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Comment by yalurker | Hacker News Reader

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?"

Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of applicable skills that landed me a high-paying software engineering job instead of doing the manual labor or trivial office tasks that I was qualified for before college.

If you go to a private school to get a history degree then sure, it was 4 years of expensive partying that doesn't leave you any more employable. Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end.

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I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.)

It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to explain why it's valuable to be able to think about math and programming (especially to a math class full of skeptical kids). Essentially, a good liberal arts education transforms your world-view of those subjects the same way a good engineering education does. Just like you shouldn't condemn yourself to reinventing Quicksort when you can be capable of more advanced algorithms, nor should you find yourself reinventing Locke when thinking about politics. It is much better to build on the history of thought instead of being doomed to repeat it (and you'll only repeat it satisfactorily if you're a genius anyway).

OK, there are worthless liberal arts educations. But there are also worthless computer science educations, as anyone who's worked with other programmers has discovered.

> Essentially, a good liberal arts education transforms your world-view of those subjects the same way a good engineering education does.

I think most people agree with that, they just disagree that it's worth paying $50/hour to get. Go into any high end coffee place and you'll find someone you can have a good discussion with about liberal arts-related topics. I was talking about Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian democracy with a member of the U.S. Foreign Service at a coffee place a couple months ago. Talked for two hours - cost was $5 for an iced tea. Sure beats paying $150 for a three hour lecture and getting assigned some busywork essay at the end of it.

Isn't that like arguing that you can pick up programming knowledge on internet discussion boards cheaper than a degree program?

In theory, sure, you can. In your spare time you might run into someone who really knows his shit and enlightens you.

But, just as with the coffee shop, more times than not you run into people whose facade of knowledge would shatter the first time you ask a question. Trick being, if you barely understand the topic yourself, you'll only stumble onto a question that exposes their ignorance by chance. You're as likely to be led completely astray and have your time wasted as not.

Further, the chance that a given discussion board or coffee shop will contain someone interested and educated in the particular concepts you care to discuss when you care to discuss them gets pretty damn small beyond trivial depth.

The reasonable component in the price of higher education is about the quality of the interpretation and dialogue between yourself, the professor and the other students.

In short, you're paying to have some assurance that the discussion and/or lecture will be of a higher quality than you would find elsewhere and some assurance the discussion will occur and be relevant at a given time.

> Isn't that like arguing that you can pick up programming knowledge on internet discussion boards cheaper than a degree program?

Nah, it's more arguing that you'd be better off learning by contributing to Open Source - then you'd get lessons and contacts for free instead of paying a lot of money to get.

> The reasonable component in the price of higher education is about the quality of the interpretation and dialogue between yourself, the professor and the other students.

$150 per class is a lot man, you can't just brush that aside. You can live on $150 for a whole week if you're frugal and live with roommates. And that's just one class. A day with four classes = $600 you're now in debt. That's a month of rent and cooked food if you're willing to slum it. Work on OSS, freelance, connect with people from the community - I say a month's worth of "living time" is worth a hell of a lot more than four classes.

Agreed. Hard to argue that price inflation in education hasn't reduced its value.

Not its worth -- that's remained or even increased. But its value.

I don't understand the distinction you're making. Did you mean "marginal value" instead of "value"?

I interpreted that to mean

  value = worth - price

So as the price goes up, the value you get goes down.

No, Value.

What? In normal English, value and worth are nearly the same thing. In economic English, value is worth, usually spoken of relative to other worthwhile things, but not relative to price. So I don't understand you at all.

So, define "value" in the context of an education.

There are other options. For example you can get a huge number of humanities lectures from good universities online. Try out "iTunes U" sometime if you haven't seen it already; it's got top-quality lectures, but not the discussion. (This discussion component should be cheaper to provide than the whole package. There's probably a startup opportunity here. I don't know where you can get such discussion now, though.)

Anyway, it's a large part of what you'd get in college, free. All you have to do is make a commitment to watch some lectures and study supplementary material if you don't understand something. It's a hell of a bargain.

Agreed 100%. I have a BA in history & religious studies from UVA -- I had intentions of becoming a museum curator -- but decided to follow a career path in technology instead. I parlayed my hobby & part time job into a Manpower temp-to-hire gig and, courtesy of a couple of tremendous bosses, was empowered to further my education on the job (trial by fire style). Now I direct a full stack (analysis, design, dev, ops, support, administration) of ~60 great folks and love my job. And it pays quite a bit better than $40k/yr....

