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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

If you like college good for you. But the first two years are bullshit. The last two, you should be able to learn them on the job for many career tracks and test them out.

Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree? Because the british said so many centuries ago is not a good reason. Neither is "what about the profits of colleges".

We put up with 12 years of random but generally useful things forced on us. Once we decide a career as adults, information not directly useful to the job we will be working should be optional.

Not to mention the financial burden and lost time in a person's prime years

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University is not trade school. There is more function there than simply learning to do the narrow job one believes the future may have in store for them. Here are some others:

  - Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation
  - Find sexual mates
  - Find platonic mates
  - Learn many disconnected things
  - Learn many connected things
  - Learn to take criticism in the open
  - Learn to render criticism in the open
  - Engage diversity
  - Engage similarity
  - Discover the value of value
  - Make mistakes in the open... recover
  - Watch others make mistakes in the open... help them recover
  - Learn to how to think
  - Learn the history of thinking
  - Become a robust citizen of the universe
  - Learn you are much smaller than you thought you were

A "liberal education" was, originally, an education appropriate to free people, as opposed to slaves. Slaves got an education that was more like trade school, if at all. Free people got an education for those who didn't have to work for a living. If you're getting that education today, it has value, but you'd better be in a position where you don't need it to get you a job when you're done.

On the other hand:

> Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation

One of the things you don't learn in college: Not to talk like that.

> One of the things you don't learn in college: Not to talk like that.

Totally uncivil comment.

Fair. I stated it badly, which made it look like a personal attack. So let me try again:

In most environments, that kind of writing comes across as pretentious, and even as deliberately obscure. But for at least some people, in college they learn to write that way, because it gives them better grades. But they would in fact communicate better if they didn't write that way, and college in general would be better if they taught people how to write for a general audience, instead of for professors.

Now you in particular, just that one sentence struck me that way. Your writing in general didn't come across that way, and my comment should not be taken as a personal attack. That one sentence, though, I feel merits criticism.

In a different context or some other format, I would not have been so brief. But the point of the list was simply to rattle off indications of ideas, not to communicate concepts with reliable clarity.

Further, what's pretentious to one audience is idiomatic to another. HN has a diverse crowd with many backgrounds. Implying that your own taste in this matter is representative is a bit much.

Edit: I'll admit I'm feeling a little sensitive at the moment. I've had a bad week. If I'm being a bit defensive here, I apologize. I do essentially agree with your judgment re that particular bullet -- I might have landed on better words.

Hey, I've never done that. Never been over sensitive on HN. Never snapped at anyone because I was having a bad week. Never... um, or maybe not this week... um... (checks time of my initial post in this thread) this afternoon?

We've all been there. May your week improve.

You don’t need to go to college to do any of that.

The same can be accomplished with a year of travel and a year of internships/apprenticeships.

Also I think at this point it’s safe to say that a college environment does not in any way shape or form engage diversify. It tends to be a monolithic culture that is hostile to contrarian views that may disrupt may d disrupt the status quo.

Military service does much more in those social areas than college. Intermixing with others and learning how to get along and communicate are not optional there -- as unpopular as that may be.

You can do all of those things outside of University though. I think you actually made a very valid argument against your point.

University is beneficial for access to laboratory infrastructure that you otherwise couldn't obtain on your own without incurring significant cost. A good - albeit extreme - example is the nuclear reactor at Reed College. University also provides you with resources to ask questions on observations or thoughts around what you experiment with in the lab. It's a great sandbox and gives you flexibility to determine what you want to do in life before you fully invest into it. This is only true to the extent in which you're not pouring thousands of dollars down the drain at college to learn you just wanted to weld shit together. Conversely I think trade school is where you've discovered what you want to do and you go learn how to do it with peak proficiency in a controlled setting.

I am glad you like those things but for most people an undergrad degree is a piece of paper and a line on the resume. If it does not help me with my job and future income it should not be mandatory for employers to require it. I have no problem with degrees not required by employers. If you apply at a tech company and get rejected because of lack of undergrad degree then are you saying becoming "a robust citizen of the universe" and finding sexual mates was why?

> If it does not help me with my job and future income it should not be mandatory for employers to require it.

And you've pinpointed the problem - it's not with universities but with employers.

It's both I think. I can understand employers wanting employees to know more than leetcode for example. English/writing would help having good documentation for example. The current undergrad regime is too broad is my argument. I am not a coder but in my field undergrads are not very well prepared to enter the workforce.

Anyone making an argument against the value of philosophy usually fails because they don't have the analytical/argumentative toolkit to construct a good argument. Precisely because they didn't study philosophy. And if they had, they probably wouldn't be making the argument in the first place.

I don't have anything against philosophy man, I just don't to be forced into debt and lose valuable time to learn someone else's philosophy. And even that a very western centric perspective. And how is that relevant to compsci undergrad?

