through the material (Or similar) myself if I'm interested.
> I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add
This new social trend - which suits the reactionary movement very well (which doesn't mean you are a reactionary - is really tragic. We are just destroying so much in instututions and potential, so many years and resources lost, and mostly just to destroy things. It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts.
With people online you can at least vet them well and have access to their knowledge and advice. Even though it's not the same as a mentor I think learning from an expert online is better than having a mediocre mentor.
> It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts
I agree knowledge and learning are important, but I no longer feel like university is the primary place for that unless you want to go into academia. Internet communities feel like better environments than university at this point.
This doesn't feel like a purposeful destruction of university through a social trend though. The institutions are destroying themselves.
Yes, generally speaking. And they were better prepared than people from the 1840s, who mostly were illiterate (no universal education), lost most of their kids at a young age, etc. If you spend zero years preparing for something and I spend four (or 12 and 16 years), I'm going to be better prepared most likely. There are diminishing marginal returns at some point, but college is qualitatively very different than high school.
This question comes up many times, as if it's a personal insult to people without college degrees. Let's imagine it does insult them (which I don't think it does); should we reject all progress for ourselves because others don't have access to it and might be offended? You have access to the Interet and I don't - are you saying you are better than me? The Internet is useless! And now we don't want to offend people in the 1930s? There are things other people have done that benefitted their lives, and that I missed out on - good for them!
This is not an answer to a “in what way” question. I will grant you that elementary school teaching people to read, write and basic arithmetics, does indeed inculcate skills very important in adult life, but from there to argue that a marginal year of education gives you some marginal amount of human capital, only shows how weak your argument is: it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning. What if a year of college actually reduces a day’s worth of useful stuff? What a waste of time it would be, and yet totally compatible with your argument.
And, it might be of interest to you, that the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show. This is actually obvious to everyone, that obtaining diploma is worth more than 4 years worth of learning, but the point is that education is not about learning.
> it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning
Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
> the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show
What studies?
No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "mostly illiterate"[1]: I was talking about reading and writing, because you were talking about literacy, and I do agree that it is valuable to teach people basic literacy and numeracy. In no way my comment above implies that I question the value of education past 5th grade.
That said, I do in fact question value of state-organized mass education past 5th grade as it currently exist, yes. To be clear, I'm not questioning the value of learning things past 5th grade, but rather the way we pretend people learn things today.
> Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
If you decompose the syntax of the sentence you're referring to, you'll find that the "useless" in it does not refer to "education", but rather to your argument: it is useless to argue that "X is good for you, so extra 4-8 years doing X is worth it", unless you can quantify exactly how good X in fact is for you, and how good extra 4-8 years of doing X would be.
Say, imagine X to be "learning to play a musical instrument": it's probably worthwhile for everyone to spend some time doing that, but the idea that everyone needs to spend at least 12 years of their lifes, and most people should spend 4 on top of that, is rather ludicrous. How do you know that regular schooling is not exactly liked that, without trying to quantify it? You don't.
> What studies?
The Google Scholar keyword for you to familiarize yourself with the rather substantial literature on the topic is "sheepskin effect".
[1] - you are very much wrong that Americans in 1840 were mostly illiterate, by the way: literacy in US was historically always very high, and by mid 1800s, large majority was already literate, despite lack of federally-mandated government schooling. This is a legacy of English heritage, where majority of male Englishmen were already literate in mid 1600s. They did not get there through top-down state-organized schooling, it was mostly a bottom-up effort, where local Church played huge role.
Even worst than than that. Ford was a huge anti-Semite and one of his papers had major influence over Hitler who then went on to genocide millions of Jews. Dude was for sure an asshole. He also fired workers who drank or gambled during their off time and had company men who raided homes of his workers.
Unintuitively, harder lives don't make people tougher. Intuitively, they make people more exhausted and traumatized. Look at how functional people were back then when they were elderly (though that could be due to other aspects of health). Look at anyone who has had a hard life; they wear down.
Similarly, children, contrary to some pop politico-psychology, generally grow stronger if they feel safer. Unsafe kids are scared to face the world and often never develop an inner sense of security. Trauma leaves wounds that sometimes never heal. Safe kids feel like they can brave the world, and they internalize that sense of safety that their parents model and give them.
People repeat that but what is it based on?
Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.
We can't do better? Functioning is our only standard? We could go back to the Middle Ages, or be hunter-gatherers, where for 95% of homo sapien history probably most adults were 'functioning'.
You don't define what adult means. You don't say or imply what ways college would help you become a better one.
For what I would define as "adult", which is understanding the realities of life outside the shelter of their family infrastructure, I would argue most colleges don't really further a student's self-reliance in that way.
If anything, they create another, different reality bubble which is again popped when they are dropped into to the actual real world, often with a mountain of debt. This is the point at which, in my opinion, where someone learns to become an adult.
Does learning new information and skills help one become a better functioning adults? Of course. But college doesn't have a monopoly on being the way to acquire information and skills.
As the price of education in the US continues to increase (for no good reason, other than people can get loans to pay it), college will increasingly fail the cost/benefit analysis for a lot occupations.
