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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

I run an LSAT prep business. You'd be surprised how determined some undergrads are to go to law school, despite the objectively terrible math.

They'll have a mediocre LSAT score, but say "School X will let me in!". School X is terrible. They have lousy employment prospects, and charge $50,000 a year.

When you add miscellaneous fees and opportunity cost of not working, the law degree costs at least $250,000. And your school might close.

But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.

This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall. This chart from the LSAC shows a massive drop in LSATs administered.

http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered

2008-2009 was the high water mark: 171,514 LSATs. 2014-15 likely will be less than 100,000.

Which is good. The industry's been in a bubble, and it needs to pop. But that means this is a VERY bad time to be going to law school unless you're extremely careful (and ideally have a guaranteed scholarship to a good school that won't close).

View on HN

> As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.

Soon this will trickle down to college. In many cases, you pay $250K for that too. In many, many fields, you can learn everything you need to know on the internet, and get the job you want by just hustling (often by impressing only a single person with influence in the field you want).

I'm in biomedical sciences, have a Ph.D. and will be a professor at a very good school soon, but I don't give a crap about somebody's degrees. If this line of thinking is invading my world, then you better believe the rest of the economy is getting there too. (I also only got into MIT because I managed to impress one influential person).

Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion.

There are entire fields in the professions that could easily be taught by appreticeship. But this would be very risky politically and socially for the establishment. The establishment profits from having all new employees and their families be deep into debt, only for the chance to put Jr on the entry-level job within the establishment. That makes Jr alot more malleable in his/her on the job training.

err no becase aprtiships tend focus on the practical almost 100% in the trade ones - even the so called advanced aprtiships don't go as in depth as a 3/4 year degree.

there is also the unfortunate fact that in the UK at least aprtiships have been debased by alowing mcdonadls and unskiled employers to offer them.

BTW back when I was doning my BTECH if you had called any of my cohort that we where aprtices you woudl have been told to F$%^ off

Obvisly HN reders have zero idea what "apprenticeships" are.

> I'm in biomedical sciences, have a Ph.D. and will be a professor at a very good school soon, but I don't give a crap about somebody's degrees.

Many funding opportunities in academia are still tied to holding a graduate degree though.

I know, but Kickstarter, Experiment, Onarbor...that too will change.

You think so?

I highly doubt crowd sourced, non-industry funding will ever be able to fund R01 or even transition grant level projects sustainably, and among all projects I can only see highly translational projects which are easier to pitch to the public getting funded through this model.

All the existing players have an incentive to maintain the status quo as far as government and industry funding goes, and the infrastructure requirements and regulatory issues associated with practicing biomedical science make it basically impossible to break out of the traditional academic or industry model.

From the research side, academics who have gotten PhDs, post-doced for 5 years, been associate professors for years, and then finally gotten faculty spots would be furious to see scarce grants start going to people who haven't put in that time.

From the government side, I haven't seen many bold ideas in terms of funding come out of NIH or NSF. I saw Francis Collins speak at MIT about a month ago iirc, and he had essentially nothing to say on the subject except that he hopes the situation will improve and that they were introducing "bold" new grants which would facilitate post-doc transitions faster.

> You think so?

Yes.

> I highly doubt crowd sourced, non-industry funding will ever be able to fund R01

I'd be careful about the "highly doubt" part. This sounds like something the Blackberry or Blockbuster would have CEO said.

> All the existing players have an incentive to maintain the status quo

They don't care what the status quo is. Nobody sings three cheers to their alma-mater US govt. grant agencies. People care about getting money to do their work. Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Cell press didn't exist until they did and then their money and power started talking and everyone listened.

> then finally gotten faculty spots would be furious

The market will have no sympathy for this.

NIH budget is $30 Billion. Many crappy internet businesses, Yahoo, have that kind of money. People spend more than that on iPhones. If the "crowd" mobilizes to any extent like it is prone to do on the internet, the collective purchasing power will have no problem blowing away the NIH. Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially. It's happening. The ivory tower has been warned.

The main problem with Kickstarter is people are intolerant of failure. They see their money as a purchase, not an investment with uncertain payoff. With that kind of attitude in place, how is anybody going to fund hundreds of extremely experimental drugs (or what have you) via Kickstarter?

"intolerant of failure" is almost the opposite of how the majority of people give money through crowdfunding. You really have to use these platforms more. The whole idea is a culture of benevolence.

