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>There's been a rash of Anti-College sentiment around this place lately

It's no different than the general anti-intellectual sentiment growing in the US. The feeling that you can learn it all on your own without anyone telling or anyone's help is what is driving so many peoples thought processes recently.

That people looked at and treat higher education as just job training and nothing more doesn't help either.

The problem is when college doesn't even provide that job training. Students put their whole effort into college and then graduate without any skills employers are looking for. With massive debt from four years of loans and no one wanting to hire you, students find it harder to stomach this traditional path to a job and the American dream.

I've read a few op-eds and they mention that vocational schools in the US do provide the training employers are looking for but their status is looked down upon within society since historically this has been for "blue-collar" jobs. Well those blue-collar jobs are paying upwards of $50k which is much higher than being unemployed.

So now it's on the student. Get the degree with its pros and cons, get just the skills with its pros and cons, or do both. It's going to be harder but college is an investment, not just of money but also time and energy. If it's done properly (maybe not in the most traditional way), it will pay off for the rest of your life.

Higher education isn't just job training, but that's what many people want, especially for the cost.

...anti-intellectual sentiment growing in the US. The feeling that you can learn it all on your own without anyone telling or anyone's help...

How is the idea that you can use your own intellect and educate yourself anti-intellectual?

I think the anti-intellectual sentiment is a bit broader. I'd define it as, "Those people who studied this their whole lives and have degrees and papers in journals don't know more about this topic than I do."

The anti-intellectual movement is the belief that everyone is biased, and since everyone is biased their scientific position is no more correct than mine.

This started more than a decade ago, and I used to joke that one day people would say, "Science and Nature are left wing rags". About three months ago I actually had a debate where someone said almost exactly that -- "All those papers published in science journals are by Democrats!"

I love self-education (although I'm of the camp that believes all education is self-education, even when you go to college) -- but the anti-intellectual movement is taking a fringe left-wing pursuit from the 60s (relativism) and making it mainstream for the right-wing in this century.

"Those people who studied this their whole lives and have degrees and papers in journals don't know more about this topic than I do."

Insofar as it pertains to this conversation, that isn't the belief. The belief regarding college is "I can learn just as well by reading books written by the top experts as I can from listening to third rate experts talk about the topic in person."

I'm not really sure what you mean. The person who posted the anti-intellectual comment was speaking about the growing tide in the US, which is very much about what I posted.

With respect to the article directly, it's really not about reading books written by top experts vs lectures from third rate experts -- unless he's reading CLR or Papadimitriou or Ullman.

Really the article is about vocational education vs a liberal arts education. The complaint isn't, "My harmonic analysis professor clearly doesn't have the understanding of a Terrence Tao". The argument is more like, "In school I'm learning about organic chemistry and b-trees, but what I really want to learn is how to use this new framework to talk to this NoSQL store to display data in this web view. Where's that class?"

"Those people who studied this their whole lives and have degrees and papers in journals don't know more about this topic than I do."

Just because you've studied something your entire life doesn't make you right 100% of the time.

"All those papers published in science journals are by Democrats!"

The problem? Many scientific studies are also political in nature and slant to one way, which is why I start to question many of them. I can see the bias 10 miles away and most people just read it as fact.

You make it sound almost like a religion: I'm not to question the supreme leader (people who are smarter than I am because they've studied a topic their entire lives), I just need to follow it. I will never think this way. Sorry.

I am in no way anti-intellectual. I just refuse to be force-fed things by people claiming to be smarter than me.

The problem paul is that this same level of criticality isn't enforced uniformly. Many, if not most, of those same people who doubt anything that comes out of Harvard, MIT, or CalTech as Democratic propaganda will cite Rush Limbaugh as a reputable authority on virtually anything. CalTech says that a certain nuclear facility has problems, Limbaugh counters by saying, "If that was the case why are most of the people in the nearby city still born with 10 fingers. Clearly those at CalTech are lying."

I don't know if Wiles did or did not prove FLT. I've seen the proof, don't understand it. Do I believe it -- I believe that a good faith convincing effort has been made. For most things I know in life that is also what I believe. I haven't confirmed really anything about the periodic table or much about quantum physics our sun or even more basic things like the gravitational pull of things not as large as the Earth. I do generally believe what others have told me (and the fact that they "say" they've done experiments), especially if they have a history of telling me things that are consistent with other things in my life.

And to be clear it's not about people claiming to be smarter than you. It's about people who have consistently shown that they know more than you do about a specific topic. Of course if you must prove using standard levels of scientific proof everything all over again then I'd love to see your lab where you've done this work. It must be huge.

"Limbaugh counters by saying, "If that was the case why are most of the people in the nearby city still born with 10 fingers. Clearly those at CalTech at lying."

See. you're biased. You are talking about the left and the right. Not anti-intellectualism (which described above is actually anti-elitism). The left will never admit Rush is correct, even when he as scientific proof/facts to back it up.

"It's about people who have consistently shown that they know more than you do about a specific topic. Of course if you must prove using standard levels of scientific proof everything all over again then I'd love to see your lab where you've done this work. It must be huge."

You need to look at who is funding the study/research/scientist to really give you an idea if you can really believe it without further research.

