For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.
Now we're talking about "HS is..." or "HS is not..." or "HS sucks." Why wait until HS? Now we're talking about MS... then lower school. Then it's just your entire life as an individual.
I like the idea of a loose education system where there aren't Nth-grade, Xth-year students, but simply students who have proved themselves in a particular set of studies. For those with the time to study, take one year. For those without, take ten years. Then there won't be any of these ideas of what college should or should not do.
It's my personal fantasy. Impractical perhaps?
Having just graduated college, I see it as the most valuable experience of my life. I've defined who I am and what I want to do in the past four years, and learned a ton about engineering on the side.
There were actually three or four test schools operated this way during the 70s. The literature on them is really interesting.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&...
I don't think he was arguing that nobody should do 4 years of college. Just that employers need a better vetting system.
No, but that seemed to be what the commenter I replied to was advocating.
I think you could base it entirely on empirical results -- successful programming projects being the sole measure of value.
Come to think of it, Open Source projects somewhat fill this role.
The security certification is a wonderful idea! I think that would be a great place to start. (And end, perhaps.) The test for this could be entirely empirical. An applicant could be required to place $1000 in escrow, and implement a web application on the guild's servers. They would be required to add certain features. During the test, anyone would be welcome to try and hack the website. If anyone can prove that they are successful, they get the $1000. If the features all get implemented with no hacking, then the applicant gets their money back, minus the fee.
In other words: the market does do something, but someone could do even better.
If we had mandatory security certifications, Reddit wouldn't exist. Nor, for that matter, would Windows. And while many of us would probably rejoice at that, I think a lot of people would be pretty pissed off if they had to use OpenBSD.
BTW, I interned at a company that does avionics/medical devices/financial software. Those industries do have strong regulations, like mandatory code reviews and traceability matrices. And that's great for what they do, but I'd hate to see the same standards applied to your Web 2.0 social bookmarking site.
Rebuttal here: http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2007/07/04/certification-pl...
The industry doesn't need to the government to penalize non-guild programmers to benefit from a guild. All the guild has to do is to show that it is effective in producing competent, knowledgeable programmers. I suspect that things like employment at Microsoft have filled this niche. (Sub-optimally.) An organization that is designed to fulfill this particular purpose would be much better at its function and more robust.
A majority of US drivers think they are above average. I have met very few under-qualified programmers who realized it.
"...bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses."
So either the graduate is knowledgeable and the system did its job, or the graduate knows how to be a good member of a big bureaucratic organization and how to accomplish arbitrary things they're told to do.
Sounds like one more level of sorting, and the schools have done the job for big companies.
The benefits of college are benefits because you cannot get them otherwise. It is a fallacy to claim otherwise.
It's funny, but I got a whole lot more of that stuff after dropping out. Am I really going to learn more from a place where I don't pay the rent, buy stuff with a meal card, work fifteen hours per week but don't necessarily have to show up, and am surrounded by proto-alcoholics? If you can deduce the modern college experience from any sane set of first principles, I'd like to hear about it -- but it seems to me that Murray is right. If we didn't have college, and you tried to invent it, you'd be rightly denounced as a loon.
And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.
Murray has crunched the numbers rather than counting the anecdotes; studying for the SAT can raise scores a lot at first, but if you studied two hours per day for 150 days, your expected score increase would be seventy points. Murray cites this (http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...), which I haven't read. It would be a good plan to introduce your convictions to some data, so you can back up your assertion with something besides "I used to do test prep, and envy rich people too much to wonder what I can learn from them."
Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence.
You also might be happier if 1) you didn't assume that the newspaper that recently published a Barbara Ehrenreich piece (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121380066376984...) was irredeemably right-wing, and 2) if you considered the possibility that since college professors are overwhelmingly liberal (http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2002_08_25_cellasreview_arc...) and nearly impossible to fire, they would consist of a greater than average number of liberals who do, indeed, have too much influence.
Murray considers himself a libertarian; Ehrenreich is a socialist. Neither is strictly 'right-wing'.
And which errors from The Bell Curve are repeated in his column? I didn't spot any glaring mistakes, but perhaps I did not read as carefully as you did.