I disagree, at least for the foreseeable future. The amount of resources and energy needed to convince the general public to fund "difficult-to-understand" research which is needed to solve larger "difficult-to-understand" problems will be too great of barrier to overcome for most research groups. I think crowd-funding in research will be ancillary at best for a long time.

You're absolutely right in saying that we need to increase our budget, and that the citizenry could afford to crowd fund science sustainably if they chose to do so.

Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.

> People spend more than that on iPhones.

> Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially.

People get ROI at Kickstarter in the form of products. People get ROI in the form of utility from buying Apple products. There is no obvious route to ROI from crowdfunding science. Perhaps a system can be devised where investors are invited to take part in some of the work or can track the progress and get regular briefs, but this would be enormously distracting to the investigators. Maybe I'm just cold hearted, but I simply don't see people giving away billions of dollars per year to fund science (I would love to be proven wrong though!)

The second potential issue with crowd funding science is the difficulty in evaluating the merit of proposed projects. The general public (and most of the scientific community) is not qualified to evaluate the legitimacy or impact of highly domain specific projects. How do people decide what is a good project vs a bad project within a discipline? How do people evaluate projects across disciplines? Sexy translational projects involving novel therapeurics / device development may be easily pitched, but who is going to invest in boring basic science in a zebra fish model? What happens when groups come in to take advantage of this ignorance and pitch bullshit projects and then walk away with the money? This situation also dissuades people from funding young investigators. If people don't understand the projects, they're likely to fund people with established track records and titles because that seems safer, not new people.

As I have espoused in previous threads involving the academic science model, one way to solve our current funding problem and the problem of title requirements may be to augment the academic science model with for profit (or not for profit) institutes. I would envision such institutes immediately granting PhD or post-doc level investigators PI status so that they could apply for all grants, and allowing BS level scientists to do research without having to go through PhD programs. Such institutes might also uncap investigator salaries so that investigators could be paid fairly, and would allow investigators to own their IP. These places could also charge significantly less overhead than universities as they don't need to fund non-science related endeavors. Perhaps crowd funding could be used to establish or augment such institutes, which could then bring in established investigators to oversee how money raised is distributed.

Another solution to the funding and title problems is simply to increase government funding, but tie in rules which stipulate that universities much raise the number of faculty spots or add restricted faculty spots for very junior investigators.

These seem like plausible solutions, but the idea of a crowd funded marketplace for science seems frankly dubious.

> Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.

I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables. It academia/govt was forced to bail space exploration (SpaceX), it seems much easier to understand how this will happen in other sectors.

> I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables.

The government funds basic science specifically because the market WON'T do it. A classic example is the work done on early cancer research. This breakthrough work along with several blockbuster drugs came entirely out of government sponsored research and work in academia. Pharmaceutical companies weren't interested in performing the basic research because they didn't forsee a good ROI. It was only after basic research was done and the market developed that pharmaceutical companies became interested in what is now one of the most lucrative drug categories.

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/68/21/8643.long

Do we want to make research even more winner-takes-all than it currently is? Is is important to conduct research across all disciplines, or only the ones that are appealing to those who might like to fund research via Kickstarter etc.

Call me elitist, but I do not think the wisdom of the crowds will lead to the consistent funding necessary to maintain a base level of expertise across all disciplines.

> Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion

People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes. Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc. These things are valuable in themselves and valuable for their roles as citizens, parents, community members, etc.

To read that claim from someone with a Ph.D., a degree from MIT, and will soon be on the faculty of "a very good school" is a bit rich. It reminds me of wealthy people who says money doesn't matter to them.

HN is a unique environment of generally highly-educated, high-achieving people. Most of the world cannot program computers; many cannot operate them. It would be interesting to hear from members of the large majority who lack college degrees.

People with college degrees, in the past, earned significantly more over their lifetimes than those without. But this may or may not continue, particularly for certain degrees where the person may have been better off learning marketable skill and applying it early.

I have a college degree and have never really used it. The jobs I have landed, the things I have done, none of them in any way shape or form are attributable to that degree. And, I graduated college nearly 20 years ago. College was a good place to drink beer and get laid, but really, I think I would have been better off going straight to work. The sad part is, I knew it at the time but my parents were insistant that without a degree I'd be mopping floors for a living. So I listened to them when I should have trusted my gut instincts. I'd trade the degree back in a heartbeat for tuition and interest and book costs alone...to say nothing of the 4 years (ok.. almost 5, I was having a good time but who is counting?) of opportunity cost.

