Comment by win_ini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by win_ini | Hacker News Reader

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"Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate."

Who cares? Notice that they didn't mention Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Kay, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright - who arguably have all contributed more to this country than our established political leaders recently. Clearly this is the washington post - but the myopic view of looking at the political arena, if anything - shows what is wrong with associating college with "smart, capable, and adding value to our country." I'm just saying that many people in the US are not proud of legislators - and saying that they all went to college hardly proves a good point.

Hard work, natural curiosity, caring about your community, a desire to learn and being in the right place at the right time has more to do with being successful and adding value to our society than becoming part of the "College club" that is Washington.

What about the people who dropped out of college hoping to be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson and failed? These guys are now part of the statistics shown on the graph.

Bill Gates was successful and dropped out of college. He was also hard working and curious. Does that mean that everybody else who's hard working and curious will be as successful without a diploma? I wouldn't bet on it.

Also, having a desire to be in the right place at the right time doesn't guarantee that you'll do just that.

I agree that having a diploma is not what is going to make you successful. But at least, it gives you better odds to beat economic troubles, which is the point of the article.

> These guys are now part of the statistics shown on the graph.

Most likely they're in the negative space though, the part of the 'employed'.

In terms of social validation, getting into college counts for almost as much as actually graduating.

You grab a sample of some of the most successful people in over 100 years, people who are quite literally one in many millions, and use this to say people over-value college?

If we could all be that lucky, then sure, college would be worthless. But there's a hundred million people for each one of those who want to have something instead of all or nothing.

You've missed his (meaning the quoted guy's) point. Imagine that the graph showed unemployment amongst African-Americans, women or any other group under-represented in congress. They won't solve the problem becuase they're insulated enough from it to either not know it's a problem or simply not care.

Bill Gates isn't in congress, and he doesn't hang out a Georgetown bars in between writing his newspaper column.

Moreover, among those senators and babble-recyclers in the media, let me assure you, none of them are Bill Gates.

The author is saying that nobody anywhere close to Washington power centers has any perspective on this.

Those are anecdotal. Statistically take everyone without a degree, and everyone with. Check the unemployment rate in one group and compare it with the other. If you want to focus on one particular field (say software engineers) look if the percentages with and without a degree in that field are equal than the overall population, or more skewed toward one group or the other.

For every Bill Gates there are millions of people cleaning toilets and working at McDonald's.

If someone is unemployed that can barely hold a keyboard without dropping it calling himself a software engineer is out of a job is counted it gets a lot harder though.

You can stick labels fairly easily on the various degrees, they may not mean much in terms of practical knowledge but they do put up a lower boundary that they had to cross. For auto-didacts you run the gamut all the way from incompetent bumbler to ace, and there is no foolproof way to separate those when looking at large groups but it will make a huge difference to the outcome of the study.

Especially in the IT sector there is a lot of "I am an 'x'" where X is anything from the set of recent buzzwords.

So I don't think you can make even that comparison in an easy and reliable way, what people call themselves may not be what they actually are.

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