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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the obvious 0 line, it's worth taking the article's observation that S&P has returned 7.8% and mentally drawing a line there too.

Also, for anyone in the position of deciding which to do, I'd add the observation that it is way easier to go to college and get a formal education in science, math, or engineering, and pursue an ongoing adhoc self-directed education in the arts and humanities in your remaining decades of life, than the other way around. Locally to HN's interests, this calculation is a bit distorted by the way that programming can actually be learned via adhoc self-directed education, but as science, math, and engineering goes, I'd suggest it's on the short list of exceptions, not the rule.

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The 7.8% line is to be taken with a grain of salt though. If you decide to invest all the theoretical college money and work without said education you'll (hopefully) still earn >0$.

It would have also helped if the article said what degree/how long it takes (BA, MA) and what the investment cost for the degree actually is (provide median or something). A typical BA takes 2 years and is in the ballpark of 50k$ on the lowish end (I heard that as a low end average for in-state public schools). Had I invested that fictional amount at 7.8% since universities are "free" here I'd have about 225k...yay

> A typical BA takes 2 years

Do you mean 4 years? It's extremely rare for someone to get their Bachelor's in fewer than 4 years.

Well, the Economist is an British magazine. English and Welsh Bachelor's degrees are generally 3 years, whereas Scottish ones are 4 years.

The average in-state tuition & fees at a public university in the USA is $9,410/year, ranging between $4,890 and $15,160 [1].

Unless otherwise specified, US publications tend to assume "college" = 4 year bachelor's degree.

[1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...

I'd add the observation that it is way easier to go to college and get a formal education in science, math, or engineering, and pursue an ongoing adhoc self-directed education in the arts and humanities in your remaining decades of life, than the other way around.

Yeah, not really. There is a huge difference between reading a book by yourself, and reading a book then discussing it with a room full of other intelligent people + a knowledgable teacher.

That's a null argument. It cuts both ways equally, and therefore can not distinguish between the two.

In these days when STEM is so promoted, I think sometimes there is too much tendency to dismiss the arts and humanities as complete lightweight fluff compared to STEM. Perhaps there are some subjects which fall in this category. But I know, for instance, with music theory and composition, the heavy stuff can get fairly complicated and technical very fast. Certainly few people would be dismissive of the technical training required to be a virtuoso player.

I think this is the same for other "liberal arts" subjects too. Take linguistics -- from what I know about some of the linguistics concepts that pioneer translation software, speech synthesis, natural language processing, etc., linguistics is hardly "fluff" and requires some years of deep study to be an expert at.

The Economist's monetary chart is solely based on supply vs. demand.

In many subjects, I think extremely gifted autodidacts are pretty rare. No matter whether its the STEM subjects or the arts or anything else, I think most people benefit from an environment where like minded peers can bounce ideas off of each other.

When I look at Wikipedia's list of autodidacts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts

I know this is just a sample, but at first glance, the list of autodidact scientists and engineers certainly seem to be of comparable size with artists / musicians / etc.

EDIT: I will add that I agree with other above posts, that one of the biggest barriers for the modern autodidact scientist / engineer is that it is really hard to home-tinker with certain concepts. You can program at home very easily. You can make circuits and robotics at home. You can even "group buy" small order electronic bare boards from contract manufacturers with all the difficult-to-hand-solder parts already taken care of.

It is nearly impossible, however, for a home tinkerer to get access to $100K scopes, electron microscopes, GCMS / NMR machines, or any other "big equipment" of this nature that you can think of. Heck, depending on what you are doing, you probably even risk a run in with "the law" these days from tinkering in certain sectors of hobbies like home chemistry or home biology.

To me, that's pretty much the barrier for non-college STEM in a nutshell.

I'm not disagreeing with your general point -- from my observations at a tech-focused school, many STEM folks write off the arts pretty hard -- but I think your examples are poorly chosen. Most folks are aware or have at least heard that, at a deep level, music has a lot of mathematics. Additionally, linguistics emerged specifically as a scientific study of language: much closer to STEM than other humanities.

A better example might be that philosophy/law require broad and deep contextual knowledge of prior thinkers and extremely strong logical skills. Even having trained in formal logic as a software developer, I sometimes struggle to parse philosophical arguments, even when laid out plainly. Yet, even that is still a comparison on the same plane as STEM when ultimately these fields come with different sorts of complexities. Apples and oranges.

