Thinking too highly of higher ed
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A good college degree (especially in STEM fields) provide the basic foundation upon which to innovate. Our industries have gone so deep, and we are standing on such giant shoulders, that anyone who is going to take it further must first absorb the century or so of knowledge created so far on the subject. Even in Computer Science, the next innovation is not yet another WhatsApp, it's more along the lines of Counsyl (a dna-sequencing app), where a person without the knowledge-foundation equivalent of a degree simply would never get started with the idea of making such software, leave alone actually building it.
And I say that as a self-taught software engineer. Yes I can probably build the next Snapchat on my own. But even then I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, especially low-level stuff like kernels, bits and bytes, and fundemental details of cryptography and security. Not to say anything about the "unknown unknowns" which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now, after spending years in industry and freelancing.
College is only structured learning. If you can build that structure yourself, you're only missing a piece of paper.
a) A degree with no knowledge (perhaps you forgot everything after the final).
b) The knowledge with no degree (autodidact).
Which do you believe will help you more in your job search? If the answer is (a), you pretty much agree with Thiel. If the answer is (b), it's unclear why you are spending money on a degree.
You are omitting other resources no autodidact could replicate: Billions of dollars in capital resources (labs, systems, etc.), access to and personal instruction from leading experts and researchers in a wide variety of fields (professors), and large numbers of smart peers studying the same things.
Because universities help you accumulate knowledge.
Yes, autodidacts exist. But, for most people, the atmosphere of a university, the exposure to and attention from experts, and in addition the various sticks and carrots in place (e.g. if you don't study this weekend you'll fail the exam), help with learning.
Sure, many folks need structure for learning. But why would such folks be desirable for hiring in programming jobs? Wouldn't we rather hire an autodidact that happened to suffer his way through college instead of the student that required the forced structure of college to learn?
There will be a lot of new and difficult material (additional compsci and/or business domain knowledge) to learn after the the 22-year old student graduates. If the student didn't have a "love of learning" to motivate and self-discipline his study, what value should we place on him as a job candidate?
I found that the material I encountered in college was significantly more difficult than anything I've seen in industry. My coworkers have expressed similar opinions.
I certainly agree with wanting candidates who have a love of learning though! On the other hand, I would think someone who loves learning would want to go to school. I can't see why someone who loved learning wouldn't want to work with people who are the experts in their fields and tackle challenging, still unsolved problems.
I was taught data structures by a guy giving powerpoints and code examples on windows XP. In 2014.
I can only speak for my own experiences, and when I was in college I worked with several people who were clearly leaders in their fields. The reason it was obvious was that I would go to talks with guest speakers and they would usually either cite a paper written by one of the professors or informally say that if you have questions about X you should probably ask a certain person in the room.
The issue here is that there's quite a disconnect between our research and our teaching. They take tenured profs that aren't capable of doing research and stick them teaching undergraduates. Everyone else that is worth a damn is inaccessible to us. (I'll make one exception: Jin-Yi Cai is amazing.)
I don't even know what to say, besides that our CS program for undergraduates is kind of shit. These people are academics. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's not like they're at the head of their field either. They're at the head of the field from a decade ago maybe.
The woman teaching the intro classes, the guy teaching data structures, and the woman teaching machine programming (low level) all have been doing so for over a decade. Their classes don't change either, you can find their powerpoints and handouts from 6 years ago and they're the same damn thing, give or take some small changes like the date.
Let's look at two 500 level classes, my compilers class and the OS course. There's two profs teaching OS. One is the chair of our cs department.
Searching google for "<their name> site:gmane.org" returns no results for the non-chair OS prof and no results for my compilers prof.
The chair has a few mailing list posts, such as one on the ALSA list with an amazing subject of "help with first ALSA program, please?" And this wasn't from 1999 or anything. He was the active chair at the time of asking. It was less than 2 years ago. It's embarrassing, honestly.
As for guest speakers, that's another subject. UW has a lot of smart people around it. It's just that they're entirely separate from the 18 year olds.
It's really unfortunate that this isn't the situation at all schools. I guess I really lucked out!
If you'd looked at the maze of spaghetti code I wrote when I was 11, you would have definitely concluded that someone should teach me how to do things right...
You probably feel like you've missed out on something really important but once you actually get to college, you'll realise that it isn't as great as it is portrayed to be. A lot of stuff can be self taught in a much more efficient and less time-wasting manner. As well, you can focus on recent technology whilst the curriculum of a uni may be outdated.
Despite that, I don't think your definition of "self-taught" is where a lot of industries will end up. You can still have a great education experience online (there will be many services offering this as technology evolves), so you can still cover the same content but not have to enter a traditional physical university relationship.
The OP's point was that increasingly, the low-hanging fruit is already picked and areas of high growth require a deep technical understanding of one or more fields.
The problem is even worse, because the low-hanging fruit isn't. The Paypals and Facebooks of today employ armies of Ph.D.s to work on their critical infrastructure. Google started as Ph.D. research.
