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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I have absolutely no evidence to back this up, but: I feel as if the "shallowness" of recent SV-culture startups can partly be attributed to the glorification of what I'll call "dropout culture," that being a subtle anti-intellectualism and an acceptance of the idea that only technical knowledge is valuable.

University forces you to be exposed to a lot of different fields (that you would never see otherwise).

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One of the top three classes I took at my university (next to "Algorithms" and "Data Structures") was "Introduction to Drawing." It's changed the way I look at aesthetic beauty. I would have had a hard time motivating myself to have that experience otherwise.

I couldn't agree more. Steve Jobs is an interesting example in this case - although he dropped out, he credited a random calligraphy class as the inspiration for some of the Mac's beautiful typography:

"Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-designer...

My sister is currently in college. The other day she was complaining about having to take classes outside her major to graduate. I made her watch the video of that speech and her opinion changed completely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Ditto. My favorite class during my CS undergraduate aside from databases or probably autonoma was Sustainable Agriculture. I've purchased Michael Pollan's books for multiple people as a result, it's a very interesting field if you cut through the fanaticism of "being green" and made me reconsider what it is to be a "healthy" eater.

I generally thought I was fairly well rounded before collage, but oddly enough it was fairly technical classes just outside of my specialty that I found most enlightening.

'History of Math' (Algebra was not developed until the dark ages? etc) 'foundations of geometry' (starts with logic and builds to counting and Euclidean geometry) 'Information Security' (Mostly a people problem.)

Where the purely technical classes like C++ and Databases where fairly useless by themselves.

I ended up taking an ethics class to fulfill a deck requirement, and I loved it so much I declared a minor, five classes later. It's pretty hard to begin philosophy study outside a formal setting, so it would have been near impossible for me to realize this passion without the weirdness of college liberal arts requirements.

The ONLY reason this kind of thinking is gaining leverage is because the cost of college. College simply is unaffordable for small but growing portion of the population. If the price did not keep increasing past the point of inflation year after year no one would question the value of higher ed.

Well, that's half of it. To my understanding, college used to have more focus on simply becoming a more rounded, worldly individual. If that is your goal, the value of big name schools drops precipitously. It's the perception of college as the next level of education requisite for a job that increases the value of big name schools and leaves individuals weighting expected salary increase vs. tuition.

It probably isn't anything devious- no matter what you believe about higher education today, I think most people will agree that as human knowledge has expanded, so too has the amount of education required to perform and compete in cutting-edge fields.

Believing that you can learn what you need without being taught by others is not anti-intellectualism.

SV-culture startups certainly value far more than technical knowledge - marketing (or "growth hacking" or whatever) for instance is certainly valued.

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