College is a waste of time
cnn.com
cnn.com
Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.)
He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students do show an improvement.
I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.
Your thoughts are welcome.
Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing.
And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could have won the Vietnam War in just a few years.
19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.
(The differences between good and bad colleges are, of course, usually missing from these sorts of discussions...I have difficulty taking seriously anyone who can critique or discuss "college" as if it were one monolithic program.)
College is not to teach you "how to be successful" or "become a better coder". In this case, it's about giving you the tools to learn to think. (...I think this doesn't apply for med school, though)
I have my current job because of an alumni from my school. There's a lot more to the college experience than just the diploma.
On the other hand, I'm yet another 19-year-old with an opinion. Yes, I think I know something about what the right decision for college is (and I think it's completely individual), so perhaps I just fall under that category and the above should just be ignored. Not that I think so, of course.
I will say this for starters. I thought that college was actually one of the most open environments I've ever been in. Moreso than pre-college education. Moreso than working at a VC-backed startups. Moreso than working in corporate America. Probably the only time I had significantly more freedom was taking some time off between jobs.
When I see statements like, "Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity" -- I see immaturity. He punishes himself for failure. I've seen it as a learning opportunity since junior high at least (I think this something athletics really instils in children, although certainly not exclusive to athletics).
In any case, he sounds like a friend, and I don't want to rant on a friend, especially if he's not here to defend himself. I look forward to what he can do over the years. Maybe he'll prove me wrong.
Disagree. In many cases academia DOES actively punish failure, through negative feedback mechanisms involving grades, comments on papers/essays and the like that subjugate "out-of-the-box-thinking" in favor of a certain theme or buzzword a professor wants to hear, what his or her political or economic viewpoint is, etc.
I'm not saying this is inherently good or bad either. If you're a surgeon or an airline pilot, your room for experimentation & outside the box thinking is slim to nil. But actively discouraging an aspiring hacker, developer, entrepreneur etc. from experimentation (I.E. a high rate of failure before success) is a surefire way to diffuse the creative process, in my mind.
I think you're conflating two things here: negative feedback and biased evaluation. Two very different things.
Regarding negative feedback -- it's not failure, it's feedback. And that's what I mean by the immaturity aspect. When I was a kid, I'd cry when I lost at chess. As I got older I usually learned more from my losses than my wins. They were no longer just failures, it was a chance to improve. Throughout school I felt the same way. Comments on papers/essays and grades I used to make myself better. I appreciated them.
The biased evaluation isn't unique to college. In fact its a pretty major part of life in general. You're going to have to deal with it in businss, dealing with VCs, dealing with spouses, banks, employees, etc... If you can figure out a way to remove it, I'd love to see it.
Regarding out of the box thinking, I generally found it well received. Especially in CS. But I guess YMMV.
When I was 19, I didn't see it as a valuable skill, I just thought it was obnoxious bullshit. Today, I see it as so valuable that when faced with a pile of potential candidates, nearly everybody who graduated magna or summa gets at least a phone interview.
The problem with the UnCollege movement is that it might disqualify a lot of smart students from graduate study, which IMO is where the teenage hubris starts melting away. Spend a few years in a PhD program, and even if you don't finish, you'll realize that the world is a lot more complicated than you imagined, and there is a lot of advanced knowledge out there that requires a period of dedicated study with a mentor. You might not need graduate school for it, but it's a structured environment for those who aren't fortunate enough to be adopted by a VC.
But yes, if you're saying that doing more education opens you up to more than just knowledge, but a realization that stuff is really a lot harder than you thought, definitely ++ on that.
Of course, there are things which are better suited for jumping right in—I'm thinking areas of work where experience can teach more than learning, like startups. But I'm biased.
In any case, I think with every article that's sensationalized like this, we can all agree that the headline sucks.
This leads to confusion for a lot of young people. The ones who are more ambitous will have thoughts that college isn't enough for them, and will consider their dissection that college is a beauracratic sheepfarm to be brilliant, and they will have convincing thoughts of leaving which is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because there is another realm which a lot of these young people might find a lot of challenging enjoyment and that is the academic world. Unfortunately again, though, the first two years of college have been dumbed down to accomodate the new trend of having college not mainly being for aspiring academics.