On balance, tech startups that do not require a deep understanding of computer science to run are an anomaly. So where does Thiel's attitude come from?
I think the thing to keep in mind when listening to someone like Peter Thiel is that he's a businessman first, not an engineer first, and this colors what skills he sees as most important and necessary.
Thiel says "you don't need a degree to be successful". But almost all his warrants actually only defend the claim that "you don't need a college education or equivalent to build a successful business [because you can hire the college-educated experts you honest-to-god do need to build a business]".
Which is fine. But you're either under-estimating the difficulty of large swaths of Computer Science or over-estimating the intelligence and will of the average person if you think we can meet the demand for high-skill engineers with only people who spend large chunks of their childhoods learning about programming and computer science.
The points by Thiel seem to be that uni can exist purely to be an exclusive option for a certain [richer] demographic of people, rather than an open playing field for anyone to study and improve academically. And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.
Sure. Any my point was that I don't believe we can sustainable pump out the number of high-quality software engineers that a place like Google needs without something like a college system.
I think your interpretation of Thiel is uncharitable, and I hope it's not true. That would be awful.
> And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.
This is certainly true and needs to change.
That's not enough information to tell you if it's a good investment or not. What would the next best alternative be? Unemployment? A 70k job? And remember that you didn't just lose 40k - you also lost the potential income you could be earning during those years. Assuming that job would earn you 40k/year of disposable income, and you went to college for five years, you actually forwent $240k, not just $40k.
How would you feel?
> because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.
This is an issue about "credentials" & "signaling in the marketplace"[1], and not possession of actual knowledge.
>I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, [...] which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject. And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now,
This is an issue about attaining knowledge. This is a separate issue from "credentials". All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available. Course syllabus, textbooks, and not to mention the vast resources of wikipedia, etc. If anyone wants to learn CS, he/she can study it. There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge. This is why hiring managers complain that many compsci graduates do not have actual programming skills.
I suspect the main thrust of your post is about the credential which is very defensible especially if you have aspirations for certain employers that absolutely require that piece of paper.
[1]http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
There's a few things that make them good — most notably, the support available if you don't understand something well. While certainly there's a fair amount of support available (esp. online, and depending upon your corporate culture possibly at work as well), I'm yet to find a community that's as willing to help people understand material as many teaching staff are, especially when it comes to more obscure material.
Today, there is everything from IRC channels to mailing lists to forums to subreddits to facebook / g+ groups to linkedin groups to get involved with other students of the same topic, maybe even with a few veterans to provide guidance, to learn these subjects.
You won't find people that lecture you, but you will find people that will answer questions. I'm surprised there isn't an SO for that yet...
That's certainly true, and the same for mathematics or physics or philosophy or any other subject. But I've met very few people who have on their own actually done it, working through the material you'd cover in a 4-year degree (let alone going on to cover graduate-level work). Not zero people, just very few. I've met many more people who've worked through the equivalent of a few courses of material (e.g. have self-studied SICP), but that's a much lower bar.
Of those people I know who have done so, most are mathematicians. Could be random draw of who I know, but math does seem to draw autodidacts who go all-in and teach themselves the equivalent of a 4-to-6-year (or more) course of mathematics.
For reasons I don't fully understand a cs degree does not imply cs knowledge. Grade inflation? Maybe they weren't given enough story problems?
When someone asks me about a concept I'm unfamiliar with, I don't have the excuse of that not being part of the curriculum.
Second there are concepts that if you don't deal with them every day, you lose a your grip around them.
Third (and maybe most important), maybe CS was a good degree to have in terms of opportunities but wasn't their passion. You can't compete with passion. There are people who read this and that book only to acquire knowledge of a very specific domain out of pure passion about the topic at hand. You can't compete with those. These are the people who usually can make combine sources, spot errors, think outside the box for obvious reasons.
ps. I remember an instance when reading the Cryptonomicon, where Waterhouse - one of the main protagonists - was thinking that the fact he was at Princeton university in the 1930's was nothing special. He thought that in this place there was just a bunch of guys who knew one thing or two about maths and that was all there was to it. Later in the book while almost being drowned inside a German submarine, the only thing he could think of, was how to get his hands on a German strong box he came across. When he was healthy enough, he spent ~ 6 hours in a row trying to open the damn thing. When he did open the strong-box, he was almost depressed because he didn't really give a sht about what was inside. He wanted to know how thins German strong-box worked and if it can be reversed, somehow. Now that he knew that, there was nothing appealing about this strong-box. Not even the contents. To a pure mathematician like he really* was, there was nothing appealing in implementing something, once you understood how it works. Now, how on earth can you compete with a guy like that? :-)
It sounds like you'll be in a better position to direct your academic experience, but you may end up feeling frustrated as well. There's a good chance you won't be able to study what you want to in college, and you discover that you have to get it through self-study anyway. On the bright side, some professors absolutely love students like this (because it's how they learned as well) and will help you out.