"I think sometimes there is too much tendency to dismiss the arts and humanities as complete lightweight fluff compared to STEM."

It's not that the subjects are lightweight fluff, it's that the students are disproportionately so. STEM is fairly objective, so it's comparatively hard to hide your lack of depth.

But if you just want to go to college as a social signal, and a ticket to 4 years of parties, then arts and humanities will offer you a place of comfort. Not every professor for every class at every university; but at pretty much any university you can find some kind of lazy path through the arts/humanities departments.

There are a few reasons for this:

* Many professors / TAs use classes as a political platform first, and an education platform second. If you just tell them what they want to hear (a slightly avant garde kind of progressive liberalism will do the trick pretty much anywhere), you get an A or B.

* Based on the title of the course, huge mobs of lazy students will sign up assuming that it's easy (this is never a serious STEM class). The professor then adapts the grades so that a lot of them pass, because otherwise there will be a revolt.

* Universities like to provide "a path to success" for pretty much all of their students who are willing to put in even small amounts of effort. If they can't tell the difference between a concerto and a sonata, then the counselors can take them out of music theory, and put them in "post-modern ethno musical studies".

From my experience what you are describing is exactly psychology, which is a STEM field.

And humanities disciplines are quite dissimilar as are STEM disciplines. Philosophy is generally fairly rigorous and difficult, communication is often not except when it encompasses fields like journalism, etc.

I think the bar for mediocrity is much lower in the humanities, but the bar for top-notch excellence is much higher. When two students complete an exam correctly, they are both great students who wrote down the correct answers as instructed. When two students write papers, you can actually tell that one of them is genuinely brilliant.

That's a good point, and you could make similar claims about economics and political science (do those last two count as STEM?).

Oh well. I guess colleges want money, and they will find a way to make their customers happy.

>From my experience what you are describing is exactly psychology, which is a STEM field.

From my experiences, the rest of the STEM field doesn't take the social science parts (psychology, athropology, economics, political science) very seriously or even consider them STEM on a colloquial level (even if "officially" they are).

>>I think sometimes there is too much tendency to dismiss the arts and humanities as complete lightweight fluff compared to STEM.

As a teenager in India, most people took Arts, Humanities and commerce(No economics, but accounting) because it was widely believed to 'light fluff', course work easy to get through. And you could get a 'Bachelors' title next your name without much work.

Among science people these subjects was what we believed losers took, because they couldn't study anything better. Which was to some extent true. I studied Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology. I would typically get to sleep 5 hours a day. Apart from the main exams, we had to study hard for engineering entrance exams. Compare this to some one who studied history or accounting. You can't exactly compete with someone working 3 times more harder than you, in a area which is vastly more economically valuable.

I disagree slightly. Mostly because you can find dozens of commentaries and critical analyses of great works of fiction to complement your reading. These are essentially transmitting the same info a knowledgeable teacher/group of classmates would. The resources for math and science are also vast, but often require access to specialized laborites/equipment at the upper levels.

Uhh... no they're not "essentially the same." The value of being in the same room as knowledgeable people is interacting with them. If there's something that is unclear or that you want to delve into, you have an interactive way to do so.

This whole "self-learning is just as good!" is ridiculous. If it was, it would already rule the world. People trust accreditation for a reason.

It already does rule the world. The greatest writers, actors, musicians, engineers, salespeople, marketers and entrepreneurs nearly all mastered their craft outside of brick an mortar institutions

You have a PHD in drama? Good for you. I'd rather watch a high school drop out like Leonardo DiCaprio.

You have a PHD in computer graphics? That's nice, but once again a dropout beat you to it. He currently leads Oculus Rift.

Marketers? Salespeople? Businesspeople? Authors? Seriously... try to name even one at the very top of the game who became that way through formal schooling. It's not easy.

Oh good, so all you have to do is be a prodigy!

Sure, maybe the top 1% is self-taught (probably not, though, you're just selecting for your point). How about the next 15%?

My comment was not a guide on how you can "rule the world", in your words. I was simply pointing out that those at the very top are "self-learning".

The examples I gave should make it incredibly clear that people can and do learn enough to get to the top of their fields without going through a formal process. It doesn't mean that you will. It doesn't mean that there are no fields with rigid credential requirements. It does mean that no formal body controls education, only schooling and credentials.

