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Just Say No To College
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Alex Williams writes in the NY Times that the idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Inspired by role models like the billionaire drop-outs who founded Microsoft, Facebook, Dell, Twitter, Tumblr, and Apple, and empowered by online college courses, a groundswell of university-age heretics consider themselves a DIY vanguard, committed to changing the perception of dropping out from a personal failure to a sensible option, at least for a certain breed of risk-embracing maverick. 'Here in Silicon Valley, it's almost a badge of honor,' says Mick Hagen, 28, who dropped out of Princeton in 2006 and moved to San Francisco, where he started Undrip, a mobile app. 'College puts a lot of constraints, a lot of limitations around what you can and can't do. Some people, they want to stretch their arms, get out and create more, do more.' Perhaps most famously, Peter A. Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, in 2010 started his Thiel Fellowship program, which pays students under 20 years old $100,000 apiece to bag college and pursue their own ventures. 'People are being conned into thinking that this credential is the one thing you need to do better in life. They typically are worse off, because they have amassed all this debt.' UnCollege advocates a DIY approach to higher education and spreads the message through informational 'hackademic camps.' 'Hacking,' in the group's parlance, can involve any manner of self-directed learning: travel, volunteer work, organizing collaborative learning groups with friends. Students who want to avoid $200,000 in student-loan debt might consider enrolling in a technology boot camp, where you can learn to write code in 8 to 10 weeks for about $10,000. 'I think kids with a five-year head start on equally ambitious peers will be ahead in both education and income,' says James Altucher, a prominent investor, entrepreneur and pundit who self-published a book called '40 Alternatives to College.' 'They could go to a library, read a book a day, take courses online. There are thousands of ways.'"
You certainly don't need it, but it helps. If it helps enough to compensate the additional time spent on it depends on what you plan to do though. In some areas, for examples, you must have a specific graduation degree to be even allowed in.
I agree that it would be much more sensible and fair if you were always judged by what you know and not by what title you have, but unfortunately that is not always the case.
Along the same lines as your point:
All Of Nation's Resources Dumped Into 50 Children Who Are Actually The Future
If we could just cherry pick those kids now, we wouldn't need to worry about everyone else! ~sarcasm
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
To first get to talk to people, they need to pick you out of 100 other resumes.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I paid about half a year's starting wage for my degree in computer engineering. I don't think the problem is college, I think the problem is people thinking they have to spend ridiculous sums of money for it.
Speaking as a history major, if you go to school for a subject that isn't going to be related to an actual opening in the middle class, you're not going to get a middle class job. That's math that even a barista can do, if they want to.
Don't get me wrong, I like the subject I studied, a lot. It's extremely important to have perspective and know how things were, and not what people tell you they were. On the other hand, if I hadn't had a solid technical background, a tech job in college, and some CS classes, I was looking at being a lawyer, a stockbroker or a waiter.
I really only needed college to get my first job, but it was directly related to getting my first job. You also probably want the degree so you can get into a graduate program. You don't need it, but it may help to get your MBA at some point if you want to be a manager, or at least, an MS in a technical field to move up that track.
I am just going to state, you are going to need a college degree on your resume to get past HR, but I will also say *it doesn't matter where you get it from, if it's accredited* all they care about is your degree being written on your resume after your first job unless it is an academic job. If it's academics, you better have gone to an Ivy League or other notable school and been in a very good graduate program afterward. Otherwise, you're teaching community college, buck-o.
There is an issue here.
People with degrees have a lower unemployment rate than those without.
So, statistically, it makes a difference.
Wish I could mod you up. I picked up BS, MS, and PhD (why on this last one... I'm not entirely sure) in CS without I or my parents having to pay for it. There are scholarships available for undergrads and assorted "graduate assistant" positions if you continue to the graduate level. The biggest thing most people I've dealt with need to understand is there is nothing wrong with going to a state school.
At the college level your degree is heavily what you make of it. If you want to learn a lot about the field, you can. If you want to skate by and barely do what's required, you can. However, if you interview with for a position and it's clear that you never did anything beyond the basic coursework and never cared enough to dig deeper on anything you're probably not getting a job. Pick a field somewhere in the intersection of "you're interested in it" and "you can get a job in it" and actually apply yourself. Look at the edges of what's taught in school and find bits and pieces that are interesting to you. Learn several programming languages, just so you can see that they're so inter-related that you can pick up whatever the new hotness is well enough to get through a basic interview. Learn some basic desktop IT work along with that CS degree so you could identify how the OS ate itself or what part the magic smoke escaped from and replace it. Learn every trick you can find for debugging tough problems from debuggers, to profilers, to writing your own logging routines, to breaking out wireshark because god only knows what's ACTUALLY traveling over the wires.
None of these things necessarily require a degree but if I were to roll a die on either a programmer who has a degree and one that doesn't, with no other knowledge, my odds of getting someone useful are slanted toward the college degree.
This has been tried, more or less, in a large study spanning over 70 years(!), but without great success: "In his book Fads and foibles in modern sociology and related sciences (p. 70-76), sociologist Pitirim Sorokin criticized the research, showing that Terman's selected group of children with high IQs did about as well as a random group of children selected from similar family backgrounds would have done."