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Comment by adbge | Hacker News Reader

The author sidesteps the issue and answers with (roughly) "education is never a bad thing." That's true enough, but that doesn't answer the question of whether or not a degree is worth the cost. Not a very informative article.

One thing I've never understood about the whole degree v no degree debate is: don't people learn on the job? That is to say: I think the educational value of things other than college are often overlooked. It's the information age! You don't have to go to a university to learn.

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A lot of my work is on avionics software. As far as programming knowledge goes, I've learned most of what I need to do my job before college, or at least outside of college. As far as avionics goes, I've learned most of it on the job. My college education has been at best marginal with respect to the work I actually do.

However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that.

The degree itself is valuable if you are endeavoring to work in an environment whose administrators expect you to have one. The education itself you can get on your own. Though, I personally find it helpful to be "forced" to learn some topics more deeply or broadly than I would have on my own (and this is something that I probably wouldn't have really understood until experiencing it in college).

However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that.

Put yourself in the place of a hiring manager, or, better still, the person setting hiring policies for large companies. You have hundreds or thousands of people competing for jobs, sending you resumes, and the like. You only need to make one decision: hire or no hire. When you're weaning down those resumes, you're probably looking for shortcuts, and one way to get there is to filter out a college degree -- which isn't that high a bar, especially for hyper competent technical people. If you're setting hiring policies, you want to stop people from hiring their incompetent brother-in-laws or wastrel friends. And so on.

PG actually wrote an essay about this kind of thing in Two Kinds of Judgment: http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html :

But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you.

Anyway, this isn't an attack on the parent poster, but it is an attack of the thoughts I often see on HN and other tech sites about the lack of importance of a college degree. If you start your own company or can get others to pay you... great. But degrees are often there not only to show that you've learned and provide learning, but also as a heuristic for people who are hiring. False positives and false negatives exist, but not so much as to abrogate the usefulness of the entire system.

Sure, no doubt. Even hip big companies like Google and Apple require/recommend/suggest a college degree for technical jobs. I don't think it's a bad hiring heuristic, as completion of a college degree does suggest an amount of knowledge and perseverence to complete a goal.

Really, in HN-related industries, unless you are unwaveringly committed to working for a startup or going into business for yourself, the work possibilities that would render a college degree as desireable-for-employment probably vastly outnumber work possibilities for which a degree has absolutely no use whatsoever.

On the flip side, I don't think a degree should be viewed as a guaranteed ticket of entry to employment. If there's a hundred or a thousand people applying for the job, and half of them do have a college degree, you still have to stand out somehow or another. It might be as simple as having solid writing skills, or an agreeable personality at the interview. But the degree alone may not suffice.

If a degree is just intended to show that you're not an idiot, there could be cheaper and less time consuming ways to do that.

See Griggs Vs Duke Power. The courts essentially made less expensive means, eg testing, illegal in an attempt at "fairness".

There's a legal way around that. You could set race quotas that would keep you out of court, have the test, and hire the top people from each race.

That wasn't a court precedent, it was a legal lynching during special circumstances. Plenty of companies currently get away with using aptitude tests as part of interviewing, and this is supported by copious precedents.

I think this is a good point. Has there ever been a point in history where literally anything you wanted to know wasn't locked away in some obscure institution? It's hard to sometimes remind yourself how lucky you are to live in our times (though I imagine they've said that about past decades as well).

Learning on the job is a valid point, but it's often not interdisciplinary. You learn and develop your skills in the areas you work in. Opportunities to expand your skillset and study other topics are difficult to come by in many work environments. Especially if you're in a position that didn't require a degree in the first place.

I agree you don't have to go to a University to learn, but you do have to find willing and qualified teachers and mentors which can be harder than it might seem.

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