Comment by almosthere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by almosthere | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The higher education system is largely a scam. I have a degree in CS but I didn't really need to get it. I was already coding in C++ and other languages before I even went. I used to argue the opposite and that I would never have learned O notation (and its purpose), or red-black trees, etc... But the internet since the time I graduated (2003) has massively filled out what you can learn. Yes a college "forces" you to learn this stuff - but there HAS to be another way to FORCE someone to look at YT without taking on 100k of debt.

The one thing I would say that I agree about however is there is a difference in a person that went to college vs one that didn't. It's not exactly what they learned, but the filter they had to punish themselves through to say "I finished college". And yes, there is no other filter that does that. You can find people like that who didn't go to college too, but the "filter" is a convenient thing for employers.

We need to go back to a system where there are apprentices and masters and get rid of this entire college thing. The filter works just as well in those scenarios without putting people in 100k of debt.

So what you’re quite literally saying is that a college degree is proof that you learned the course material well enough to pass exams and that you were reliable enough to follow through with completing a large project, the large project being a significant load of college attendance, coursework, hands-on labs, group projects, and exams.

But then in the previous breath you said it’s a scam? What makes it a scam? You just said yourself that it is bonafide proof of a base ability to follow through and proof of some non-zero level of knowledge absorption.

If you didn’t go to school you’d just be telling your prospective employer “hey don’t worry I already know C++” and they’d have to find some way of verifying that skill set on their own.

Meanwhile, your competition who went to school can say “I got a 4.0 in all my fundamental accredited coursework and I was the front end designer for my group capstone project with 3 other students where we built a dog walking gig app, here’s how we worked together to make decisions and resolve issues…”

If the only thing that makes it a scam is the price…that’s a weak argument. And we have the statistics to show us that college degree holders still out-earn high school graduates greatly.

When we see the wealthy stop sending their kids to Wharton and Harvard then you know it’s a scam.

>without taking on 100k of debt.

>without putting people in 100k of debt

This exists, and it's called "attending a state school."

You can cut the costs by roughly 50% more by going to community college for two years and transferring.

> We need to go back to a system where there are apprentices and masters

Apprenticeships are still around in the modern day -- including for white-collar jobs! Kelly Vedi writes a lot about this in her Substack: https://kellyvedi.substack.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com