As an aside, your attitude seems to imply that you think people who have not gone to college are lesser in some way. I would apply some critical analysis to that.
That's what we're seeing now. Understanding where that led last time is useful.
In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local. When that changed, the routine minor wars of the 19th century turned into World War One.
> In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local.
Knowing some history of Napoleon, for example, would help too. :) But yes, your general point is taken. And then 25 years later, WWII ...
Engineering programs are widely considered to be difficult to complete in 4 years. Where do you get 2 years?
Also, after my sophomore year in college, I was not nearly well-educated enough (whatever 'enough' means); I would wildly approximate that I learned 70% in the last two years. Much of freshman year was just adjusting to college, learning how to write at a college level, etc.
But most importantly, you are still focusing on college as job training, and as I imply in the GGP, specific skill training is just a side benefit. If corporations want job training, they can provide and pay for it themselves. College for the student, not the corporation.
Two, I don't think someone needs a full engineering degree to become productive. Writing my own compiler was a blast, and gave me some real insight into how computers work under the hood. But if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden, I wouldn't be teaching compilers. I'd be teaching how to spin up cloud services, the network stack, and modern web dev.
College is for the student. But it also costs the student a boatload of money. If we want to give the student the best bang for their buck, approaching it as a form of job training would be more effective. Sure, companies could pay for that training. But they're not and colleges fulfill this role, and insist on tacking on a bunch of other requirements that don't really do much to help the student's job prospects.
Humanities are more important than STEM. Humanities deal with the world and yourself on issues that aren't quantifiable, which is most of the issues in life and in the world, including at work.
> if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden
Again, life is much, much more than jobs - you are much, much more than what you do for some corporation - and early jobs are the least important ones. It's all so absorbed in the corporate perspective: your only value, your existence, is for serving the corporation. And it puts people permanently in that class, as servents rather than as the powerful - the citizens of a democracy, to whom the corporations report.
I think if more people studied the humanities, it would be brazenly obvious. It's craven on the part of the powerful and corporations.
What does a computer science student take in their first year? In year 1, in my hometown's university, through year 1, a student takes Linear Algebra, Calculus, Human-Machine interaction, Computer Hardware Fundamentals, Electrical engineering fundamentals, Intro to programming, Logic, Discrete Math, Discrete Automata, Numerical Methods, and intro to software engineering. Very different from an American University that might have 1 or 2 years worth of cross-major electives.
This is not unique to computing: A 1st year med students (which you get to start at 18), is going to be crushed under a pile of biology, biostatistics, cytology, anatomy and the like. Literature? Philosophy? History? You better have taken those in high school if you wanted to learn them, because college has no time for you to decide what you want to do with your life.
I am not going to try to figure out which system is better in the short or the long run, but it makes it pretty clear that college in the US is nowhere near close to universal in western countries, even after we take away the unique financial challenges the US gives college students.
Have you ever met someone fresh out of college? Let's be real, if they didn't do something before or during that wasn't college, they are arguably less qualified to do anything than an average person who didn't. Wew, they've memorized how to traverse a graph, or something something roman emperors
Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things. Your college education coincides with your formative years, but from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
They do? And if they do, is it true? Who are we talking about? High school students? People who read HN?
> from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
That's too bad. There is so much more going on. What about all the knowledge and critical thinking skills, from science and stats, to addressing the bigger questions in the humanities and social sciences?
Again you keep making the argument that university is the only place where you can learn how to think, which is a pretty basic human skill. If that was true, then it's a dangerous system that needs to be fixed, not something to celebrate.
I said "was true" because I didn't know that the government installed locks on books and encrypting mechanisms on the internet and public libraries so that they are only accessible from universities.
> Only activists have opinions...
That's not what I said, but you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.
Adult to me just means you can take care of people other than yourself. Of course it's a subjective definition, but a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Here is something to consider though: why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years, apparently unable to think, before "university"? Why should they? What are they before that? mindless primates?
I didn't say that (provide a link?), though I do happen to think that adults do have to be responsible for others, as you say, and the bigger issues are big because they impact those responsibilities. The rest is your own ideas.
At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think, and also the very narrow limits of your own mind.
> a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Right, college is about knowledge and thinking skills, not so much maturity (but it helps there too). For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old.
> why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years
Hmmm ... I had science classes, and was taught to think critically, before college, but not nearly on the same level. Why do people not learn more complex things earlier? Why not teach graduate level physics to 6 year olds?
Again with this "at college" rhetoric. I guess if you don't go to college, you will be a bigot, on top of having no critical thinking and being an absolutely selfish individual
> For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old
Did college teach you this stellar argument?
Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone. Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
Well, a worker with a college degree has higher job mobility. The worker being educated may be orthogonal. And I'm not sure if becoming educated increases one's ability to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
And it's also part of the problem, as I see it. Decades ago, one could switch industries or fields much more easily because of the lack of expectation of a specific college degree. Today one is much more "locked out" of other fields if they don't have that degree, and people feel trapped because they see no path to a higher paying career without taking on a ton of loans and risk to go to college (for the first time or for another degree).
I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge a lot (but not all) of higher education is arbitrary gatekeeping, and it's long past time to rein in the "arbitrary" part.
