Or at least you are supposed to. The problem is that in our society, the college degree has become a commodity. You are supposed to have one, even if you really don't need it.

Someone getting a CS degree, paying $80K is an investment. Someone getting a Communications degree, paying $80K is borderline retarded, why? because they'll wind up working at the Gap after they graduate making the same 25K/yr that they made before going to college, except they lose 4 years worth of promotions and raises.

Yes college is not vocational training...but if your degree won't help you get a better job...then you are just pissing a ton of money away. Someone working at the Gap should not be $80K in debt.

Actually, vocational training now a days is probably a better investment than a college degree. A plumber won't get outsourced, and will still make as much money as a programmer.

Speak for yourself. I went to college to expand my mind, meet interesting people, and learn things I would never have learned by myself. I am very happy that I did so, even though I barely use any of the actual Physics that I learned, in my daily job.

I will add that I learned far more than just Physics at university. I learned that there were a lot of extremely smart people out there. I learned about my limitations (cramming only gets you so far). I learned about my abilities (few things seem that incredibly hard after a physics degree). I learned how to learn new things (there are many ways to learn). I learned how to behave in a wider variety of environments than I had been exposed to previously. I learned that even amongst very smart people, there were things I could do that no one else could. I learned that if you make the right connections, you can benefit immensely. I learned many more things, far too many to list here.

What went in was a naive, uncouth, slightly ill-mannered boy, what came out was confident, friendly, approachable go-getter.

Perhaps your university didn't expand your mind. If that is so, it is deplorable, but might be the fault of either the university, or yourself. But certainly you should not generalise your unfortunate case and assume that everyone had your poor experience of university.

Especially when you don't have to pay $80k much less $160k. I paid $10,000 over 4 years. I worked hard enough in high school that every college I applied to wanted to let me come for free, and all I had to do was pay for food and my car. If you are really hard working, don't apply to MIT or the Ivy's and put yourself in debt, just go to a good state school for free.

You can find lots of people with non-vocational degrees that have had extremely successful careers, don't work at the gap, and have more fulfilling works lives than code slaves who "invested" in a CS degree.

You know what would really impeede you from doing that? Telling everyone else in the company you work with that their degree is inferior to yours.

Especially when we are talking CS, which I don't think anyone can claim is a difficult degree. Physics, Chemistry, real engineering, those are hard. But just because you call yourself a software engineer and you have a BS in CS, doesn't make you an engineer, so get off the high horse.

I didn't.

To get a "good job" you get training. That's usually a job you get after college. You go to college (for a Bachelors) to learn how to think rigorously logically and to learn the fundamentals of your field. That's of intrinsic value, irrespective of whether it gets you a job. If you enjoy and have a passion about the field you study, all the better (on the other hand if you chose to study CS to "make a lot of money", you get to miss out on the biggest advantage of a programming career - doing what you enjoy for a living).

When an employer gives you a "college hire" position (which is often the only way into some mature companies, unless you're already wildly known and successful), that means they're making an investment in you. Education (or lack thereof) is one way for them to gauge the risk of said investment.

As I've also said in earlier posts, if you're worried about outsourcing and/or your job going to entry-level candidates - then you need to pick up domain specific knowledge.

Domain specific knowledge builds on these fundamentals (of computer science and mathematics) and can't be looked up on google.

Don't you think that if you haven't learned that at all by 18, you won't learn it in the next 4 years surrounded by equally ignorant kids?

But, speaking of the topic, how many colleges these days require courses in rhetoric?

I sat in on a bunch of college sophmore classes when I was 14 and 15, even wrote some of my friend's English papers for them, on books I had never even read. I wasn't impressed. And this was a "good state university" as someone else mentioned.

Nobody plans on having a worthless degree after school, and no educator wishes to leave their student ill-equipped. No one wants to work at the Gap in the first place, and whether they have a degree in Communications or not is irrelevant.

Education, like a trip to the hospital, is a practice in fighting for yourself and getting what you came for.

The problem with b.s. liberal arts degrees like Communications, is that you are majoring in the Extra. You don't have that core technical/analytical shaping of the mind through the "hard" classes. You are majoring in the fluff. I mean hell, take math for example, communications majors pretty much end their math curriculum, at the same level they ended in High School.

It really depends on the program that you're attending. A well rounded Philosophy department will produce better hackers than a poorly-focused Computer Science department.

I agree. But our society has completely bought into the idea that it is. Even the so-called educators have. And as we know from Gatto and others, this is not a recent distortion, but one that goes back to the origin of public education.

And, there's merit in an under-graduate degree. There is merit in going to prison too. But that doesn't mean we don't have better alternatives.

1. Most of the professors I had cannot teach as well as a well-written textbook. You can choose your textbooks on Amazon. You cannot (usually) choose your lecture professor. With MIT open course, Berkeley webcast, nowadays you can even choose your professor for without going to college.

2. The good professors and grad student that you met in college, why can't you meet them when you are not in college? What stop you from send them emails or just stop by their offices anyway? In fact, I've talked to far more professors who are not in my college than ones that are.

3. People who want more than a vocational education will actively go out and get their knowledge. The internet + a good library + Amazon is a far larger reservoir of knowledge than any college. Why do you need an excuse like college to learn more?

4. People who just care about a vocational education, and really don't give a damn about liberal arts or general education, why should they let a college force them to learn things useless to them, trick them into thinking that a degree is equal to vocational training, and rob them of their money so they had to spend the rest of their life paying back loans?