I stopped trying to write code back around 2004. It's not my forté. I excel at dataset analysis & pattern recognition, and communication/soft skills. While it does not apply so much to the startup scene and bleeding edge tech companies, the corporate world has a dearth of competent technical managers, not being technicians are hard to find, but because it tends to be a lot easier for liberal arts majors to acquire a working competency of tech knowledge than it is for hardcore geeks to learn people skills.

As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.

Strawman. Very few people are saying that, not enough to worry about. The claim is not that 100% of college should be about teaching useful skills, the claim is that if you're going to be put into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can not be removed by bankruptcy it should probably be the case that more than zero percent of your college time should be spent on a directly-salable skill.

Many people are really misunderstanding the argument here. It is not that liberal arts are bad. It is that it is basically large-scale fraud to sell a college degree as best way to a well-paying job and worth the massive undischargable-debt without explaining that the promise really only applies to practical degrees.

You are free to complain about how the market only values degrees that produce marketable skills (and I've deliberately phrased it a bit tautologically to make it obvious that it's not really a very compelling complaint), but I still say that if you want people to pursue impractical degrees you need to be doing it by telling them the truth about what they are doing. I will not deny anybody their right to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt chasing their dream, I just want them to do it with eyes wide open.

There was an article in the NY Times a couple of weeks back describing all these students are getting into tons of debt, graduating private colleges, and expecting to leave college and get some high paying salary because they went to Harvard or Columbia. The article at followed one girl in particular, showing examples from her life how tragic the situation was for these college grads. It wasn't until the end of the article that her major was mentioned: Womans Studies.

A liberal arts education can only be supported by an economy that that is strong enough to allow it. Thats just not the case anymore. At least not for people to spend 4 years on; not to mention the negative cash flow. Its not that Liberal Arts is inherently bad, it is just unsustainable as it exists right now.

>As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.

A computer science education is not merely vocational training, as you imply. But theoretical CS is still a hell of a lot more meaningful than postmodern literary theory.

By what standard? And to whom?

Maybe, maybe not, but for the time and cost investment, it's not a good proposition if you aren't going to make money off of it. And, at any rate, if you're not going to use the qualification bestowed, why not simply take part time classes and take on the subjects that interest you most as oppossed to taking the curriculum mandated for a degree?

Just a reminder but Hard Science degrees also make you take some general education requirements, for instance my Computer Science degree came with courses such as:

* 4 Semesters of Latin

* Chinese Mythology

* History

* Linguistics

* Entomology

* Sociology

* Macro Economics

Not always. I went through an engineering degree and took exactly two non-engineering courses in my 4.5 years - and that was only because I loaded one of them on as an extra credit (damn near killed myself doing it too).

The way the college system works today, the "well roundedness" aspects are disappearing, and quickly. Don't blame the schools, blame ourselves - we're the ones balking at paying top-dollar for a hard science degree and then being forced to take "useless" liberal arts courses.

Whoa! really? Which school?

University of Waterloo, in Canada.

Same here, we had to take eight 3-credit humanities courses to graduate. I ended up taking history, literature, and some sociology. We even had to take physical education for 4 or 6 (I forget) semesters at 1 credit a pop.

heh. One of the things I found most amusing on applying to college was how my military service filled all my physical education requirements.

Brown?

I would personally find it a sad, sad day if enrollment in liberal arts rapidly declined. People that major in liberal arts bring great joys to our world. Film, music, art, dance, and great books are all things that truly enhance life, and honestly, is also the cultural force that makes the United States so great.

One of my biggest regrets of my collegiate education was not making a conscious effort to expand my curriculum by taking courses in the humanities department.

how many great filmmakers went to film school, though?

I think the question you want to ask is "What proportion of film school graduates become great filmmakers?"

No, you want to compare that proportion with the proportion of amateur filmmakers who never went to school and became great filmmakers. In other words, does film school increase your chances?

Most of them.

The point is, there is a shortage of engineers, doctors and lawyers. This is why the market pays them higher starting salaries and higher salaries overall. There will forever be a shortage in my field, as current graduation rates go.

On the other hand, there are a glut of "enhanced worldview" liberal arts majors applying for jobs with little to no experience or day 1 vocational skills. They are not failures or cogs -- but from a hiring perspective there is little to distinguish one from another when sorting through resumes.

A liberal arts degree, from an employment perspective, is ubiquitous and a commodity. Specialization is worth more.

If I told members of my generation they could get a job in Pittsburgh, PA starting at $55,000, requiring 36-hour work weeks in 12 hour shifts, with city benefits and pension, and that it started 15K higher than my first job out of college, most would be interested.