>"Sure, maybe the top 1% is self-taught (probably not, though, you're just selecting for your point)."

Another thing to think about is that with or without credentials in their past, at the very top everybody is self-taught. No business school on earth can teach Zuckerberg exactly how to set Facebook's strategy. He's got to make his own curriculum.

At the same time, I can interact with the web.

I can google questions, I can read discussions that take place between other people, I can chime in, I can be replied to.

I would probably find it more useful to be able to read all the TOP QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS from all the Roman History 101 discussions around the world, than just whatever came up in my class. Being able to sort by global best as opposed to local loudest sounds very useful.

Many artists peak in their early thirties after about a decade of constant practice and work. There are many hormonal and social changes that occur after that point which make creative paths more difficult. Certainly not impossible but I certainly wouldn't consider doing those later as simple as it sounds on paper based upon financial means.

I studied Japanese in school and I think it would have been extremely difficult to learn on my own. So... I'd say it depends.

Language seems like a complicating factor here. It's difficult (especially in non-Latinate cases) to learn self-directed, and people who are fluent and willing to work in the field can actually do quite well traveling and translating for businesses and government agencies.

Of course, all of these numbers are complicated by "salary of graduates" versus "salary of graduates employed in field".

But it does depend. If the above poster was taking Japanese as his sole Major it is probably not worth it. If he/she is taking it as an addendum to say a Business degree then it is very much worth it.

I guess it depends how you define "worth it." I have a satisfying career but it has nothing to do with my ability in Japanese.

If you're studying Japanese because you think it will make you money it is a bad idea

Less well known languages like Japanese tend to have higher returns on investment than common ones like Spanish. IIRC Spanish has a return on investment of about 3%.

In my experience the Japanese translation market was very crowded and didn't pay well so my first plan went out the window.

I forget if it was Planet Money or Freakonomics, but there was a podcast about the ROI of learning a foreign language and according to the research they cited the only foreign language worth learning from a pure ROI perspective was English.

Given the thousands of majors, there are certainly exceptions on both sides. But I'm still comfortable with that assessment in general; "learning an entire language" is also one of the exceptions.

I'd also point out that if for the sake of argument that was your primary goal at college, college is a very cost-ineffective choice. There's plenty of non-college ways of doing that, for way less money, since it's something that business people have to do routinely. Even if it means taking languages courses from the local community college on the side... I'm not aware of much evidence that major colleges teach the courses all that much better or indeed even differently for languages.

I'd be very surprised if business people spend much time reading Japanese literature, learning anything other than pure modern business Japanese, or probably even learning to read and write the language.

Once you embark on the quest to learn japanese, you begin to look for other avenues to hone in on those skills -- whether its finding other people who speak it, or in some people's cases, play on japanese gaming servers, or skyping/hangouts and converse with japanese people in full immersion. After that you want to start reading more literature, so you do what anyone would do and search for japanese books on Amazon. After a while amazon starts offering you remarkable suggestions based on what the majority of japanese speaking people are reading.

You would be surprised how much you could learn on your own!

My case it was german. I was so fascinated with the german language, and germany as a whole, in part I must sadly admit because I was such an avid fan of WW2 history. I actually tried to go the traditional route, and I hated it. I noticed one time some germans playing counterstrike and other MMORPG's I was playing. I got to know them better, in part because of their extreme delight in my ability to say a few things in german. Then it turned into ventrilo/teamspeak sessions, which then turned into me wanting to read actual german books, then it went on to learning about Otto Von Bismarck, German Reunification, the East/West cultural divide, watching foreign german films such as Der Unterfall, Das Leben der Anderen, Good Bye, Lenin!, effects German engineering such as Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler and von Braun, which led me down the path of looking into german businesses, especially the ones that are here in my own home state (which are many), it was so much fun!

edit: I realize you qualified it with 'business' people, implying they won't see the value of learning the other things, but since business people is a large group (of which I myself can be considered a part of) I imagine there are others like me.

Maybe they would, but I've attended Japanese courses intended mostly for businesspeople before college and they were almost universally focused on conversational Japanese -- which is fine but nothing like studying Japanese literature with a professor who is an expert in it. We're getting away from the claim that it would be "easy" to learn this on your own, to be sure.