If you could build a Snapchat app on your own, you are already far ahead of most programmers, so it is only a matter of getting experience to show people other than a degree. When you get into a job you will see just how incompetent most programmers really are.
If you got a job now you could have a modest house payed off instead of being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt four years from now.
If it's a large proportion, doesn't that say something about the quality of intake, education, and qualification in college CS?
It's a general thing and not at all restricted to programming.
FWIW, I too don't have that low level knowledge - I did math & physics in undergrad and math in grad school. I never took a CS class, and am completely self-taught. I am happy & successful, and have no problems with getting a job if for some reason I am unhappy with my current one.
(Overuse of credentialing in engineering hiring is one of my biggest pet peeves and something I'm doing my best to fix. Wrote about it at length here: http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-m...)
The reason I ask is I don't have a degree either but I haven't had much trouble getting offers after I got my first job.
Nevertheless I think it's great that you're going back to school; I plan to do the same later.
But, I went to school for a few years didn't find that the undergraduate curriculum really went in detail for any particular subject, so I hope you won't be disappointed as I suspect you will still have gaps in knowledge even after you leave. On the other hand, you will have a good foundation and also have an idea of where to look or people to ask.
First of all, the unknown unknowns are much worse from the kid who went to school. Wanna know why? Because the autodidact is definitely better equipped to repair a gap. Its ridiculous to think a 4 year degree can teach a gapless understanding of computers-- do you really expect a 22 year old to have a gapless understanding of any field?
The most important thing a CS degree can teach someone is how to learn more, and at least in my experience it dramatically falls short. Never encouraged to read source. Never encouraged to implement an assignment in another language. The message to me and my peers is clear: learn java and go work for Epic or another dead-end enterprise place.
Last semester I did a hackathon and some of the competitors were 4 kids that clearly did nothing outside of class. My group implemented a mobile app and responsive website. We learned NONE of that in any class. They implemented a GUI desktop application in java with eclipse. (It astounds me how many people can come out of my CS program and the only way they know how to compile their projects is via a green button.)
Second of all: your lack of knowledge about low level stuff is entirely on you. You can learn that anywhere. The problem is that 20 year olds, whether they're in uni or not, think that the high level world of rails and Python is more interesting than bits and bytes. I have never formally learned about the specifics of any of the *nix kernels, Unix tools, python arthimetic, C macros, and more. But I do know about them, because it interests me.
Maybe it just doesn't interest you.
Stupid autocorrect. Pointer arithmetic
It was about 10 weeks long. There were ~100,000 students enrolled. It was free. And it was, far and away, the most valuable thing I've ever done in my life. It was an order of magnitude more valuable than my 4 year undergraduate education at the University of Connecticut.
Since taking that course, I've pushed hundreds of code commits into the Airbnb codebase (I work on the online marketing team here). They're small pull requests , and I'm rarely ever writing anything from scratch, but the number of engineering hours I've saved by being able to write my own PRs is extremely valuable.
Out of curiosity, I asked a few of the recruiters at Airbnb what putting CS184 on my LinkedIn means. I explained to them what it was, how much value I got out of it, and how much value the company got out of it. I showed them the course, and the certificate you get when you finish. Everyone had the same answer: "It doesn't mean much".
My bias is, online education still has that "University of Phoenix" stigma. How valuable the course actually is still doesn't seem to mean anything yet. Maybe, in general, that's correct. Maybe most online courses still suck. But I can very much verify that life-altering, immensely valuable online courses exist.
This idea of online learning and more specifically, credentialing, looks more like it's a social engineering problem rather than "knowledge delivery" problem.
I've been geeking out on institution-agnostic credentialing and accreditation for a little while now. If you're interested in this space please get in touch with me - email is in my profile.
You mention that a way to show ability to contribute is through "professional references and career advancement", but doesn't that also first require that you get into the company first? For the former, you need work to find colleagues who can give meaningful references, and for the latter, you need to enter the job first in order to advance in it.
Am I missing something? Is there any way to get these jobs without first getting the (dubious) credential from universities?
I think the bias against "University of Phoenix" type degrees doesn't really apply to online courses like Stanford's. Everybody knows that they're money-making schemes - so it frankly calls your judgment into question if you do it. I would wonder - why did this person choose to spend time and money on a University of Phoenix degree, rather than just take the free Stanford courses and learn on their own?
The issue with the Stanford online courses is that it's common knowledge that not many people stick it through to the end / pay attention. So having it on your resume would get my attention, but I would need to verify that you actually absorbed the knowledge. Once that concern is addressed though, you absolutely have an advantage in my book.
I guess my concern is that most recruiters aren't you, and probably aren't anyone commenting on this thread.
My bias is that mass-adoption (and ultimately, online learning as an alternative to a ~100k education) will only happen when an entry-level recruiter is able to filter through and use online courses as a hiring signal. So far, the only people I've seen get anywhere close to this, or care at all, are very technical founders hiring for a very small team, usually in the valley.
