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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.'"
First of all, most of those "billionaire dropouts" were dropouts from Ivy League schools with plenty of startup money from daddy already at their disposal, not dipshits coming out of no-name-high-school. Secondly, most of them only left college when they already had contacts and solid plans (and financing) in place for starting their own businesses. They didn't need degrees because they were going to be hiring *themselves*, not having to worry about some HR department that will toss any non-degree applicants right into the trash.
For most of the non-rich, non-Ivy League assholes like the rest of us--we still need a college degree if we're going to get beyond the front door to any stable job. We're not Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I’m all for the elimination of college/university as an almost necessity to get a decent job.
That said, for every tech millionaire dropout, there are probably 1000 guys with good technical knowledge eking out a living on a hell desk. At a minimum, not having a degree is going to make things harder and reduce your options. Again, for every small startup you can wow with your cool open source contributions, there's a dozen companies who will just shredder your resume (and before you say "who wants to work for such a company", keep in mind HR is usually not reflective of the working environment at most places).
Much as it sucks, I still think the best bet is to learn on your own, then sweat out the degree.
Then again, here in Canada tuitions are high but not insane. I worked a McJob part time through highschool, full time through summers, and was able to pay off the remainder of my debt fairly quickly after graduating.
There is also something to be said about college/university as a good thing. It forces you to take stuff you’d have no interest in otherwise, there is some social development, you learn to deal with different personalities, etc..
If you have drive you can succeed by yourself.
With high-school becoming a pat-on-the-back-thanks-for-showing-up affair college is what teaches people to knuckle under and get stuff done. If you need that lesson you need college.
The unemployment rate for college grads is half that of non-college grads. Yes, there are these billionaire dropouts, but they are the exception not the rule. Besides, if you're capable of having a billion dollar idea without a college degree, aren't you just as capable of having a billion dollar idea WITH a college degree? Why take the risk? Stay in school and have the best of both worlds.
This comes from the same mentality as people who skip vaccinating their children: we have a generation who grew up taking things for granted, so they feel free to reject the very things that gave them that privilege. Grow up without being surrounded by disease, and it feels safe to throw away vaccines. Grow up taking an educated populace for granted, and it feels safe to throw away college.
It's also the same mentality that leads people to stop taking medications. I've seen so many people with seizure disorders stop taking their pills after a time because they don't have seizures anymore..... then immediately have seizures again. I know one person that died as a result of this.
As a person who has gone to college, dropped out, and is now going back, I understand the value of the education and experience. It's not for everyone, but it really does have immense value. Very few people have the disposition and dedication to focus themselves and spend their time doing something better than college - most who drop out or don't go will spend their time doing something far less valuable.
...welcome the chance to be an overlord to the new underclass of skilled workers. Without a degree (maybe even diploma), they will have to start from the bottom and fight their way up, leaving hundreds of less lucky but equally skilled workers at the bottom too. And if they think "the bottom" is unpaid intern, they're in for a surprise. They might have to pay for the experience (those education dollars have to be sucked up somewhere).
See, but if you went to college you would learn that outliers exist in all populations. One should not make conclusions based on an outlier because they do not provide significant evidence for a result. If instead you look at the vast majority of successful people they have college degrees. That being said there is evidence that certain programs such as vocational or even Ivy League programs have negative effects of certain subsets of the work force. But let's try not to make grandiose claims on faulty evidence.
Skipping college and starting your own blockbuster company is an option, much like winning the lottery is an option, or being born with millionaire parents is an option.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And anyone with any athletic ability should just head straight for the pro's. I mean, the odds against becoming a basketball star or the next Zuckerberg can't be that long, right? Right?
or NBA, or music, etc, etc, etc The VAST majority of people who skip college will never achieve anywhere near the financial level they could have achieved by going to school. Skipping college and becoming a billionaire is akin to being the lead point scorer in the NBA without ever playing in college. Yes, it happens, to one person out of millions that play basketball.
Unless the drive you're talking about is the one to your parents mansion, drive gets you more work.
Up here in Canuckistan, 'college' means Community College. Community Colleges are mandated (in Ontario at least) to serve the local job market. That means that if there aren't jobs in a particular field, there should not be a college program.
In other words, if you attend a community college, you have a very good chance of getting a job. Some programs have 100% job placement year after year. The statistics are available, you can check the graduate placement and starting salaries before you enrol.
In my particular program, we often get university graduates who can't get jobs. Community Colleges don't get nearly enough respect.
where you can learn to write code in 8 to 10 weeks for about $10,000
Just what we need, more shitty code for someone else to figure out how to work around the problems created by said code.
Considering the amount of work I spend every day fixing issues or trying to resolve problems due to bad coding from multi-million dollar companies, the last thing we need is more people shoveling out more shit when there is enough shit already out there.
We don't need the latest and greatest shiny. We need code that works.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The problem isn't so much about not going to college, but having the drive to do something after you get out of college. My job requires me to be on several 'higher learning" areas, and the common thread I see is LAZY students. They are more worried about hooking up, getting drunk/stoned/high, or some other alternate level of conscientiousness than to worry what they are going to do if they graduate. Granted, they are 18-22 usually, and that would be job #1 for the most part, but, if they had counselors who would explain to them what life was going to be like in a few years, maybe it could penetrate their polluted brain cells. I skipped the traditional 4 year and went to a trade school for two years. I have been employed & successful for the past 35 years. I had a high school counselor who was the best in figuring out what I loved to do, encouraged me and suggested a school to improve my skills. BEST thing that ever happened was skipping the 4 year college route. And, when I graduated? I was DEBT FREE!
Students who want to avoid $200,000 in student-loan debt
Yeah, I don't know how this happens. I mean, I know how it happens ... you go to a school on the East Coast so you have the name on your resume. I went to the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities for four years and came out with $20,000 in loans (worked three jobs in college). A coworker's cousin just graduated from George Washington in DC and came out with $250,000 in loans. Tuition rates at the University of Minnesota versus tuition rates at GWU (note that those are per credit hour! and they don't give you every credit over 13 free like they do at the U of MN).
Frankly, I think this article should be titled, "skip the overly expensive college because you'll get a more than adequate education somewhere else." Okay so I have to prove myself in an interview over someone from GWU. Challenge accepted.
And if everyone drops out of college to start their own thing, who are you going to be hiring when your startup needs to transition to a medium to large company? Other dropouts whose ideas were crap. Are you sure you want to advocate this to be a more widespread phenomenon?
My work here is dung.
Please, do tell of all those Silicon Valley kids who didn't make it. Or the drop-outs who didn't go into CS? How do they get their foot in the door with HR? Those kids who "made it" were very bright to begin with, and they had an opportunity they couldn't pass up by the time they dropped out. What the article is saying is if you drop out, opportunities will come - that's the mentality of every actor trying to "make it" in Hollywood.
I have a certain set of skill that unfortunately aren't too profitable. I'm not in CS nor in dog-walking (as the article suggests). I don't have the aptitude to be a cop. But my skills require a college degree to get my foot in the door. The problem isn't college, but the HR system. And unfortunately, I'm not as bright as Bill Gates or Zuckerberg (both who went to Harvard) to make up the diploma deficit with talent. I went to a state university and as the world goes, pretty average.
What annoys me the most of all, are the examples cited in the article. I bet most, if not all, the kids came from an affluent background, where if they fail there would be a financial safety net from the parents. As for me, I saved up and only had one shot. I tried my hand and didn't make it. My life has changed now where I'd have to save up again for a couple of years for another shot in entrepreneurial career success or start a family.
God, I hate articles like these. It just feeds into every high school kids' fantasies into never going to college and think they can make it big. Opportunity follows talent, not the other way around.
Drop out of Harvard University to start your tech company? This might work.
