Comment by julianeon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by julianeon | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of discussion covering various points other comments have addressed. I'll tell you what I find most personally surprising, though:

The assumption that partying is something important that needs to be preserved.

Look, I'm not coming at this from a culture war perspective. I'm speaking from my own experience here: if I could go back and talk to my 17 year old self in the first week of school all these decades later, I'd ask about all the parties I was thinking of attending, and say, "Yeah, none of those matter. Feel free to skip, oh.., every one, from now until graduation."

Connections? Didn't make any that mattered. Romances? Zero. Friendships? Basically they were as strong as they needed to be from daily conversations.

What was really valuable and unique were the classes, though I had a hard time seeing that then.

But people here seem to disagree - and I don't think it's because they're all in college either. They really find they have value. Sadly, they did not for me.

For me it's the opposite. I wish I spent less time studying, more time socializing and making connections. I don't think the marginal effort required to go from a B+/A- student to an A student is really worth it (unless maybe you're applying to grad school or something and they consider it a big factor, employers don't really care as long as it's above the cutoff). If one wants to spend that time productively better to invest it in working, doing research, or entrepreneurship.

> If one wants to spend that time productively better to invest it in working, doing research, or entrepreneurship.

None of those are “socializing and making connections” though. Sure it happens during these events, but this article seems to say it’s “innovators” of our tech world—who dare to dream. Except the people who actually did that work weren’t out partying. They we’re studying physics, chemistry, math and programming while having a curiosity to tinker and experiment with this knowledge.

It also took some silver tongued entrepreneurs with rich families like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. to use these geeks (being rich nerds themselves) to create profitable organizations now synonymous with Silicon Valley itself

I guarantee you, innovation isn’t suffering because a bunch of Stanford frat students can’t fill houses up with sand anymore.

College is where I went from being a rando loner to actually having friends, and part of that was attending parties.

Those friends have more impact on me today than whatever my GPA average might have been with a few less hangovers.

>Connections? Didn't make any that mattered. Romances? Zero. Friendships? Basically they were as strong as they needed to be from daily conversations.

Geez, can't imagine why

Keep in mind, this is me reporting back decades later on the results. But I acted very social at the time and as if I really believed in the value of drinking w friends, going to parties etc. I’m just telling you now that the data is in, it was a waste.

For example, I made connections, including to lawyers and one to a friend who was an MIT prof for a while; the problem is, they didn’t amount to anything practically useful (I’m not a lawyer or in that profs field). And a connection is defined by its practical utility.

As for the friendships, truthfully I could’ve substituted any one of those friendships for another one in my 20s or 30s and I don’t see it changing much. Or I could’ve basically been as strong friends w them post college, even w less face time in college.

In other words all this partying and close time w your buddies in college is, in my experience, vastly overrated. I could’ve skipped out on most of it and not been worse off.

Different strokes for different folks. I learned pretty much all of my adult social skills at parties. Computer science classes were useful but everything useful I learned in college was from the traditional college experience of partying and meeting as many people as possible.

I had a similar question in my head while I read this article. What proves that “value” to the university or to the students in an average sense was lost? A “value” which is important to school or students? How the different values (or indicators) compare to each other? The author jumps over this like it’s evident. Nothing is evident without proof. It’s just states that it’s more important that the level of equality which they want to achieve (btw which we don’t know from this article, there is no proof in it, what they really want to achieve, and especially why), than the perceived fun of parties. The whole article seems to me a simple rage bait about “everything was better in my time”. The problem is that probably there are really some issues, but this article is not detailed enough to address those at all.

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