Elon Musk says college is ‘for fun’ and not for learning | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says college is ‘for fun’ and not for learning

cnbc.com

42 pointsdanso21 comments

"“You don’t need college to learn stuff,” he said. The value is “seeing whether somebody can work hard at something.”

He added that “colleges are basically for fun and to prove you do your chores, but they’re not for learning.”"

I tend to agree, more so with tech than with subjects like medicine. I think institutions will catch on before long that degrees are not all they have been cracked up to be. We need a less costly method to prove people can follow a deadline and collaborate with others.

Maybe that was true for Elon. But if you apply yourself, and challenge yourself, and broaden your horizons by exposing yourself to a wide range of learning ... IE, get what you've paid for ... then college will help in in a multitude of ways, not just professionally but socially and in daily life. And you'll be prepared for life-long learning, regardless of your applications.

And you'll get that sweet degree, which is really what you need to get a decent job in the current market!

This story is better titled "Gen X-er has very Gen X opinion." Which should tell you immediately that it doesn't matter what was said, it matters who said it.

But that brings us to the question: why is CNBC reporting this luke-warm hot take from that person? Nobody needs more ammunition to argue that kids these days are just faffing about. That's been the default stance of the over-forty set for millennia, and millennials have put any doubt to rest.

It's not because Elon Musk pointed anything out. He didn't. It's because he doesn't have a solution for the problems with post-secondary education. (Well, maybe he does, but CNBC sure as shit didn't quote him on that part.) It's very safe to have a mainstream opinion and when the guy the media tells you is a genius repeats your mainstream opinion back to you, then you get to feel smart for having a boring opinion. That warm and fuzzy feeling distracts you noticing the article stops there. You're diverted away from wondering why: if you can see the problem, then why the fuck isn't the article even thinking about the solution?

Yes, I know the article pretends to get at substance. But that's a con. Pointing out the hypocrisy that Musk's own companies want Bachelor's degrees isn't sticking it to him or advancing the conversation; it's confrontationally agreeing with him. If the author thought degrees actually mattered, they'd argue the point that the kind of work Musk is hiring for does demand a degree. Not highlight the seeming contradiction.

And of course the writer thinks degrees are worthless, they have a Master's but spend their days reporting on pedestrian ramblings from Musk.

> Nobody needs more ammunition to argue that kids these days are just faffing about.

Well, I think a lot of them are. I don't think this (just) because I'm a crabby old guy. I think this because so very many of my classmates in college 40+ years ago were just faffing about, and because college enrollment has increased out of proportion to the population. A hell of a lot of my classmates seemed to have come to the school (not a great one, not necessarily a terrible one) to work out their late adolescence in a reasonably safe environment a comfortable distance from home.

And I should perhaps say that I agree that CNBC's reporting is pointless.

I disagree. I learned so much more in college and it opened me up to various fields I would have never even thought of. I had truly no idea about sociology, psychology, or philosophy before entering university and needing to take them to fulfill my general education requirements. Those classes opened my eyes up more to this world than anything before or after taking them.

College today is mainly for equipping people with the necessary conceits to sustain bureaucracies. It’s tribal initiation. Competence and excellence come from somewhere else.

“The necessary conceits to sustain bureaucracies”, well put! “Bullshit Jobs”, anyone ;)?

Would HR at Elon's companies hire people without college or university degree?

I think Elon means Elon's companies aren't against college or university degrees - quite the contrary. What they are against is college education.

In other words, yes, go and get education, and a degree which confirms that. No, don't go to college to get that education - it's too wasteful. What's instead of college is an interesting question - Thiel thinks entrepreneurship is adequate (so you have a resume with such an experience), another option could be self-education with certification(s) - online courses and degrees maybe.

Good question

Yes, he recently advertised that they'll even hire ML engineers without a high school degree if they are good.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/el...

If your parents own an emerald mine, like Elon’s, yes, college is for fun.

Depending on major he really isn’t wrong.

It depends no the college you go to. I went to the same university as Elon Musk, there was a heavy emphasis on social grooming, talking the part, looking the part, and just in general exposure to the wealthy and their values. Most of this came in the form of out-of-class activities and, yes, parties. In other colleges things are a bit different, so the value may shift the other way.

Can we not extrapolate on one off the cuff sentence Elon made.

He's not fact checked by god like Jesus was.

He can make awkward remarks that don't express what he's trying to say well. He is human.

He didn't say they were just for fun either. We can't even get his one sentence right.