Given The Bell Curve, none of his number-crunching statements are believable, without close scrutiny. I do know who Barbara Ehrenreich is, and I agree much more with her than with Murray, but calling her a socialist is typical political name-calling.
Edit: changed "right-wing" in the last sentence to "political" as being more accurate and less political.
but calling her a socialist is typical political name-calling.
Apparently you don't 'know who Barbara Ehrenreich is':
http://www.dsausa.org/about/structure.html
She is a a member of the Democratic Socialist party. Her Wikipedia page mentions that she's a socialist before it mentions that she's a writer! Calling her a socialist is like calling Obama a Democrat -- a radical redefinition of name-calling, though it does please me that merely identifying someone as a member of a leftist party is considered grievously insulting.
If you don't put much effort into school, don't blame school that you got little out of it.
That part of my comment was addressing the idea that school prepares 18-22-year-olds for the real world. I think the real world prepares them a lot faster.
School is one of the few times when it's okay to just learn without also producing something of value. What I chose to learn was computer science and some math and physics. In grad school, I've learned a lot about high performance systems. While this knowledge and related skills are highly valued in the real world, very few real work entities would be willing to pay me to acquire it.
It's tough to learn this stuff on the side. You really need to devote years to learning to be useful. During that time, you're not producing much of value to the outside world. My PhD dissertation will not represent six years of effort; more like one or two. But it took four years of learning to be in the position that I could do that level of work in a year or two.
If you take a CS undergrad, some company somewhere can probably get use of them at their current skill level. But that company will have little interest in paying them to continue learning.
Regarding what you put out versus what you put in, that's true of everything.
That is so weird to me. When I was in school, I spent about eight hours a day, five days a week learning stuff that had little practical application. And now that I work, I spend, oh, six hours a day seven days a week learning stuff with little practical application. Bizarrely, the fact that I'm neither paid nor graded for learning has not stopped me.
Maybe school is good for people who are unable to learn without those incentives, but I'm not sure how much of the population shares that problem. After all, for schools to have something useless to teach, they needed someone to get the ball rolling by learning that stuff before schools existed. So it's been possible in the past.
School is the only time we're allowed to learn without also producing something. You can learn on the job, but there's an expectation that you will produce something as well. They're not paying you to learn for your sake, they're paying you to learn so you can produce something for them. This does not exist in school; everything you produce is only for pedagogical purposes.
I don't know why you brought up incentives; my point has nothing to do with them. My point has to do with time and money. Since you produce nothing of value in school, no one will pay you for it. So you're deferring income so that you can devote all of your time to learning - school is an investment.
If you somehow have a job where you are allowed to do anything you want and produce nothing, then I'd like to know who you work for.
You tell me which will teach an individual more: A sheltered, friendly environment with mostly privileged peers, or living independently? I chose the latter. I interviewed for a web design job before receiving my HS diploma, got the job, and started two days after graduation. A month later, I was out on my own, paying bills, taking care of myself. Now that was a learning experience.
I think a little discussed reason college is such a big deal in America is because most communities are so socially and architecturally dysfunctional. Many colleges provide what a proper town/city is supposed to: public spaces and facilities, walkability, organizations with civic and social functions, etc. It's only because people graduate and go live in alienating suburban asteroid belts or in soulless political-machine big cities that they idealize college so much.
College isn't so great, it's just adult life in most of America sucks. But it's not like that every where.
p.s. The oft repeated "college rounds people out" line desperately needs data. I think it's a load of bullshit.
Yea, plus, those details can change with time. People can be moody, motivated one day, slack the next. Those details can be influenced by a lot of internal & external factors. So yea, that's a good point.
People need to give up the idea that it's easy to evaluate people. It's not, you can't just look at some one-dimensional number. (Be it GPA or some certification score.) If you want to really know their strengths and weaknesses, you need to get to know people.
That's not to say I'm poorly educated by any means. I have the writing, mathematical, scientific, historical, and artistic skills needed to earn a degree. My knowledge of the Russian canon alone might be enough at a school which offered that major (Russian Literature or even World Literature). It just didn't take me four years in a restrictive environment and an empty wallet to earn it :^)
The most valuable thing about college for me was the support, money, facilities that the college provided to me while I was there. They enabled me to do plenty of things I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
When I was at college I worked on plenty of OSS, created a web site for Nasa, and contributed to the W3C. My school paid for me to fly to a number of W3C conferences as scholarship.
