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Comment by purplezooey | Hacker News Reader

A college degree is not some terminal credential to make you into a coding cubicle robot the rest of your life. It goes more towards helping you be a more well-rounded person, for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine. US execs aren't helping anybody out when they push this anti-college garbage.

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I would like to see a study that indicates that dropouts working in a professional environment are less "well-rounded" overall. I don't dispute that something exists, but I haven't seen one.

I'm obviously biased, but I have a lot of interest in linguistics, history, political theory, moral philosophy, and a lot of other non-coding fields, for which I have purchased and read many of the college textbooks. I also do not have a degree, as I dropped out after two years towards a math degree, and work as a "senior" software engineer (I think titles are kind of stupid but it works for my point).

I typically did well on the tests, but for various reasons too elaborate to get into in a post, I had trouble focusing on and completing a lot of the homework, leading to poor grades, and then me dropping out.

Of course a lot of dropouts don't have much curiosity, but once they get to a professional level, it's basically impossible to avoid learning a fairly diverse set of skills.

I think most people who want to work in a professional field should probably go to college and get their degree, but college is not for everyone who joins. Autodidacticism can lead to new perspectives on projects, and allows people to focus on things that are important, but not emphasized in most colleges.

For example, I greatly dislike how concurrency is taught in the undergrad level. It seems like with many curriculums, the students learn a bit of some locking glue, what a semaphore is, and then they promptly forget any of the safety mechanisms that follow, at least in the people I've interviewed.

Conversely, a significant portion of the students in my class when I was attending university were only there to get a degree & didn't care about anything but the easiest way to get a passing grade.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that; I have no doubt that the top student from Harvard or Yale is dedicated to learning new things and at some level wants to be there. However, the bottom 25% who graduate probably are doing it simply to obtain the piece of paper and the letters "B.S." or "B.A." after their name.

Nevermind that many students just go for buying their papers so that the party can go on. I remember boasts of this at U of T back in the day—there was even signage above shops on Yonge St offering the service. They haven't even had to leave their seats for a long time—they can just purchase them online:

2001: https://slate.com/human-interest/2001/12/how-to-buy-a-good-c...

2019: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/02/19/cheating-at-u-of-t/

Not to say it's universal, but it's rampant—the view that they're just there to pick up their ticket to an easier life. (if it's accurate, or not!)

I mean, you get what you put into college. I sort of veered off my senior and took a bunch of business classes after finishing my CS requirements. I wish I took extra CS classes because there's a lot I had teach myself. Motivated people can teach themselves a lot, but there IS something to be said for having a credential.

I can see why recruiters and business-owners prefer it; it basically implies "Person X has at least this much discipline to get through this degree".

However, a sort of consequence of this is you create a sort of inadvertent filter of "normal" people, e.g. the people who passed the classes designed around them.

>Autodidacticism can lead to new perspectives on projects, and allows people to focus on things that are important, but not emphasized in most colleges.

It also allows people to veer into becoming cranks, without appropriate teachers to guide you along the way. As long as we're exchanging anecdotes, in my undergrad I've met my fair share of "physics autodidacts" who seem to believe they've "solved" massive problems related to engineering/physics.

That's fair; there's no doubt that self-teaching can lead you down an incorrect rabbit-hole (though I do think most grow out of that eventually), and I'm not an exception; I once thought I could write an entire OS kernel on the GPU because clearly no one has ever tried that.

I think my point still stands, however.

No amount of "roundedness" is worth the current asking price of college. They're going to have to offer more.

This is why European universities are _extremely_ worthwhile, especially if you're a US student.

Great point. I was thinking of returning to finish my degree at $US_PRIVATE_COLLEGE, where tuition is around $60k/year now. ETH and EPFL in Switzerland, about equally good, turn out to be, like, 1/3 the price, and those are at the expensive end. (You do need competence at French or German first.)

Corporations should pay more of the costs of training. They get about as much benefit as we do. In the case of Apple, the company gets far more benefit from each employee than each employee gets, from a nominal perspective ($400k profit per employee).

Why do we pay all of our own training costs at this point, I have no idea why. I think that the workers of America deserve the same as the workers from Europe.

In the UK we pay the costs too (although the loan system is more like an extra tax).

I think the UK is actually more expensive than the USA in many cases as almost every uni is 9k GBP per year here vs. the USA where you have cheaper public colleges and community colleges etc.

I went to a public university, with a pretty decent scholarship, so it wasn't terribly expensive until I lost it due to the aforementioned bad grades.

I'm not sure what else they could offer; most of the information they provide isn't "forbidden"; you are welcome to go buy the textbooks and read them yourself if you wanted.

Considering the political leaning, expansion of censorship and other ideologies ever more prevailing in higher education, I wouldn't exactly call it well rounded as a goal. There used to be a goal for actual tolerance and an ability to listen and respect ideas or politics they disagree with.

I have no formal education... I've worked with others in software development with no formal education who can code with the best rock star developers. I've also met those with a masters in CS who couldn't think their way out of a paper sack. It really depends.

> US execs aren't helping anybody out when they push this anti-college garbage.

Exactly - how many employees has Apple hired who don'5 have college degrees and are working on something essential?

I do believe that the US corporates do this to convince graduates that their college education isn't that valuable so that they would be more willing to work for less.

Roundness isn't acquired from a degree. It's acquired from learning multiple perspectives.

Colleges push that propaganda but they only offer perspectives that fall into academia approval.

Life is much much more than structured curriculum. Life is chaotic. Knowledge can be obtained through structure. Wisdom is obtained through chaos.

> for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine

Except that for most, they are adding profit to a different machine: the $1.5T in student loan debt, averaging almost $40k each. $40k to become "a more well-rounded person"

They're also not helping if they're pushing well meaning but ultimately misguided STEM programs when these STEM classes displace classes where children were rounded such as the arts, music, foreign language, social studies, and civics.

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