I've been learning some Korean in my spare time and I feel pretty confident in my assessment that being in a college course would both be easier and see me make more progress more quickly.

I see. I think maybe the difference is enthusiasm? If someone is going into it thinking "It would be really helpful for my work or business to learn Japanese" versus "Japanese is cool. I would really like to immerse myself in this language and learn how to talk to Japanese people" would merit different results. The business-focused person would be more inclined to trod those traditional routes of instructorship and classes, etc, but being a student of languages myself, as well as knowing 3 of them (sorry if this sounds like I am trying to argue by authority), I can say the latter is the only way you really ever learn a language.

My good friend has a PhD in Chinese, (yes that is actually a thing), and he attests to the fact that he didn't grok the language until his travels and studies there, being immersed.

Now typing this I realize we may be debating across each other, because even if you believe you can learn on your own better, or having structured courses is better, the real answer is none of it sticks unless you fully immerse yourself in it, self-taught or not.

I too have studied several languages, both in high school and in college, as well as some dabbling on my own. The classes alone are not enough, no. But they are a tremendous resource and make it much easier to get where you want to go.

You might be able to reach similar levels of language proficiency without the courses but the biggest problems are 1) finding hours and hours a day to drill writing characters and other mundane aspects of learning 2) guidance from an instructor who can tell you whether things that look/sound right are. And also I think a university course also gives you a survey of the literature and culture of that language and insight into it that would be hard to acquire on your own.

But are you fluent in those languages? Sorry I am not trying to come off a presumptuous, I am just trying to emphasize the distinction because I think it is important to bear in mind. If the goal is fluency, do you think that traditional education has succeeded for you?

Also how long have you been studying languages? I ask because I am curious if you think that the web, and later, apps, like Duolingo for example, can make a huge difference versus the pre-web era of language learning. Pre-web, I would agree with anyone that yes it would be extremely difficult to learn a language on your own unless you had traditional schooling. But today there is nothing a traditional course in German could give me that I couldn't get from Deutsche Welle, for example (but I also realize there isn't a 'Deutsche Welle' for every language).

Sorry if this is going further than you wanted, I am just trying to get different perspectives and it seems like you have a good grasp.

I'm hesitant to give too much detail for fear of outing myself here, but: In a few, yes (or at least at one point; I'm sure I've dipped in fluency). In others I am less accomplished. I think traditional education has been very successful for me. I'm not going to argue that it's not possible to graduate with a Japanese degree without being able to carry on a conversation -- it is -- but I think a university program is still a very effective way of not only attaining fluency in the language but also some level of erudition as far literature/culture/etc.

I started studying in middle school. I haven't tried the online stuff you're talking about. I'm not sure that they would be just as good.

If you ever are interested in german, I highly encourage the learn section of deutsche welle, it's among the best.

If while you are there, and are aware of any similar websites like that for any other language I would love to know!

Who cares what other people do? What are you going to do? Are you incapable of leveraging from an intro course in Japanese into anything you want? If so, why do you think you're going to do any better in a formal environment either? It's not like they crack open your head and pour pure distilled knowledge into it while you passively sit back and just take it in.

Also, I think people are fundamentally missing the comparitive here. My claim is not that learning humanities is "easy". Nothing worth doing is easy. My contention is that it is easier to learn math, engineering, and science in school and study humanities on your own that to learn humanities in school and then try to break into math, engineering, and science on your own.

And as I watch the conversation flow here, bear in mind I do mean "math, engineering, and science" here and not just "programming". Which is easier to do on your own, learn Japanese from scratch enough to get a relevant job, or learn biochemistry from scratch enough to get a relevant job? (Note we're also discussing "learning Japanese" as an extreme in the humanities but I consider "biochemistry" an average sort of what I'm talking about.) And part of my "easier" also encompasses the fact that life is a lot easier when you have a job and a paycheck. Someone who actually has leisure time due to not working two-and-a-half jobs and who is much more relaxed about paying off their loans will find it easier to spend their leisure time learning things.

The meta problem is we're in the discussion comments of a linked article that buys into the belief that the only purpose of the higher ed system is monetarily rewarding vocational training.

In the real world that's a completely wrong way to look at the purpose of life and education, but in the small minded narrow constraints of the article its actually "correct".