I agree completely, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
College as STEM job training is absurd and clearly a failure. As you say, it's about much more than job training, but I would argue it doesn't even do that. Hell, it makes applicants worse somehow.
I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.
Well, not the manual workers, temporarily. But then we’ll have to deal with the problem of unemployment honestly rather than leaving make-work jobs around.
The real problem is machines can't replace those jobs or they would have. 25/h would mean very high prices for local food so everything will come via imports.
It is a problem for them. They wouldn't come if it weren't economically advantageous to do so. Losing those jobs leaves them worse off, at least in the short term.
Oh yeah you think the only thing between us and a fully automated robot-run future is labor market conditions? The perfect robot slaves will not be forthcoming for quite awhile. We will have to settle for human slaves, or in modern times, immigrants totally reliant on their employer and without the normal rights afforded citizens for our low prices. I sympathize with libertarian and capitalist ideals but I find it disturbing that the agricultural and energy base of the US economy is anything but free market.
This can't be good because it suggests that 30%+ of the adult population aren't prepared to be adults.
As If you have to go to college to become an adult.
A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.
College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world.
Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.
Look at the marvels modern democracy has created with a population that mostly wasn’t college educated. Does democracy work better today, with vastly higher college graduation rates, than it did 30 years ago?
Also, I have two step siblings in college and they aren’t learning any of those things. They’re learning fantasies that make them less well-equipped to deal with reality than their parents and grandparents who didn’t go to college.
I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.
More importantly, who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems that institutional education is precisely what gives people the impression that there is such a thing as "stop learning" aka graduation.
What makes you say they are that, and for everyone, and from everyone's perception? Because lots of people say it on HN? Because lots of people say it anywhere? Does that make it true?
And if it is true, it changed once, why can't it change again? Through these discussions is how society changes - and it will change, one way or another.
> who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems like universities are the best place to learn, given the obvious resources? If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?
That would be true prior to the internet and/or digitalization of resources.
Today, a kid in the 3rd world country can access those very same resources. Whats left is the value of the credential - accepted in the marketplace.
They cannot access the experts to mentor them and teach them, they can't access much of scholarly work, which is in expensive books and research papers.
I'm not a child and not in a 3rd world country; I've been through higher education, and seriously studying anything is inefficient and impossible - I simply can't catch up with the expertise of professors in selecting the media and understanding it.
who said it can't? It will be changed by looking into the mirror and fix the incentives or whatever that corrupted higher education. Not by preaching people how they should invest their time and efforts. Preaching only works in churchs.
Universities that stifle dissenting opinions are the best place to learn? Interesting.
There are plenty of online resources these days with active communities where you can learn from peers without fear of being penalized by your peers or an ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line.
> ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line
It's a baseless accusation against nobody.
> you can learn from peers
Peers are no substitue for experts. If I want to become a doctor, I need to learn from professors of medicine, not peers. Who would hire your 'peers' to teach a course in whatever you want to learn? Who would ask their advice?
College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture, so the idea that going through a 4-year degree leads to a well informed populace is laughable.
I would argue that a 4-year peace corps posting in an improvised country would lead to a better informed population than any liberal arts education.
Reactionaries repeat that over and over, which is their most common tactic for any issue. But reptition is not truth, as we have learned well in the Internet age, though that hasn't stopped people from repeating it. Also, the reactionaries main objection seems to be that their own ideology isn't taught (including things like denial of climate change and racism); they insist they are a non-ideological norm and everything else is ideology, again through repetition. Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas. It's also a place that disrespects the current establishment; again, no ideas get special treatment.
Tell that to Judith Butler.
It's sad that so many comments like this are dismissive, and therefore not much reason or argument is put behind them, making them very thin.
You can be an adult with no education or training at all, and for most of human history, that's what happened. Is that our standard? Just 'be' an adult? Why have any schooling?
Ironically, college starts preparing people to be adults at age 18, where in most jurisdictions in the US, you are already an adult.
For now. Let's look at young people though. They're indicative of the future.
Outside of finance and STEM, it's really hard to see a clear and reliable path to prosperity for a 20-something year old. Perhaps some trades as well.
What's even worse is that the paths to prosperity seems to get narrower and narrower by the year.
no
I never went to college to get a STEM degree to be a resource for anybody. I went because I imagined myself being Tom Swift.
Of course, Elon Musk turned into a real life Tom Swift!
Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do what he does; I certainly do.
No 10-year olds are talking about how to become a savvy financial engineer like Jack Welch at GE, but they are talking about rockets and electric cars thanks to Musk.
LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster.
> You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money
I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people.
But smarts alone simply isn't good enough to do what Musk does. You'll also need:
1. excitement
2. interest
3. drive
4. willingness to try impossible things
5. perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles
6. a thick skin for being laughed at
7. a willingness to continue in spite of withering criticism and vomit
Besides, although Musk was born into wealth, there's no evidence on his wikipedia page that he had access to it:
"working odd jobs at a farm and lumber-mill" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
"Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother."
He made his initial money on an internet startup. Nothing wrong with that.
People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.
More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.