Even if they respect the course or what was learned, they don't actively seek these people out. I've seen startup founders aggressively seeking out and trying to hire Stanford / Harvard / Princeton alumni because they're alumni. Yet I've never heard anyone saying "Let's go recruit and hire CS184 grads".
... yet.
Is it possible that a non-degreed candidate with no work experience is the best of a pool? Sure. Is it worth a recruiter's time and energy sourcing candidates to put THAT guy in front of a hiring manager if he's only got a few spots available (because he probably isn't the only recruiter in communication with said hiring manager)?
IMO, no. As someone who has worked both sides of that aisle (currently a developer), unless a recruit has serious experience, he's not in the final pool of qualified applicants. Let someone else take that risk. I've got to worry about my next paycheck. This is a sales job, after all.
Edit to add: I think I left this too implicit: my main point is that as these courses become more prevalent, there will be more people with personal familiarity in higher positions, and that will make them more valuable.
It all worked out well which is good because my parents couldn't afford to send me to college. But they did have the foresight to save up and buy me a Commodore 64 in 1982.
Turns out basically nothing I did in university was remotely applicable to my current actual job. Though I suspect it's more a comment on my country's industrial priorities than anything else, but it does make me incredibly sad for US students.
Why do most elite schools refuse to bestow online degrees for anyone who can complete identical coursework with rigorous test proctoring?
It's not about cost. Forget about the lower marginal cost of online students, in most cases elite online degrees are not even allowed if students are willing to pay full price.
There is also the argument that the experience of being on campus and closely working with peers and instructors is an integral part of the credential. Yet that can't be the reason either or else a simple solution would be to offer "on campus" and "online" versions of a degree to clarify what has been achieved.
The biggest reason not to offer online elite degrees for all who can complete the work is to maintain prestige for the institution. Artificial scarcity is used against students the same way it is used by luxury brands such as Ferrari and Hermes hand bags.
Any why should this change? No one at these institutions would benefit including alumni who have already made it into the club.
It's prioritization of brand above the betterment of society through education.
B.S. required required
to
High School Diploma, GDE, or Military service required[1]
While I worked there, they decided to make the change because, "software development can be learned anywhere." It's interesting to see the change in corporations and makes me feel they are really trying to make a change.
[1] http://jobs.capitalone.com/virginia/software-engineering/job...
Investment banking, the practice of law, many parts of medicine, and bridge building can also be learned anywhere. None-the-less, we demand practitioners of these trades have a foundations in their respective fields.
To be clear, I am perfectly happy using software written by an expert at the craft who taught him/herself the foundations of computer science and software engineering.
I am far less happy using software written by a graduate of one of these "learn to code" 12 week workshops. Especially as anything more than pure implementation work ("implement this spec to the letter") on anything serious (such as the core infrastructure for a bank).
Security is hard. Reliability is hard.
It's incredibly ironic that the current administration invests hundreds of millions/billions into cyber-security while simultaneously calling for less -- not more -- training in software engineering.
Sure. But the graduates of those workshops don't get jobs working on security and critical infrastructure. Rather, they get hired as junior programmers and are given small-scale projects where they can continue to learn and grow under the guidance of more experienced developers.
Besides, the code school graduates often have critical subject matter expertise in their former fields. For example, when I need a programmer to build an in-house system for a marketing team, I'd be much more willing to hire a former marketing specialist who completed a 3-month code school than a fresh computer science graduate.
And it's the former that there is a critical shortage of.
The main idea is that many smart people start companies or consult and dont go to school. There's no reason to ostracize then.
After reading this article, I'm still not sure what his alternative plan is.
> Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.
Great advice for a 17 year old.
The "plan" would be to take an honest look at yourself and decide what sort of career makes sense for you. That might mean you go to a trade school, it might mean that you go to college, it might mean something I can't think of right now :)
The worst advice is saying just go to college and it will all work itself out.
That employment and wage statistics say that's actually better advice than "don't go to college and it will all work itself out."
Stop encouraging people to abandon the old system when the new one is nowhere near ready yet.
In my opinion HR departments are just lazy or understaffed. A real face-to-face interview with the candidate about the subject you're hiring on is almost always enough to see if a potential candidate has 'got the goods'. And without going to deeply into a discussion about what is and isn't a good interviewing strategy: Ask questions to see if the candidate knows what he/she's talking about. As how a person would react in situations you've come across. Examine the his/her responses with what you'd have done, ask your colleagues what they think after the interview. In short, just talk to your candidate, engage in a discussion.
Yes it's impossible to interview each and every single candidate. But, really, a college-degree-filter is not the way to go. A majority of the people will learn important lessons in college (and some won't), but sometimes it's the people that chose another way that prove the most valuable for your company.
The system of higher education isn't going to change because people have too much invested in it, and that investment can never go bad like the housing market or tech stocks did. College graduates will talk about how much they learned, the networking and social experience or of being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking. It isn't possible to question the value of those intangible benefits, or to prove to someone that they could have gained the same things through other means. So the system perpetuates itself.