Have to agree with OP. I believe college to be generally overpriced and over rated. Particularly in certain disciplines. I'm about as sad to see law schools going out of business as I would be to see mosquito breeding pools being drained. Maybe some of the potential attendees can do something socially useful with their lives now. (yes, I know...we need lawyers. we probably need mosquitos too. just not so many of them.)

You can make the subjective assertion that college was worthless to you personally, and who can challenge it? But a subjective assertion by one person is not data nor is it representative of any population (I learned that in college).

Also, education has many benefits beyond earning money. It's seems absurdly narrow-minded to evaluate college solely by the marginal income gain. Life is so much more and education benefits much of it. I could not write nearly as well, use mathematics, understand science, understand art, understand humanity, be as creative, etc. etc. without the years I spent studying those things.

I can't imagine doing what I do with my high school education. Can someone waste their time in college? Of course and I'm sorry for those that did, but don't impose it on everyone else. I remember most of my peers' intellectual curiosity and how much they learned. Someone could own a computer or raise kids and gain nothing from those things either, but that doesn't devalue my computer or family, or argue that they don't provide great benefits to humanity.

> But a subjective assertion by one person is not data nor is it representative of any population (I learned that in college).

The opposite is also often true: data about a large aggregate population (across all demographics and generations in this case) might not represent the reality on the ground for a precise sample. Circumstances vary significantly and with rapid technological change smashing straight into global economic instability, everything is up in the air.

> I can't imagine doing what I do with my high school education. Can someone waste their time in college? Of course and I'm sorry for those that did, but don't impose it on everyone else.

Based on my experience growing up in the United States, all effort is spent on imposing $30-50,000/year degrees (and debt) on students, instead of realistic alternatives that might be better suited to circumstances.

> Life is so much more and education benefits much of it. I could not write nearly as well, use mathematics, understand science, understand art, understand humanity, be as creative, etc. etc. without the years I spent studying those things.

You could study and understand all of those without going to college, given the right resources (like books and time). In my opinion, it is a person's intelligence and curiosity that matter, not four years in an institution or a degree (I say this from a the inside of the educational system, currently pursuing a PhD myself).

However, what's missing is access to a teacher who can guide you through the subject material, answer questions, show you the pitfalls, extrapolate on topics and give you a thorough understanding of what you are studying. A good teacher is an invaluable resource that you will not receive through independent study alone.

> what's missing is access to a teacher

And peers, and resources such as organization (clubs, teams, classes, etc.); labs, tools and machines, including IT; and the very many information resources that are not yet online.

That's an idealistic view of education. In today's "industrial education system", where each teacher/professor teaches classes of 30-100, I don't think each student gets the attention/discussion time they need. You still wind up doing most of the work yourself (at least I did).

Part of the reason I am throwing down $60k is to learn from other people, not books.

Plus I get an international exchange in Hong Kong and one year's paid industrial placement, it would certainly be challenging to secure those things by myself (though that would be an education in itself).

> In my opinion, it is a person's intelligence and curiosity that matter, not four years in an institution or a degree

People do not come out of the womb with their levels of intelligence and curiosity set in stone, and they're still quite flexible at 17/18 when they hit college. Even the most naturally intelligent and curious 18 year-olds do not have the free time, motivation, and access to experts that enrollment in a university provides.

My own practical experience (from looking both at myself and many others) is almost the opposite. I think one of the great fallacies of modern education is the idea that you can take an idiot (for lack of a more appropriate/PC word), put them through school and they'll come out a genius. IMHO, practice shows otherwise.

The problem is that there are lots and lots of people that comes to you and say "college is not worth it because of..." and you dismiss every one of them by saying "that's just one anecdote, there's no data to support it".

Well, the data is coming to your door, but you refuse to look into it unless it is neatly prepackaged by a figure of authority. I wonder if when you read the prepackaged version of the current trends, 30 years from now, you will say "oh, I was wrong after all... who would have though that back then!"

I'm not entirely confident how things will pan out, but here (Denmark) the value of degrees seems to be getting higher, if anything. Not in the sense that a degree is a ticket to a good job, as in the past, but in the sense that not having a degree will shut you out from a wide range of jobs, because it's just so expected now, that it's become like the new high-school diploma. Employers don't care about high school diplomas per se, but they treat not having graduated from high school as a significant red flag. For many jobs university diplomas seem to be filling that role now.

The monetary context is admittedly different because universities are essentially a continuation of the free public schooling system: zero tuition, and you get paid a stipend if you're a full-time student (about $1k/mo to cover living expenses). There's still an opportunity cost in lost earnings vs. getting a job straight from high school, but the delta is less.

