Is University Necessary? A professor debates a student.
consideronline.org
consideronline.org
But maybe the job will involve more than just a web frontend to a database. Maybe you will will need to optimize a solution somewhere, and you'll think, "Hey, I bet I could use simulated annealing for that". Or you'll think, "Hey, I could write a simple grammar to solve this just like the first problem in my compilers class". Or "I can simulate the system variance by convolving the individual component variances" and thus you'll be able to provision your system better. Or whatever.
Sure, you could have figured out how to do all of these by carefully reading wikipedia. But how would you have even known the right questions without having been exposed to the material?
And then, of course, there's that next job ten years from now, that isn't Ruby on Rails. It's something else, maybe even in a different problem domain altogether, where the Ruby on Rails expertise doesn't give you any advantage. Wouldn't it be nice to have a good solid grounding in a wider base of material?
Several times in my career, I've been brought in to tackle a problem that has been vexing other (and maybe even better) programmers, and I've said, "Well, I don't know much about it, but I think we could solve that problem using X", where X is algorithm or technique I learned in graduate school. It is great to be able to have those moments, and I know had I not gone to school (and gotten my MS) I would not have those insights.
If you have a better, actual alternative to university, do that. Else, do university, which is an established default for those who can afford it.
If you can't afford it, the debate isn't even relevant.
2. Look at unemployed graduates.
3. Define "established default", or better "establish good default".
In more of an HN demographic context... I'm in the "socialization" camp. College/university can serve a similar purpose as attending primary and secondary schooling, i.e. to further develop your social skills with other people as you age. While this can be found in other places, I'm not sure how effective it can be for those of us who wouldn't otherwise go out of their way to interact with others.
In the vein of preparing you to do specific, non-obvious things, I would agree with you that education is necessary; I do think we should get out of the "high school -> college -> job" idea that seems to have turned into a fallacy over the last decade or two.
Trade schools can be a good example of this; in my opinion, apprenticeship is also a great alternative, though in the US those are -- as far as I know -- almost nonexistent.
I got out of high school and got my first programmer/sysadmin job in '97 or so. (I had a few years of cable monkey and hardware/windows work in high school.) - But that was almost entirely timing; The minimum requirements in '97 were really low, due to the dot-com bubble; Pure luck, really. But then I was able to learn enough that I made the cut when the minimum requirements went way up after the crash. (There is no way I would have made that cut right out of highschool.)
If I had gone to college... well, it was really, really hard to find a job in my field with no experience, four years after '97. Maybe I would have learned enough in school to make the cut, maybe not. Maybe I would have been able to convince an employer that I was that good without paid work experience, maybe not[1].
Also, if someone else is paying for school? that's a big opportunity there, too, and it's possible that opportunity might not be there in a few years. (Is it a bigger opportunity than a job in the field you want? I don't know.)
But that's how I'd look at it.
[1] As a sidenote... if you are badass enough to go to school and have a job/internship in your field at the same time? that's best of all. Many of the best people I know did that. It's really difficult to pull off, though. I don't think I have what it takes to pull that off, not without stretching the school over 8+ years.
The absolute worst thing I've ever done for myself was to go to college. I had a 50% scholarship towards one of THE top electrical engineering schools in the country (not MIT, but you'd be in the right state if you were guessing), and I toughed it out for four years. Due to financial aid f&ckery, I made the choice to drop out with around half a year of credits left to complete my BS. I had my own IT consulting business at the time, and I made a pretty decent run of it for about a year at which point I realized I was a MUCH better 'technology person' than 'business person'. I made the jump to full-time sysadmin for other companies at that time, and haven't looked back since. NONE of the skills I use today (either in my 'day job' as a nix sysadmin or 'real job' as a musician/bandleader) came from my college experience. I had over $100k worth of debt (slightly less now, almost 10 years later) and no degree. If I had to do it all over again, I would've skipped college entirely, gone straight into the 'failed' consulting business, and taken the extra four years of earnings instead of the staggering amount of debt. I have never once felt limited due to my lack of degree. The fact that I don't have one is easily eclipsed by what I've achieved professionally, and companies have had no problem bringing me on at top dollar (according to the various sysadmin salary surveys I read) to do my thing.
I'm not saying my path is for everyone, and as always Your Mileage May Vary. However, if I had a time machine I'd go back and slap my younger self around until he decided to forgo college entirely :-) In my experience, it wasn't worth it - from the 'you NEEEEEED a degree to get a good job!' perspective AND the 'crushing amounts of debt' perspective.
How expensive is college if we take away tuition? Is a college really more than just an employment agency for professors, an agency that provides its own classrooms and spaces?
(Btw, if you are being sarcastic and referring ironically to the last line of the counterpoint, my apologies for misreading you.)
I would be interested to know whether there are any cohort studies on dropout success. I know overall dropouts tend to make much less money and perform much worse on many other metrics. However, that may simply be because the weak drop out.
But overall, I guess it is an unsafe bet. If you can't seem to pursue your passion with a few hours of classwork a day in your way, you're going to have a hell of a time doing it while also working ten hour shifts as a waiter because you couldn't get a more lucrative, easier job thanks to your lack of higher education.