To be honest, it seems like an unbreakable cycle. Well off kids go to college, get jobs and move into management where they hire other well off kids who also went to college. MOOCs, community/online colleges and vocational schools are emerging as additional options, but most of the decision makers at major institutions attended traditional four year colleges and expect the people they work with to have done so as well.
It seems like the best way to control the cost of education would be to make employers responsible for paying for it, instead of the students. Then market forces would come into play. If a business had to choose between paying $120k to send someone to Harvard or $20k to send them to a state school or community college, then they would have an incentive to evaluate the difference in quality of education and training from the respective institutions. Right now all of the financial risk is placed on students, and businesses get to pick and choose who to hire with relatively little consequence.
Obviously the system isn't going to change any time soon, if ever, no matter how many opeds the washington post publishes.
Sticking with the same analogy: if you rapidly increase the amount of money in circulation, its value falls. The people whose wages and prices are rising in tandem experience little net change. But people whose wages don't rise suffer from the rising prices.
College is undergoing the same process. The fraction of people who go to college is up significantly. All those new degrees have pushed the absolute value of a degree down, which is why college is no longer an automatic path to high-paying, white-collar work. But at the same time, people without degrees are left ever further behind, and the relative gap between college and no-college is bigger than ever.
Imagine there's a trusted business who makes the tests and certifications, and anytime you wanted to hire someone, you'd check to see if they had the relevant certifications. Maybe this person self-taught themselves everything they needed to pass, maybe they went to a cheap institution to receive formal training for the certification, or maybe they went to an expensive one.
Colleges could no longer be more expensive just for the sake of being expensive, the colleges who could educate people to better scores would be worth more. Similarly the testing/accreditation companies who could better differentiate potential hires based on their actual ability would be more trusted by the hiring companies, and would be able to command higher prices.
The reality is that when you are at the stage of deciding whether you should do college, you have little idea of what it is that you want to do so it's difficult to reverse engineer your education against your potential career path. For this reason college seems like a good default. It's insurance (as was mentioned in the article, but in a different light) against realizing that your career path would benefit from a degree but you did not get one. It seems like a useful strategy may be to help young students discover their careers at an earlier age, or at least to enter the workforce before deciding whether college is for them.
I believe (and would love to see research around) that learning is a pull model. Traditional education works on a push model. This fundamental incongruence wastes decades of a person's most prime learning years. That's not counting all the other ills that come with the artificial environment of restricting immature people to interact primarily with other immature people (bullying, ostracization, self-confidence issues, depression, etc etc).
The model I plan to use with my own children is incredibly simple: do something productive 8 hours a day, every day. The set of productive activities is defined solely by their ability to justify why it's productive. That combined with good nutrition, emotionally supportive household, physical security give the building blocks and raw ingredients that will allow a person to achieve their full potential.
Beside, this article started with "higher education", but never even touched upon what that word meant. It's higher education, it's education. By and large, college provides the best environment for young people to meet and learn from professors and from their peers. The college experience is a very special experience for learning. College is not just an investment of how much money you put in and how much your salary will be after you get out.
Even if Bill Gates and Zuck Markerburg dropped out of Harvard, I am sure they learned a lot while being there, and perhaps beyond what they probably were aware of at the time. Bill Gates for example coauthored a paper with Cristo Papadimitriou (a giant in Computer Science) while at Harvard. I bet Bill had great opportunities to meet and learn from many great people while being there.
> it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place
Not at all. It implies a future where people are more productive, produce more, and earn more. It's not just an implication, but fundemental economics.
> a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists
College is not a zero sum competition; everyone can be winners and get degrees. Also, most people complain that college encourages too much non-conformity. I've never heard, and it certainly wasn't my experience, that college creates conformists.
> Is higher education an investment? Everyone knows that college graduates earn more than those without degrees.
The focus on earnings is very narrow. Increasing your knowledge, your understanding of the world, your exposure to ideas, and especially your critical thinking and other cognitive and intellectual skills, helps you in every place in life where those things in apply. Not only as an employee, but as a citizen, a member of your community, a member of a family, as someone managing your own affairs, as an autodidact in your learning after college, and as someone seeking a fulfulling life.
College degrees do not correlate with productivity. The earning power of degrees is almost entirely driven by proximity and access to higher-paying jobs. Productivity simply has nothing to do with it.
> College is not a zero sum competition; everyone can be winners and get degrees.
I believe Thiel is arguing that college experiences are becoming a cultural binary -- either you have a degree or you do not.
I read Thiel's commentary as: if you're a zero in that system, you lose out on future opportunity; and to become a one in that system, you need to conform (in the manner of social norms.)
I'm surprised to hear this. What is it based on?
On the other hand, how do we do better? Massive companies still need hundreds of thousands of workers? How do they find them without college admissions offices providing signals? Hiring is a massive problem, as we can probably all agree, that isn't going to disappear just because people start skipping college or attending alternative institutions. How does a "nobody" 18 or 22 year old prove his or her value without a letter of admission or a diploma?
