Wise decision, but this renders the cost of education (in US universities) even more unjustifiable.
I don't know how I would have learned how to become an RF engineer if it weren't for a four year BSEE that focused heavily on DiffEq, Complex Math, Fields & Waves, and Discrete Systems... and access to patient and friendly (mostly) professors for help during open office hours, which were a necessity (for me, anyway).
I'm pretty sure I would not have been able to teach this to myself with YouTube videos. But maybe you've had better luck?
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
You can learn all of this by yourself.
> I'm pretty sure I would not have been able to teach this to myself with YouTube videos.
YouTube videos suck for serious learning of non-visual activities. Written resources, particularly books, are optimal. People like to pretend that it's hard to figure out what you need to learn, but just taking a look at syllabuses and assigned readings and what the "best" books in the field are will get you plenty far.
> access to patient and friendly (mostly) professors
For many majors you can find decent help online, but often crossreferencing between different books will provide just as good results as talking to a professor.
Lectures are extremely inefficient.
The hardest part is not being able to find answer manuals, particularly with graduate-level books. Usually you can find alternatives.
No, and I know this for a fact because I'm me, and you're not. But thanks for telling me I'm wrong that I can't learn something without a tutor. That's a new twist on mansplaining. I guess I'm happy for you that you are so smart.
Networking isn't everything but it's definitely the lion's share. Anyone who paints the world as a meritocracy is disillusioned, but it helps to have merit to fall back on. There are many who get through life and succeed financially almost entirely through networking and situation.
This isn't a glamorous story where my network made me a millionaire, but my life would be much worse having not made those friends back then.
Do a good job, be secure in your abilities, have empathy for others. I'm a freelancer of 13 years with a lot of happy clients and – before I started living off-grid – I'd earn a month's rent in half a day. Now I don't have rent or mortgage.
Sure, I haven't climbed any corporate ladder, but I hope that in a decent company you can be those things and also do well.
[1] https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/new-high-court-judges-all-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_of_the_Supreme_Court_o...
For undergrad, 3 went to Princeton, 1 to Columbia (not RBG, interestingly), 1 to Harvard, 1 to Yale, 1 to Cornell, 1 to Stanford, and 1 to Holy Cross.
That's evidence that signaling matters in a law degree, but the larger context of this discussion is of an undergraduate degree and I don't think the signalling is as strong there.
She and her husband both went to Harvard Law, though the husband started and graduated one year earlier. He then got a job at a New York law firm and RBG transferred to Columbia to stay near him. She completed her third year at Columbia and received their law degree.
Harvard Law actually has a rule (adopted later) where you can complete your third year elsewhere and still receive a Harvard degree. They offered this degree to RBG, who refused it[1]. So technically you're right that she's a Columbia Law grad, though it's not a stretch to call her a Harvard Law grad as well.
So unless you are in the Skull and Bones and your frat bro's uncle is an executive at Goldman Sachs, and that uncle was a frat bro with your Dad who's an executive at Morgan Stanly, no.
But, a college education is still a valuable thing for getting a job. Depending on what classes you take anyway.
As someone who DIDN'T network in college and compares to peers who did - it is utterly devastating. It is hugely influential.
Admittedly, your networking won't matter as much if there isn't high movement from the school to your work region... In my case, I went to a school where most of the student body had no intentions of leaving the region. I was also in an extremely anti-social department that was overly competitive.
Harvard/Yale for Law/Government/Policy - yes
Stanford/Berkeley/MIT/CMU for venture funded startups - yes
Cornell for Hotel Management / Veterinary Sciences - yes
Georgetown/Princeton for Diplomacy/Government/Fed/Policy - yes
Georgetown for venture funded startups - questionable
Stanford for journalism - probably neutral
Most US unis for Investment Banking - * not a chance *
Most US unis for Strategy Consulting Top-3 - not a chance
But perhaps it is different at US colleges (or for others in the UK). I personally couldn't wait to put academia behind me and get into the real world.
I now live off-grid in Central Portugal. I have clients I still work for, and I get referrals to new clients too. I'm also starting a wireless ISP here, which is great for networking and meeting people :-)
I've also hit up random alums at various companies who have given me referrals, there are a lot of friends of friends who are in pretty good positions, such as founder/CEO/partner at various companies and VCs that will be willing to chat with you if you happen to know someone they're connected to that can vouch for you. I was actually interviewing with a company, and I found out the CEO was an alum of my school, and we had a lot of fun talking about college.
Outside of ambition, the people matter too.
I know a lot of marriages that started in college. I've met a lot of my best friends there too. Some of my professors changed my life, and not in a textbook way, but in a human way. I made a lot of mistakes there, and I know a lot of people did too. But it was college, you're kinda supposed to make mistakes and grow from them. Take the wrong major, kiss the wrong person, say the wrong thing, etc.
I'm not saying that you can't have those experiences elsewhere. Most people do.
But the structure of the place makes it a lot easier to meet other people your age, fall in love, fall out of love, have your opinions challenged, listen to some great/terrible music, imbibe too much of the wrong thing, get help on classwork, etc. You can still not opt into it, of course. And you can do that almost anywhere too.
But it's a lot easier.
Virtual classrooms aren't going to replace that. Honestly, until we get a vaccine, that's all kinda on hold. Sorry class of 2020 :(
I've never been as lonely as I had been during my first few years of college. I had no friends basically. People always got up and left the classrooms after classes were over -- no one hung around to socialize. I was depressed and extremely lonely, and rarely talked to any human beings, and mostly spent my free time on my laptop filled with an ocean of sadness. In my later years in college, I did make some friends, a few of which (like around 3 or 4 friends) have turned into life-long friends. And I'm extremely happy about those.
But people seriously need to stop selling/touting college as some great social place. It emphatically was not during my first two years). The "social aspect" absolutely does not justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on college. You can find friends through events on meetup, or joining a social group (like a club that teaches to code, or a writer's group, or a music/singing group, or a church/religious group, etc). There are plenty of groups like this that are open to anyone in most major metropolises in the US. I've also made online, on Reddit and other sites. People randomly start chatting with me after seeing one of my comments.
You absolutely don't need to and shouldn't spend hundreds of thousands just for the social aspect of college.
Maybe you could work on something on github for your resume during this gap, but I'm anticipating given the absolute chaos this pandemic has caused worldwide, employers aren't going to care if you've failed to secure an internship in a time when no one is hiring, or that you preferred to take more engaging in person coursework rather than watch live action youtube lectures for exorbitant fees.
If anything, I'd think the choice of incoming freshman is even clearer assuming they can defer--including financial arrangements. I'm sure they could find something better to do than severely compromised campus activities that might revert to full-on remote a month into the fall term.
It's based on ability to pay, which is based on available credit, which is based on whatever bankers can get away with saying lifetime earnings will be.
For whom? We're going to save ~0 QALY with this decision, but we're going to derail a lot of people's life plans and probably contribute to a lot of deaths of despair.
To break the system would be to snap your fingers and will more knowledge worker jobs into existence to meet the oversupply of qualified candidates, but given our free market society and increasing disfavor of public engineering and public research, that just isn't ever going to happen. So you try and play the game as it is the best you can, and apply to schools like Harvard with faculty who can push your life forward.
That remains the problem, and credentials/prestige remain our best way of dealing with it. In other fields you develop portfolios (e.g. github repos) perhaps that's what education will evolve to, developing a student work portfolio to prove you are knowledgable.
Of course the hard part is getting hired without that rubber stamp, but there are many options (many have an idealized idea of what your career will look like, but that's often disconnected from reality)