I have to wonder that if these students stuck it out (and perhaps with the choosing of a rigorous major) they'd find their life leading a whole new direction by the end of their upper division courses.
College isn't entirely about learning things in the classroom, it's four years where young, hopefully creative people get to have almost nothing to do but think and create. The overwhelming majority of people in the world don't get to work in cool offices, on cool problems, with cool co-workers who want to solve difficult problems with them. The majority of us spend our days under fluorescent lights working on mundane business-intelligence type things. Not to say that creativity cannot be found in anything, but sitting in my dorm hacking until all hours of the morning because I didn't really have to go to class is certainly more conducive to creativity than working an 8:00-6:00 and going to bed at 10:00 because I have to be up in the morning.
While college might not really offer much in the way of knowledge acquisition (at least until grad school), it would does offer the time to work on things you're passionate about, and network with other people of similar inclinations.
I dropped out of college when I was 19, and it was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. For somebody who is already a member of the silicon valley set, this might be good advice, for everybody else this train of thought is parasitic.
(I'm not saying that networking and hacking and soforth isn't possible when you're working a "real" job [hell, I spend almost every waking second I'm not spending at my job hacking and writing and networking], I'm just saying that college is a better environment for it)
If your college left you with nothing but "time to think and create", dropping out was absolutely the right choice! The entire point (until PhD studies) is that you should be learning and doing things according to some curriculum; if you're not there for the curriculum, what are you doing there at all?
College is great preparation for grad school, which is great preparation for a teaching job. The system serves itself very well, thank you.
Depends on what you mean by "work" and what you think the purpose of college is. That's one point of Louis Menand's recent article, "Debating the Value of College": http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110... and his book, The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... . Should college prepare people for work, or for general kinds of abstract thinking? At the moment, colleges do both (and neither).
The other big problem I see is that the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not.
And even if college only filters students ("Theory one" in Menand's article), it does still serve some kind of signaling function. As you note, "As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic." But most programming jobs do still appear to require a college degree. There's probably a reason for that: even if it is too low a bar, it is still a bar that not everyone can hurdle. People capable enough to be self-taught can hurdle it and, ideally, learn more; those not capable enough can't accomplish even that.
However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.
"conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content, rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software development and literature.
"competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have their own problems.)
"regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.
"theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job.
I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless.
Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of it.
When I was in college group projects were extremely common. As were group-projects for clubs. The SW engineering sequence was all group based. The compiler sequence was group project based. OS was group project based. And architecture was group project based.
It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.
Is it really? Most of my tests were open book or take home. You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization.
Particularly math classes. Memorization was almost meaningless and tests could be open book for all the prof cared.
In some ways, college was my personal social-engineering experiment.
Worrying your grade is in and of itself conformity, and if you throw the idea that you need to get a 4.0 to succeed in college out the window, the first two or three points are complete bunk. The theory vs. application thing is mostly bunk too, because you can find the application in college, but you will have to look, ask around, and find someone who is interested in it, and those people aren't always going to be in your academic sphere at the college of engineering.
I graduated with a 2.5, made a lot of mistakes, but like I said, college was a huge experiment for me, and I knew what I needed to do to come out ahead and I did. I used and abused every opportunity there to learn what I wanted to learn while getting a degree. I had access to a machine shop, made friends with the shop supervisor, and got to do whatever the hell I wanted on $100,000 CNC machines. I worked for an experiment for professors, suggested projects and got to work on them. I walked to the engineering department and talked to the DSP professor and got explanations on things I didn't understand, even though I wasn't even enrolled in any engineering classes.
It's such a cop out to just say college is broken because somebody isn't feeding you what you think you need to be fed. Nobody said you need to get a 4.0 in college to succeed in life, people just assume it, and nobody said things would just come to you when you were there, but people do assume that.
College is a collection of amazing resources, and I would think that any true entrepreneur would understand this. I'm not saying that college is for everyone, but I am saying that pretending it's worthless or a waste of time only shows a lack of imagination, creativity and proactivity.
Of course, if I had a startup called UnCollege I would say it was worthless too.