> Despite Musk’s skepticism, many of the open job listings at SpaceX list a bachelor’s degree or higher education as a basic requirement.

Snarky reporting at its best.

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At it's core, Musk looks to be claiming that college isn't required for learning (trivially true) plus an implicit claim that people waste time in college where they could be productive. Fair enough. Seems like a silly proclamation to make but there's a class of people who like to make these claims. Suspiciously these people tend to be the folks who are uniquely driven, but that's just my bias, I suppose.

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I do think a lot of this sentiment from Musk and others in this thread come as a result of a pretty naive way of looking at learning. For illustration purposes, let's go with a story.

When I was in high school, I fell in love with the band Rage Against the Machine. Because I was a curious sort, I listed out all the books listed in the linear notes of _Evil Empire_ and tried to read as many as I could. I have a distinct memory of sitting on the floor at my childhood home with a copy of Stephen Jay Gould's _Mismeasure of Man_ and a dictionary. I was smarter than average, I guess, but I really was floored at just how many words in that book I didn't know. I may've made my way through 1/3 or 1/2 of the book before I was too exhausted to continue.

In college, I studied philosophy. For whatever reason, I fell in love with the subject and exclusively focused on that in college. Well, that love lasted until roughly senior year when I realized that I had fallen out of love with the subject and had zero interest in pursuing the subject as a career. That really sucked for me since I had put all my eggs into one basket. I hadn't really focused on taking courses which provide hard, technical skills which I could leverage into easily acquired job opportunities. It also sucked that I graduated in 2007 and while the full on financial crisis hadn't hit just yet, the easy throws were there so I had a hard time finding a job. I luckily got a job at an academic library and moved on with my life focusing on developing the skills needed for a long-term job.

The sense that I had squandered my time in college was a malignant wound on my psyche and I would've been sympathetic to the views that Musk and others hold now. One day when I was shelving books in the stacks, I happened upon Stephen Jay Gould's _Mismeasure of Man_. I remember reflecting on the memory of me in high school and picked the book up to see, almost on a lark, whether it was still mystifying to me. I scanned a paragraph here and there as I flipped through the book and was absolutely shocked. Those words which were barriers to the high school version of myself? Easy. I knew them. Not only did I know them but I knew the historical backstory and context to the topic that Gould was presenting. I knew the pro arguments, the con arguments, the responses each side would have to the cons. I couldn't believe it.

Ever since that experience, I've been left with a fairly firm belief that we just do not have adequate ways of quantifying learning when it comes to the liberal arts. It isn't tangible. We can't easily do tests to see if people can communicate more clearly. Whether they can analyze arguments. Whether they have a cultural context to understand why people believe what they believe. As a consequence a certain set of people love to disparage the whole enterprise. It's really unfortunate since it seems pretty self-evident that those skills, that awareness is extremely valuable, both to the individual and to the society as a whole. It's fair for someone to disagree on the merits and I am sure there are thoughtful people who do, but the larger belief that this experience inspired is a humility when it comes to casting aside things which aren't easily measurable. That cynicism has stuck with me and has proven to be extremely valuable in my professional life since the KPIs and measurements which organizations love to fetishize are those which just so happen to be the easiest to measure.

Yes, Gould was a biologist. Yes, that book was about evolutionary biology and certain specialties in psychology. But the crux of the book was a really in the liberal arts sphere of things.

Unless you're going to college for engineering, math, the sciences, or to become a doctor, college really isn't for learning.

It's for having fun and to some degree networking. If you can join a fraternity/sorority, your network will most likely get you a job right out of college.

I knew a guy that had jobs in the tech industry lined up after college for nothing more than knowing people in his frat.

He was running his own business and had very little hands-on experience and wouldn't have lasted a week at most of these jobs.

I, on the other hand, had at least 5 years of experience at that point (not to mention the decade prior to this of writing software as a hobby) and had to work pretty hard to get my first job.

Somehow, it doesn't seem fair. But it taught me that networking is equally or more important than experience and skill.

That's generally true. But you don't have to join a fraternity and bro down with people to build a network that'll get you jobs. Writing articles, publishing open-source, going to industry conferences, etc. are probably more effective.

No way, I didn't even join a frat but the idea of suffering/making memories together builds a much higher trust network than publishing work online. It's much better to have a drink and network than to network over impersonal channels of communication. Networking is about building trust. That's sometimes through displays of confidence, but better displayed by time spent and demonstrations of alignment inngoal/loyalty.

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