Drop out of the County College of Morris to start your own tech company? Not so much.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It's amusing that people would advocate this when statistics show that college graduates not only face a lower unemployment rate, but they average higher incomes as well.
As others have pointed out, you'll notice that the successful entrepreneurs who dropped out either went to ivy league schools or had wealthy parents. Even if they had to scrape for their own money, their backgrounds conferred instant confidence in their abilities amongst anyone they approached. One of the most important aspects of a successful business, contacts, where there from the start.
A second important factor here is that these guys were already actively engaged in whatever lead to their success. They would have been successful just the same had they completed college because the drive was already there. These aren't random students more interested in partying than schoolwork. But sure, let's perpetuate the idea that we don't need college so that we end up with an even bigger group of resentful individuals resentful for not having been multimillionaires.
Of course, we should be talking about the cost of an education. College tuition is seriously overpriced but instead everyone harps on student loans. And the government backing those loans simply adds fuel to the fire, creating a massive bubble. Certainly, we should be looking at trade schools, but I think the real problem in the US is perception. Most people think trade schools are beneath them. But when you've got MBA's sucking everyone else dry in a race to bottom, who can blame them?
Let's look at the vast majority of people who haven't gone to college and be inspired by them. This is like saying that the 2 people who won $250M each in the lottery should inspire us all to spend all of our disposable cash on lottery tickets. Statistically your chances of becoming rich as a professional athlete are probably better than becoming Bill Gates or Zuckerman. Oh, not to mention, both of them were in college, and without it and the resources that were available to them because of that neither would have what they have now.
Personally having a degree in languages and engaging in the academic circle made me a lot better person overall. Even though my degree and employment career are stark opposites, at least I got the time to think and explore under the guise of "academic development". Then again, I was a student in Norway and our educational system is a bit less costly than compared to the US. I am satisfied with my career so far and it does only seem to be better from now on, building on the knowledge I accumulated by having some years as a student.
Wait! I have a better idea to avoid $200K of loans. Don't go to an overpriced private school; do go to a good state school. Get a major in a technical area where you can work on internships or co-op often to cover a good portion of your tuition. Get an automatic job offer when you graduate from your co-op / internship company.
Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer who also went to harvard and made lots of contacts
Zuck hired a hardvard educated COO
Michael Dell also hired a college educated COO when it was time to really grow the company
same with all the other startups that made it big. they all hired college educated senior officers, gave up a lot of control and ownership in the company to have it grow. writing up some code on the weekends and renting space on amazon isn't going to turn your startup into a billion dollar company
running a startup without someone who knows how to grow the company means you will always be some small fry and never make it
Students who want to avoid $200,000 in student-loan debt
If you are taking on $200,000 for a 4-year degree, you're doing it wrong. While it is increasingly more difficult every year to work your way through college (as I did), nobody should need to take on this much debt for a 4-year degree. Likely someone taking on that much debt is living way outside their means.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
For every dropout that got to be a billionaire (specially if they don't come from a wealthy family which can pay for their mistakes), there are thousands of dropouts which will never get beyond a minimum-wage job.
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
Go ahead, just say no to college, that's fine by me. Degreed people like myself need ambitious young people like you to work for us and do all the shit we don't feel like doing.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Who are these idiots that continue to spout this inane crap trying to fool?
The very people they want to be able to hire on the cheap and force them to work 12+ hour days. Telling people to not go to college has nothing to do with wanting people to succeed more. It's about wanting a less educated populace so that tech companies can depress wages.
This works great if you can take what other (typically college grad) people have done and build on it - a la Facebook. It doesn't work so well if you want to create something NEW, a la the linux kernel. It seems like a great short term win, a 'sugar high' type of thing - you cash in long term success early for a short term (unsustainable? ask Facebook shareholders) win. The problem is that you need an ever increasing number of long term things to get the same short term boost, and eventually all you have is short term stuff.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What the hell does one get out of just reading a book, especially one per day? Learning requires study, analysis, comparison, debate, experimentation, more analysis, more comparison, more debate. I'm not saying it is impossible to learn stuff on your own simply by being exposed to ideas, but a well presented and managed college or university course can accomplish a lot more than simple exposure to an idea. My country (Canada) is badly enough run now by people who think they know everything they need to, but don't.
Hmm, you need a tertiary education to understand statistics and why some people make it big without formal education...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Look at the money they paid Lebron James right out of high school. No need to go to Duke or Kentucky.
Absurd? You bet, but the the analogy is the same. Those who have the talent, motivation, and contacts to start a business without college are out there past the 6 sigma point on the curve just as athletes like James are. For the vast majority, however, going to college to learn your trade and, even more important, learn how to learn is the best path to a successful career.
There are two issues - 'value of college' and 'cost of college'.
As many other posters have eloquently put, the value of college for most of us is priceless. Very few of us have the entrepreneurial spirit. For every successful entrepreneur or 'self made millionaire', there are thousands who did not make the cut. In a winner takes all society, we forget the majority and we focus on the minority and aspire to be a part of that rarefied circle. This is at best wishful thinking, and at worst will have disastrous consequences to ones morale, prospects, motivation and energy. This is what the guy who says "in Silicon Valley, being a drop out is a badge of honour" fails to notice.
The actual issue is 'cost of college'. There is no reason - absolutely no reason - for a four year degree to cost more than $20 or $30K without scholarship or stipends. The classic American aphorism "follow the money" should be applied to find out "why college costs a bomb"? You will end up in the door steps of American government, lending agencies, universities becoming a profit centre and other vested interests.
Americans should fight "cost of college education", not "value of college education".
Tat Tvam Asi
Basing a decision not to get a degree on outliers like Zuckerberg and Gates is pretty dumb. Some thoughts:
1. People who are highly successful sans-degree would likely also be highly successful with a degree. The lack of a degree did not juice their success; they succeeded despite a lack of credentials.
2. Choosing not to get a degree creates a much crappier "worst case" compared to getting a degree (a. from a reputable institution, b. in a marketable field and c. with decent grades). Many more non-college-graduates experience this worst case than wind up like Zuckerberg.
3. College needn't cost $200,000. Especially if you're the sort of high-achieving person who is likely to be successful even without a degree. If you're paying $200,000 for a degree you're most likely attending a private university and have wealthy parents. My household earns more than 85% of households; my kid would pay $15k/year to attend Harvard. Paying full price at a top 25 public in-state university would run $10k/year. Toss on a national merit scholarship and we're looking at ~$5k/year. Depending on the field of study that could be earned back via paid co-ops during the final two years.
You don't need college if you're going to compete with $1/hr third world labor. You just need the ability to work 16 hours a day and not ask questions.
You don't need college, son, but we've got a dormitory waiting for you.
The past year, I've been reading a lot of these "You don't need college" stories, mostly in right-wing and pro-corporate media. I don't think it's coincidental.
Nobody is telling Mitt Romney's kid that he doesn't need college, even though (guess what) he REALLY doesn't need college. In fact, it's one of the trending memes of 2012: "You fucking proles don't need college because there are pictures of cheeseburgers on the cash register buttons."
You are welcome on my lawn.
The main reason, it seems, is cost. While the USA actively scares out people from pursuing a degree, a masters' or a PhD because most don't want to pay that for the rest of their lives, the rest of the world is doing the opposite: stimulating and financing such degrees.
Should I extrapolate that for the future or are you able to guess what happens next?
The most important skills needed for successful administrators and technical employees in general can't be taught. Critical thinking and problem solving.
College will teach you some good CS theory and maybe one to three languages and possibly some life skills if you don't already have them. But if you can't learn a new programming / scripting language or CS theory without a college class, you'll be viable after college for 5 years max.