A side issue is outside bubble areas, every low paid service industry worker has a liberal arts degree and they guarantee the ROI of self taught foreign languages or liberal arts will be zero. A guy looking for employment who merely is a lifelong expert on Japanese will never get hired if the competition is ten baristas, bartenders, and real estate agents all with bachelors or masters or PHDs in Japanese Literature.

The point of view you speak for -- that education is an end in itself -- is a privilege of the rich and reflects their historical attitudes towards education. Back in the day, liberal education was for the children of the rich, and it gave them culture, polish, and perspective that was hard to attain elsewhere. Those are the non-economic benefits of studying the humanities. They're certainly real, and valuable. I'd definitely prefer that people in positions of power and authority have studied philosophy, history, and literature.

However, to argue that a young person of modest means should study the humanities is just cruel. If your family and connections aren't going to set you up as a company vice president or send you to the legislature, your job prospects are dismal.

Look, I'm not going to get into a pissing match about what discipline is harder. The point is that learning Japanese at a university is not an experience that could be easily duplicated somewhere else and that there are probably other "soft" disciplines of which the same could be said.

Learning Japanese is way easier if you just go to the country and live there. I'll guarantee if you go with the same amount of money invested in college you'll learn the language faster.

Part of my studies took place in Japan; being there certainly helps but it's not the same thing (and besides that, how do you get to Japan? It's almost impossible to get a long-term visa unless you are either a student or have a degree)

I think you can self learn Japanese by moving to Japan without much formal education ed: in Japanese. This assumes having a background where you could move to Japan. But, over a 20 year time scale it's not unreasonable.

That would be next to impossible without some college degree. Might as well study Japanese.

Yes, but the idea was you are better off studying something else and then picking up Japanese on the side. Instead of studding Japanese and learning that other thing on the side.

Well, besides that, twenty years is a lot longer than it took me to achieve.

Sure, but it's a classic time money tradeoff. If you have a large trust fund it's a non issue. Or, if you can pay for two degrees in time and effort then the second degree need not pay for its self.

However, if you have two interests then gathering credentials in the one which can make more money is probably a better investment.

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/find-the-thing-youre-most-p...

I studied Japanese in school too. Being young and having free time helped a lot, as did having a Japanese roommate who invited all his buddies over to drink in my room until 3am every weekend.

Nonetheless, I have achieved a level of fluency and especially literacy in Mandarin that puts my Japanese of that time to shame and I have no formal credential backing it up.

You don't need formal classes to become fluent in a language. If you'd like to learn how some very successful language learners have done it, check out http://lingsprout.com/experts

You don't need formal training in anything to practice it unless there is some sort of licensure scheme.

Yeah, the comparison with S&P was for fun, I hope. Because in one case you're sacrificing 4 years of opportunity cost, then working full-time to make the ROI numbers that the author use for comparison.

Whereas, my understanding of the S&P is that you don't have to work 40 hours per week for it to give you returns ;). So, if you had your college money as cash you could put all that in the S&P, then work full time without a degree to then, most likely, have an even higher ROI. Of course, most don't have the significant cash for college lying around.

> it's worth taking the article's observation that S&P has returned 7.8% and mentally drawing a line there too.

Unfortunately people aren't generally in the habit of handing out low-interest loans to recent high school graduates with no assets so they can invest in the S&P.

I mean this seriously. One of the bigger advantages of college as an investment is that you can get favorable interest rates on purchasing it. Though perhaps this advantage is minimized by the relatively poor tax treatment of college returns (ordinary income vs. capital gains).

That might be slightly offset by being able to reduce your tax liability due to the interest payments of college loans.

As a self taught-programmer, I'd be interested in why HN thinks

>it's on the short list of exceptions, not the rule.

As an example, I've fiddled around with circuit design. I'm not good at it, but I can make some basic stuff.

It feels a lot like fiddling around with linux early in my career, and I'm not seeing any obvious point where it suddenly becomes more difficult to learn the skill.

It's just a bit harder to get into, and a bit harder to get on-the-job training/mentorship.

>, and I'm not seeing any obvious point where it suddenly becomes more difficult to learn the skill.

In terms of pure theory, I can see what you're saying but a lot of STEM curriculum includes lab work that's hard to replicate for an auto-didactic.