I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the university library which was many times vaster and better resourced than any library I've had at any employer since. Any technical book I wanted that they didn't have would normally turn up within a matter of weeks.
Add to that a 24hr computing campus with access to mainframes around the clock. I got to experiment because I could keep my own hours and get time on the interesting hardware at 3am when sensible people were in bed.
University is not just about a degree. As many other people here have said it's about the experience (I met my wife in college) and the learning, in an environment which allows it.
It really is possible for poorer families to have kids in University in Britain. It's a shame that isn't true everywhere.
My only loan was a student one, paying for booze and rent.
I did study Math, and while most of the knowledge can't be used directly in my daily job as a programmer, and most of the higher math was forgotten, I was taught to think abstractly in several different ways (like algebra, math analysis, statistics, geometry etc.) All of those subject are very beneficial to study, IMHO, even if you don't apply them directly in your job.
Entry level office job. B.A. or B.S. required. It would be nice to have a GEBA, just like we have a GED.
Additionally, you can't take many of the exams you just mentioned without a degree. I.e. the degree and the exams are still married, the exam is just standardized.
The point is that a degree doesn't prove much, and a certification can prove approximately as much at a significantly lower cost.
Today times have changed drastically, a guy sitting in remote part of Africa(with a basic internet connection) can obtain the same information which the guy in Stanford or MIT is trying to obtain.
Colleges surely had advantages a decade back like Mentors, Teachers, Abundant Information, Labs, Job Guarantee. But today Internet is replacing all these one by one and colleges today can't guarantee jobs. Unless colleges start offering something really substantial else they will have a tough time competing with internet educated population which is growing day by day.
ISO 9000 certification in the 80s and 90s played a huge role in sending US manufacturing overseas. People were reluctant to believe that factories in various second and third world countries could be just as good. Then the certs proved pretty well that they were!
Same deal now with personnel. Employers are sometimes reluctant to believe Indians or Vietnamese are on par with a four year American college grad. Sufficiently standard tests would prove they are.
In other words, the US has coasted on reputation in a lot of ways and empirical approaches can damage that reputation.
Evidence? I'm curious, mainly because I always hear about the Rust Belt and how it's been screwed over by outsourcing.
The rustbelt is caused by their inability to compete with the better quality Japanese cars (and Japanese salaries are higher than in the rustbelt, you can't make the cheap labour for that).
You can talk about the theoretical upsides to global free trade all you want. I'm a believer. But 2 billion people jumped into the labor pool and the reality in the US is that they made a wave that drowned a lot of people. Real wages are depressed. That's not to say there's any real alternative to full open participation in the global market, but your free-market cheer and pom-poms don't capture the full reality from a US worker perspective.
if you want to attack free markets, why not go further and advocate barriers on inter-state commerce within the US.
If you want to bring back the rust belt, you'll probably need to start a large war in Europe and Asia...
Or better yet, why not get a couple princeton review books to pass the test? I passed 35 credits of AP exams in high school, all with 5 out of 5s, and several without taking the course. When I actually took some classes in college based on that, I quickly found out how little you need to know to pass a test.
Personally, I think this is better. If you try to legislate breadth in your students, then you end up just making a mockery of what you're trying to teach. You end up accomplishing the opposite of what you were trying to do.
I spent a few years teaching Computer Science 101/102 as a TA. A whole lot of my students were in Journalism, Communications, or Criminology or some area like that and just trying to get their math requirement out of the way. My conclusion in retrospect: to most of my students, this was largely just a bureaucratic exercise.
If you want true students, you need to find the students that have the interest and desire.
The problem with this view is that some people just want the vocational part, and bundling it with something they don't want, but for which they will be charged, just makes them worse off. Being able to buy A or B is better than only being able to buy A and B.
It would be pretty annoying if some forward-thinking politician realized that a keyboard is worthless without a computer, and unilaterally banned the sale of keyboards that didn't come with a computer. But that would be a terrible plan.