The other thing that has been happening is that outcomes (employment/earnings/etc.) have been rapidly diverging between university graduates and vocational-school graduates. The two tracks used to both lead to good employment—in different sectors, but paying well and with job security in both cases. But in the past 20-30 years or so, the vocational schools' employment statistics are nose-diving compared to those of the universities.

> People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes.

While your statement is factually correct, the slogan has been adopted by the sleaziest of the institutions pitching the most useless degrees to drive potential applicants into thinking that a student loan + years of their time = automatic cash further down the road.

To quote The Economist http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-man...

"But not all degrees are equally useful. And given how much they cost—a residential four-year degree can set you back as much as $60,000 a year—many students end up worse off than if they had started working at 18."

Not only that, a more accurate statement would have been "People who obtained college degrees forty five years ago earned significantly more than those who didn't."

I'm not at all convinced that will be true for the current generation. The job market used to have room for pretty much anyone with a degree. Even your degree in 17th century French literature was good enough to get you a sales or local government position at an employer who required a degree but wasn't picky about the major. These days there are so many graduates the sales manager can wait for someone with a degree in economics and the local government guy can wait for a candidate that's similarly (sort of) related.

Plus there was always law school. You can still get into law school; it's just that there's no job waiting for you when you get out.

What also goes unsaid: 45 years ago, many fewer people earned Bachelors degrees (edit a smaller percentage of workers had degrees). Using past performance as an indicator of future performance is often fraught with peril.

> Using past performance as an indicator of future performance is often fraught with peril

It's a useful turn of phrase, but not good reasoning. It would be unwise to ignore decades of history because of a lack of certainty. Arguably, college degrees and intellectual skills will become more valuable in the future, as more and more jobs demand it. Demand for unskilled labor is decreasing.

Also, my analysis is that people who spend four years in a guided program to acquire knowledge and skill among the resources of a university (experts, teachers, labs, etc) will be more knowledgeable and skilled. I don't think that's controversial.

What you have to watch out for is the debt to expected earnings ratio. A lot of the data from previous years was based on low (or zero) tuition rates.

Getting stuck with a six-digit loan while being underemployed would still support the "college graduates make more money" statement, as to get that barista job a college graduate probably ranked higher in the resume stack than people with high school degrees, but I doubt anyone is gloating.

By similar measure, getting a mortgage to buy a house and then pay it off was a decent deal for most of the century until people started overpaying by purely believing in the principle, but not running the actual numbers.

Do you have data to back up any of that? The data I've seen says that, right now, unemployment is much higher and income is lower for people who lack college degrees.

Do I have data to back up what's going to happen with this generation in the future? Sure, just let me hop into my police box.

I don't have a fancy college degree, but even I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation. College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college, mostly because they are expected to by society. Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that's hard to prove empirically without a large control group. Your argument seems different when applied to basketball instead of education. Was Michael Jordan great because he played for a top college basketball program, or was he playing for a top program because he was already great?

I think part of OP's point was that college itself isn't what makes people successful. There are a lot of great reasons to go to college, but advances in communication technology have fundamentally changed the landscape. It used to be that college libraries and professors were the only way to gain access to certain kinds of knowledge. That period in time is obviously over. College degrees will become less and less important in a world where anyone can communicate with everyone. A diploma used to be the only way to certain open doors. Now a facebook account and an impressive resume can do just as much or more.

> I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation ... Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that's hard to prove empirically without a large control group.

There is a lot of research supporting my statement; it isn't something I came up with. I don't see research supporting yours, though it is trendy and often repeated around here.

> College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college

I think people who spend four years studying, guided by leading scholars, will improve their knowledge and skills. That seems like an uncontroversial statement. You claim these people are intelligent and motivated; that would seem to backup my claims.

> mostly because they are expected to by society

You may look at it that way, but is there a basis to saying how many others share your view?

On one hand, you can argue that almost everything people do is because they are expected to: Go to high school, listen to their parents, get a job, get married, etc.

On the other, I think most people I know went to college because they wanted to learn and grow.

"People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes."

This statistic must be based on people who have completed their lifetimes earning. So effectively a lag of 45 years. Work doesn't seem to be paying as much for my generation as it did for the boomers.

>People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes.

This is almost certainly due to people with college degrees having more racial and economic privilege than people without college degrees. Controlling for this I'd doubt the difference was that large.

>Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc

This is probably the just-world fallacy.

People who can waste money on higher education, especially during a sustained "recession"/depression, are people who already have money and connections.