This is a really important idea for the public to understand. It's not simply a class thing either, which is how it's typically portrayed (e.g. "you just want college to be for rich kids and poor kids can learn to be plumbers at community college"). It's more of a "how is a person's brain wired up" thing.
I was an amazingly mediocre student, but I've been very successful in industry. I think it's because in school, the curriculum is set in stone - you're just consuming it. There's no opportunity for self actualization. In "the field", you will have opportunities to drive real solutions and even innovate.
> How does a "nobody" 18 or 22 year old prove his or her value without a letter of admission or a diploma?
Usually side projects and a kind of radiant passion. If you can point to some solid code you're written and you sound passionate when you're talking about the technology and the job opportunity, many interviewers will sense that.
Moreover, it's very difficult to be admitted into an Ivy League school. It is also very difficult to recruit graduates from Ivy League Schools. They are rare: In 2014-15, 1.8 million bachelors degrees were awarded in the US [1]. Roughly 20,000 of those are from Ivy League schools. That's about 1%.
Hence, even sought after employers like Apple employ more students from mid-tier schools like San Jose State than top-ranked schools [2]. So if you are an Apple recruiter, the bulk of your recruits come from a University that is ranked 38 out of about 130 -regional- schools. It is not even ranked nationally.
The notion that if an applicant is not admitted to a top-ranked school, they are going to wind up a janitor, is simply false.
What has become skewed is the perception of the value of elite schools. Since perception drives price, the price of attending them has skyrocketed. The 4-year cost of Harvard is now $234,000 [3] vs. San Jose State at about $100,000 [4].
And schools like Missouri University of Science and Technology present the better ROI.
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 [2] http://www.wired.com/2014/05/alumni-network-2/ [3] http://www.harvard.edu/harvard-glance [4] http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/Applying/Cost_of_Attendance/
I've always been curious, and a little disturbed, at how inflexible a college education is for something supposedly universal. People are different and need different things from their education, but everyone gets the same sort of classes at the same sorts of medium-to-large institutions. If you want something less oriented around classes or smaller and more personal or more specialized or more hands on or not forced into digestible quarter- or semester-sized chunks, you're completely out of luck.
But if this doesn't work, it's apparently a problem with you, not with the system.
And then, of course, we turn around and feign surprise when college prices go up as we artificially drive demand through the roof.
I personally valued the college experience I've had so far... with the exception of most of my classes. What really worked for me was doing research, taking graduate courses, learning on my own, interacting with other students and a bunch of external things like working part-time at a startup. But there's simply no other way to get into research, even though many seem to agree that the overlap between strong study skills and research potential is, at best, limited.
I'd like to be doing research now and, false modesty aside, would be entirely capable, but it's very difficult outside the inflexible system. It really doesn't need to be.
In hindsight, I would have loved an alternative. But, as far as I know, that alternative does not exist and, if it did, I would not have known about it in high school. The only other choice would have been going to a small liberal arts college, which has more classes and less of everything I actually liked.
The pressure to go to college is too high. The worst part is that the pressure itself is not irrational because of the irrational way the rest of the system is set up.
To me it looks like he has got it all wrong here: Higher education is not an investment. It's not a preparation to get a job. People should not be considering higher education as a way of getting lots of money in future. Higher education is an opportunity to delve in to subject that you dreamed about all your teenage life. Did you wanted to become astronomer? Physicists? Mathematician? Painter? Were you interested in learning why biggest wars in history happened? How our ancestors lived 10,000 years ago? Do you want to build airplanes? If you asked these questions and were intensely interested in some subject, higher education is a tremendous gateway to do what you love for rest of your life as opposed to possibility of becoming millionaire first and then do all these things. No one should be persuaded to be turned away from it. Not everyone needs to be in rush for making million and retire before 30. Some people wants to do what they love to their last dying day. Not everyone needs to be startup founder either. As Guy Kawasaki said, jobs are for rest of your life (even if you are "boss" - it's still a job), education is just those few early years when your brain is hungry and eager to absorb everything. Your best years should be spent in studying something cool and worthwhile rather than selling underwears and rental apartments to people. You should take advantage of it. I consider advising youth to drop out from their selected area of study with a lure of making millions in startups a sin.
Splitting it up another way, that is three years of studying on my own, and one year of lectures.
If I had decided to forgo a bachelors, if I wanted the same level of knowledge as someone with a bachelors, I'd have to spend the same three years studying calculus, discrete math, theory of computation, graph theory, algorithms, data structures, databases, assembly, C++, Java, paradigms of programming languages, AI, graphics etc.
So really a bachelors is just one more year on top of that. Plus the extras you learn from the professor in class, or after class, or during office hours, or hanging around with other students.
While theoretically an autodidact can study the same as a college student, they generally skip over pushdown automata and Gödel numbers and L'Hôpital's rule and go right to learning things such as Ruby and its methods, without any theory. Some progress can be made initially, but the lack of a base of theory usually causes problems at some point.