5. People who network in college, what stops you from networking in the real world? What stop you from talking to people on a bus, in a park, in the subway, in a conference, in a bar, in a farmers market, in your jobs? Most people don't learn networking in college. They are given their network by dorm assignment. Of course, there are exceptions, and those are the people who eventually learn how to network in the real world anyway, so why not start in the real world?

I can go on for a while. My point is under-graduate college has it's place, but it certainly shouldn't be the only way.

Yes the post author is generalizing. But the fact remains true that most people are not getting what they want out of their college degrees. If that's the way we educate the mass, then there's something wrong with that.

What this hell is "our society"? Is it the most common occurring opinion of a set of people magnitudes larger than the set of people you will meet in your lifetime? Our society is made up of a lot of people. If some, even most, have bought into a particular idea, it still leaves many, many people who haven't.

So even if 99% of our society has bought into the idea that education must be vocational doesn't mean that one can't go through life spending most of her time with people in the other 1%.

As I advanced through my schooling, I had more and more Renaissance-personalties as teachers. At Rutgers University, I had enough choice that I was able to pick classes almost exclusively taught by people who didn't think of my education as vocational. Sure, it took a bit of work at the beginning of each semester - adding and dropping classes based on the first couple of lectures and conversations with the professors, but it certainly wasn't some insurmountable feat. Independent studies helped a lot, also.

IMO, there's a greater pattern here - a large part of life is about avoiding the vast majority of people who focus their lives around petty nonsense.

PS - Unless you're talking about maximizing social productivity of some kind, in which case, yes, it is a shame that most people see themselves as slaves being trained to do a job. The average person would be a lot happier and productive if we were to pursue our interests for their own sake, but that's their mistake to make.

Certainly it's possible to deviate from the consensus, at least up to a point, and I'm all in favor of doing so.

I think that's the point that the blog is trying to make: college has become something of less value, even in the minds of the people who attend it. No longer is it some special thing, even though it should be a special thing. Now it's just an extra 4 or 6 years applied to the end of your existing 13 years in school. Some people apply to college just to go through the motions, and attend it in the same way, and I hate that. College has turned into another mandatory for most people.

I'm not saying there's no purpose to college - my first semester was all mandatory know-nothing classes, but this coming semester I'm in an advanced design course, an upper-level coding class, and I'm taking "intro to religion" for fun - but at the same time, there's a very important point being made with this blog, and that's "Only go to college if you really want to get something out of it." Otherwise, there are other more satisfying routes available.

I think it was Einstein who said one always cuts a poor figure if one complains about others who are struggling for their place in the sun too, after their own fashion.

When I'm in a beginner's coding class, sitting next to a girl who doesn't know how to program and hates the idea of programming, and she'd rather copy my stuff, then it lowers my ideal of what the class ought to be. When the professor cares more about making a joke and talking about her son than she is about teaching as effectively as possible, it lowers my ideal.

Not everybody's like that - I love my roommate and some of my floormates - but my point was that college is not for everybody. For instance, at this moment it's not for me. I've got an idea for something I want to do with my life - not my whole life, but my life right now - and I'm benefitting from planning parts of my life around that idea, and seeing it grow, and possibly seeing it succeed. After that, I'll probably end up back in college, but older and wiser and surrounded, hopefully, by people who've gone through similar experiences.

It may be different in later years, but that's my perspective as a freshman. College is built around the social. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't matter as much.

But Universities are big - surely, you can find people who are of the same world view. Again, at Rutgers, we had ~40k undergrads. Given that many people, it wasn't all that hard to get together a suite of 6 math majors, hang up a huge whiteboard (technically, shower wall from Home Depot), and geek it up :)

As far as classes, it gets a lot better after you finish the common pre-requisites (if your school doesn't offer "honors" sections of those). When you have the choices of picking one of a dozen classes each taught by a couple of different professors (I'm thinking across-semesters), smart people often start gravitating toward the same teachers - ask around.

Hopefully this'll be the first semester where I'm really going interesting stuff. One of my first-semester professors let me and a friend into one of his top-level courses, so I'm excited for that.

Any large university will give you enough of a selection of professors for you to be able to focus on the good ones.

College helps us learn new ways of thinking and teaches us a lot of the theory and some of the practice behind the profession we think we want to go into. A college education is no guarantee for success, but it does tend to say something about the person.

i agree, gwb got his mba from hbs, that should say something about the degree ... errr ... the person

I'm glossing over a lot of history here (the GI bill had several tremendous effects on postwar America; suburbanization is another huge one), but this was one of the main times when what it meant to go to college shifted.

* Though veterans of any race theoretically had tuition paid at any college, they were still mostly segregated.

College kids beware, education is the foundation of whatever you want to become in your adult life.

Anyway, you'd be surprised at how many successful people in all kinds of fields do not have a degree, or don't have a degree in the field they're in.

They just don't make the news as often (cough except for Richard Branson cough). You're right that there's a selection bias, but you missed the other selection bias.

Also related is the word "eduction", as in "the eduction of relations and correlates", Charles Spearman's definition of acting intelligence (1927). http://www.google.com/search?q=eduction+relations+correlates...

Government funds, research grants and philanthropic bequests are either drying up, or come with onerous conditions (e.g. ban on stem cell research institution wide). What we've seen in the last 25 years are universities entering the vocational education market and acquiring technical and further education colleges in the hunt for revenue and growth. Add to this full fee paying places with lower required entrance scores (you can actually "buy" an engineering degree now), and industry's incessant demand for vocational training and you'll find most universities simply ain't what they used to be, more's the pity.

Now, your education might not be just a piece of paper - mine sure isn't (most guys laugh at my major) - but the sad fact of the matter is that an undergraduate degree is simply a meal-ticket for a great many people.