It's never been about what you know, it's been about who you know. College is a good way to buy those connections.

If you start seeing rosy pictures of the world, you should notice that and correct for it. The world is not a rosy place. For any question that fits the template "Does X fulfill its direct stated purpose?" the answer is almost certainly no.

Notice that the sea change we're seeing doesn't actually amount to a paradigm shift. It's not like people from the economic class prevented from getting college degrees now can afford to fuck around on Udacity and "hustle" to get a job. Don't worry, there's no more equality now.

There are lots of areas where formal education is a must.

Even when you can self-teach everything, you still need some structure, some meta-learning, to learn what you need to study to build the pillars of your knowledge. And you still need some organization that certifies that you know what you claim you know. Medicine is an obvious example. Engineering is another. No-one would like to live in a tall building made by somebody who claims to know how to build tall buildings, but didn't go to college.

I bet not many pharmaceutical companies would like to hire someone without a degree to design a new drug. Regulations, insurance, credibility, lots of problems.

> Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion.

So, yes... you can earn a lot of money without a degree, but if you want to work in some areas that need a degree, you must go to college.

And I see that with my sister today. She's 2 years older than me. She left university after 3 years, went to live to another country for 6 years, and came back with no money. She worked there, but spent a lot living large, having fun and enjoying her twenties. Meanwhile, I studied and worked (to pay my studies)..

Now, I earn almost 4 times what she earns. And it's difficult to her to find a job that she likes. She tried having her own business, and burned all of her savings. She started studying again, realizing that without a career, she's going to have a really hard professional future.

I know that the choices we both made are based on very different philosophies. She prioritized enjoying her youth, and that's OK. I prioritized investing in my future, and that's OK too.

But a formal education, is still a great tool to help you in your professional life, even when you can learn all by yourself.

But what did she do during those 6 years out of the country? Bartend in beach bars or worked in an office/whatnot learning the skills and tools to have a good career?

I think that is the main problem with people that assume college degree equals more money than not. Because it is either study and get a degree or go work at McDonalds or bartend.

I'll give you the opposite. I dropped out on my 2nd year. Went abroad as well, but went to work in the area I wanted to (game development) and continued to move around and learned a lot in various industries. 12-13 years since then and I'm making more than 5x than anyone in my HS class that got a degree (and I'm talking STEM degrees), and more than double what other friends that got a medical degree are making (which took them around 7-8 years to get).

Sure, if you want to perform surgery, you are going to have to get that degree, but that is a very specific degree you are going to get and not just 'CS because I like computers' or 'English Literature because I don't like math' which seems to be why a lot of folks go to University these days: "you got to have that degree y'all"

I can't edit my original post, so I'll write this here. I wrote this in a misleading way:

"But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.

This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall."

I didn't mean their prospects have improved. I meant that more students are realizing that going to a really expensive law school just because you have poor prospects is a lousy idea, given today's bubble.

Non-technical students are still utterly confused as to what they're supposed to do after college. Though I think more will start figuring out what you've written.

A college degree and a college experience is a nice thing to have, I think. But I doubt it's worth $250K as the price of basic entry to the job market. Something's got to give.

I spent many years trying to navigate various job opportunities and met quite a few people and yes, you are right, if you meet the right person you can get lucky. But it is pretty much just that, luck.

I work for a state agency and the people around here still view a 4 year degree as an elite status and it drives me nuts. On top of that, the PhD holders get no respect, its as if no degree makes you nothing and the higher degrees were a waste. Its silly given the atmosphere (a lab). And as far as the agency hiring process goes, all applications are put in online. If they even hint at wanting a degree as a requirement for hiring (even if the position doesn't necessarily require a degree, not talking engineering here) they will ask a prelim about having a degree. Answer wrong and a human will never even know you applied, even if you told someone you did; EVEN if they told you to apply in the first place.

The problem with this "college is required" mentality going away is that it is ingrained in a generation. Today's 20 somethings, and tomorrows as well, will have to deal with this as long as the 40, 50 and 60 somethings are still doing the hiring. They were raised with black and white views of requirements to do a job it seems, only from personal experience. And even if they give you the time of day, if the decision comes down to guy with degree and guy without, often times the guy without is going to lose because he doesn't appear to be the best investment of time and energy.

As for me, I gave in. As humbly as possible I will say I saw through the bullshit since before I left high school. I could earn as high as marks as I wanted and knew I could do what I wanted, but the chances were high that without a degree I was going to have to have some luck in finding that one special position. Once leaving the private sector and finding myself in a gov job, as I said, I gave in. I am enrolled in school. I am doing as I figured I would, 4.0 blah blah, but still sort of lack direction. I have picked a path, am going to follow it and see where it goes really.

