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You don't go to college to expand your mind

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.

Expanding of the mind is extra. Would you have gone to college, if there wasn't a big bucks career at the end of the tunnel to repay you for the investment for the $80-160K and 4 years of your life?

Yes.

Yes. $80k spread over your life after college is 2k a year at most. So what? Fluctuations in taxes based on who is in power are going to effect your personal bottom line a lot more than that.

Especially when you don't have to pay $80k much less $160k. I paid $10,000 over 4 years. I worked hard enough in high school that every college I applied to wanted to let me come for free, and all I had to do was pay for food and my car. If you are really hard working, don't apply to MIT or the Ivy's and put yourself in debt, just go to a good state school for free.

Absolutely. I didn't go to university for the big bucks career, I went because I wanted to learn more Physics.

My studies were not a financial investment like that - most students at 18 are not that financially motivated, and just looking to extend the good times and learn something new.

Pure ignorance. Not all communications majors work at the Gap. Many work in communications, marketing, etc. These high end jobs project higher salaries than a high end computer science degree.

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.

You can find an example of success no matter the situation. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But you need to look at the averages. Someone who graduated from an average school and not some Ivy, someone who doesn't have connections thanks to daddy...more often than not, after graduation they'll be working at the Gap.

You have numbers to back this up?

I doubt he is right, but I bet he will be right soon :-/

You are an idiot if you believe that and will probably always be a CS guy. What does the best programmer make at your company? $200,000? $300,000? So what. Thats pocket change compared to c-level executive pay. The CEO at my company is making $500,000 and he graduated with a communications degree from a college that doesn't even exist any more it was so crappy. What he did do was work his ass off after that for 28 years at the place working from being a salesman, all the way up.

You know what would really impeede you from doing that? Telling everyone else in the company you work with that their degree is inferior to yours.

Especially when we are talking CS, which I don't think anyone can claim is a difficult degree. Physics, Chemistry, real engineering, those are hard. But just because you call yourself a software engineer and you have a BS in CS, doesn't make you an engineer, so get off the high horse.

I appreciate your rant and I agree with your points. I'm not saying a CS degree is the hardest thing to obtain--it certainly isn't trivial though. Please refrain from attacking an entire field because of a troll.

It's not attacking the field, it is a fact. A CS degree is not an engineering degree. That is what a CE degree is. Don't confuse the two. He rants about communications majors stopping math after high school. What does CS require? Calc, discrete, and prob/stat? An engineer degree is going to require 2-3 more classes than that in math. So the sword cuts both ways.

This really varies from place to place. Many CS degrees are engineering degrees - that's how it works at Berkeley, for example.

If you don't think CS is a difficult degree, you are talking about something quite different than what I went through.

> You don't go to college to expand your mind...you go to college to get a good job after you graduate. Or at least you are supposed to.

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.

That was the line 10 years ago that I heard, "You go to college to learn how to think logically."

Don't you think that if you haven't learned that at all by 18, you won't learn it in the next 4 years surrounded by equally ignorant kids?

But, speaking of the topic, how many colleges these days require courses in rhetoric?

I sat in on a bunch of college sophmore classes when I was 14 and 15, even wrote some of my friend's English papers for them, on books I had never even read. I wasn't impressed. And this was a "good state university" as someone else mentioned.

"you go to college to get a good job after you graduate."

I didn't.

With all this talk of vocational training versus a real degree, I assert that a college degree without some form of Liberal Arts grounding is no degree at all.

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.

yes you need Liberal Arts classes as extra on top, to get the full package of shaping yourself as an individual. Granted, maybe not as much as they currently make people take...right now you take more B.S. classes to round yourself, than classes that actually have to do with your major.

The problem with b.s. liberal arts degrees like Communications, is that you are majoring in the Extra. You don't have that core technical/analytical shaping of the mind through the "hard" classes. You are majoring in the fluff. I mean hell, take math for example, communications majors pretty much end their math curriculum, at the same level they ended in High School.

You have a point, but don't forget that there are technical, analytical, and even quantitative aspects to the most fluffy-sounding fields.

It really depends on the program that you're attending. A well rounded Philosophy department will produce better hackers than a poorly-focused Computer Science department.

I'm not sure what you think the "liberal arts" are, but mathematics is definitely one of them.

There is definitely a demand for those "fluff" skills that many engineers like myself cannot fulfill. There are many great careers out there that don't require math beyond the high school level. Don't look down upon them just because they have passions in other areas.

But a lot of people make a lot of money off their people skills, and math doesn't matter one bit. Negotiating a big contract takes a lot of skill you may not see, but little math apart from arithmetic.

You know, for a lot of students nowadays "high school math" means calculus. And as far as I was aware that's still considered fairly advanced.