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Comment by hbosch | Hacker News Reader

It's actually incredible how many engineers and designers I have met personally who believe that college was a waste of time, in comparison to the knowledge that can be gained just through internships, mentorship and forms of apprenticeship. Do you think someone with 4 years of interning around major tech companies is better equipped to work for those companies compared to a person who came directly out of college?

The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people 80% of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions of the cost as well. Are university educations really that much better?

To me, the value of the university system seems to be the connections and networking that form rather than skills and acuity.

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Personally I believe that theoretical CS/mathematics in college was a great use of my time, and that those subjects are hard to learn and truly internalize on the job. I've got a lot of value over the years from that kind of education, not only from the specific things I learned, but the way of thinking it ingrained and the broad exposure/skills it gave me (eg I might be able to recognize some problem as control theory and find and understand papers about it).

However, most of the practical skills I learned in college were not good uses of time. Classes in general weren't structured to teach you the kind of skills being an actual fulltime SWE gives you. Plus the industry changes so fast, and college is so unrepresentative of what actual problems people work on in the real world, that you may learn something soon/already obsolete.

So my advice, especially for people going into the software industry, is to learn as much foundational and theoretical content as you can. You may never get a better chance to learn graph algorithms, real analysis, abstract algebra, or theory of computation after college. Your professors may be experts on compilers or programming languages, and able to teach you the theory behind eg LISP better than you could teach yourself later.

Signup for the classes that will remap your brain and pay dividends for decades instead of "web dev 101", and you might find your college experience worthwhile (beyond the fun, personal growth, and networking - all important too).

> The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people 80% of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions of the cost as well.

It really depends on what you sorts of jobs you're talking about. There's a bunch of work available in the vast realm of "computer jobs" that are essentially on the intellectual level of plumbing or hvac repair and indeed, college is a waste of time for those sorts of jobs and boot camps are fine. I'm not denigrating it, that's mostly what I do. I wire together systems that other people mostly developed and do a bunch of troubleshooting and most of the value I bring is on-the-job experience with the systems involved.

There's also a lot of cutting edge R&D and dev work that does indeed benefit from an academic background, and you don't really have to look any further than open ai for that. But even outside of machine learning, a lot of people have built companies on taking academic research papers and turning them into products.

Those cutting edge jobs are not using material from university classes, they're inventing it whole cloth. University education, particularly undergraduate education, is a socioeconomic filter. It proves that you have some combination of family connections or money sufficient to be admitted and graduate.

I disagree, because in Europe university is basically free, so the function you ascribe to it does not apply there. The education and social experience you get there is very valuable and quite different from what you learn on the job. I regularly apply the thinking I learned in university in my job, and it’s generally noticeable when you have coworkers from a different educational background.

Taking those students out of the college pool might also decrease the overall cost of college.

I think it really depends on what your goals are. If you're just aiming to get a job or make as much money as possible, then yeah I think college is often overrated. But as somebody who took the nontraditional route and is now interested in the "harder" aspects of computer science, there are absolutely gaps where my formally trained colleagues have a leg up. Formal academic bodies of knowledge, and getting exposure to them, absolutely have a use. But you for sure don't need them in many day-to-day jobs or to advance as a professional much of the time.

EDIT: this response assumes a good program / department. There are absolutely subpar college programs that are a giant waste of money and time.

I totally feel you on this. One time I spent three nights writing a language parser before my Google wormhole showed me I was writing a lexer/tokenizer. My colleagues with CS degrees just looked at me like I was an alien when I shared my excitement.

I have never met an engineer in person who believes this, and without fail any one in my career I have talked to says college is invaluable.

The only place I see this thinking is on Reddit or among people who aren’t engineers. It’s something people want to believe from the outside.

There are probably rare exceptional people who grasped all of the fundamentals without college, but I have never met one.

I personally believe university is exactly what you make of it. I went for a full 4 years to an expensive private university with a good reputation in my field, and it’s done a lot to open doors for me. However, I don’t really believe that my accomplishments (work I have to show) from my time there is automatically better or higher quality than peers from state schools or self-taught people. But the words on the resume do work.

The truth to me seems that a lot of ego and subjective judgement comes from the prestige of university to begin with, and oftentimes any specific school is not a guarantor of quality or success. And if alumni from “good colleges” are not easily distinguishable after 5 years from alumni from “middle colleges”, then to me that calls into question the entire system as potentially dubious.

It’s not that university “doesn’t work”, it’s that it mostly just isn’t a good value of dollars-to-knowledge at todays prices.

If your lens views Universities as a work training substitute their view would be accurate. If you view the University as Universus (Latin for Universe or everything) then what they offer is quite unique. Arguably all do not fulfill all of these.

1. A kinder gentler form of kicking your child out of the nest and learning to be on their own.

2. A no mac-education environment were students can participate in research and learn how to answer question that are not yet answered as opposed to regurgitation.

3. Learning to socializing as adults.

4. Meeting groups of people that spend their days thinking deeply about specific subjects. These people can then be used as resources for society as a whole to solve problems and make decisions.

