Hacker News Reader

Comment by PlunderBunny | Hacker News Reader

Implicit in this is an assumption that the purpose of a higher education is to give graduates the skills demanded by the businesses. What if it (the purpose of a higher education) was something else? What if it had always been something else, and only in the last few decades did a certain segment of the population try to convince us that the only reason higher education existed was to churn out workers that could slot straight into entry-level jobs without businesses having to invest in any training first?

View on HN

College is a massive time and monetary commitment. The reason the vast majority of people go through it is because employment opportunities are gated away behind a degree. Without one, finding the job you want can be extremely difficult, and at times even impossible.

It always bothered me how colleges hold someone's future career hostage like this, forcing them to go through them, and then they pretend it's not the case and that college is simply intellectual enrichment.

The gating that colleges do also makes it much more difficult to change careers than it should be. The whole system does the task it's given extremely poorly, and pretends that it's not even responsible for the task. Great, fine. Let's work on alternative ways to handle job credentialing then.

>It always bothered me how colleges hold someone's future career hostage like this, forcing them to go through them, and then they pretend it's not the case and that college is simply intellectual enrichment.

>The gating that colleges do

It feels weird to me to blame colleges for job description requirements that they didn't write. Colleges aren't gatekeeping you, people requiring a degree and refusing to train employees are.

It's not a "certain segment" that changed their mind. It's the reality of what's happening to our country (countries). We can no longer, at large, afford the luxury of spending so much money ONLY to "learn to think". We also need practical education more than before. That's the undeniable nature of what has happened to the economy, especially in software.

I can guarantee you that the only people who went to college to be “better citizens of the world” were those who were privileged enough to have parents who could afford to subsidize their living.

That's completely untrue. I paid my way through school off student loans & the wages from my internships. I got a degree in computer science, but I took a wide variety of electives outside my program because I wanted to get a broad education.

Taking a course in macroeconomics is good for you; it makes you smarter. Sociology makes you smarter, pure math makes you smarter, english lit makes you smarter, miocrobiology, philosophy, and history all make you smarter. There's a lot of value in a liberal education. I certainly wouldn't have traded mine away for a primer on kubernetes or whatever.

As soon as I needed k8s on the job, I skimmed through the O'Reilly book and that was all I needed. The least valuable thing school can give you is an explanation for how to use a tool which is already well-documented.

All colleges have electives. I also took business classes with my computer science degree and while I am an MBA drop out, learning about business helped me talk my way into a lot of opportunities over the years. Of course learning how to write and communicate is actually part of the leveling guidelines to get to be a senior at every tech company.

And math classes are essential to understand machine learning algorithms and how to apply them and have been way behind the recent AI craze.

But I bet you would think different if you were a junior in today’s market…

> All colleges have electives. I also took business classes [which] helped me talk my way into a lot of opportunities over the years. [...] And math classes are essential to understand machine learning algorithms [and get a job related to] the recent AI craze.

These are exactly the sort of career-focused courses I wasn't talking about.

> But I bet you would think different if you were a junior in today’s market…

No. A k8s crash course from my alma mater wouldn't be any more use to me now than when I was entering the job market.

Machine learning algorithms is not a “new craze”, using computers to predict outcomes was a thing when I was in grad school in 2001.

You explicitly mentioned pure math and macroeconomics. Those are definitely helpful in a career. I was a math double major and I just recently started studying the latest in ML (not just gen AI) and my math background definitely helped.

And does history and philology make you “smarter”? Maybe at cocktail parties but it doesn’t help me better at exchanging labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter and I definitely didn’t need to pay thousands of dollars for it.

Your anecdote does not make it "completely untrue". Only "not absolutely true", which isn't compelling in the face of the overwhelming other experiences.

> Only "not absolutely true", which isn't compelling in the face of the overwhelming other experiences.

Which is to say, yes, the person I was replying to was incorrect. But you liked the vibe of what they were saying, so now you're going to play with language to suggest that their statement might be true in some "non-absolute" sense where it doesn't matter whether the thing they said is correct or not.

Most people pursue higher education for multiple reasons. A lot of people just want the "campus experience." A lot of people enjoy learning. Many people just feel like it's expected of them. Any degree is associated with a boost in wages, so most people expect their loans to pay for themselves in time, especially at a cheaper institution. So the idea that middle-class people don't go to university to become better-read is patently silly.

If you are a “middle class” person that means if you don’t get a degree or don’t get a job you probably have parents to fall back on or at least go home. That means your parents can “subsidize your living” just like I said even if it’s just letting you stay rent free.

And there are plenty of degrees with negative ROI

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/does-college-pay-off-a-compre...

Much of my generation (hitting their twenties in the 1980s) went to university if they had the interest and Tertiary admissions scores over the threshold.

University was free, rent was cheap, particularly in shared houses, and part time work abounded (I worked three months of the year in mining or agriculture).

Many of those at the time were idealistic to a degree, almost all wanted to better themselves in some way or another.

Well, my still living parents grew up in the segregated South in the 40s-50s. There was no “idealism” about why my mom and her 3 sisters went to college and her brother went to trade school. They knew that college was the only way out, their parents were already struggling and they had no choice but to go to a “Black” college (now HBCU) because they were not allowed to go anywhere else.

On the other hand, I grew up as an only child with my mom a teacher and my dad a factory worker. While I knew I wasn’t going to be homeless or hungry or put undue burden on my parents, college was solely a means (dual degree in computer science and mathematics) to be employable even though by the time I went to college I had already been programming in 65C02 assembly and some BASIC for six years and was learning 68K assembly on my Mac my freshman year.

But knowing C and how to bit twiddle definitely helped me get a job straight out of college - a week after I graduated.

It would seem that some benefit flowed from the pragmatic idealism of the likes of Alexander Crummell and others that worked and fought hard to establish HBCU's.

I went to university while a number of kids I played football with didn't \1, the kind of event that prompted many to study law \2 and parallel that with art \3

\1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_Pat

\2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck

\3 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/10/this-is...

I went to university to become a better citizen of the world. My parents are as middle class as they come. Sorry but you’re wrong.

And if you didn’t get a job right out of school would you have been homeless and hungry or could you just have moved back in with your parents? If you hadn’t gotten a job 5 years out of school that would have allowed you to support yourself would you be homeless or hungry?

I told both of my sons that I wouldn’t pay for a degree that would be less likely to lead to a decent paying job. When my youngest graduated from high school, I was working for BigTeh but I made it abundantly clear that a colleges sole purpose was to be gainfully employed.

> I made it abundantly clear that a colleges sole purpose was to be gainfully employed.

That's not true at all, though. An education has loads to offer beyond a bump in your wages. Do you really think knowledge is worthless unless you can make money with it?

Do you need to get in tens of thousands of debt to gain that knowledge?

You'll earn the money back with the increased wages a university degree affords you.

I never said knowledge was the only purpose of a degree—that'd be as ridiculous as saying "gainful employment" was the only purpose. It has multiple uses. This should be obvious.

The parent is not wrong unless you uncharitably pounce on their use of the word "only" as absolutely literal. As you have.

So, “only” was figurative? Why was it used? The entire sentence would have been better without it. Or you’re wrong. Somewhere in there.

This is exactly what I wanted to say, but phrased more nicely than I think I would've managed. So, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com