Most people can't construct a valid argument unless they have taken philosophy classes in college? That sounds like your argument is rather shoddy.

What is your argument then? Saying nuh-uh you're wrong isn't a valid argument.

Saying "that argument is faulty" is a valid argument about the other argument. It is not a valid argument about the original topic.

I can say that the argument is invalid without even taking a position on the original topic. I can do so with extra appreciation of the irony when the original claim was "those people can't construct a valid argument".

This is right. I try to make a point to STEM graduate students that it is called a Doctor of Philosophy for a good reason.

I learned enough in the first two years to start working as far as compsci was concerned. Everything after that was supplemental. Depending on what you are studying and where you are studying, the first two years absolutely aren't bullshit.

Yes, I had to take a bunch of classes that I wasn't interested in, but there's also no way that I would have been able to cram in all the math and compsci that I wanted to into 2 years. Especially as not everything can be learned concurrently. Like I said, I could have started working after the first two years, but I would have never gotten the depth that I did if I had stopped there.

People with CompSci degrees have changed the world in the past few decades. Many of those changes are good, but they have also built tools that are being used to undermine democratic processes, to cause wide-scale depression, the violation of the people's rights, etc.

The reason is exactly because people with CompSci already do not study enough philosophy, ethics, sociology and hence do not have any idea that you have to think about the consequences of the tools you build on society. Or do great evil.

> We put up with 12 years of random but generally useful things forced on us. Once we decide a career as adults, information not directly useful to the job we will be working should be optional.

It is optional. You just can't get a bachelor's degree without doing that, because that degree indicates completion of a broader course of work than you're interested in.

Bonus: auditing classes is usually cheaper.

There are tons of schools that have weak gen-ed requirements, which can often be tested out of either with high school AP's or as a college student with CLEPs. My undergrad was about 3.5 years of rigorous engineering education with roughly a semester of gen-eds spread over it. You should try to research the school and program before attending.

> Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree?

In Europe (AFAIK this is very broadly true) you're expected to have covered these in high school, and university is for focusing on a single field (and its prerequisites, so lots of math in engineering fields, e.g.)

See that makes sense to me. But dare I ask why europe is not 2 years then? Do US colleges teach less because in the US, you could be studying oceanology or electrical engineering and the first two years are more or less same courses. In HS, I mostly showed up to class and cruised through with minimal effort last two years bc it wasn't that interesting or challenging.

At least for my undergrad (CS, at www.epfl.ch), the answer was basically "more math" (2 years of).

The usual generic answer was "it's approximately like a US master's".

And at least for the EPFL today, they've essentially formalised your suggestion and that master's equivalence: you get a "bachelor's" after 3 years. And you can optionally continue 2 more years and get a "master's".

This is a benefit of getting a BFA. BA has the fewest credit hours in your major, BS has more, but BFA requires the most. Out of 4 years in my program I only took 3 classes unrelated to my major and didn’t have to pay my college for any sort of P.E. class. A decade later and I see plenty of people working in my field with BA and BS degrees who still didn’t know even basic things because their college programs were so sidetracked with these credit requirements.

I rather find it strange as here those subjects are covered in High School, to different depths depending where student is aiming at. This might be too early, but in general it opens up avenues to Universities or Applied Schools. Where goal is to teach focused things in certain fields.

Was it the British that said so? AFAIK most British undergraduate courses don't have general education requirements

Yeah - I did a CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s and it was 4 years of maths & CS stuff - pretty focused.

Learning how to actually write code was something you were pretty much expected to pick up by yourself - most of the CS classes had requirements to do a personal project which was a large part of the marks for that class. Absolutely no way could any graduate from that course without having produced multiple applications in everything from assembler (6502 and 68000) through to Pascal on a mainframe (yuck) and C and Prolog on Unix minis and graphics programming in C on Atari STs - which was great fun.

I loved it - although I did make a bit of a mess of my first year, but you just had to get through that - no impact on my final degree.

Edit: I should explain - Scotland so first degrees are 4 years rather than the 3 years of the rest of the UK.

Would love to take a look at the courses in that degree. That's my main hangup, I have such a thirst to learn college level compsci (not how to code but algorithms, theories,etc...) and crypto but spending two years writing english essays and philosophy presentations is no bueno.

As far as I know most UK universities tend to have focused degrees - you sign up to a particular course and that area is what you focus on for 3 or 4 years. The good side of this is the focus on a particular area, the downside is that if you choose a course that you find that you don't like it can be difficult to transfer to other courses unless they are closely related.

Mind you - my experience is 30+ years old at this point.

I did a CS degree at a UK university in the early 2000s and we were forced to take two modules of non-CS in the first year. Due to the ridiculous way places were allocated (you literally had a single day in which to physically run around the university town trying to visit the offices and find courses with space), I ended up doing history and archaeology.

Mostly, this reinforced the general impression that these subjects were extremely easy and involved next to no work, compared to CS. It didn't help me much in later life though.

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