If you are self taught, you will continue to self teach your entire life. If you additionally have critical thinking and problem solving skills and decent life skills, you will find that you continue to rise to the top of whatever team you are on and that opportunities seem to fall in your lap over and over again, regardless of whether you went to college or not.
You will live a comfortable life without much worry. And chances are if your problem solving skills are strong, then you also ENJOY solving problems and will enjoy your work.
I know someone who studied Information Systems and dropped out. Guess what? On his linkedin page he claims to have a degree and he does work as a software engineer.
I think if you know the basics, lying on your resume about your degree is a strong option.
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I went to university because I wanted to continue learning.
If all I wanted was a job, I would have gone straight from high school to get a pilots license and got a job flying tourists around.
Or I could have told my friend I wanted to work in his store.
Will my degree help me get a job in a field I find interesting?
I sure hope so, but even if it doesn't I already got what I really wanted out of it, which is that I learned lots of things about different fields.
Of course it helps that due to various scholarships and part time jobs I have almost no debt.
The big-name schools do provide a few benefits: 1. They have more financial aid money available, so there's a decent chance that if you get into, say, Yale, you won't pay even close to the full price. They may even have special programs specifically to help people like you if you're from a historically disadvantaged background (e.g. a scholarship fund set up 50 years ago dedicated to educating people called at the time "Negros").
2. The future movers and shakers are your classmates. If you want friends in high places for cozy patronage jobs, that will help.
3. Everyone around you will think you're brilliant with no other proof whatsoever. For example, my sister went to an Ivy League school, and many of her classmates were hired right out of school to work in "consulting", which is basically a job of traveling around the US giving Powerpoint presentations on topics they knew little to nothing about. They got the jobs specifically due to their Ivy League education.
So basically your defense of these overly expensive schools is nepotism, dumbshits at the top of the pyramid and other horrors of what is wrong with America? Got it. Also I find it amusing that "you need money to make money" also applies to college ... "you need money to be unquestionably paid lots of money." This should be closer to a meritocracy not a country of "daddy has contacts."
Also, to invalidate your first point, the article starts with the premise that everyone is coming away $200,000 in debt unless you drop out or skip college so, no, apparently not everyone gets Yale at reduced price. And if $200,000 is the "reduced" price, you should asked to be kissed first.
My work here is dung.
The only skill a degree proves you have learned is how to pass exams. If passing exams is an essential part of your job description, then I guess a degree is invaluable.
My view is that there are two ways to look at College. One is as an investment the other as personal growth.
From an investment standpoint you need to look at the return on the investment. This decision should be treated as any investment decision.
From a personal growth standpoint you have to look at the cost with the full knowledge you won't get that money back. This should be treated like any purchase of leisure like taking golf or cooking classes.
The problem is some people confuse the two. It is irresponsible to go into debt for personal growth. That is the same as taking on debt you have no hope of paying off to go on a trip. If you have the means to pay for it there is no issue with taking the trip.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
As a never-went through age 22, I wore skipping college as a badge of pride while I tolled away at various dot coms and consulting companies. I did attempt to go back at 23, but did not appreciate the challenge and went back to work. I decided to restart my college education in my 30s and I have found a new appreciation for the courses taught. If a lesson is learned by a kid going to college, I believe it should not simply be how to buckle down and get work done, but how to critically think and logically examine the many sides of an issue. Personally, I was a pretty black and white thinker through my mid 20s---perhaps I just greyed out of that a little---and I do believe that college education helped me to recognize and analyze multiple opinions and viewpoints on a myriad of issues without being too quick to rush to judgement.
The conversion of a college degree into an MCSE style mill is undermining most of the value that a college diploma would add to a resume. In my initial college venture I encountered a lot of undergrads that seemed to believe that if you just showed up, you would get your diploma and upon graduation be rewarded with your new six figure job (pre-recession). I am not sure where that idea came from, but I felt bad for them. Tens of thousands of dollars of student debt, and limited post-college career prospects often netted well under 40k a year pay, for years, while they learned their actual career skills.
IMHO, the system has turned into a racket. There are a decreasing minority of students who try and make the most of the education and they are the ones who are most likely rewarded on a long-term timeline by their hard work. There also seems to be an increasing majority that treat it as High School Round 2. They simply show up physically, incur huge amounts of debt with no takeaway other than a piece of paper, and then move on to the next hurdle (law or grad school) and repeat the process. Having either type of student coming out into the workforce with massive amounts of debt doesn't seem like a great economy builder to me... Perhaps I am overreaching, but it seems like for-profit education and wreck-less fiscal accountability in the state schools has undermined the entire reason higher education exists, to internalize critical thinking, Socratic methods, and mold well rounded people that help the economy and civilization as a whole positively evolve.
Just my two cents
All of those companies were doing things that (almost) nobody else was doing at the time of their inception. When 1000 people drop out of college with the exact same "great new idea", 999 people become unemployed and eventually discouraged.
Don't put the idea in someone's head that they should immediately drop out of college if they want to start a "tech company", because nowadays people think "tech company" means "I want to build a website like Flickr but with a red logo instead of a blue one". They also think you can get by by doing what someone else is already doing, only a little differently. This is very, very far from the truth.
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to think up a model on your own, and it needs to be very different from established businesses. You can't just copy-paste a business plan and call yourself an "entrepreneur", and nobody's going to pay you to sit there and wallow in your own perceived greatness. You have to do something that people want to pay for!
The last thing society should be doing is encouraging students with no unique or original ideas to drop out and create the next Pets.com. Encourage students to think of creative solutions to existing problems, not blindly follow the "entrepreneur" fad when they have no creative merit. That's a recipe for unemployment and a very rude awakening.
This shows the issue alone. It's targeted to those who already have technical skills. Nothing to help those trying to develop the skills but are otherwise distracted or held back by their education (never more in-depth than "Hello World") or environment ("Johnny, get off the computer").
Also, the focus shouldn't be getting rid of college, when you can get rid of something that causes stagnation. If a person is at a stage where he needs to build up technical skills, then you need to use an environment where those skills get practiced.
Hopefully it will reduce the number of college applicants and therefore give my kids a greater choice in which college they can attend.
1) Don't enroll in college
2) Teach yourself statistics
3) Realize the chance of being the next Zuck or Bill Gates is close to nil
4) ?????
5) Profit !!!
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
When people doing ANYTHING, people want justification if it is something that is seen as negative and I think we have this here. While I agree that a college degree is not a necessity to being a smart and intelligent person and also that a college degree doesn't make someone a smart and intelligent person, a college degree is an important piece of paper if you want job stability and security. I used to work in Silicon Valley during the .COM boom. I dropped out of college to work there and I made decent money. The first company that I was with got acquired and downsized and I was one of the people cut. I don't know if it was because of the lack of college degree or because of inexperience, but it happened. I then turned to taking online classes and finishing my degree. The next job a got with the degree paid me 50% more money and unfortunately went out of business. I don't regret dropping out of the college, but I'm very glad that I have a college degree 13 years later. I know that I wouldn't have the job that I have today without it.
When talking about the cost, the options for obtaining an accredited college degree have not be more open than they are now. There are many accredited online degree granting options that can be done at home, while you have a full time job. In other words, you can start working AND work on your degree if you don't want to take 4+ years out of your life for college. Some of these options are quite affordable compared to the traditional college experience.
