Almost 30% of Americans Say College Not Worth It in Pew Poll

During the time I was at RIT, I tutored in maths two students at the nearby community college (it was just down the road from where I lived), the level was abysmal and yes pretty close to learning html.

I’ve also hired and worked with people from top universities in my career, MIT’s reputation is deserving, people I’ve worked from there have been very good. Harvard not so much (but the sample is only 2 people and, well CS is not Harvard’s forte)

Note, this is most likely biased based on my experience but as someone educated in Europe that has spent most of my career working for US companies.

EDIT: oh one major difference between my mostly free(540 euros a year back then) French engineering school and the much more expensive (25000 usd per year at the time) RIT, the non-educational (sports etc) facilities were much nicer.

I actually have an amusing anecdote there. In one lower level class the professor ended up asking about how to convert a lower case string to an upper case one, or vice versa. I immediately chimed in with the right answer - you flip the 5th bit. This is literally how ASCII was intentionally designed. Capital and lower start at 65, and are separated by 32, so changing the case is a single bitflip. The same even works in unicode english characters where they're still separated by 32, though in this case it was not a unicode input string anyhow.

He just about lost his shit trying to mock me and my 'inelegant hacky solutions' in front of everybody. It didn't bother me in the least because I knew I was right, but later (perhaps after he looked it up?) he actually went out of his way to find me outside of class and sincerely apologize. I just found it all pretty amusing. But if anything it really emphasizes the overly embraced gulf between theory and practice at higher tier institutions, or at least mine. And FWIW this was an algorithms class which should ostensibly be 100% about practical application.

I wasn't challenged at all throughout my time, was extremely disappointed at the piss poor quality of eduction, and basically skipped class 2.5 years of a 3 year degree (still got the highest GPA somehow). (Btw, it sounds like I'm bragging about how smart I am but I was always always a middle/bottom of the road student, never the top but at least I never failed out and I enjoyed learning)

Maybe it was the "school" (not university it doesn't deserve that title) I went to that was weak, but I really expected more, at the very least to be challenged. Looking at my friend's course work from other universities it didn't seem much different except for the person doing nanobiology lol.

I think another factor it could be is the country I'm in (Denmark) has piss poor education throughout schooling (by the time they leave high school they can barely and I mean barely solve right angle triangle problems). I went through IB which is held to some modicum of a standard so that could also be what influenced this experience. Denmark for years has been reducing the challenge of its university level courses because students coming out of public education cannot keep up - nearly every year several professors from "the best" institutions complain about these students and have now started setting up extra courses to teach them the basics before they can actually go into the degree.

Actually had to skip some Comp Sci (my major) and math electives because some required liberal arts thing was in the same time slot. I could have used more training on both of those, as I've dealt with a lot of unemployment because I'm naturally fairly weak in both. Did not need liberal arts, had plenty of that in high school.

But compared to today, I didn't pay a lot nor did my parents, it just wasn't that expensive back then. College today seems to be a much worse deal, more filler content and way more expensive, as well as worse employment prospects overall when you do graduate, especially now that AI may be poised to smash a good fraction of those jobs.

I think my education was pretty good. Was about 8k a year about 10 years ago. Worth every penny.

I went to a supposedly good university in the UK (Durham), to do a computer science degree. The university is in the so-called "Russell Group" of leading research universities and comes a little below Oxbridge in the rankings. That turned out to mean nothing: the course itself was garbage, with the department and its course being almost entirely fake. Cheating by the professors was rampant because they really didn't want to do teaching (teaching programming is notoriously hard), and universities mark their own homework, so if they don't want to do it properly there's nothing forcing them to do so as long as they team up and cover for each other. The students also didn't care because they were all struggling and happy to conspire a little with their teachers in order to get the bit of paper they were all there for. I was gutted, I'd been looking forward to doing CS at university literally since being a little kid. My parents had been singing its praises for years, but looking back I wonder to what extent they were just flattered to be allowed to go at all. My mother was the first of her family to go to university and they were all super proud of her, a common story in that era.