The reality I have found myself facing is that no matter what degree you have, a lot of times, a 4 year degree means you have a degree and that just makes you better somehow. It doesn't even have to be a relevant degree to the position in which you apply. Especially when a system such as this one counts each year of a degree as an equivalent to a year of experience. (BA required, or AA with 2 years exp, or HS with 4 years exp).

Anyway, I will end my wall of text here. I only wished to share a perspective of someone who tried without, and is in the process of what he ultimately considers concession to the pressure of societal norms.

No offense, but I think people who went to MIT (and similar) are least-qualified to comment on this matter. People who go to elite schools are generally going to be fine either way, they are highly motivated and high-achieving and their classmates are the same.

But lower down the rankings things are different. Those kids can't even get an interview without a degree. We aren't talking about Google or something, we're talking about jobs working the desk at a car rental office, or being an assistant manager at a grocery store, that sort of thing.

It has absolutely nothing to do with learning skills (which, you're right, can be done online). You don't need any special skills for those jobs, at least none that are taught in school. It is just the piece of paper that matters in this case.

Until companies stop demanding degrees for entry-level positions, college will be beneficial. Maybe that will follow once the bubble pops, but wow is there going to be a lot of pain when that happens.

The structure, organization and ability of the institutions, curricula, and people that shaped your ability to learn independently is non-obvious privilege.

You would be surprised at the many varieties of ways there are to think, of how chaotic a world that world truly is, and how so many variables had to come together for you to get where you are, and how delicate a balance that truly is.

It's one thing to be humble, it's entirely another thing to humble yourself so much you manage to convince yourself you are actually an idiot.

You learned how to learn by having the privilege of having the free time to teach yourself how to learn, how to observe others in a learning environment, and how to get an idea of how to position yourself in a huge organization where you can contribute your specific skill set to a larger whole, and you continue to collectively add to human knowledge without adding a static layer of chaos and confusion.

Please, tell me where I can get a tenured professorship without a PhD by hustling. I'd love to know.

I agree and am a bit disappointed by the prevailing blind spot on HN to exactly that privilege.

I agree there shouldn't be as much emphasis on a bachelor's degree as a requirement - it's ridiculous to need a 4-year degree for most entry-level positions - but to attempt a solution by prescribing the universal cure-all of "learning the material yourself" through eBooks, tutorials, and MOOCS isn't feasible.

Most people don't have the initiative or free time to complete any serious course of self-directed study (why MOOC completion rates are abysmally low). That doesn't mean they're immoral, lazy, or worthy of condemnation - it's simply a very common learning style. Being a true auto-didact is rare.

The notion of going it alone also completely disregards the necessities of non-STEM careers. Although you might be able to at least attempt learning a subject like physics or mechanical engineering in a vacuum (though I don't think you'd get very far), it's simply not possible to grow in writing, rhetoric, or many of the humanities, without a dedicated dialogue between authors and evaluators. Writing for your blog is not enough to improve your style as a writer. The best advice on that front is to have someone savage it. College provides the critical space, time, and learning community to accomplish this. It has serious flaws, but there's a reason much of the West has adopted the (originally German) model of the modern university.

> The notion of going it alone also completely disregards the necessities of non-STEM careers. Although you might be able to at least attempt learning a subject like physics or mechanical engineering in a vacuum (though I don't think you'd get very far), it's simply not possible to grow in writing, rhetoric, or many of the humanities, without a dedicated dialogue between authors and evaluators.

That's if your goal is to have an audience. Art was very successful in the West when Art was declared to exist for the sake of Art. It gave birth to a plethora of new techniques and artistic perspectives - many of which refined themselves in such a precise and beautiful way over time, that it almost seems to be a dance itself.

Regardless of whether you consider a painting of a square to be Art, or a musical composition of silence to be music, well... I think there are always new things to learn. It doesn't always require constant criticism. That kind of persistently critical culture can squash diversity, intelligence, and creativity before it even has the chance to grow. It's like an invisible judge - a line that you dare not cross, but can never see.

> As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.

I think that's pretty much it. I certainly knew people who had majored in "Classics" or whatever--at a good school--but didn't feel they had the ability/connections/whatever to parlay that into a decent paying career. And given that realization, law school was one of the obvious paths--and didn't tend to require full-time work experience as the better MBA programs did.

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