Speaking as a foreign-born college professor in the U.S., I think that this whole anti-college mentality in the U.S. is largely fuelled by the excessive cost of higher education in this country. Most of the countries that are rising economic competitors with the U.S. are investing in higher education, trying to encourage more students to graduate, and creating a more-skilled workforce. The new President of Mexico has campaigned on a platform of confrontation of Mexico's entrenched teacher unions and wants the country to focus on improving its poor educational outcomes that are holding back development and long-term GDP growth, particularly in tertiary education. In the U.S. state government funding for higher education has been reduced substantially since the 1980s (e.g. University of California, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota). Most of these systems are only nominally state-funded now; they essentially function like private institutions with revenues coming from endowments (i.e. charitable giving); corporate partnerships and patents; and tuition. Compare this with France or Germany where universities are nearly completely state-funded, and consequently where tuition costs are almost neglible (France = 150-500 euros per semester; Germany = 50 to 500 euros per semester). There are of course problems in European universities with lack of resources for research, poor salaries, underfunding of amenities like buildings, facilities, computer labs etc. But students are not hobbled by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Is is not for this reason that these countries lack the anti-college movements we see here in America? Education is viewed primarily as a public rather than private good in these countries; and while it is connected to economic development and incentives these are understood in national terms rather than in terms of individual earning potential. There is also the sense that university education is oriented towards abstract learning that has intrinsic value (what used to be called 'philosophy' understood in a broad sense, e.g. in the term PhD, and whose purpose is understood in terms of the expansion of human knowledge ) rather than practical job training whose value can be measured in monetary terms. When the cost of a degree is low, an investment of several years in this kind of learning seems reasonable even if it does not immediately lead to a career track. In my opinion, it would be best to strengthen the community college and state university systems in the U.S., and develop programs of study explicitly oriented towards careers and job training for substantially lower cost (perhaps even with funding from potential employers. Students who are not interested in academics for intrinsic reasons should be encouraged to go to these sorts of institutions (which might develop their own 'elite' variants). In contrast, (a smaller number) of research universities should emphasize their traditional mission of abstract learning, scholarship, basic research and disciplinary progress largely independent of immediate economic incentives. It seems that most American students see college as a means to an end, a waystation on the path to a career. These students need to have a cheaper practical alternative, while the most motivated, intelligent and intellectually curious students who are in a position to make a contribution to an academic field of learning and don't care about making big $$$ should be supported in their endeavors.
Isn't this all rather a hasty generalisation. You may be able to point out a small number of people who have dropped out of college and been successful, but what about those who drop out and end up picking goods for the owners of Microsoft and similar? I am sure that there must be people who have bodies like Charles Atlas without doing any workouts, but I suspect they are few and far between.
Yes, there are a lot of examples of people becoming successful without a degree, but there is MORE examples of people living on the streets because they don't have a diploma and cannot find work, or are working their asses off just to barely scrape by.
To say that college is completely a waste of time and money is just plain irresponsible. There are far more career paths that must begin with a diploma then those that can start by being self taught. Even in software development just because you can code doesn't mean you are good at it, and there are far more skills learned in school then just how to code, such as better problem solving skills, social and organizational skills.
College is a 4 years sacrifice that prepares you for a 40 year career.
A generation of kids not going to school because of schmucks like this telling them they don't need a diploma to get a job will be the last nail in the coffin that is the decline of the USA into a 3rd world country. An entire generation of kids thinking they can get rich quick without education and instead saturating the welfare system and social assistance programs will bankrupt the government and force more American companies to use outsourcing solutions.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Or history.
Or art.
Or mathematics (though that's do-able, it's extraordinarily hard without proper tuition).
Or medicine.
There's a LOT of problems with a drop-out culture for even a minority of students.
Go and ask most people what they wish they had done differently and probably "stay in school" / "work harder at school" / "gone to university", etc. will be high on their lists. Because they realise, and have life experience of the fact, that dropping out makes the choice between lucky/skilful entrepreneur, and waitressing. (There's nothing *wrong* with waitressing, per se, but how many people grow up fantasising about being a waitress?). Whereas a degree of some kind, and education in general, vastly widens the scope of the jobs you *can* get into.
A vanishingly small percentage of people are billionaires or being paid to churn out code that they love on their projects. There's nothing wrong with dreaming of being in that group. But the rest of the world, plus vast percentages of those people who then go on to fail, plus all those people who find they're just NOT good enough to become a self-styled guru on business / programming / whatever, will end up having to find something else to pay the bills, even if only until their "big break" arrives.
And for that, an education doesn't GUARANTEE anything, but *does* give you an advantage, if only of the scope of jobs within your intellectual range afterwards and the opinions of job creators on what those qualifications say about you.
I have a degree. It single-handedly, and through no forcing or "luck" got me my first job. I was building websites freelance. I got a website job for a school because of a friend that my brother knew who worked there. Working there on the website alone, I also was asked occasionally if I knew how to fix X (I generally did, because of a lifetime experience of IT). I was called into the head's (principal's) office the week after I fixed their entire network by flicking a switch and pressing Enter before their paid support line could even answer the phone. We talked. He wanted to give me a network job at the school (they had no on-site IT staff).
The primary factors they were concerned with were integrity (there were entrusting an entire school's data and operational systems to me), work ethic, ability to learn (they were complex systems and almost all their support experience was of "office"-type support that didn't understand schools do things differently) and, finally, experience. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that my degree counted towards all of them and proved many of them. Whereas just "knowing computers" would have hinted at only the last. He stated quite clearly that he wouldn't have employed me if I'd had bad grades - it would not only look bad on the school, employing staff less qualified than some of the kids, but it would affect the work I had to do. No amount of network knowledge or lucky guesses would have got me that job.
(And from there, I went on to work for many other schools on word-of-mouth alone and ended up in a nice cosy job for a private school that I've been in for years now - and in 12 years never had a day where I wasn't employed).
There is no "one plan" that will help everyone, and no doubt a couple of budding entrepreneurs who couldn't make it through college will do okay by the scheme. But claiming that people should drop out of college and go that way automatically is quite, quite daft (especially because most students will struggle at some point and might think it the "easy way out").
You can say it's the field I was sucked into working in, you can say it's the experience and hands-on skill I had, you can say it was just luck, you can say lots of things - but my degree got me my first ever job on it's word alone, and has kept me employed ever since, and often comes up (I'm technically more qualified than a lot of the school teaching staff, even those teaching IT for instance).
If you want to know if a degree, or any sort of
I don't want to work with you.
College are not designed to make the smartest 1% smarter or more successful.
Actually they do that, too.
They don't make 1% most successful any more successful, but this is because your society is based on winner-takes-all principle that turns everything into a win-a-lottery-then-lord-over-everything.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Aside from the other good points people have made about how wrong this article is, you also don't need to accumulate $200,000 in debt to go to college. Go to a good public school (not the best, but a good one) and it won't cost you nearly that much. You could get a 4 year degree for about $50,000 (tuition + frugal living expenses) from a good school. You could also go to a community college for 2 years for practically free then transfer, giving you a college degree for $25,000. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me as long as you are getting a useful degree (one that will actually improve your chances of getting a job).
Software is about the only remotely tech-centric field where you have a small chance of success as a college dropout founder even without prior certified qualification, and then only in submarkets which do not cater to other high-tech or regulated fields.
You may become a lucky millionaire with a blockbuster iPad app for the unwashed masses - if you somehow hit the customer taste better than your 1000 competitors, and cash in before you spend your money on the next 10 unsuccessful projects - , but you will never get a foot into, for the average start-up company, much more reliably profitable fields like machinery design and control software, simulation and research data processing tools, or even seemingly boring stuff like custom database-related software which needs to adhere to strict regulations - which is about anything from bookkeeping to medical data processing.
And do not even dream about starting your biotech company directly out of high-school.
Besides, if you're capable of having a billion dollar idea without a college degree, aren't you just as capable of having a billion dollar idea WITH a college degree? Why take the risk?
If you have a billion dollar idea, and you wait to move on that idea until you've finished college, you may lose the first-mover advantage.