You can get into a good local public school like Berkeley or UIUC or Georgia Tech for a decent price. You can apply for Pell grants, work/study and so forth.
During go-go times, you can often get work without a degree. During downturns like 2001 or 2008, suddenly everyone is laying people off, and the market is flooded with job applicants, many with college degrees. This is when you really need a college degree, especially if you have a family. You don't want then to be the time to realize you need a bachelors. Even if you get work again, you'll be juggling a full-time job, wife, kids, in-laws, plus your night/weekend classes and studying, in addition to whatever else you're doing.
In software, the term "engineer" is roughly meaningless without anchoring to a specific context of company culture and/or an individual's experience. That someone can be called a "software engineer" with no formal training and six month's industry experience doesn't change the fact that designing a procedure keeping a process out of NP is not a natural talent.
In the same way that plans for a homeowner's kitchen remodel don't require an architect's seal has no bearing on the requirements for a hospital emergency room remodel, amateurs are fine for bridal consultant landing pages but not for self driving car control systems. There are problems that require professional judgement not just a technical opinion.
If surgeons/lawyers/engineers say "I'm only go to offer an apprenticeship to someone who went to school for eight years like I did", then that's fine, it's their choice of who to invest their time with. But it doesn't prove that a traditional four year education is a necessary prerequisite to being able to do any of those jobs.
It's not enough to say, "Hume proved we can't really know anything about the world of things." The claim is not that the current system is perfect. My claim is that the system is better than the alternative for certain vocations and that engineering is one if them.
It is a very very ugly mentality.
my guess is Peter Thiel 's real answer, the one that he doesn't want to say too loudly, is that he wants more and more people to go be entrepreneurs. to be the next gates, jobs, or Zuckerbergs. this is great! let's all start our own companies! let's have every college student drop out, start a new business, and we can all ride the rising tide of technological advancement together!
except you can't have everyone be a ceo. not everybody should be! the founder isnt a lone hero, holding the weoght of the world entirely on his shoulders! they still need the engineers, the marketers, the insurance salesmen, and all the other trades and skilled workers that make our economy work. we cannot forget that it is the middle class that does the vast majority of the day to day work that keeps everything humming along smoothly.
college is certainly an excellent path to get to these sorts of careers. it's a great place to learn the skills necessary to be an hr rep, or an fda regulation expert, or a general manager of a restaurant, or a journalist, or a lawyer, or any of the other of thousands of middle class jobs that everyone forgets about because they are boring and unglamorous.
the honest truth is that, for a majority of the population, college is a great decision.
thiel is surely smart enough to recognise that the economy will always contain a diverse range of companies and roles within those companies. but there are better ways to train the population if we can only get beyond our fixation on certain credentials
Most 18 year olds are not ready to go straight into work and I'd say they are definitely not ready to start a startup (remember, general case).
At uni you learn a great deal but you also benefit from being eased into adult life with internships, mentorships, you have tons of opportunity to network too.
We sometimes have applications to our entry-level software developer jobs from people with two-year software development diplomas from community colleges. My manager won't even look at them. He absolutely insists on a true college degree.
So the Bahaus was conformist. Strikes me as a myopic opinion of someone that hasn't studied the history of art movements and schools.
>“The same kids would probably enjoy a wage premium even if they spent four years in the Peace Corps instead.”
“Would probably” is telling of privilege here. Perhaps Mr. Thiel would probably do well to study some post secondary sociology or anthropology?
>“But what if higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive tournament?”
Curious how many HN people have degrees outside of their career. Was it relevant to your worldview? Is it possible that higher education isn't mired in capitalist competition?
>“Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t famous because of the similar ways in which they left school. We know their names because of what each of them did differently from everybody else.”
Seems to me that at least part of the formula here, if he is choosing to cite these people, is to be white and male. Many would do well to skip higher education and perhaps chase that.
>“You need to figure it out for yourself.”
“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”
For instance, if I learn to speak French in school A, and if I learn to solve differential equations in school B, then which form of education is "higher"?
Discouraging high school graduates from going to college is just bad for society. Entrepreneurs are essential, but I would argue that the most profound advancements in STEM fields come out of universities. Those advancements tend to be in highly abstract fields (e.g. physics, math), where there is no immediate applicable benefit, but there may well be one in the future.
Students should go to universities to gain a theoretical foundation in STEM fields -- that's how we find young researchers. And those who decide that research isn't for them will nevertheless gain a strong intellectual foundation that is hard (but not impossible) to acquire otherwise.
Firstly, Thiel argues that society suffers when high-caliber people go through elite colleges and take positions at conservative organizations in old industries. He implies that society would be better served if more of these people went off to do startups or other cutting-edge organizations.
