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Comment by collegeburner | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking at college this fall and seriously wondering about this. I'll have to spend a lot of money if I go to an "elite" school, and the point of doing that is to make connections with my peers and with professors. I don't see the point of paying that kind of money for that sort of experience. That aside, not starting college may not be a good idea, either. Does anyone with more experience have advice on this? I do have a job at a cybersecurity firm where I'm a part-time developer, and my boss would probably convert me to full-time. I've also been working on some interesting side projects to learn stuff and could continue self-teaching. Does anyone with more experience have some advice for me?

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> I do have a job at a cybersecurity firm where I'm a part-time developer, and my boss would probably convert me to full-time.

You already have a job and your boss has made you a developer. One thing you'll get in school that you won't get on the job, in general, is algorithm training. This is an important step for developing the best code you can and being exposed to weird and different ways to write things. This is important.

I personally do not see a real advantage to going to an elite school, depending on how you define elite school. If you're speaking Ivy League or some school that's world renowned, then no, that's not really important, I don't think. You already have contacts in the industry and there are "lesser" schools that are still pretty great.

Your company might be willing to pay for your college education. It almost certainly won't be from MIT; but, it could greatly reduce the costs you're worried about.

The next thing to consider is future employment, not this employment. Future companies that you work for may want you to have a degree or look down on you for your lack of one. Lacking particularly impressive projects or lots of random technologies on your resume may cause this.

Whether you decide that's going to matter or not is up to you; but, I think the one thing you should make sure you have experience in, either way, are the classes seen as less important for day to day development: your algorithm classes, discrete math classes, and similar. You can get much of that education online and for either free (YouTube, etc) or through educational sites like Pluralsight.

I have no college education because decades ago, I was in the same situation as OP: had a job in hand, so I went to work instead of college. It was the best choice I ever made. I never worked somewhere that required a degree, three years into my career was making six figures, and have made at least that for the next ~20 years of my career. I had no student debt, or school expenses. I have had employers offer reimbursement to go get the the undergrad checkbox, which I’ve passed on (more important things to do IMHO).

YouTube, online material, and actual experience of trial and error will take you a long way without a degree. You probably also don’t want to work someplace that prioritizes a degree over experience. Don’t forget to network: that’s the biggest ROI you’ll ever have. It’s who you know, not what you know. Two cents from 20+ years.

> You probably also don’t want to work someplace that prioritizes a degree over experience.

No but I want to work on the things they're working on.

As much as I despise the absolute scam that's peddled by universities, and dont think they're for everyone, they can still open up a lot of opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible or highly difficult to access. OTOH If all you're worried about is money, then yeah no, you probably don't want to waste your time there

Money buys options. Options are freedom. Don’t let others gate you unnecessarily. We all operate in a physical world that doesn’t care about credentials as long as you adhere to the laws of physics (caveat aside for professionals that require credentials by law, such as the medical profession and such).

Going to school in another country that’s more reasonable about costs (Europe comes to mind) is also an option.

Consider more efficient paths to the end state you desire is all I’m suggesting.

Or honestly state colleges. There's some really great state colleges in the US and they're far less expensive than some of the other options out there.

Do you feel not having a degree has slowed your career progression?

Not at all. I’ve worked for startups, enterprises, the US government, and provide guidance to Congressional representatives on an ongoing basis on technology policy. No one worth working for has asked for a degree.

I still get inquiries from Amazon and Facebook for roles. Not Google, but I’d never work for them anyway (nor Facebook or Amazon, for completeness).

I also intend to run for public office, which has age constraints, but no educational requirement.

As a counterpoint - having an elite school on your resume is beneficial for your career. It won't get you jobs, but it will get you interviews and can help you in the interviews (the interviewer's assumptions about you tend to be positive).

That was back when an elite degree meant that you had valuable social connections and not that you spent $80k a year watching ungraded lecture videos in your parents’ basement.

This really depends on why you want to go to university. Is it just for the knowledge and nothing else? Save the money and self learn. Since you specifically mentioned developer, you can take a look here https://ossu.firebaseapp.com/#/curriculum

I've looked at and talked to a lot of different people at different universities in comp sci bachelors. For the most part the curriculum is the same. What sets some schools apart are what you do on the side and general academic environment.

Some people might say that going to university just for the sake of a degree might be a waste, but again this depends on you and your circumstances. There are companies that only hire people with a degree. It's a stupid way to make a hiring decision, but here we are.

I've actually just finished my masters degree in info systems and can definitely understand your thought process. Let me know if you have any other questions. More than happy to help.