If you're a certain type of individual with an aptitude for starting businesses (especially IT related businesses) then you might do just fine without college. But young people reading that story should know that the odds are heavily stacked against you being successful taking that route. People like Gates and Zuck are extremely smart. Both of their SAT scores were off the charts. Most people just don't have the tools they have. It doesn't mean you can't do it, it just means that it's going to be really hard. You need a combination of brains, luck, contacts and a bit of ruthlessness to be successful with your own business.
In the IT field I have worked with several people that did not have college degrees and were very good at what they did. Having a college degree does not mean you are smarter. It's just one measure of accomplishment that an employer can look at. As others have pointed out here, the biggest impediment to success without a college degree is the HR drones that filter the resumes. Most of them don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. But in a big company you have to get past them in order to get interviewed.
College gives you a few advantages: it gets you interviews, it allows you to advance higher up the corporate ladder, you meet people in your industry. Eventually experience counts for more than the degree but in the beginning it helps. For most people it's probably best to go the college route in my opinion.
This will probably get buried on the bottom, but I hope some kid who is trying to figure out their lives gets to read it.
I agree the mogul dropout thing is not a good analogy for most people. But just to share my story - I was exceedingly poor when I was about to go to college. I ended up having to quit college on my second year to move back home to help my parents for a couple of years. I was forced to really think outside the box, and this is how I built my career.
First, I knew I could not afford a 4 year college. I did a one year technical degree. All student loans, no grants, and it was kind of pricey still (about 30K). It did not give me the well rounded education a 4 year college would but it gave me immediate useful skills to make some money. When you are poor making money is a big deal.
Second, I thought very hard of where I wanted to be and what SKILLS I needed to get there outside of what I learned in college. My goal was to manage a large post production facility or digital media production unit. I knew I needed management experience. I knew I needed production experience. I knew I needed exposure to the field in one way or another. And that's where I planned out the rest of my working education. First, I wanted to get a job that would kickstart my career by giving me responsibility. I did a ton of research and ended up taking a job as a head of IT / Multimedia developer for a tiny nonprofit abroad. I didn't care about pay, or the size of the organization, I just wanted the responsibility, the title and the opportunity to get my feet wet.
I did that for a year, then moved to San Francisco. The nonprofit experience was invaluable in educating me and getting my foot in the door in a desktop support position in a kick ass advertising agency. I did that for two years and beefed up my tech knowledge. This place was very supportive as far as giving you room to learn and grow. They gave me a linux, a windows and a mac box and tons of good advice and training.
Next, I really wanted to grow my management experience. I knew I was looking at 10 years or so to grow into management without a bachelors. It was important for me to not wait that long. So I focused on the skill I wanted - management - and looked for ANY management job. Anything that would teach me to deal with people, financial targets, HR, and the added responsibilities that come with that. I went completely out of my field and got a job managing a Dave & Buster's type of place in texas. This was not glorious work. It was a giant pizza buffet, kid's birthday parties, a giant arcade with redemption (run more like a casino). It was a multi-million dollar business with razor thin margins. Hours were grueling, I got paid less than the desktop support job, and many times I would get home at 3AM at the end of a shift with a sore body and a burned out mind. Sometimes I would sit, have a beer, and I wanted to cry. But I didn't - I just reminded myself that there was a plan.
I stuck with that for about a year. The lessons learned were incredible. It would take over a decade to get that amount of responsibility in the tech/production industry. Then I wanted to build up my entrepreneurial experience. I quit my job and started my own videography business (my technical degree was in the media field). It did surprisingly well, which is to say I did not become homeless at any point and was able to pay my bills. Again, huge lessons learned.
Finally, I needed to get back in the tech/media business. I got another job managing an AV business. Nothing glorious but it let me catch up again with technology.
I did that for a year and felt ready to move on. To take the bigger step. I found a job in NYC with a huge ad agency. Deputy IT Engineer for an in-house post production facility. And that's where all the crazy, outside the box thinking paid off.
You see, even though I had no college degree, I had tons of life experience and maturity. At 25 I had done way more than most kids my age. It was time to let that show, and
IMHO... yeah. CERTAINLY over hyped. The vast majority of college age kids have no clue whatsoever about what they'd like to do for the rest of their lives. They go to college because... everybody is going to college.
If you know what you're interested in "AND" you need college to get a degree in it, go for it. But if you haven't a clue, what are you thinking?
If you like to drive truck, work with your hands, tear engines apart, work with plumbing, etc. etc. etc. you'll never be happy in any other field. Maybe a trade school would work for you. Or just an apprenticeship with someone you know. And if you're good at it you'll likely make more than the vast majority of college grads and be happy for the rest of your life.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
"'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"
How about we start using real language to describe things rather than beating this poor word into whatever form we see fit. What they're referring to is learning, which, outside of a university, is still learning, it's just not university learning. There are *lots* of non university learning options, but to call them hacking because they simply aren't quite as commonly accepted as being the most common path doesn't follow the spirit of the word. You're still building skills to build a career and progress your life, you just aren't using a degree to do so... If your world view is so narrow that you somehow consider progressing your career while abstaining from college to be an act of circumventing or subverting an obstacle, in the way that the word 'hacking' would indicate, well I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be very qualified to do any sort of real 'hacking' at all. Hope that career involves doing something with lots of rules written down by other people for you to follow.
What a bargain! I am surprised that Americans study for a STEM career, in today's environment.
Holey moley, if I was allergic to buzzwords I'd be in anaphylactic shock right now. Could the have possibly crammed more buzzwords into the summary?
Really all that needs to be said for going to college: "don't be stupid"
Racking up huge debt for a worthless degree when you aren't already rich? Stupid.
Taking gen-ed classes at community college and then transferring into a state college to get your degree? Smart.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
I work in a large financial services firm, and here is the value of a college degree. It tells me you are willing to finish something. That's about it.
I don't particularly care if your degree is in horticulture or anything else, we have to use a baseline to employ for education. This is for multiple reasons, audits, external investors, etc. It's not as cut and dry as people think; while I like the idea of getting people with skills from outside of the college realm, my HR department still basically requires that I get college grads. It's kind of being part of the 'club' -- I went through, and I'm only hiring people who went through as well.
Granted, there's a great argument to be made about the value college provides, and the obscene cost of it all.... but right now it's just the way it is, and unless you are in an Ivy League school with a great business already in motion, going to college is a safe bet for your future. You won't rise anywhere in the ranks if you don't have a degree, but you can probably get lots of technical positions. But forget management or being an executive.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
...and think twice before you drop out based on what a few privileged geniuses (who were going to succeed in life no matter what) were able to do. Cherry-picked anecdotes are nice but in real life, the unemployment rate among recent college grads is 6.8%. Among recent HS grads? 24% Do you feel lucky punk?
Hmm, I don't think their motives are that viciously evil. People with degrees like Art who aren't inspired enough to make it big in commercial art etc, are also the cheap desperate labor because now they also have that debt to pay off. Questioning the value of the traditional degree is fine, with the cost analysis thrown in there.
I like to observe that the classes themselves are related to the Copyright problem. A lot of my lower level courses were your classic lectures - so just suppose that you could buy the 40 hour lecture set in mp3 format plus book plus Khan-Academy type diagrams for something like the TV Special "Low Price of $129.95". You could then get the bird's eye view of the degree path for a few thousand bucks. For one thing that might cut down on hand-wringing about picking a major. (Yeah Yeah, then someone decides to make it free, copyright lawsuits ensue, but then eventually someone will make free versions of the materials, and THAT'S when this topic really kicks off.)
This is innovation at work. But innovation is messy. So there will always be detractors of the flaws of the Alpha and Beta versions of the new idea.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Inspired by role models like the billionaire drop-outs who founded Microsoft, Facebook, Dell, Twitter, Tumblr, and Apple,
Those drop-outs as we call them had a combination of several of the following:
That is, for these successful folks, dropping out is just a near irrelevant factor in their success.