Not to be mean, but that might be a problem with your college rather than colleges in general.
What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into these arguments that all higher education is worthless.
This isn't good logic, much less good advice.
"College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago"
This is insane. Public university tuition has inflated about 360%, while salaries have stayed flat or declined, and unemployment is on the rise.
I agree with others that college benefits those who take advantage of what it offers, but when you come out with 6-figure debt, the cost/benefit of "investing in yourself" is seriously in question.
The societal fabric in the USA has been under assault by the rich and elite, and public schooling (both k12 and collegiate) is merely one of those threads that's becoming unraveled (by the excessive burden of the profiteers/leeches).
Some colleges and some majors. I wrote elsewhere: "the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not." This also applies to majors / departments, and the problem with criticizing "college" is that you're criticizing such a heterogeneous set of institutions, practices, and experiences that you're not actually describing a specific good or ill.
I think the anti-college movement is good because it helps draw a line between those parts of the workforce that value a degree and those that don't.
No one is arguing specialized education is bad, but there are much more efficient ways of getting there.
Now that you told me what college isn't about, what is it about? And why must it be threatened by a modern business model?
It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal. Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".
Once you get past the prerequisites and basic classwork, it's a world of difference. I feel bad for the people who will be missing out on some truly great educational experiences because this kid couldn't stick it out for more than a few semesters. Few people will have his success rate right out of high school.
Also, this kid apparently went to a Liberal Arts college in the middle of Arkansas, so some of his biases and thoughts about college are going to be based on that.
Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would even have accepted this as actual work.
College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I previously thought useless.
The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically speaking) serfdom.
Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good salary. Going to college gets you on that track.
This isn't really true. Universities got started in the Middle Ages to a) collect what knowledge existed, especially from Greek and Roman sources and b) to a lesser extent, train religious authorities and theologians. In the U.S., universities got going to basically create gentlemen, and later to create scholars and researchers (Menand goes over a lot of this in his book The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...).
Today, a lot of colleges and college majors focus on creating employees, but that's a relatively recent shift that only began taking place on a large scale circa 1980, as far as I can tell. That's when the number of business majors, relative to the liberal arts and sciences, really takes off in the U.S. I don't know enough about the European situation to comment on it.
Why is this? We clearly ought to be overall better off since it allows greater specialization and higher productivity, but how much better do more specialized people with fewer choices actually do in general?
starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5
Yay for us programmers being FLSA-exempt I suppose...
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly talking about the short term effect. In the mid-long run I'm sure we're looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.
Wow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't know how to teamwork and learn from others.
I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others can be counterproductive, in my opinion.
I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.
Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one.
Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments.
Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held in equal regard.
Computer Sciences, absolutely. Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure. Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it. Biology & Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study
None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught in a formal setting.
Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming and web development.
Education as civilizing self-development is something other than schooling and training, but our institutions have abandoned that, if they ever provided it in the first place. I think they did use to, but only for a tiny elite.
I went to college and did Mathematics. Why? Cause it looked cool. Was I good at it? Not really I had a hard time with many of my classes but I enjoyed the material. It was interesting even if useless. It's all about what you want to get out of college. I wanted to learn something interesting. The best part is it wasn't useless at all in the end. Nobody really cares about what your degree is in except for some specific jobs and get it cheap (that even goes for Ivy schools, they are now cheaper than many private sub Ivy schools due to Financial aid).
If someone spends $100,000 on school and they don't make that after graduating, people label it as a failure.
College's worth shouldn't be evaluated in a purely financial context.
In my view, college is broken in 3 ways:
1. It is too expensive -- this severely limits talented people from going to college
Hopefully, online, free college lectures will go a long way to remedy this situation.
2. Brilliant PhDs are not able to find jobs in their area
This is not about money but about the ability to do research and about the ability for these people to contribute in their chosen fields.
3. The Wrong People are going to college
People are going to college because they don't know what else to do and because everyone tells them it's what you should do.
College should be optional for jobs. Some of the most brilliant engineers that I have worked with are self-taught without a college degree.
You don't need college to be educated and you don't need a college degree to make lots of money.