5. Exposure to just about everything we know or think we know about everything.

If you do not view them as such then I would agree they are not worth the effort or expense. Industry can afford to train their own automatons. Which is one of the reasons they are salivating over AI at this very moment.

Even universities advertise the job placement rates for their various majors. Kids aren't told by parents, teachers or counselors to go to college to become well rounded, they're told to go because they'll earn more money if they have a degree.

As for #2, that's a very rare thing to encounter in an undergraduate degree. Most of your classes are being fed information, then asked basic comprehension questions about it. Maybe some creative authorship skills in the form of writing courses, but nothing groundbreaking there either.

Many degrees are luxury goods that you either get paid for by someone else or become a wage slave to pay off in a decade or three, depending on how much you borrowed.

Depends on your perception of value. I would/could never pay millions for an NFT any sort. I simply see zero value in them. Others seem to have no hesitation in writing that check.

Don't get me wrong I would like to see that type of education available for a lot cheaper. We always seem to make enough money to not qualify for financial aid of any kind but not enough to pay college fees without having to give up something else. My house needs a paint job for example - going to wait 2 more years until my son is out of college. That's life I guess.

Social connections/networking are part of it, but so is the social/professional/international cachet of having a degree. Many people who express (quite legitimate) doubt about the value of their degree as an educational experience are oblivious to the numerous filters that get in the way of people who don't have a degree.

A bootcamp gets you the requisite education to be an entry-level engineer at a place like Google or Facebook. However, these jobs are mostly training (like a bootcamp) for you to become a more senior engineer, where you will actually be designing systems and coordinating with others. In a senior job, your job is more about communicating with people and making predictions about what will happen when you eventually build something.

The skills bootcamp graduates don't pick up are things like math, writing, and research skills. You don't use those skills as a code-slinging junior engineer, but when you start coordinating with other people and doing things like designing large-scale systems, you may find yourself doing a lot more math and writing than you think.

> A bootcamp gets you the requisite education to be an entry-level engineer at a place like Google or Facebook.

Absolutely not. A bootcamp gets you the requisite skills to be an entry level employee at the local web design agency. Or, more often, the "#lookingforwork" ring on LinkedIn.

Perhaps I have an even rosier view of bootcamps than I should. It used to be that Lambda School was a decent way to turn your humanities degree into a job at a decent tech company, but I guess those days are over.

> The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people 80% of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions of the cost as well. Are university educations really that much better?

This is the wrong comparison IMO. All of the good engineers I've come across are autodidacts. This makes sense when you think about it. You aren't going to be among the best by learning at the pace of a class. Many of them went to college because culturally that's what smart people do in the US (hopefully this changes). They acquired their competency despite--not because of--being preoccupied with useless coursework.

Bootcamps and micro-certifications don't produce competency either, but the stakes are much lower, and it's much less time and money wasted.

> To me, the value of the university system seems to be the connections and networking that form rather than skills and acuity.

Yes some of it is networking, but it's really that universities function as rating agencies for humans. Getting into the university is the most important part. If everyone switched to putting the best school they got into on their resume instead of where they graduated from, very little would change. And it would provide roughly the same signal to employers.

> Getting into the university is the most important part. If everyone switched to putting the best school they got into on their resume instead of where they graduated from, very little would change. And it would provide roughly the same signal to employers.

I understand some entrepreneurs who pitch VCs do just this. I know the practice is common among HS tutors and admissions counselors. Their resume includes all the schools they got into, not just the one where they enrolled.

I would be slightly more impressed by a kid who got into some Ivy but went to UCLA to save money (or even a lower-ranked private school with a huge scholarship) rather than just going to the Ivy.

The purpose of college is to show people you can jump through four years of bureaucratic hoops with a smile on your face for no guaranteed reward.

This is actually a fantastic test for working in a large company. I always worry that anyone who can't finish college may not be a good fit for a large organization. I'm not always right but I'm right a lot.

Also it really does teach you how to learn. The content doesn't really matter.

If that's true (I do believe in it to some extent, but I'm not quite that cynical about it), European universities must be something right: You get a lot of Kafka-grade bureaucratic bang for your buck (often $0)!

It’s not too hard to imagine what it’s like when someone spends four years interning at tech companies. That’s basically one of the computer science courses at Waterloo. So you can just find people who graduated from those courses and see how it worked out for them. Though obviously there’s a lot of selection bias there.

Yet many people leave college with few connections and little networking ever done. So by your standards anyone without those social skills should consider college as a total waste of time and money. College: only worthwhile for extroverts.

One of my litmus tests for looking at prospective MBA programs is which ones require significant industry/career experience, versus those that promulgate a high school > college > MBA > management position with zero real world experience (i.e. are more driven to the consulting/networking audience).

That should lead to hopefully finding an MBA course that augments my knowledge on a technical level rather than a mindset of "I did this course so I must know more than you about how to do your job".

Surely we can create a cheaper networking event if that's the main value.

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