And I'm sure that a lot of you will say that that's an indication that college is mostly a waste, but I don't think that that follows, necessarily; although I haven't been to college yet I feel vaguely that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I could think of to do otherwise, and certainly that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I would in all likelihood do otherwise.
But what if everybody (or almost everybody) prefers SUVs? And I guess we need to extend the analogy a little more: what if everybody needs a car, and their parents are buying them one, and the parents choose primarily based on cost, and hybrids cost less? But everybody wants an SUV. Maybe everybody wants an SUV to the extent that they'd be willing to personally pay for the difference in price, if they had the money. Oh, and maybe the SUVs are actually better for the environment.
...This analogy is terrible.
If you can give me some reason that the existence of something that performs most of the functions of college, but that is cheap enough to be a viable opportunity for people who work, or people who want to get their credentials faster or whatever, is such a threat to college that it must be stopped -- but college, despite its vulnerability to better ideas, is still worth keeping around -- I'd like to hear about it.
But that might be convoluted. So here's what I would ask: if we had the credentialing system and no college, how would you pitch the concept of a modern college to the typical VC?
The system is supposed to be separate from college. That's the whole point. That way kids who don't want to go to college can still get a good job, and colleges can be even better for those who do go because they don't have to teach job skills.
College is only as useful as you want it to be. If you want to 'coast' for four years and meet/network with a lot of people, do it. If you want to study your tail off in a difficult field and try and get a good job afterward, do it. Just do not complain afterward that college did not prepare you to get a job or that college did not make enough friends for you afterward.
Maybe they could call themselves the "Bene Gesserit?"
On the same note, High school and middle school are pretty much a waste of time. In fact, any kind of system that categorize kids into homogeneous age groups are socially and psychologically unhealthy. How can kids learn form their peers if all of them have just about the same exposure and experience in the world? That's why we have all these angsty kids, because no knows better.
I've been teaching on the side for a few years. And from my experience, when I mix kids of different ages, they assume instinctual responsibilities (almost tribal). Older kids become more authoritative and care-giving. Younger kids become more attentive and respectful. This kind of social learning is both top-down and bottom-up.
I understand the importance of school as a social environment. But if it's going to be homogeneous and unrepresentative of the real world, no real social skills will come out of it.
Don't take my word for it. I'm sure we all have interacted with college grads who are clueless about the real world.
This is misleading, because the word authentic has a specific meaning in psychometrics. It means that the evaluation of competence is based off of things like observations, student journals, portfolios, inquiry projects, exhibits, hands-on activities, essays, performances, etc. A standardized test score is not considered to be an authentic measure of competence.
I assumed he was using common vernacular. Wouldn't it be odd for him to use such a technical term in the middle of an opinion piece in the WSJ?
I think your example is a great one. The conservative would then proceed to argue that his definition of "progressive taxation" is adequate for the discussion at hand.
I'm probably just making a big deal out of nothing. I'm just flummoxed at why his own technical field's definition has anything to do with communication directed at a non-technical audience.
Perhaps he used it like that to get the response you gave? That would make sense.
In current times most young people would be well advised to avoid Universities and Colleges. After 4 years of classes they come out dumber than when they went in.
The employers that use low-information predictors of productivity will go out of business and whatever system the remaining businesses are using will drive the educational system.
Either that, or the inevitably-higher credit standards in the near future will help to give the college system a population haircut, which will weed out quite a few of those who don't really mean it (and unfortunately, some of those who do...).
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...
I've worked with many people who have degrees and certification in computing and many who don't. As a result of my experience, I've rejected resumes from people who have studied computing and sought professional certifications solely, in preference to people who have English degrees and weird hobbies. Professional experience is supreme, but after that, I want a broad mind to tackle the problems at hand. While that's highly prejudicial, I've found it a very rewarding way to approach a stack of resumes.
1. College should train you for some sort of career and should do so in the most rigorously objective way possible. In this view, certifications provide the gold standard of objectivity.
2. College should help you become well rounded, responsible adults. By which I mean, able to reason about complex issues, having some background in history, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, a basic understanding of subjects that affect our lives, such as economics, etc... In other words, the sort of people who desire to remain informed about political events, who could weigh several candidates for office and be able to apply some sort of selection criteria beyond a mere gut instinct. In other words, the sort of people that keep democracy on track.
