Which is really funny, since that's absolutely the primary reason why college educations are pushed. E.g. "if you don't go to college you'll end up working at McDonald's"
Plus, I have yet to see the evidence that colleges provide this virtuous yet intangible quality of non-economically beneficial "wholesome" education.
If one does have such an intense interest in some topic, getting a "real degree" at college would offer them a lifetime of spare money and time to pursue it. You can't do much painting working 80 hours at McDonald's only to not be able to afford paint. It just doesn't make sense to me.
The biggest performance dilemma I noticed upon entering college is basic literacy. I saw most people reading at a 9th grade level, which is average for most Americans, and struggle to write a 2 page paper. That 2 page paper was hardly competent once written.
The problem was so pronounced that in order to be awarded graduation of a bachelor's degree you had to take and pass a writing competency test at any time during your undergraduate education.
In the real world, as a software developer, the biggest barrier I see to the success of many developers is basic literacy. I see so many people who cannot communicate at a professional level. They struggle to reason about the problems they encounter and struggle further to put their thoughts into words that a make sense to an outside party.
Most developers I have ever worked with spend their entire careers struggling with a variety of concerns that ultimately (when you remove the bullshit and excuses) boil down to struggles of basic code literacy. I suspect we have all encountered this when everything is an argument of code style, spaces vs tabs, OOP vs functional, and so forth. Code literacy is the difference between thinking in terms of algebra (instructions) versus thinking in terms of calculus (process). When you are literate you form visions of what you want and simply build the vision accordingly.
As somebody who rewrote their personal application from scratch last year (about 40,000 lines of code with minimal boilerplate) while also working for two separate employers and having a spouse and kids I really don't have patience for people who fill their time with literacy bullshit. As somebody currently deployed with the time military to a conflict zone this is the thing I dread most about returning to the corporate world.
Holy shit people. Pick up a damn book and read. How you communicate will influence how you write code.
This is a problem when most information consumed are now either in Video ( TV / YouTube, etc ), Pictures ( IG with short or no description ), and Short form of writing ( Blog Post / Internet Comments ), even worst is when most of these are for Entertainment. And there is a trend of basic literacy falling even those coming out of College ( Or Universities ).
Not quite sure how we could fix this. People aren't reading books any more. Steve Jobs once said we need Editorial more so than ever, and not fallen into a nations of bloggers, and that was nearly 9 years ago.
Sadly he also learns new words on youtube and in games, and sometimes I need to correct his spelling and he doesn't believe me.
1) what evidence would convince you?
2) when you consider that education is a social policy, and is designed with the purpose of delivering benefit at scale, does that change your opinion? (That is, when you consider that it's meant to shift the median student's outcome more than that of the p99 student)
College education is hugely overrated, and especially by using bad reasons like that
Spare me the hyperboles, using the "well rounded" adjective makes no sense except for objects that are supposed to be round.
College is essential if you are in a regulated profession and/or is it too expensive (or impossible) to learn it yourself (like medicine, other engineerings, law, etc)
For other areas? Not so much
You could try checking course requirements. Every college I'm aware of requires that students take classes in a variety of subjects outside their major before they can graduate.
Otherwise, all you’re claiming afaict is that the posters should argue with themselves — find the counter-evidence to their own claims, which is likely sufficiently convincing that they would not have had any reason to speak in the first place.
That is, this idea of “not anyone’s job to search for (counter)evidence” is antagonistic to any form of discussion where parties disagree. If you want to make the opposing claim successfully, its quite useful to have evidence to support it (it’s not their job to find it for you... its not anyone’s job to do anything in an HN thread.)
One one or two occasions, when I was about to post something, I looked for evidence, and realised I was mistaken, and didn't mislead others.
But in this case, evidence was requested for a particular idea, and the response was completely tangential to the request. And it wasn’t really an issue of citation needed, I think, so much as just anything to support the idea that colleges actually offer non-job value (and that they offer courses across multiple fields is insufficient, which is true, its a thing they’re doing but says nothing about effectiveness).
Ofc, the difference is in the intent. And the problem I have with “its not my job” is the intent; it’s a belief/defense whose primary purpose/outcome is to kill communication, and I very much like communicating
> virtuous yet intangible quality of non-economically beneficial "wholesome" education
How could I possibly provide evidence of an intangible benefit? All I can do is show that they provide the education that's supposed to have this quality.