Is College Obsolete?
alexkrupp.typepad.com
alexkrupp.typepad.com
http://learninfreedom.org/School_obsolete.html
There are a lot of institutional protections in the legal system for colleges (as sources of mandatory credentials for many occupations), and a great deal of preferential funding of colleges. But many learners can learn as much or more outside of college as in it, and as long as learners can find gainful employment without college credentials, colleges will be under pressure to justify their continued existence.
After edit:
pg's thoughts on a closely related subject:
Although the average CS program is pretty terrible, the underlying differentiating factor is that doing practical CS work is cheap and easy (the same thing that motivated internet entrepreneurship); additionally a large part of the literature is directed at 'lay practitioners'. Doing (advanced) physics or chemistry is neither cheap nor easy, and it's pretty hard (impossible, AFAIK) to do pure professional mathematics outside an academic setting.
College might be an onion in the varnish, so to speak, but when you talk about "I went to Harvard", you're not talking about visiting the buildings, but being part of the great intellectual conversation, and that's the key point.
And why can't people have great intellectual conversations without attending college, as some people do here on HN?
But while I found it easy to write off my degree and what I learned in college when I graduated as unnecessary, at least initially, I have found myself recalling lessons I learned in class more than a few times.
1. A lot of hackers and tech people look past business and marketing as the boring part of running a company. It's not, it's actually one of the hardest parts. It's easy to believe that "if you build it, they will come" but most successful software is the result of good marketing and good business sense. I learned a lot about this in school and I am glad I learned the basics where mistakes didn't cost real money.
2. While it may not have been necessary to attend school to read and discuss cases, it helped a lot. Working through marketing problems and understanding business with a group of like minded people helped it all click faster. Much like discussing technology issues on Hacker News can help make sense of everything faster.
People learn differently, let's just accept that college is a good environment for people who are not the most motivated or skilled self-learners.
Obviously when you're talking about the more elite and hard-sciences, it's definitley something you'd want as a hiring credential. My uncle is an engineer working in a nuclear power plant, I'm pretty sure it'd be a bad idea to hire him if he didn't have the engineering degree to show his dedication and skill (not saying you can't be that good without the credentials, but there isn't a large room for error in that position, better prepared and safe, than a radioactive toxic avenger).
Edit: It's all a personal choice in the end anyway, pretty subjective topic wouldn't you think?
Are colleges not ranked in order of how much students learn because that would be impossible to measure? Or is it because no one cares?"
if you think about it, this doesn't make sense. the us news college rankings are used by high school students and their families to select colleges to attend, not by (most, i assert) employers to select employees to hire. they list credentials of colleges, not college graduates. so they are not evidence that "credentialism" is a function of college at all.
employers care about the difference between schools in regard to what their students learn---and these differences surely exist---and they assess schools with this criterion using empirical data they gather from interviewing and hiring people.
That was my argument. Students don't choose their college based on how much they think they will learn. And so colleges have no incentive to make sure they do.
No one cares if students aren't learning, not the students, not the colleges, because learning is no longer the point.
sorry to directly contradict you on this, but i also don't believe this was your original point. you were trying to show that a degree serves mainly as a credential. students may select schools on the basis of their rankings, but it doesn't follow that the rankings are the motivation behind their selections. to use an analogy, i may use reviewer ratings to select a computer to purchase; it doesn't follow that i select brands _for_ the prestige of owning a computer rated 5 stars by cnet.