After graduation relatively few of the students took jobs related to doing computing, let alone to do computer science. A lot went off to do things like accounting, subject switches, banking, one even became a VC. After graduating I went to work for Google and was assigned to interviewing rotation. On that road you learn pretty quickly that degrees mean nothing. The best candidates have random degrees in unrelated subjects. Back then people with CS degrees from supposedly top universities regularly couldn't start new projects in the editor/IDE of their choice, couldn't write programs that load text files from disk and struggled to manipulate arrays. Sometimes people with no degree at all managed to get past the recruiter firewall and breezed their way through it. Even job history was of little use back then, though I imagine it's got more signal now.

Asking people if college is worth it is a tricky thing, because it conflates two very different things. Is it worth it for the educational value? I suspect many realize the answer is no. Is it worth it to get past the ever escalating auto-filters HR departments like to mount? Maybe still, but that's not a sustainable perspective. Soon people will master the art of using LLMs to review CVs properly and cut HR out of the loop. The prompts probably won't be dwelling on elite universities outside of the few firms that have incorporated that demand into their cultural DNA.

Having said that, education in the US is too expensive. It is captured by an olygopoly and it needs competition.

College has a monopoly on social life if you're in the late teens/early 20s. I believe this is part of the reason it is still such a popular option, to the point that people will pay extortionate amounts to do useless degrees.

If you're thrust straight into work that isn't stocking shelves or being a fry cook you won't be around people your own age and it's very alienating. I'm in my early 20s and have considered changing course despite having a successful SWE career to go back to university just so I can have a social life.

Who is going to sit down for 2-3 years (assuming you're faster by yourself to help your argument) and self learn with the same intensity, giving themselves the same amount of homework and projects?

What I agree, however, would be to break down the learning into smaller steps and going back to the apprentice where one learn and earn at the same time.

In theory. In practice, few people have the intelligence and discipline to self-study engineering subjects for a couple of years - that's what higher ed schools are for. I sure as shit wouldn't end up in software engineering (by far the easiest branch of engineering to self-study and get a job in) without doing my CS degree - my motivation and tenacity when I was 20 years old weren't nearly on the level required.

Maybe 10 years ago.

I'd argue the opposite, college/uni has negative impact in your life.

What is missing from that thought is: can everyone learn online what's required to do an engineering job? No.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the education system, but I don't think that promoting it as a scam is a good thing. Nor do I think that saying "anyone with internet can learn X to do Y" is fair - because while it's true anyone can, but the missing detail is that not everyone can.

My anecdote is that I enjoyed both systems - college and learning on my own, and I think they complement each other.

Basically everything that gets you a decent paying and stable job if that's what you're after: STEM, law, medicine, management consulting, banking, finance. Did I miss any?

Because my generation grew up having all of those thrown into the same pot. Kindergarten to high school the constant mantra from parents, teachers, to counsellors was to, "Get a degree! It doesn't matter what the degree is, just get one and you will have a good job! If you don't you will be a garbage man for the rest of your life!"

And the adults all genuinely believed it. Because it was true in their generation. An fine arts degree was basically a ticket to a decent paying office job as some manager's administrative assistant typing out letters, taking phone calls and scheduling meetings.

It's not that true anymore, even when I entered into the work force. And that was a long time ago.

I know two history majors well, both found it very hard to use it for anything. One started over on a math major as math teachers are in high demand. Other had taken a single psychology course as one of their self-selected courses during their degree, and ended up teaching psychology in high-school, as the school had plenty of history majors to pick from but hardly any with psychology.

The problem with it is that they provide an endless firehose of money, that drives tuition costs up.

Thing is, employers don't leave another choice. It's either jobs on the level of flipping burgers, the trades, or it's going to college because even mediocre paper-pusher jobs require a college degree these days.

The reasons for that are pretty simple:

- college degrees save employers money on training cost, as the students have to shoulder it (you know, it used to be a red flag for scam jobs if you were required to pay for the privilege of getting the job - but with college, it's accepted that we saddle 18 year olds with five figures of debt)

- they are a versatile proxy... they weed out people from entire classes of society (the poor, the disabled, people of color, people with mental or physical health issues - all of that has close correlations with lower chances of academic degrees) completely legally

- they reduce risk of hiring a "dud" - if you can't get out of bed reliably in the morning and stick to deadlines you won't get an academic degree, so requiring degrees weeds out this as well with no financial risk to the employers.

There is only one way out: legally mandating that requiring a college degree for a job is only allowed if there is a material need for the knowledge acquired during a matching academic degree.

I recommend studying a little of basic statistics.