When I told them it was working as a Pittsburgh Waste Disposal job (aka Garbage man), most would tell me to kindly fuck off. Their "degree status" is insulted that a starting garbage man will make 20-25K more than them, despite the fact I could never pay them enough to do the job themselves.

Getting a Bachelor's degree is more about proving you are educable than proving you are educated.

A history degree is just as applicable to this mindset of educability as a computer science degree. The only difference between the two is that a computer science degree offers its bearer some amount of vocational skills.

I got CS degree from a liberal arts school. I really considered it the best of both worlds. I enjoyed the art, music, and other arts classes I had to take, and I think they kept me from getting burned out on math/science.

I feel that I received a very good education for the money I paid.

The folks here are knocking liberal arts degrees because they don't believe that there are any worthwhile careers outside of hacking.

That's obviously false -- there are quite a few non-technical professions out there that are perfectly viable for careers beyond teaching.

For this forum, non-IT related degrees don't mean much, but that doesn't mean that they don't have value in one of the legion of other fields out there.

"I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.)"

I knew a fellow maroon before I clicked the profile.

"Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless."

Hello, very definition of a straw-man argument. I'm surprised this is rated so high on this site.

To reiterate, his thesis is not about college, it is this:

"I am offering encouragement to a crop of college kids infantilized by terrible advice from parents and TV who have the freedom and opportunity to try something; while simultaneously describing the only long term solution to America's economic problems: more businesses."

Now, you can certainly take issue with the thesis he presents, but there is no point arguing about something unrelated to the point of the article.

Whenever I read these articles debating the value of a college degree (which I think this article isn't about, but that seems to be the way everyone is interpreting it), the argument is always treated as a black and white issue and it's not.

There are a few types of people that go through college in different ways. You have intelligent people that have learned how to "excel" well, who fit the bill of the subject of the NY Times article. They get through with a decent GPA, party hard, and get a corporate job. You have intelligent people that thrive in the learning environment that college affords, and they gain a lot out of it. Their work ethic takes them places, and some develop that work ethic in college. I'm one of the latter, so call me biased towards it. Then there are the hard working, intelligent people who feel caged from the curriculum. These are the people who question the value.

The problem with the people that already have the strong work ethic and intelligence is that they assume that everyone is like those peers in the first group that simply go through the motions, and its not a question of whether they should have went to school but how they approached it. These are the loudest voices against the higher ed system.

It's undoubtedly a broken system, but inherent value exists for some. I think we'll see a revolution in higher education, hopefully sooner than later and ideally these issues are rectified.

What you say is true, but not the main point of the article. Its a kick-in-the-pants for young smart people to go and actually attempt to create something, instead of waiting for a job to come to them.

I don't see him knocking schooling. Rather, he is criticizing seeking schooling for the sake of schooling.

And he has a valid point. There is very little economic benefit, outside of research and some professional fields, to pursue additional degrees.

He did knock Management Degrees… with good reason.

Agreed. College has definitely changed my view of the world and expanded my mind. And I'm glad I went to an affordable state school.

I do, however, believe that past generations had more advantages with their degrees than my generation does.

I agree. However, another route would be to take a sum equal to your 1st year college tuition, and use that to seed a bootstrapped startup. Take a year, $20-50k, and see what you can build. If you fail, you still have (ostensibly) three years of college funding left to go, and you can probably pay off that 4th year through hard work by the time you graduate. When you graduate, you have the degree and a really interesting line item on your resume.

Of course, this all presupposes that family or savings can fund that $50-200k in the first place. Unfortunately, many students are dependent on loans. Because the government backs student loans, bankers are willing to lend money for school where they won't do so for a startup.

If there was a provision that would allow you to get fully-backed "startup loans" that carry the same terms and guarantees as student loans, I firmly believe our economy would be stronger and default rates probably wouldn't be much higher than they are for student loans.

As an eighteen- or nineteen- year old, I would have wasted that money almost instantly. Could it work in reverse with the money arriving in your fourth or fifth year of college?

Perhaps a curriculum dedicated to giving students more and more autonomy until they are working almost entirely independently by the fourth year?

My first year of college education was probably about $2000. I'm not sure I could have done much more than pay a couple months rent with that.

I wanted to chime in something here: I went to school at a state school "down the street" from CMU in Computer Engineering. It was "what my family could afford" since my father was between jobs.

Myself and a CMU grad might have the same degree (B.S. in ECE)but our starting salaries are vastly different. I started out around 40K (w/no bennies) whereas CMU students would probably start closer to 55-60K + bennies.