By comparison, the typical schmuck who thinks college is typically not necessary is the type of person that is severely lacking many (if not all) of the factors above. It is simply a law of numbers kind of thing.
To think that college is not necessary in the general sense is either wishful thinking for the lazy, or self-selecting bias for the ones who had the opportunity to make it without one. Those successes are not the rule, they are the exception. Ergo, it stands to reason that one cannot make a general rule ("say no to college") out of exceptional circumstances.
That is not rocket science, except for those dumb enough to indulge in such silly wishful thinking games.
For every successful drop-out, there are thousands of drop-outs squeezing a meek existance that falls short of what they could have made had they maintained a steady course in education.
MOST IMPORTANTLY for every successful entepreneur drop-out, I can point you to far more college-grad entepreneours (Sergey Brin, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, etc.).
Simply put, there are more successfull college-graduate businessmen than drop-out businessmen. Logically, what should that tell you?
In order to drop out of Harvard or Princeton and start your own (hugely) successful company, you first have to get accepted to, attend, and pay for the aforementioned schools. You just might already have a leg up on the majority of potential entrepreneurial dropouts.
I am not a crackpot.
You know who else didn't have college degrees. Those people who won the lottery this last week. That proves it. Don't waste your time and money on college.
That doesn't mean this is the path for everyone. This is not an invitation to every slacker on the face of the planet to drop out of school and keep smoking weed because "the man's" diploma isn't worth anything. I worked very long and hard before, during and after college, perusing engineering and computer science interests.
In the end - College didn't fit my learning style: Hands on, highly practical, very project-oriented. Combining my need for that with my ADD, meant I learn much better staying up all night tinkering in a lab working on my own projects, than sitting in some lecture hall for a mandatory "humanities" course on "Modern European History". I still read books at home at night on DSP and Theoretical Physics.
I also think the analogy to people like Gates or Zuckerburg is stupid. There is a one in a billion chance of doing something like that - but when correctly executed for the correct individual, a VERY good chance that they would have a very good career, rivaling those of a [typical/average] college grade.
It's totally dependent on the person.
We may agree that a college degree does not guarantee education and that becoming a skilled professional is not strictly conditioned on getting a college degree.
However, ask yourself, when you next go see your doctor. Imagine they say to you: well I studied in a couple of books, sure I can diagnose your condition. Would you trust them? What about your surgeon? Same thing for most fields. When it becomes a little complicated, we have not invented something better than formal education.
In addition to all the lecture and homework, college also gives you a starting network of friends. This is fairly useful as well. Most importantly it is a proving ground, usually the first in a young person's adult life.
It is overpriced in the US though, this is a huge problem. Obviously the education bubble is going to burst at some point, and this means some people are going to get hurt, most likely those who need education the most.
It seems to me that the education and employment bureaucracy is bloating to the point where ones career could be summed up to a long list of bullet points. At the same time I feel the point is always between the lines - its about style - something which appears frequently difficult to define formally. I am currently close to graduating a master in mathematics, but the most important things I learned were barely ever uttered in a class (more likely a bar).
I believe in increasing emphasis on process orientated and project based learning, while trying to keep a wide range of lectures available. I also believe in institutional decentralization. Perhaps we should consider reverting in part to a variant of the age old Master/Apprentice system. The stuff you learn on freshman year is the basics - and its good we have a solid introduction to show us the ropes; But the perfection of ones craft comes from a subtlety only experience and a teacher can convey - whether in person or through a book. We are learning a craft not just collecting knowledge. Keep in mind - decentralized curricula don't rule out third-party quality rating.
But maybe I am just an old fashioned skeptical romantic who finds bureaucracy an inelegant mess. Fortunately decentralized systems can often be started from a small seed, and the price of failure is not that great. So I say - let the Hackademics try it out! Lets see what it evolves to! Maybe a couple of professors will jump the bandwagon and make something new. We need something new - the only consensus I have seen of Academia by Academics is that it has its share of problems.
I for one - will side with the Intellectual Anarchists and Libertarians any day.
University education is not just to get a job. The unfortunate misconception is that that is the only reason you go to school. Or to state it a different way, Universities are not trade schools, never have, nor should never be.They teach fields of study, how the think, review the theories, ideas and practices of a field, give you access to other fields of study so you understand more than just one field.
You learn how to think critically, how to do research, how to present ideas clearly (or at least those are goals). So in the end you come out a better more well rounded person with skills that are applicable in many fields of endevour.
I have noticed a very big difference in self taught and university taught programmers. The difference can be striking with the university taught, having studied multiple languages and problem spaces are more easily able to learn new things and are not trapped in a single language/tool space for solutions.
That is not to say self taught programmers are bad, many are quite capable but would be much better deeper level programmers if they had also sudied, say OOP or OAD and Data Structures and Analysis of algorithms, and some AI and some Business Programming and Some Database design and programming. Usually the biggest deficit I see is the Data Structures and analysis of algorithms part with is much more difficult to pick up DIY unless the programmer is very motivated.
The problem is that many employers are wanting to get programmers on the cheap (offshore presure) and don't and can't see the value of real engineering that goes into programming. To them is all code and one program is like the next. Not so my friend.
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 don't understand how students rack up so much debt. This semester, I brought in more in financial aid (no loans) than my tuition is (over $1000 more, off-campus living expenses considered), so did several of my buddies. I'm a white male, so most scholarships I run across I don't even qualify for for those exact reasons. So I suppose I do understand; they're being lazy and not going for the financial aid that's available.
And it seems to me that if a student would be racking up student loan debt, that same person wouldn't be able to outright pay for that $10,000 2 month camp, and would have to take a loan to get it (or other financial aid), resulting in debt that's a) NOT subsidized interest and b) higher interest rate and c) not deferred payments until you graduate.
Tell that first mover story to Altair, Compuserver, Altavista, Netscape, AOL, Friendster, Myspace....
There have been many studies in many industries that show that there isn't any inherent first mover advantage. In fact, there is more advantange in being a fast-follower (market is already evident, finding/stealing customers, raising money and hiring good people is easier).
The general average over all industries for first movers that caputured more than 50% pre-mass-market share is a 60% failure rate (50% for tech, 70% for others). The long-term first mover mass market share averaged a mere 5% (6% for tech). And these studies don't count the failure rate for those first movers that don't even reach the success level to capture more than 50% pre-mass-market share, or those that failed because the mass market didn't materialize.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, the ability to execute those ideas are the keys to success... Maybe you don't need college to develop the abilites to execute those ideas (and I don't just mean writing code, you have to run a business, raise money, etc.) that but don't throw away college just to be a first mover... The odds aren't necessarily with you.
On the other hand, if you think you can out-smart someone that currently has something going in a market, perhaps that's something to think about chasing quickly... That's the real story behind people like Bill Gates. There were many incumbents in that OS market, before Microsoft stepped in. Just tell that Bill Gates first mover story to Gary Kildall (and his predecessors)...
The basic problem is college pricing is becoming a commodity, the cost of tuition is being justified on future earnings. It shouldn't be a surprise that advanced education is less of a bargain when you set tuition rates based on what a student can earn when they get out, the rate of return on investment becomes less.
I think the social mistake we are making here is that educated people help society beyond what they earn for themselves, outside of business school anyway. By and large if you are being trained to be an employee (STEM, Teaching, Social Work) more or less by definition you are providing more value to society than you are being paid, your employer calls that profit BTW. Thus it must be understood that education benefits society normally more than it benefits a specific individual and society has a responsibility to educate its members. This situation is similar to that of basic research, society (government) can and should spend money on basic research knowing full well it will be businesses who develop the advances and make profit with the help of the recruited scientists and engineers who helped develop the advance on government money to start with.