College is easy. If you can't pursue your passions while also doing college, you're gonna have a problem either way.
That's probably why the statistics favour the students.
I went through gen-ed classes that I literally never attended. I sometimes read the books and got A+s in the courses. I went through a high-level technical communications class that was to re-teach basic English mechanics that a proficient high school student ought to be able to master. I was retaught the primitive basics of C, Java, and C++; nothing that couldn't be learned through a few online tutorials and nothing advanced enough to prepare someone for an embedded job without prior internship experiences.
On the other hand, I got instruction on advanced algorithms and had two year long projects where we worked for actual clients (Microsoft, others) for actual money with deliverables and accountability. But that wasn't worth the $200K it would have cost if I didn't have scholarships.
I'm really not sure what that has to do with it; proportionally, I know more people that didn't go to college that got individual contributor programming or sysadmin jobs than who started companies. The things that school gets you can be as important (and sometimes more important) in a management/owner role than in an individual contributor role.
I know for me, it wasn't hard to get myself up to the minimum technical level for a Programmer/SysAdmin gig... but my social skills are, well, lacking. I don't know that you learn those in college, but I always thought that college was an important part of the social development of the 'middle-class adult' that I was missing.
University was never meant to be a system of general education. But because of the prestige garnered by graduates, it slowly began to be a status symbol. Instead of being a system of truly advanced knowledge, it has become an extra pipe on the education system, bringing to the table little intrinsic value. The concept of the university, in short, has been eroded by its growing recognition of the incapacity of its students. And because the university has access to funding that the public school system does not, it was able to expand itself to attempt to meet these needs; the price it paid was a loss of vision.
Entire swaths of the university curriculum should be torn out and moved into high schools, which in turn need to be re-conceived to produce fully-grown adults who find the choice between going to college and going to work to be a real choice. In such a world, the university is not at all necessary: it is where you go for that above-and-beyond level of intellectual rigor, but that is not a requirement for all people. Professor Holloway talks about the discipline and structure a university provides, but I ask why this is absent in the halls before one reaches university. For it must be, else these particular characteristics would not define the common student's need.
The university is necessary only because it is our latest patchwork fix on a system that is a conglomeration of patchwork fixes itself. If only Professor Holloway had advocated his ideas for secondary education, and considered the implications of such reform on the university due to the consequent changes in the nature of the applicant, I would have agreed with him fully.
He doesn't need to provide a "backing for the idea" - Holloway's point did that adequately. And for me, personally, reading the counterpoint just convinced me of the validity of Holloway's argument further.
There is a visible disconnect with the views in the arguments. They are more open and accepting at the start and get more emotional at the end. To state an example, the author mentions that 'school is in no way a negative experience...' and later mentions that 'Sure, school might maximize one’s chances of living a stable, moderately successful life with two and a half kids, a modest house, and a job. But is that really what we want? Does our generation want to forego pursuing our passions in order to be part of a shrinking, mundane “middle” class?', which seems to point that schools leave you passionless.
The OP also uses arguments that cannot be proved or argued against. For instance "Not that dropping out of school ensures success, but had Bob or say, Mark Zuckerberg, stayed in school, we could all still be hanging out on Myspace." What this statement assumes, is that (1) School didn't help Mark Zuckerberg, (2) He wouldn't have been able to build FB if he had waited to finish school (3) No one else could have come up with an alternative to MySpace, university student or otherwise. I am not dissecting the argument just for the sake of it, but I am arguing that the OP is selective about his dataset. Yes there are Mark Zuckerbergs, but there are Larry Pages as well.
If you did go, then you don't know what would've happened to you if you hadn't gone. You could have lived in Costa Rica for 3 years and decided to establish a charity, never thinking twice about the value of higher education. Maybe later you would've posted in this thread, and had the top rated comment about how much you learned on that trip in comparison to what your friends learned in college.
However, it's also possible that you didn't go to college, and are simply regretting that choice and trying to warn those younger than you not to make the choice that you did. But what if you had gone? Maybe you would've hated it, and dropped out after two years, thinking it was a completely horrible idea.
Whether or not you went to college, you don't have the full picture. You don't know what it would've been like to do the opposite. That's why this is not an easy question -- that's why people actually talk about this. If it were as easy as "I'm older than you, and I think you should go, therefore you should go," this thread wouldn't exist. So don't act like you have the right to tell others how to live very important parts of their lives. We all have to walk our own journey, and make our own decisions, and if we just listen to those more experienced than us, we will never get anywhere important. And we probably won't be very happy, either.
Yeesh.
Quick question, have you gone to university?
Is this you then?
What would be interesting is your argument for the case, ... obviously if you don't have one you might want to save some time and money and withdraw from UofM.
The existence of remarkable individuals, which is by no means a recent phenomena, demonstrates that for some a university education is not, in the strict sense, a necessity. That hardly addresses the issue of whether or not Universities as entities are worthwhile enough to be considered a necessity in a society.
> "The question is, “Can you be successful in truly meaningful ways without going to college?” The answer for most of you is “No.”"
... because it sets up two simultaneous No True Scotsmen: any given counterexample can either be dismissed as not "truly meaningful success" or not by "most people".