Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about this today. I remember I used to think 'well, if you do a degree, at least you'll be an expert in something, even if you can't find a good job with it.' When I think of it now, the notion is almost laughable.

University students don't become experts in anything. For a non-technical subject, the knowledge gained isn't really going to beat a normal member of the public with an interest in the subject. English literature students, for example, just leave with some long essays under their belts, they don't graduate as well-read authorities on different epochs of literature. For technical subjects, I suspect most the skills learnt are forgotten afterwards.

It's just too easy for people to coast by, or cheat. The astonishingly low pass marks in some courses have the added effect that the bright students don't need to really get on top of their game to get a good grade. So most people who graduate are far from experts on what they were learning about. As in, if a member of the public needed any of those skills/knowledge to do their job, they could acquire them privately without much difficulty.

> University students don't become experts in anything.

You're absolutely right. A bachelor's degree is supposed to be a mark of well roundedness, not specialization.

> English literature students, for example, just leave with some long essays under their belts, they don't graduate as well-read authorities on different epochs of literature.

They're not supposed to be authorities - if they wanted to dedicate time to become authorities, it's well understood that you'll have to specialize in English lit, likely in some kind of subfield, which is what a masters/PhD is for.

> As in, if a member of the public needed any of those skills/knowledge to do their job, they could acquire them privately without much difficulty.

That doesn't necessarily mean that University education is all for naught. University education purports to teach us how to be better thinkers, not necessarily produce people who are skilled in one kind of thing.

The latter definition that I gave above is what the article is trying to defend.

Maybe it's different where you live, but doing an Honours degree means specializing in the subject. For instance with English lit, you would typically choose 7 or 8 modules (spread over two years), each representing a different period of literature. For those classes you should read one or two books per week (but you have all summer to prepare), and write 3 essays for each module. You should also seek out criticism on the books, and for the ones you do essays or presentations on, read a lot of the related work. There will probably be a whole module on Shakespeare, so why not read all of Shakespeare? Max out. And since you're in university anyway, you might as well attend the lectures for modules you didn't choose, just to augment your knowledge. There is ample time to do all this.

That would certainly make you an expert on your subject. Not a leading academic, obviously, but someone very well informed and educated on the matter. Of course, none of that really happens. Students do the minimum number of essays required (one, instead of three). They don't bother reading the books except the really short ones and the ones they need to write or present on. They barely even attend the lectures for the modules they did choose. Basically they finish having accomplished a fraction of the learning that was supposed to take place. Really no better than the average person who reads a lot of books.

> Really no better than the average person who reads a lot of books.

That might be true, but of course the "average person who reads a lot of books" is not even remotely average. Most people don't read a lot of books, so if college were to make an average person nearly as knowledgeable as self-motivated individuals interesting in spending their personal free-time reading books, as opposed to watching American Idol, it is pretty successful.

A bachelor's degree is supposed to be a mark of well roundedness, not specialization.

What is "well-roundedness" and why is it a good thing? I went to a good school, and I was forced to take all of the worthless general requirements that had nothing to do with anything I cared about. The only thing I still have from those classes is debt. Most people I know tell me that they've had the same experience I did.

I ask myself that a lot, too.

I usually refer to David Foster Wallace's graduation speech (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html) given to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College.

What is "well-roundedness" and why is it a good thing?

A serious question: Have you ever, since you graduated, wished you knew more about a topic outside the field you got your degree in? Why? Ever wish you had more background in economics, history, politics, or science so you could have more informed opinions on the news or make better choices in your life or at the voting booth?

Now, imagine you could go back and take a good intro course in some of those fields of interest, instead of the "worthless" ones you had. Would that kind of "well-rounded" be more satisfying?

I was a science major. Yet every topic I wish I had spent more time studying turned out to be technical. For example, I never took linear algebra, or a course on polymers.

Why not let people be "well-rounded" in a field of their own choosing? We don't insist that every college applicant learn Greek and Latin anymore. Following this further, I can't think of a justification for insisting on any particular requirement at the university, other than to ensure that every graduate should complete a certain number of credit hours with some minimum average course difficulty level. If someone wants to study nothing but chemistry, physics and math, why get in their way? Who is anyone to get in the way of someone who knows what he wants? For those that don't know, how is telling them what they want a legitimate answer?

I graduated ten years ago. I am just now starting to regret not paying enough attention to those general education classes that I thought were wastes of my time. I wasn't mature enough to realize how important economics, marketing, political science, and sociology would be to me in 2011.

Whats funny is at my university, they are making degrees more specialized. An example of this is Applied Computer Science having several areas (Geography, Game programming, etc). In my program of IT there are four concentrations (network security, database programming, web design, and networking). Based on this, a bachelors is not as well rounded as it used to be.