Global warming is a good example of this. There is so much government money wrapped up in it (billions of dollars), I seriously doubt we will never know if it's truly man-caused or not (why would anyone go against it when their funding/tax dollars in many European countries gets cut).

A friend of mine has his phd in epidemiology. She really opened my eyes up to the biased nature of research studies.

> You need to look at who is funding the study/research/scientist to really give you an idea if you can really believe it without further research.

No. The beauty of science is that it doesn't matter who funds it. So long as they're releasing all the papers[1] and the data[2] you can check the results yourself.

[1] unethical scientists will do many studies and only release the ones that confirm the results they want to find.

[2] often data is hidden somewhere and not available.

Of course it's the evil Rush Limbaugh's fault.

That's fine - a questioning attitude is great. When someone says "This research shows us X, Y and Z" it's a useful skill to look at the research and spot any flaws in the methods or the stats or the write up.

Anti-intellectualism is not that. Anti-intellectuals will say things like "I don't need to read the research, that scientist gets money from $CORPORATION and thus nothing they say can be trusted. That's why climate change is bogus." or they say "So what if that research has proven a link between $FOODSTUFF and $DISEASE? So called studies come out all the time saying this or that are dangerous. That's why cigarettes are not as bad as everyone makes them out to be."

People know very little about the scientific method ("Yeah, but that's just like a "theory"" they say, scornfully.) and scientific research is often mangled by journalists or politicians. (Also, unfortunately, by scientists needing a bit more funding.) But, worse, many people don't want to know anything about science, preferring to regard it all as too complicated or for boffins or dangerous. ("I don't want chemicals in my food!")

Anti-intellectualism appeals to fringe "science", to quack "medicine", to wishy-washy pseudo-religious idiocy, and to religious fundamentalism.

And it's not new, either. People have been railing against it for years. See, for example, "The Underground Grammarian" and this essay "Hunger in America". (scroll down a bit.)

(http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/newslettersv08/8.5.htm)

Evidently, because it means you won't need to rely on self-described intellectuals when you educate yourself.

I was going to mention what I see as a growing Anti-Intellectualism in America but felt it may have veered to far off course. I think the higher-ed as job training is a real problem. I would never dream of trying to find a job in the humanities but I cherish my exposure and learning in those areas.

However, as someone pointed out below; Many people do just want job training. Perhaps, the solution is to offer traditional college and job training along side each other at the same institutions and let students pick which "track" they need / prefer.

There's no need to do that when vocational colleges already exist. As others have stated here, there's a stigma against vocational colleges. Because they're not as prestigious as universities, people have the misconception that the education or training they receive at vocational colleges is somehow inferior, when in reality they serve different functions. You also have community college for when you want a more traditional college experience, but also want job training.

That people looked at and treat higher education as just job training and nothing more doesn't help either.

Actually this might be the main reason why college enrollments have gone through the roof recently, prompting the anti-college sentiment in the first place. If all you want to do is learn programming, you can do it at home too. But dorm life, liberal arts etc. might be something that you will only do when in college

Thing is, outside of the US how many computer science people will get a chance to study "the liberal arts" at college?

In the UK the idea is that you do all of your academic exploration in the 16-18 bracket and once you start college you already know what you want to do.

If you take a CS degree you will get the chance to do maybe 2 outside-of-CS modules in year 3 and most likely these will be something about IT management from the business school.

At my uni (Cambridge) you do your first year of CS in conjunction with another subject, for exactly this reason.

FWIW, I did Physics, but I definitely regretted not picking Psychology or Economics..

From what I've heard, it's the same in France and Germany as well.

I agree with you. I went through Computer Science in college. While I've never worked with someone who didn't finish college, even working with people with different degrees you see where a computer science degree helps. I have friends with computer engineering degrees that had to teach themselves algorithms and algorithm analysis. Of course they did a good job at this because they were disciplined about it.

That said, every once in a while I'll say something and we either ended up having different terms for it or something they missed in their studies.

Another thing to note, while they may be able to get an entry level job now. The places I have worked required a CS degree. We tried relaxing that requirement one time with horrible results (inability to finish played into it). I'm not saying you can't be good without a degree, just saying from a company's perspective you may be a safer bet.

2) Deficiency in the "science" part of Computer Science (Algorithms and Theory)

This usually isn't readily noticeable to a student who thinks they aren't learning anything, but in a few years, this will be among the foundations of your skills as you move up the software value chain. Short of starting your own software company, where you'd better hire someone (or have co-founder) who does know this, its very important to have a solid understanding of algorithms and theory. Reading one or two books isn't going to give you (unless truly exceptional) the foundation that several well planned CS courses can.

Too true.

Personal anecdote: In college, I distinctly remember feeling like all the time that was spent on drilling automata theory into our heads seemed like senseless busywork. Fast forward a decade into my career, and I've come to suspect that there are two kinds of programmer: Those who choke on state machines, and those who don't.

I think this point is a lot more salient for CS majors than other liberal arts majors. After pursuing a 4 year liberal arts degree in undergrad and now pursuing a CS graduate degree (after working in the industry some years), I can safely say from experience that I would NEVER have been exposed to a majority of the important concepts without higher education, and I think I'm much better off for it. Besides forcing a solid work ethic (science and math at the higher ed level is considerably harder than the equivalent liberal arts), the things you learn will actually be used.