My rebuttal to this is: lots of elite college-trained people are going to startups. There is no system barrier between highly-trained (if somewhat conservatively thinking) people and cutting edge stuff. In fact, some of the most elite MBA programs are taking note of the interest among their students and creating programming specifically to help them enter that realm [1].
Also, what's wrong with highly trained people going into management consulting and investment banking? If talent gravitates toward these industries, it's not because peoples' training made them useless for any other purpose, but rather because of standard economics: people have a right to want to get paid.
Furthermore, I'd argue that Thiel is mistakenly conflating lack of sexiness with social damage. General Motors and JP Morgan are not startups, and few starry-eyed undergrads would dream of a mid-tier leadership role in such an organization over founding their own billion dollar company. But what's wrong with having competent and well-trained leaders in charge of these companies? They might not show up on the covers of popular entrepreneurship magazines, and they might not be the first do something sexy and innovative, but these sorts of companies do deliver a tremendous amount of growth and innovation to the economy. GM's size and distribution clout makes it as viable and worthy a source of innovation as, say, Tesla, and there's nothing wrong with training people to lead those productive if boring machines.
Secondly, on the topic of Obama's push for more higher education, I believe Thiel brings to the argument a Silicon Valley/disruptive innovation-centered view on what is actually a different problem. Thiel argues that talent is best allocated to new industries because they are the ones that produce "black-swan" type economic innovations. This may be true, but I think it fails to discuss a more systemic issue.
As few as fifteen years ago, American manufacturing represented a significantly larger portion of the economy, with a hiring demand to match [1]. As recently as two or three decades ago, a high school-educated person could live comfortably and securely on a manufacturing salary. Our economy is currently dealing with a decline of well-paying work for relatively low-skilled labor. We're transitioning from a work-based economy to a service economy where intellectual skills are most valuable.
The economic study establishment sees this. Obama sees this. Cast in this light, the spike in college tuitions is not the irrational bubble that Thiel attempts to portray, but rather a natural and unavoidable consequence of millions of people suddenly realizing that their futures depend on skills that until now only private colleges have been able to give them. Economically, subsidizing higher education is a natural response. Culturally, placing higher value on higher-tier educations is a natural consequence given the fact that simply having a degree is no longer by itself a marker of intellectual exceptionality. Hence the spike in demand for prestige.
The only way this country is going to transmute the legacy of its fantastic economic power from the twentieth century into correspondingly fantastic economic power in the twenty-first century is by successfully making a transition to a knowledge economy. People know this, and they're reacting en mass. Money is being poured by the bucketload into higher education. Radical experiments are taking place in education technology. Traditional institutions are rethinking themselves. This change is already in progress, and it's clear the solution is more focus on education rather than less.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/01/03/business-school-startups-entre...
[2] http://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/documents/Pierce%...
For the vast majority of college graduates, the degree credential is a great signal that they can be trusted to work independently, retain knowledge, and deal with a large institution. While I certainly think we need a solution to the spiraling cost of university and would like the 18-22 year olds who are not actually interested in a liberal education to be productive with that period of their lives, we have to acknowledge the signals that completing college send are much larger more than an understanding of a body of knowledge.
Advanced economies seem destined to breed immaturity and extended adolescence. You see it in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. It has to be that way, because the dirty secret of them is that there's low demand for workers and the only way to look like there is full employment is to delay adulthood (and hasten retirement, which is welcome if it's elective and wealthy retirement but horrible if it's age discrimination and despair).
We put people into college because most of them have no hope of getting jobs (at least, jobs appropriate to their social class) otherwise. Widespread college is the most socially acceptable way for (a) young people to stay out of a working world that doesn't want them and that they'd be too immature to handle, (b) middle- to upper-class parents to transmit connections and status under the guise of "merit"-- in reality, it's more complex than that, since academic success is a combination of factors including merit, and it's this illegibility that allows the ruse to work-- and (c) people to be fully enculturated into either their native social class, or (in fortunate but rare cases) the social class that society "corrects" them to inhabit when a lower-class child has proven extreme merit.
This is not an easy problem to fix. College has become a private safety net for middle- to upper-class children while they get to an age and level of intellectual maturity that will make them acceptable to the modern economy. It's a socially acceptable way for these kids to sit out of that game for 4 years, under the supposition (which I think is right) that the experiences that they'd have without college would be so negative as to be detrimental.
Peter Thiel's advice, in general, is bad. It applies to statistical outliers, perhaps. Even then, I'm not sure that I agree. But given that the social purpose of college (at this point) is to handle this problem of labor oversupply, the "fix" of asking young people to go directly into the workforce isn't going to work. It's just going to flood the labor market even more.
Also, I agree widespread adoption of going straight into the workforce could affect unemployment numbers tremendously. But for most people, the current "fix" is to have an institution babysit young adults for 4-5 years while allowing them to accumulate a mortgage's worth of debt. At least with the unemployment numbers the weakness would be more visible.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating the abolition of college as an institution, but I've seen too many people graduate with no marketable skills (and no job prospects). I would argue that for most people, it's not worth the price of admission.