Also it is true that if you have an internet connection, the only thing between you and anything you want to know is yourself, well OK and your life commitments.
Degrees basically set up a Caste system for the workplace. It's another frustrating hurdle that mires the process of managing good employees -- or getting rid of problem ones.
Some applicants we get have really stellar work experience but the resume ends up tossed, without a second glance, because of a strict policy which only hires degree grads for over 95% of our posiitions. Same thing goes with advancement. If you don't have that Degree, you may as well find another place to work when you decide you want to try something new.
The second problem is the separating of "haves' and "have nots" in the workplace. Those with Degrees tend to assume a higher social standing over those without. It's disturbing but very real. I don't think we could ever get far enough past that to "Just Say No".
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I frequently tell people that studies are useless. This article made me think about this a bit more.
I am CEO of a little start-up in software that I founded this year, at 25 years old. Nothing big, we barely break even, but we do bleeding edge stuff, work with big names and, more importantly, have fun.
I studied for 5 years (actually 6 if you count bad orientations) in France, where studies are essentially free. So I had no problem with debt or anything like that.
At the end of the my studies, I found them so boring and useless that I decided to go work full-time as a software engineer abroad (it's easier to get tech jobs in the UK than in France), while only showing up for exams, which I passed without problems.
I was offered to do a PhD, but I refused because I considered it a waste of time. The truth is, you will learn much more in one year working on your own or in a company than in 3 years studying in university.
Yet, thinking back on it, I did do some pretty interesting stuff in my early studies that I wouldn't have done on my own. Those things are not particularly useful to my everyday work, but they contribute to some kind of general knowledge about a variety of things.
What I think is that studies up to the bachelor's level are useful since they're very general, but later more specialized studies are better done by yourself alone. There is nothing that makes you a specialist more than to experience the problem domain first hand.
I swear, these articles come out Every Freaking Year. Without fail.
Look: Yes, it is possible for a person to be crazily successful and have little to no formal education. Our history is replete with such stories. But in all likelihood, You Are Not One Of Those People.
A college degree is by no means a guarantee of ability, and the lack of a degree does not indicate a lack of ability. But study after study has shown (at least in the U.S) that degree holders, on average, make more money, are more likely to be employed, are more able to weather downturns, and have a higher net worth than those with less education.
An individual is not a statistic, but to fight against statistics is a gamble.
On the whole, I agree with you. College is not a trade school. However, with the ready availability of Really Good online coursework, message forums, and used textbooks, one can get pretty much an entire undergraduate education, including all that really useful theoretical work, for little to no cost, besides time and an Internet connection. It might take longer, and you are going to have to rely on strangers on the internet to get questions answered, but I don't see the end result being that much different.
Graduate school, with the extensive interaction with professors, is another matter entirely..
My bachelors from a state school cost me about $4000/year or under $20000 total. Easily payable from working just part time during summer break. This includes dorm room (only un-air conditioned dormitory left at Texas A&M,) an incomplete but adequate amount of textbooks, and a very large amount of 10 cent ramen noodle packets.
So with no financial help from parents and without any student loans, I was still able to get a degree from a real college. And now I have a proper education as well as this little piece of paper that so many jobs demand.
They forget to mention that one of the best parts of college, apart from being introduced to new things (not necessarily taught new things, but shown that they exist so you can look into them yourself in your spare time), is networking. During my upper division coursework, I've spent far longer at the bar than I should have, but that time at the bar has been with guys from my computer science classes and we've discussed a lot of ideas, brought in our laptops and worked on some awesome things (released an Android game recently that was programmed 100% at the bar, and usually after a drink or two. Comments galore so I could keep track of my thoughts >.>). You meet people that are _awesome_ at things that you barely grasp, and vice versa. You make friends and team up and work on projects that would take you far longer on your own than if you hadn't collaborated and met people along the way. Example: I generally handle a lot of the Android, web and database stuff for my group of friends, whereas another guy handles circuitry if we want to do something with the Audrino, and is awesome at C and 80x86 assembly, and the last guy is _great_ with math and algorithms for making things "just work."
I'm a grad from CS and EE but I don't believe college is a must. However, media and otherwise keep using the examples of Microsoft, Facebook, Dell, Twitter, Tumblr, and Apple as a counter to post-sec education - to me those are out-liers and anecdote that in those cases, colleges were impediment to the growth of those founders. But media is making the implications based on those examples that, "hey see these guys made it huge without college - go try that!". Bad logic.
How many Bio-chemists or Doctors do you know that are college drop-outs?
The whole "drop out" is a farce rationalization by people looking for an easy way to financial wealth. Almost always you have technologists, business or artistic type people used as "successful" examples of the whole "college doesn't matter" supporters which makes sense because the actual skill and resources used to be successful in those kinds of ventures can be learned outside of college with resources readily available for those interested in those particularly career paths. Bandwidth, paints, computing hardware, brushes, ideas are all readily available at the individual's fingertips; all that's needed is vision, passion, persistence and hard work.
You can't and won't learn bio-chemistry or how to do surgical procedures at home as is true with many ventures. And the reality is most people won't have the fortune of great ideas, capital and luck timing to realize an amazing idea that turns them into independently wealthy, successful "drop out" examples.
Yes, there are examples of people who have become wildly successful while being a college drop-out in certain fields. What will still be required for even those rare examples is hard work, focus, persistence in the face of adversity and fortuitousness timing which most "drop out" enthusiasts are most likely looking to avoid and skip to the "successful" part.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
Built-in assumptions of the 'just say no to college' philosophy:
a) the goal of life is to accumulate wealth
b) the only benefit of college education is to obtain training to achieve goal a)
c) training alternatives to 'college' (online, self-study, internship, etc) are cheaper, quicker, and more focused
d) Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have 'proved' the validity of a), b), and c)
But...young skywalker...what if a) is wrong? In that case, b), c) and, consequently, d) are also wrong. If you actually complete a college education at an accredited institution, most will compel you to take 'training' in a wide variety of areas, will force you to test your ideas with many other people, and...most importantly, will instill in you the idea that the acquisition of knowledge is a lifelong activity that has many benefits outside of a). As a consequence, most bright people who 'graduate' from college, leave with more well-developed goals and philosophy than a) above. College graduates are much more likely to cheerfully seek instruction in new areas during their later lives that do not offer the potential for large financial gain such as, for example, something like art history. And, of course, there are outliers like bill gates or steve jobs but, in general, studies have shown that college graduates accumulate more wealth than non-graduates even if it is not always intended.
If you want to be poor, skip college and trade school.
The likelyhood of being a successful businessman like those listed is actually LOWER than your odds of being a successful actor.
And for actor's it's like 999:1.
So sure-- skip college if you are brilliant ( and often you have at least a couple hundred grand startup money plus a lot of ivy league contacts and 14 years of elite private schooling and tutoring before college) and go for that 999:1 shot.
Otherwise, if you are a normal person- no contacts, average intelligent to even a little smart, average to slightly above average drive... go to college or trade school.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'll just say this. At the very least the college degree demonstrates that the job applicant is willing to commit to something for a 2 year time-frame, even if that something may not be entirely pleasant or 100% interesting to them (all college courses rarely are). Why would I hire someone who couldn't even stick it out in college for two years - how likely is that person to leave my team in 6 months, just like they did with college, after I spend all the time and money training them?
Bow before me, for I am root.
I was one of those who did CS in the mid 90's and dropped out after two years, in my case due to money. I was stuck working on-campus, and even the highest paying job on campus under their work hour restrictions wasn't enough.
I moved back home, got an entry level job, and advanced very quickly. By the time my friends finished their degrees I was making a good salary while they spent years working help desks for minimum wage.
To some extent, I got lucky. I found the right employer at the right time, before the first big 'bubble burst' in the IT world.