I don't see anything wrong with specialization at all - it's just that college usually appeals to this notion of "well-roundedness", and even if it doesn't, I'd say that it might be great to try taking that weird underwater basket weaving class for shits and giggles, or an English lit class (outside of your requirements, IMO - you'll get a better experience in the classroom when you don't have a ton of people in the class trying to fill basic requirements), or whatever else.

I've personally taken a couple of film and English classes when I didn't need the credits - it doesn't help me one bit in my career, but at least it had helped me think of things in a different way than what I'm used to.

I've seen very, very few people able to learn calculus outside of a school system. Most will just go to elaborate lengths to avoid using calculus and justify why they don't need to learn it.

Fair enough. What examples did you have in mind of people trying to avoid the use of calculus (where it would be the best solution)?

I was one of those types who had a lot of problems with math in primary school because the style of "here are 150 problems for your homework tonight, just like every other night" didn't work with my learning style at all. It took me a long time to overcome this, and while I can't really give an example of this with calculus, I've run into this with other similarly "advanced" mathematical branches such as combinatorics, which comes up in all sorts of CS contexts dealing with trees or similar data structures.

I don't know that people are avoiding the use of calculus where it's appropriate. Rather, they believe that they will never encounter a situation where calculus is the appropriate tool and thus claim that they don't need to learn it.

It's a shame, because understanding differentiation and integration has had a tremendous impact on the way I think. It literally was a gamechanger for me, and it's worth it even though I only use it in thought exercises now.

They guessed at the answer (these are people doing mechanical and electronic designs). They'd test the design, and it would not work. They'd guess again, test, did not work. Quite a bit of time and money would be wasted, whereas some calculus would give them values for their components that would work the first time.

I've also seen people look up formulas in a book, and misapply them with no understanding. The formulas are understandable if you know calculus, but these people would get answers that didn't work and would just be befuddled.

I did, more or less, but I was pretty motivated. If I hadn't been so strongly motivated, I wouldn't have been able to do it at all. As it was, I switched to taking calculus classes at the first opportunity.

The funny thing is, though, I did a lot better on the AP exam than the kids who did take a calculus class, the same class I would have taken if I'd finished the prerequisite class in time. And, after a semester of taking it in a class, I'd pretty much lost interest.

("more or less": This was in high school. I failed to put in much time on it during the summer, since I was busy traveling to Japan and falling in love, so I signed up for "study hall" as an elective, and spent that time studying calculus with a textbook. The structured time without much distraction was very helpful in making it through enough of the book to do well on the exam.)

What are some other topics that you very rarely see people learn other than by schooling? Machine learning, physics, surgery?

High school calculus barely scratches the surface of what calculus is, though to be sure, I've only personally encountered one person who got that far with calculus without school.

Yes, unfortunately I didn't really get anywhere after my university vector calculus course. Didn't even take diff-eqs.

The big issue in math in high school and higher universities, is the excessive use of rote memory. You do not need to memorize, word for word, multiple proofs, in order to understand and apply knowledge you learn in a mathematics class. The same goes to mathematical formulas.

I don't believe it needs to be that way. Why was one of my personal heroes, George Green able to do what he did?

Through Thomson, Maxwell, and others, the general mathematical theory of potential developed by an obscure, self-taught miller's son would lead to the mathematical theories of electricity underlying twentieth-century industry.

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Green.ht... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Green

I think I have learned myself a decent amount of calculus.I suggest anyone interested in self learning calculus to to try Infinitesimal Analysis first as its more intuitive. Epsilon delta becomes easier after. And for differential calculus, consider implementing a Higher Order Multivariate Automatic Differentiator able to deal with Jacobians and Hessians efficiently. That hands on learning helps a lot.

I'm at school for a technical subject, and I feel the same way. I'd say 80% of what I've learned is from my free time/various jobs I've worked. School only provided me with the atmosphere where I could explore these things easier. I don't think I'd be doing as much with what I learn if I didn't have access to the labs.

So, when it comes to getting a job, I don't think school has really given me any advantage over someone self educated, because I feel largely self educated anyway.

As a side note, one of my professors used to be in charge of hiring at a fairly large company and started refusing to hire (for the most part) anyone with a 4.0, claiming all the good engineers were in the 2.8/3.8 range. He found that GPA was a metric for jumping through hoops, and not engineering ability/critical thinking/creative planning etc. I agree. Of course, I'm one of those 2.8/3.8 students, but I've seen so many cases where the best in class cheats, sucks up, or memorizes the material for the test and immediately forgets it. There's actually a kid famous for being a dumbass in my school, but he's head of IEEE, and has a cushy IBM job lined up, even though nearly everyone agrees he knows nothing about his major.

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