I think this depends a lot on what peers you have access to through your work and whether you'd expect them to be comparably awesome (both in their competence and the depth of relationship you're able to build with them) to whoever you'd meet in college.

Even if you do decide to go to college, I think you'd get a lot more out of it after having worked in the real world for some amount of time--in college it really helps to be good at deciding what to spend your time on, and exposure to what non-college life is like will help a lot with that. I know lots of people who got a ton out of gap years and no one who regrets it.

(I wrote more advice here: https://www.benkuhn.net/college/ )

Top schools (MIT, Stanford, etc.) have generous financial aid packages if you can get in. They'll provide you a well rounded technical education which sometimes is hard to achieve/force one-self to do when self-teaching. Networking should also not be understated since it pays off hidden dividends down the line. In five years fewer will care you went to MIT but if it helped you get a Facebook internship that then helped you get a Google offer that then helped you get a great startup offer it's still helping you indirectly. Right now having no college degree also prevents you from getting certain jobs or makes it much harder.

I think it really depends how "elite" the schools you've been admitted to are. If you're accepted to MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. you'd be a fool not to go, IMHO. Not only will they give you loads of generous financial aid, but you'll get a signalling stamp on your CV that will follow you for a lifetime.

On the other hand, if you've been accepted to some expensive private school that isn't a household name (sorry WashU, Drexel, Dukes of the world) you might be better off skipping the debt and going to a credible state school.

Nobody has more experience on this set of circumstances - absolutely nobody. Some may have a better idea than others of how this is going to play out, but that's all.

Once you are five years out of college, your resume lists work experience and the year you graduated from college. Most folks won't care whether you were the hotshot that got early admission, or the kid that took an extra year to finish university.

The framework I would use here is: is this a reversible or irreversible decision? Some factors I would consider:

- Do you think you will enjoy it? For me, it was four years of responsibility (buying groceries, doing my own laundry, learning to cook) but also four years of freedom (choosing my own bedtime, dating without being judged by parents).

- Can you defer an offer / reapply next year? (Ask the admissions department; most of the time the answer is yes, but there are details.)

- Do you have peers from high school that are going this year? (No one I knew was still hanging out with their high school friends after Thanksgiving, but I found it helped with the loneliness of the first week of living in dorms.)

- Do you have a place to live if you don't go to college? (Does your job cover rent for your own place? Alternatively, are you on good enough terms with your parents to stay in your bedroom / in their basement?)

- Would inertia lead you to never go to college? You may find it harder to go to college once you have a comfortable adult quality of life. If this happens to you, would you regret it?

- Will you have opportunities to socialize in college? (Dorms, student clubs, student newspapers, etc.)

- Do you think the job market will have recovered by the time you graduate? (I started my Bachelor's in 2009. On the other hand, folks are saying that the current recession is worse than the '08 crisis.) Where is the breakeven point for lifetime earnings between current job versus post-college job with college debt?

- What are plausible bad-case outcomes for each path, and how can you mitigate the downsides? Time-box this to maybe an hour of research: you want to be emotionally prepared for this possibility but not let it become all-consuming anxiety. (Consider: What does the world look like if we don't find a vaccine?)

I graduated in 2016 and would recommend everyone possible go to college. Without a degree you are effectively in a lower tier on all job applications, promotion tracks, etc. A degree teaches you how to think, how to be responsible, and is kind of a mark of approval from society.

College is four years of fun anyway, not everything needs to be about progressing your career.

Go to college. While I have worked with engineers who didn’t attend university who were good engineers, the ones who attend university have a better, more mature approach to problem solving and learning new technologies. If you find a good computer science program, you’ll also gain a solid foundation on the underpinnings of the systems you’re working on — compiler design, CPUs, mathematics — and be worth so much more when you come to the table looking for a job.

Different perspective here. All the best engineers I have met are self-motivated generalists. Furthermore, I have had career mathematicians beg me not to study it, on the grounds that applied forms are more efficient. (Then again, I don't tend to hang out in large organizations that engage in relative edge-case activity such as compiler design or processor design. Probably mostly because I find large organizations deeply sociopathic and unproductive.)

The best pre-university advice I received was "if you can't decide, get some life experience first, since a huge percentage of people spend four years studying something then discover they dislike or aren't motivated by, then have to start from scratch and change professions".

We should all aim to study every day at a pace, breadth and currency that is unsupported formally. Set aside time to learn every day, and you will always be wise. You are perhaps most successful if you learn throughout most of the day.

The real job of upper management in the 20th and 21st century is to learn things, because change is the constant thing that's going on. - Alan Kay (2017)

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