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Comment by achingtooth | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the gimmicky travel to Alaska, take a gap year, or having "a way to talk about one’s higher purpose in the world" is important at all. What is important is having cheap tuition and solid courses. As much as people bash on college, it's still important. I don't have a college degree and it's been impossible for me to find a 'real job', though some of that may be due to my age. This is despite having a decent amount of programming and freelance experience. Overall college is important if you want to go down the traditional job path smoothly, I think these people are focusing on the wrong thing.

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Completely agree - having solid courses that teach relevant theory/skills is extremely valuable. We simply need to make the means by which we take such courses more efficient and therefore lower cost.

The bigger issue here is that employers have gravitated far too much towards the college degree as a signal device for a quality employee which effectively shuts out alternate forms of education. Employers need to be willing to hire people who are smart but don't have a college degree. If someone self-studied all the subjects on their own and it is clear they are on the same level as a college grad then they should not be excluded from the hiring process.

It is almost like we need some sort of "SAT" for various subjects. That way if someone is really smart then they can just take this SAT in whatever subject to evaluate their knowledge. We sort of have this already for certificates but it seems like employers don't place much value on them compared to a college degree. There are exceptions but they are mostly outliers IMO.

It is basically illegal by federal law to test potential employees for their overall intelligence. It is considered racist, the term being 'adverse impact' in this case.

Corporations effectively outsource intelligence testing to colleges, as they have no other choice to obtain info about their future employees' abilities.

sorry no its not a IQ test as far as SAT, PSAT and the other tests..see Mismeasure of Man by Gould for why!

I disagree. I think it’s important to take the time to develop a personally meaningful life philosophy. Too few do. None of us is facing starvation.

I would argue that obtaining a high quality education and developing meaningful life philosophy are two separate areas. Colleges need to move away from the teaching life philosophy to everyone. If people already know what they want to do with their life then just let them take the essential courses to get valuable skills/education. If people want to learn about meaningful life philosophy then they can do that on their own.

And then they end up with vapid, shallow, self-obsessed life philosophies - see, every self-help guru peddling individualistic nonsense.

Part of the purpose of teaching philosophy is you get rigour from actually testing those ideas out in a place where people are going to scrutinise the ideas. That’s why philosophy exists, and history, and a whole load of other humanities subjects.

In my experience, the people that latch onto self help gurus, preachers of weird beliefs, and peddlers of odd lifestyles, are usually graduates of college. They were taught to be skeptics by how education is done now. So they reject traditional things and yearn for yogis and the like.

>> I don't have a college degree and it's been impossible for me to find a 'real job'

More and more people are becoming like me in this market and not overweighting degrees. I don't care about your formal education and I actively blind resume submissions for it through an assistant. I care about what you've done and what you're passionate about.

On the way to hiring 100 people pretty soon here and growth is solid. Leads to a lot of diversity of thought and background, which is a good thing.

After all, I'm a dropout nobody, too. Someone's gotta look out for us.

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