Was this because CMU was also #1 in the world in ECE at the time? Yes, of course. But the point I'm getting at is private school's higher prices often imply that you will receive a better starting offer. Assuming our job markets are equally flexible, it could be 5 years before someone like myself "catches up".

Kids like the one from the NYTimes article have been raised to work smarter, not harder. Why spend 5 years paying your dues when name recognition or knowing someone will get you to same place without brow sweat?

It's not necessarily a college's fault. They're catering to wealthy entitled people and trying to take as much as they dishonestly can. Likewise, entitled children don't really understand a world that isn't catering to them.

I went to school for one reason and one reason only because I knew I had to. I picked Psychology as my degree because, at that time, this was the only thing I could imagine studding for 4 years.

I worked in IT industry before I started school, while going to school and after graduation. Most of my techy friends discouraged my degree every step of the way.

'Why the hell do you need it? Bill gates never even finished' was the tone of their message.

Well, I got my degree and sure I don't really use it in my job. Sure I had a big lump of dissapoitnment in my throat after I graduated and came home to realize the big pay off is not there. However, as lame as this sounds, I learned how to learn. I learned that as pointless as most of my classes were, ones that weren't will stay with me for ever.

This is what I got out of my lottery-funded education. I went in to get a degree in networking (with a specialization in Linux administration), and ended up getting the most out of the liberal arts stuff.

Things I got out of it:

Got comfortable with the command line

Overcame a lifetime of math phobia (I was content with being math-illiterate before I knew its value)

Learned how to write coherent bodies of text

Got a primer in economics that helped me understand the chaos in 2008

---

I think too many people go straight to "you don't need college" rather than considering what kind of college they would get the most out of. Anyone would do well to have a simple AAS from a cheap/free technical college. Not everyone needs a PHD or degree from a top-rated institution.

If nothing else, everyone should get a basic degree even if they don't have any grand aspirations. It gives you tools to live a better life with whatever you do achieve.

Even Engineering degrees aren't necessarily the solution. It really depends on the times and severity of a recession. I lived in Malaysia through a time when the term "walking engineers" (unemployed engineers) was commonplace.

Lots of stories on the net about rocket scientists losing their jobs, and conducting tour buses.

What about the name of that guy who's preliminary work on bio-luminescence won someone else a Nobel prize, but he himself is now unemployed?

It's human nature to think that we can avoid somebody's misfortune by simply following some known heuristics. It is true only some of the time.

Counterpoint: The article's point is that these 24 year olds with "respectable degrees" but no opportunities should create their own opportunities.

Sure, it may not come with the creature comforts of a management job at a large corporation, but you're also your own boss. I know a lot of people who can't or won't put a price on only answering themselves.

To recap: Yes, a degree makes you more employable, but there's more to prospering than being a good employee. Especially as the corporate structure is figuring out that there are too many cogs in the machine.

"Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end."

Are you sure about that?

It seems to be "beat up on academia year" this year. Yawn.

College might occasionally be over-valued in some areas, but it's not useless. Last I checked towns with strong top-tier universities were much healthier economically than towns without.

You might want to think about that last point there.

TL;DR? The essay doesn't knock college at all.

It knocks the idea that the kid is better-educated at 21 than his father was, and that he has MORE opportunities because of it.

It knocks the sad fact that the kid's father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, but somehow taught the kid that he has to have A Real Job with a Career Ladder and 401k - or nothing at all:

"The parents and grandparents, like so many parents today, are disappointed in their son because he's not taking their advice, but in fact their son is taking their advice to its inevitable conclusion: he's holding out for the perfect corporate job."

It has, in short, nothing to do with you, your school, or your defensiveness about graduating college.

And if you think college graduates today are actually smarter than they were 30 years ago, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken. Their facts may be more up-to-date, however, writing skills, reading skills, and whatnot, are down across the board.

It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma.

I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.

Yes, the basic premise was that college is more expensive now, but that college graduates are not any more educated than they were decades ago.

Experience leads me argue that they are LESS educated now.

Look around on the web. Start paying attention to how many people consistently make basic linguistic errors like "loose" when they wanted to say "lose" or use the incorrect homophone for "there" or "it's" to indicate a possessive. Look for actual reasoning -- as opposed to pedantically regurgitating a collection of facts.

The sad reality is that getting a degree these days has become a lot easier, and increasingly has very little to do with how smart one is, but rather how skilled one is at cramming for a test.

The high demand and low supply in software developers has lead to both higher salaries and lower standards.

my dad went to harvard, i didn't. so no, i was not smarter than him.

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