Most people probably shouldn't go to school

It is absolutely worth $X0,000.

You can't really grasp the value of college as a smart and capable young person until you hit your thirties. That's when the idealism of youth starts to fade and hard truths start staring you in the face.

One of those hard truths is that most people are not smart and capable. They rely on others around them. If you took a smart and capable person and transplanted them into a strange environment, they'd thrive after a short time finding traction. Take most everyone else out of their carefully-cultivated social milieu, and they'd fall flat on their face.

So smart and capable people will pooh-pooh the value of college because they don't understand what it's doing for them. They'll think of throwing themselves against the free market as the ultimate challenge, the great meritocratic equalizer. And for these people, it is.

For those that are not smart and capable, it is not. The free market is a horrific meat-grinder of a system that chewed up everyone you loved as a child and spit them out beaten and broken. Most people need social stability, structure, a safe place. That's what our social institutions provide.

The value a college degree provides, that piece of paper that signals to your future employer that you are worth hiring, is indispensable. If you are not smart and capable, you will not be able to jury-rig alternative signaling. You're at the bottom of the free hiring market.

I would love to live in a world where you didn't need to mortgage your future to pay for the present. But the world is not like that. As a young person without family money to fall back on, you're going to have to make a number of investments just to get to the point where you are comfortable. You need a home, you need a vehicle. You need a spouse. You also need a degree. You're starting at the bottom of a hill, and the college degree is right there at the bottom.

This is idiotic to think this way. So we distill your experience of college into what MOST people should do? I think not. Why? Because it becomes a head trash excuse for the lazy.

A degree is something you get for finishing. A lot of people have very little to claim they have actually completed that has meaning to an employer. But a degree is one of them that is a gold standard. A degree also signifies you've given a certain subject a lot of thought. So do certifications, previous work experience community service, awards and more.

Surprise, if you are somebody who can work smart and knows how to complete things, you are more employable than somebody who doesn't. And if you also stack on that a lot of other good qualities, skills and finished work you're an even better candidate. And if you're personable and work well with others, even better.

A more appropriate sentiment would be you didn't get much out of your degree because you changed careers. (Many people do that, no news there) But others respect the work they have done in the past and how to synthesize what they've learned from specialized and general studies to apply elsewhere.

Everybody knows college is expensive. It's not a mystery. The costs are laid out there. But it's also quite easy to develop alternative paths to completing a degree in a specialized field and not get into enormous debt. One is to do fantastic and apply to a ton of scholarships. Another is to do community college work, get the degree there (something finished) and also work and save money. But I can tell you there is a point where you can do part time college, part time work and find it really draining. it's good to complete things in a lump sum.

Classic survivorship bias. "I became a successful, self-taught iOS developer, therefore all school is for suckers!"

It's unfortunate that this kind of thinking is so pervasive. You see it in a lot of contexts... I've seen this in folks who manage to raise themselves out of poverty and become successful, only to turn around and oppose social programs because, well, they didn't need them!

The author can't be faulted... this type of reasoning, a combination of survivorship bias, hindsight bias, and confirmation bias, is extremely human. We're wired for it. The hard part is realizing when you're doing it so you can try and catch yourself. The clearest remedy is the simplest: use data, not anecdotes.

In this case, the data supports the view that post-secondary education leads to long-term advantages. Of course, that needs to be balanced against the increasing debt load students are burdened with. But the reality is, generally speaking, more and more jobs are requiring a post-secondary degree, and advising people against getting one is generally speaking bad advice... while there are the odd outliers, they are just that, outliers.

You can get a lot out of a degree program if you try. It takes effort on your part not just the school's. As someone who is currently working on a SECOND bachelor's in CS (my first one was an economics), I can honestly say I'm learning way more than I ever did the first time around. I'm also learning way more than I possibly could on my own. I'm becoming a well rounded programmer. Instead of pigeonholing myself as self taught RoR or iOS dev, I'm learning the proper foundations needed to do more or less anything in the field. Combined with the effort I'm putting in my own side projects, I truly believe that the value of this education has been worth every penny.

To be fair, I actually had this exact same sentiment about college before I enrolled in the CS program. I really didn't put in more than the absolute minimum effort towards my Econ degree. At the time, I was focused on just getting the piece of paper; I waved my hand at the resources available to me.

The difference in maturity between then and now is also a factor. I almost feel as if I would have been better off taking a few years off between high school and undergrad. I would have had the maturity to appreciate all that a University offers.

The most valuable thing I received from my school was my network of friends and a place to learn and grow as a person.

Before I went to "college" (it still feels wrong for me to say University lol), I too thought it would be a waste of time. I really just wanted to get out in the real-world and work. Then I went into my freshman year basically partying my grades away and crushed my ego to a little pea. Actually, it turns out you have to work your ass off to do well in an undergraduate program. So I learned how to study and I learned how to become disciplined enough to say no to distractions.

True, the computer science part of my degree was the easy part, but the other courses, the "liberal arts" part, that was the tough part that also expanded my mind. I loved most of my classes because in reality, I love learning. I love seeing the world through different lenses.

University life is also about meeting life-long friends and self discovery. EVEN if software engineering can be distilled to just learning a language to instruct a computer, going to college is still a giant stepping stone in life that I think every capable individual should experience.

I work for a Fortune 10 company and when we are hiring young professionals, a degree signifies the individual has a certain level of commitment, dedication, and has the ability to achieve goals (aka win!).

Additionally, I have always noticed that taking a single individual's experience can lead me to taking their experience out of context. That situation is typically compounded especially when a understand very little about the person as an individual.

I would argue that Cory's experience does not reflect the average (to be fair I only began to understand the value of statistics while pursuing my college degree). In fact, check this chart out... seems like a no-brainer to me: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

I have a feeling if this person had actually gone to school for CS they would have thought it equally useless. Most CS programs don't concentrate on say building iOS apps etc.

I strongly believe in eventually getting rid of most traditional university lectures and replacing them with excellent online, free videos. However:

1) That's not all you get from a university. Labs, smaller classes, etc etc are very important.

2) The amount material covered by currently available free courses/videos is very, very small. You might get a semi-complete computer science and math education, but that's about it.

Colleges are great in that they offer nice infrastructure that's hard to find elsewhere: amazing libraries, laboratories, possibly, access to people doing research in the area you are interested in...Ultimately, though, everyone has to teach their own selves.

In this post, a holder of a business degree performs an informed cost benefit analysis of getting a business degree and finds it wanting. Also, a well trained twenty something argues that training can't match the benefits of his experience.

This makes the assumption that the sole goal of education is a path to a job. That's simply not the case.

Education != vocational school.

Non vitae, sed scholae discimus[1]

[1] Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, Seneca