College is the entry point to the academic community which should be regularly enriched by the world's best talent.
For many people, it is the ritual, the sports, the experience, and the opportunity to explore ideas for the first time that makes college so worthwhile.
I made great connections, made life long friends, and (most importantly) learned a lot. Most of what I learned was because of my own efforts, however, that seed of curiosity that pushed me to learn was usually thanks to something mentioned in a class, or because of a conversation with a professor, or because of me going the extra mile in my projects, or because of the research I had looked to work on.
Overall, I'm not saying that you need college to succeed, and I'm not saying that there isn't alot to criticize about college. However, before you knock it down, try it out. You may not regret it.
What seems to be missing from these kinds of discussions is a focus on what kinds of college programs we should be emulating.
Let me get this straight -- the whole premise of the Thiel Fellowship seems to be to get bright kids out of the doldrums of higher education and into the real world where they can start competitive businesses, and yet this kid says he doesn't like college because it rewards competition?!
And, I don't really agree with that premise in the first place. If anything, college rewards the appearance of collaboration -- when I was college, I ended up in numerous group projects where at least one person was completely worthless and contributed nothing besides their name on the written report's cover page.
I guess the biggest thing that college gave me wasn't knowledge, it was a firing range where I could practice shooting without actually harming anyone. If I think of myself when I was 18-20, if I was actually put into a position of responsibility my net contribution would be negative.
There are certainly exceptions, but the net value of an unexperienced 18 year old is negative. He costs more to the company (in mentoring and mistakes) than the value he provides.
If I were graduating high school this year, I'd go counter cyclical and get the PhD, hoping to land the comfortable government job and ride out the depression there.
I loved college, especially a lot of the stuff that happened well after I turned 19. I feel really lucky that college forced me to learn so much stuff. Otherwise my mind would have gotten stuck in a narrower path.
Technological advancement has a lot to do with "improving the human condition" and the majority of significant advances come from those who have been through higher education.
You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not that easy.
definitely a good movement to demand for change in education, will it revolutionize the system? probably not.
I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I got stuff done and everyone around me thought I was really good at what I did. This was never something I bragged about, I have always been completely aware of how little I understand about everything.
Then I went to apply for college. I had wild dreams of just picking classes that interested me and taking them, learning all sorts of complicated tools and programming languages. Imagine my surprise when I instead was asked to take basic math, english and other uninteresting refresher courses. I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't know what the program I wanted was called so I ended up in a CIS program. I lost most of my passion for programming and making websites at that time. I switched schools, got an internship that turned into a job, but it's just a completely worthless experience for me.
I'm visiting in an advanced HTML class right now and they are going over techniques I used EIGHT YEARS AGO. I used these skills in my high school HTML class where no one else could. Worse, these skills they are teaching are now outdated and trivial. The LAMP stack isn't hot and new anymore, and now I just get annoyed when people get excited about being able to use it because it is so basic and trivial to use.
It deeply saddens me that I've wasted my time at college; I could have instead worked on personal projects for the past 6 years since starting and I would have not wasted money on tuition, student loans and my time on worthless classes like I'm still taking. When I bring up how little I've gotten out of my education that I've paid tens of thousands of dollars for the response I get is "You'll have a degree that you can show to future employers!" Sorry, I'd rather have a portfolio of work than something that just shows I have had minimal experience at trivial applications of a variety of subjects.
I used to be passionate on doing personal projects and all of the skills necessary towards my goals in life, then I went to college and had all of that ambition sucked out of me, replaced with worthless boring classes that wasted my time. You're probably thinking "why not just work on these projects while going to school/work for the past six years?" I could have, but those around me made it seem like college and working were more important. The mindset became "I'm going to college and working, what more do you want?" My parents didn't realize that I will probably make every dollar for the rest of my life using a computer. Instead, they just saw someone wasting their time on a computer and berated me at every opportunity. I'm just now realizing that I need to quit listening to those people and need to just work on whatever seems valuable to me.
I ended up skipping a lot of classes in college while daytrading, but I took the most bizarre liberal arts classes I could find and did most of the reading on my own time.
I am extremely happy with my college experience, and would certainly recommend it for the opportunity cost.