While it is atrociously suboptimal, it's a bit much to call it a waste of time.
Incidentally, I happened upon this article this morning and like the idea very much: the Grandes écoles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%89coles Does anybody have any related stories to tell?
It seems like going to college is a requirement now, where people go there because its expected of them. They don't go to learn, they go there to put in the time(like in highschool)
There was a movement a few years back to increase the requirement to a full Master's degree. It's totally unnecessary to be a good accountant.
College, in my case, was totally unnecessary. Yet I'm a DBA/Developer for a respected Fortune 500 company.
I'm currently 22, and have never been to college. I'm a smart kid, and have always had a passion for learning - but went through some rough times during and after high school that I'm just coming out of. I currently make most of my income from doing simple freelance coding work, and live with a group of people in something of a music / art commune.
I would love to go get a formal education, but I wouldn't want to attend a college where I was not being pushed to my fullest. I'm capable of learning on my own, and do so pretty much everyday, but feel that I could benefit greatly from being in an environment where other people are learning the same things, and where there was at least one person who had a lot more experience in whatever field was being studied than the class did.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of college courses that I've seen that deal with areas that I currently feel I could spend the rest of my life working with are rather poor. In the town I live in, I know at least one person with a BS in "comp-sci" who had never been exposed to the concept of a finite state machine, never been exposed to the concept of "first class functions", and had no practical experience with anything other than cut-and-paste java development, or similar cut-and-paste php development. I know that this is not the case at every college, but it seems to be becoming more of the norm than not.
I'm at a point where I can either continue doing hellishly boring freelance jobs until I make enough money to drop off the map for a while and develop something really useful to a lot of people, or I can go the route of putting myself in debt to go to college with the hopes that I can excel enough to either get noticed / hired by a company that is doing interesting work, or get a job that would allow me to pay off my debt, work for a year or two, and then again start working on software that would be useful to a lot of people.
Because of what I've seen of most colleges and their courses in most of the areas that I've been in, I tend to feel that I would be wasting a good four years of my life in most colleges.
I have some noticeable gaps in knowledge, specifically in maths, that I would like to fill (and am working on filling, thanks Knuth and friends for writing Concrete Mathematics - it's a wonderful start.)
Largely, the question for me is one of quality of education. I do not want to pay people to give me busy work for four years. I don't want to be paying for textbooks on core material that hasn't changed in decades and only differs from the previous versions by what order the chapters are in, or what order the questions are in.
What I want to do is learn to the best of my ability, and apply what I learn to the best of my ability. I think that a college environment very well could provide the means for that, but I have serious doubts that it is providing that for most students. Part of me doubts that most colleges even intend to provide that sort of environment.
I can see that degrees are starting to matter a lot less, at least in the programming industry. I for one hope that that trend continues, and we get a nice influx of employers who are looking to pay people to learn and apply their learnings to solving practical problems.
Anyhow, that's enough about that for now.
Is college a massive waste of time and money for a lot of people? Probably. I think it's useless and unfair to put a person through college and then have him end up in a job that does not involve the level of autonomy and intellectual challenge that college led him to expect. Since society has not evolved to the point where good jobs are abundant, it's hard to see any good reason for more than 5-10% of people to have college educations.
One has to examine the motivations behind the proliferation of higher education. The far left supports widespread college education under the belief that if lower- and middle-class people have the benefit of a liberal education, they'll demand good jobs and become "Angry Young (Wo/)Men" if they don't get them and, therefore, evolve into revolutionaries who will overthrow the status quo. The corporate right likes it because the colleges provide companies with a sorting mechanism, the costs of which are paid by the people being sorted rather than the corporate "users". The center supports widespread college education under the guise of increasing social equality. It's obvious that an idea with such support from both the wings and the center will be implemented.
Also, there are the goals of the academics. In the 1950s, professors widely believed that a merger between the academy and the larger capitalistic society would improve their social position. As they saw it, rule of society by educational institutions seemed to be the next logical step after rule by the church until the Enlightenment, by governments up to World War I, and finally by business corporations in the XX-c. They got their desired "merger" but Mammon, being larger and meaner, won and turned the academy to its needs, rather than vice versa.