For applied sciences like biology, electrical engineering, applied physics (not theoretical physics), the universities will have expensive equipment that students can use in their lab assignments. Biology students examine specimens in $20k microscopes, physics students schedule time on multi-million dollar particle accelerators, and engineering students working on high speeed GHz digital circuits can use $100k Agilent scopes. Some universities also have specialized and very expensive labs with robotics and virtual reality rooms.

The humanities graduate wanting to "reinvent" himself/herself as a "electrical engineer" can buy the same college books and watch hours of youtube videos about circuits but the lab work is really hard to replicate. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of self-taught electronics engineers out there... there are ... but most I've seen learned it first as children and added to their hobby and knowledge over a decade. That's a very different learning trajectory than a 30-something trying to self-study physics without a particle accelerator in his garage.

Also, the STEM students have access to professors and their professional networks into businesses. Their recommendations opens doors for internships. This is another form of "real-world" lab work to strengthen the acquired knowledge.

Computer programming is unique in that it's a STEM that self-learners can get very deep and practical in -- without expensive lab equipment.

"engineering students working on high speeed GHz digital circuits can use $100k Agilent scopes."

Something interesting to think about is as a hobbyist I'll be buying that $100K scope at a hamfest or off ebay in about 10 or 20 years for basically the cost of shipping. Then at home purely as a hobby I can entertain myself cheaply and endlessly doing stuff that was cutting edge in 2016, which is still going to be an enormous market in 20 years.

There are two problems. One is that companies like to think they're cutting edge. So gaining expert level skills on, say, late 70s high speed TTL is not interesting to hiring managers. The second problem is companies that like to think they're cutting edge, almost always are not, unless they're household names. Everyone knows google uses go and python but "the rest of the real world" runs on perl and cobol, like it or not. Oddly enough the hiring managers often don't know how far behind the times they are, so you get the equivalent of an interviewer bragging about the EE equivalent of planning to implement CVS someday soon, or trying that newfangled agile design methodology someday, not knowing their plans for the future are already obsolete in the market. Half of companies are below median, after all.

TLDR is there's a lot of posing in stem, and at least some of the people doing the loudest posing are actually doing stuff right out of 1975, if not earlier. Usually because if something makes money there's no need to fix it solely to strike a stunning pose. In public of course the image will always be that theres no way we couldda dunnit without that $500K budget, partially to intimidate competitors, partially to appear more powerful, mostly just traditional neophilia.

"It's just a bit harder to get into, and a bit harder to get on-the-job training/mentorship."

Seems like you answered your own question.

Part of my point is that there really isn't a sharp dividing line between "college" and "self-education". If you're going to college and not also using it to do a lot of "self-education" you're really wasting your time, for instance. But programming seems to have a fairly solid track for moving from casual hobbyist to full-on professional that I don't witness in very many other disciplines.

Why not carefully pick which things you're going to use the "college" on, bearing in mind that there's also no magical "YOU SHALL STOP LEARNING NOW" barrier that gets thrown up on college graduation day?

My undergraduate degree is in nuclear engineering.

I really don't know how I would have learned to use radiation detectors or export-controlled nuclear reactor modeling software without institutional access to those things.

> it is way easier to go to college and get a formal education in science, math, or engineering, and pursue an ongoing adhoc self-directed education in the arts and humanities in your remaining decades of life, than the other way around.

This isn't really true. You can't really have any kind of art career, for example, if you don't go to art school. Meanwhile, tons of companies will happily hire whatever chumps code bootcamps are churning out.

I'd wager you have a better shot of getting a paying "art career" by starting with a STEM degree and trying to move to that field than getting an art degree. There's a reason we have a societal meme about art majors working as baristas and waiters -- it's more or less a degree that does not lead to a relevant career.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "art career" with quote marks specifically, but good luck trying. The fact that art majors are baristas and waiters is evidence of my point, not against it. Obtaining an art career is difficult even with the degree.

> You can't really have any kind of art career, for example, if you don't go to art school.

This can't possibly be true.

If you are a genius artist that happens to get lucky, sure. But if you want to have an actual art career, it will be tough without art school

I actually do know what I'm talking about here, and it is true. The art industry has way more supply than demand. This is why art schools can still charge what, purely by the numbers, looks like a bad deal. Some people really want to work in art, and even if you end up "only" managing a gallery, you have to have the right credentials.

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