Fuck college education, start minding your own business instead

Anyway, you'd be surprised at how many successful people in all kinds of fields do not have a degree, or don't have a degree in the field they're in.

They just don't make the news as often (cough except for Richard Branson cough). You're right that there's a selection bias, but you missed the other selection bias.

You can find lots of people with non-vocational degrees that have had extremely successful careers, don't work at the gap, and have more fulfilling works lives than code slaves who "invested" in a CS degree.

Nobody plans on having a worthless degree after school, and no educator wishes to leave their student ill-equipped. No one wants to work at the Gap in the first place, and whether they have a degree in Communications or not is irrelevant.

Education, like a trip to the hospital, is a practice in fighting for yourself and getting what you came for.

Speak for yourself. I went to college to expand my mind, meet interesting people, and learn things I would never have learned by myself. I am very happy that I did so, even though I barely use any of the actual Physics that I learned, in my daily job.

I will add that I learned far more than just Physics at university. I learned that there were a lot of extremely smart people out there. I learned about my limitations (cramming only gets you so far). I learned about my abilities (few things seem that incredibly hard after a physics degree). I learned how to learn new things (there are many ways to learn). I learned how to behave in a wider variety of environments than I had been exposed to previously. I learned that even amongst very smart people, there were things I could do that no one else could. I learned that if you make the right connections, you can benefit immensely. I learned many more things, far too many to list here.

What went in was a naive, uncouth, slightly ill-mannered boy, what came out was confident, friendly, approachable go-getter.

Perhaps your university didn't expand your mind. If that is so, it is deplorable, but might be the fault of either the university, or yourself. But certainly you should not generalise your unfortunate case and assume that everyone had your poor experience of university.

I didn't.

To get a "good job" you get training. That's usually a job you get after college. You go to college (for a Bachelors) to learn how to think rigorously logically and to learn the fundamentals of your field. That's of intrinsic value, irrespective of whether it gets you a job. If you enjoy and have a passion about the field you study, all the better (on the other hand if you chose to study CS to "make a lot of money", you get to miss out on the biggest advantage of a programming career - doing what you enjoy for a living).

When an employer gives you a "college hire" position (which is often the only way into some mature companies, unless you're already wildly known and successful), that means they're making an investment in you. Education (or lack thereof) is one way for them to gauge the risk of said investment.

As I've also said in earlier posts, if you're worried about outsourcing and/or your job going to entry-level candidates - then you need to pick up domain specific knowledge.

Domain specific knowledge builds on these fundamentals (of computer science and mathematics) and can't be looked up on google.

What this hell is "our society"? Is it the most common occurring opinion of a set of people magnitudes larger than the set of people you will meet in your lifetime? Our society is made up of a lot of people. If some, even most, have bought into a particular idea, it still leaves many, many people who haven't.

So even if 99% of our society has bought into the idea that education must be vocational doesn't mean that one can't go through life spending most of her time with people in the other 1%.

As I advanced through my schooling, I had more and more Renaissance-personalties as teachers. At Rutgers University, I had enough choice that I was able to pick classes almost exclusively taught by people who didn't think of my education as vocational. Sure, it took a bit of work at the beginning of each semester - adding and dropping classes based on the first couple of lectures and conversations with the professors, but it certainly wasn't some insurmountable feat. Independent studies helped a lot, also.

IMO, there's a greater pattern here - a large part of life is about avoiding the vast majority of people who focus their lives around petty nonsense.

PS - Unless you're talking about maximizing social productivity of some kind, in which case, yes, it is a shame that most people see themselves as slaves being trained to do a job. The average person would be a lot happier and productive if we were to pursue our interests for their own sake, but that's their mistake to make.

College helps us learn new ways of thinking and teaches us a lot of the theory and some of the practice behind the profession we think we want to go into. A college education is no guarantee for success, but it does tend to say something about the person.

And, there's merit in an under-graduate degree. There is merit in going to prison too. But that doesn't mean we don't have better alternatives.

1. Most of the professors I had cannot teach as well as a well-written textbook. You can choose your textbooks on Amazon. You cannot (usually) choose your lecture professor. With MIT open course, Berkeley webcast, nowadays you can even choose your professor for without going to college.

2. The good professors and grad student that you met in college, why can't you meet them when you are not in college? What stop you from send them emails or just stop by their offices anyway? In fact, I've talked to far more professors who are not in my college than ones that are.

3. People who want more than a vocational education will actively go out and get their knowledge. The internet + a good library + Amazon is a far larger reservoir of knowledge than any college. Why do you need an excuse like college to learn more?

4. People who just care about a vocational education, and really don't give a damn about liberal arts or general education, why should they let a college force them to learn things useless to them, trick them into thinking that a degree is equal to vocational training, and rob them of their money so they had to spend the rest of their life paying back loans?

5. People who network in college, what stops you from networking in the real world? What stop you from talking to people on a bus, in a park, in the subway, in a conference, in a bar, in a farmers market, in your jobs? Most people don't learn networking in college. They are given their network by dorm assignment. Of course, there are exceptions, and those are the people who eventually learn how to network in the real world anyway, so why not start in the real world?

I can go on for a while. My point is under-graduate college has it's place, but it certainly shouldn't be the only way.

Yes the post author is generalizing. But the fact remains true that most people are not getting what they want out of their college degrees. If that's the way we educate the mass, then there's something wrong with that.

I'm glossing over a lot of history here (the GI bill had several tremendous effects on postwar America; suburbanization is another huge one), but this was one of the main times when what it meant to go to college shifted.

* Though veterans of any race theoretically had tuition paid at any college, they were still mostly segregated.