Years later after an acquisition and facing eventual layoffs, I spent at least a year looking for a job. I had two places where former co-workers were at that could provide great references and increase my odds. One was an energy company who absolutely would not even look at a resume that didn't have a degree on it. Even their cable monkeys had to have a BS at minimum. Another was a financial institution who at least granted me an interview as a courtesy to my former co-worker but had absolutely no intentions of hiring anyone without a degree.
I tried a major hosting company. It sounded like I was set for the job, though I didn't like much of what I saw--the general staffing there looked like a freshman dorm on laundry day. That didn't go--apparently they didn't want any more senior staffers, just more college kids for minimum wage.
I finally ended up with a software vendor we used who knew my work well, and advanced from there.
I've had people trying to get me to sign up for jobs at newer government data centers that opened up in the area recently. No go there--no job anywhere near my salary level without a degree.
Big Corporate America has too many unqualified screeners in HR.
Small Corporate America is far too concerned about having to pay an employee too much, and are willing to sacrifice what they get for it. Eventually this will come to a head, just like outsourcing to India. When you have to pay ten kids $8 an hour to do what one qualified person making $35 an hour could do you either learn that lesson and thrive, or stick to your ways and die.
Well the ITT / devry / UofP are more about job skills but then why do the employers pass over people who went to them while at the same time saying people who go to other colleges have a job skills gap?
One point others have not made much is this: if you are in IT and can skip college, yes, you can be a good help desk employee. You might be a good database/systems/network administrator. You can even code Javascript or PHP to start putting together a simple website. You are not going to be able to program the type of advanced, complex systems that someone with a BSCS (or Masters, or Doctorate) can though. The only way to do that is to have a foundation of discrete and continuous mathematics, an understanding of statistics, graph theory, computability and computational complexity and so forth. An understanding of how algorithms and data structures interact. How mutual exclusion works. Of how things are fed to the ALU, of how floating point numbers are stored.
If you're going to spend the hours and days and weeks and months and years it takes to study these things, you might as well hook up with a CS program of a decent school, a public school if money is an issue, and learn it there. Most professors know their subjects well (although ones who know their subject well and are great communicators and teachers are rarer). Your classmates are often doing interesting things. Some people say you can study these things outside of college, but why not just go to a public college for 90 minutes, two nights (or on the weekend) a week and get a diploma cheaply? Also, I've never met anyone who has not gone to college, who has learned calculus by themselves, and then studied how limits work for big-O algorithm notation by themselves. They may be out there, but I have not met them.
One of the big problems for people without any college is that they don't know what they don't know. Solutions which will be obvious to someone who has studied computer science over four years (or more) will never even occur to someone who has been putting Javascript together. I tried to write a program in C many years ago which needed threading, mutual exclusion and so forth when I had only the vaguest idea of what those things were. It was a complete mess. Nor did I know it would be a mess when I tried to put it together without understanding mutual exclusion. Which reminds me of an interview question I got wrong many years ago - what is the difference between a process and a thread? I knew a process was more "robust" but could not explain why. And so on. It may be true that school is not the right thing at the right time for someone at some point in their life, but it should be considered in a rational fashion.
People talk about the intangibles learned in college...what it proves about you...
None of that really matters. What really matters is you: do you work hard, will you make a company money.
Unfortuantely first you have to get hired. And not for all of your career. No what we're talking about here is your FIRST REAL JOB. And that means for most of us getting our resume through an HR department against 1000s of other undistinguished/unremarkable resumes. And one of the key filters they use for these jobs is "Degree: Yes or Trash".
it's a simple economics problem. the more people that have X degree in a field, the less value that degree has as a distinction in and of itself, and companies begin looking at other qualifiers to select canidates to interview. College degrees used to be far more rare and hard to get, and nearly garunteed a job in and of itself.
Now you can go to the local mccollege and get "something". So with everyone having degrees, people start questioning the purpose of egtting a degree to get a job. Articles like this show up more and more. Companies start looking for higher and more difficult degrees and certs...multiple degrees, MS's and PHd, etc.
This is largely what has already happened in the US: getting the degree isnt a garuntee of a job, but the degree is so common now that anyone without it goes straight from the envelope to the trash. So the result is you still need that degree oftentimes, to at least get your foot in the door initially and past the faceless HR weenie. This is true for a lot of jobs, regardless of the anecdotal stories about people not having degrees and getting in the door and being successful. They skip over how important that first real job in a field is. Once you're in the door initially, if you do well, you're set.
But first you have to get in the door.
And that usually means a degree to get past the HR gatekeepers.
So stay in school kids.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Because we've hired ITT/devry/UofP people in the past... When you advertise your college to losers in the middle of the night, you end up with a college full of losers.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I suspect it goes something like this:
1) Complain about quality of prospective workforce, but don't hire or train anyone ...
2)
3) Profit!
Someone had to do it.
As someone who never finished college - flunked out of university, twice, but still got about 4 years in, most of them from JuCo - I probably make approximately the same as any college graduate would make who is my age and has my experience. I got in in the mid-90s at a small ISP doing tech support and that was effectively my launching pad for a career in IT. Most of the years in IT it's been as a senior sys/network admin operations-type role.
I am not sure I can honestly and completely say that a college degree would have been worth it for where I am today. It can be difficult to calculate the ROI when you might make only $30-$40K/year to start and have $100-$200k in college debt to pay back (which is what - $800-$1000/mo in loan repayments? At least.). It's an INSANE debt load to have when you haven't even purchased a home and possibly a car yet. And if you go to grad and/or professional school that's another at least 100-200K of debt.
I had only about $8000 to pay down which was manageable when I was making bupkis doing tech. support.
Where it IS beneficial depends on your career path. If you want to end up the Fortune 500/1000-type companies, they have pretty strict codified pathways to management and you pretty much HAVE to have your degree though you'd be surprised that most only care that it is a B.A./B.S. from anywhere school (basically ANY online school or diploma mills like U of Phoenix, Chapman U, etc.) and probably an MBA. If you're really, really lucky your company will pay for at least some of your schooling.
Obviously a place like Google and possibly Facebook wants a B.A./B.S. from a decent college/university. Supposedly your chances are better to get a job there with a degree from Stanford or Berkeley or MIT but clearly not all of their tens of thousands of employees are Ivy League or even top-50 school grads.
And, to be honest, only management is where the serious money is in an F500 company. I'm over 40 now and am only now making what I made over 10 years ago - yes it took that long to claw back from a lay-off from a Bay Area startup, another layoff (that time from a big F500 corporation - at least the severance was good that time!), and getting fired because I was sucking at a job I really hated (and losing our home and filing bankruptcy thrown in there). Chances are best case I'm getting 3-4% per annum increase with maybe a $3000-$4K bonus annually. In short, as a rank-and-file employee I'm just barely keeping up with cost of living increases, especially where I live in the Bay Area. I could go to a San Fran or South Bay company and make $120-$140K probably but then rent is double where I am now, at least, and I'm competing against 4-6 Facebook roomies who are 25 years old.
Where I am today I am pretty "comfortable" but not in any way comfortable financially. If I could make $30-$50k more per year and live here I'd be in good shape. The company is doing well and growing like crazy and has been around over 20 years and is tracking toward a half-billion in sales annually. I am definitely not ready for retirement in roughly 20-25 years as I'm only contributing the minimum to my 401(k). And let's not talk about all the insurance I *should* have - life insurance for me and probably my wife, insurance for my mom's old age, etc. etc.
So... I work little side jobs here and there (I recently had a very good one where I was pulling roughly $1500-$2000/mo additionally down but unfortunately that went away) and am working on big ideas that hopefully I can turn into a viable business. That honestly is the only way I see to finding a pathway to relative financial stability.
All this to say - I would seriously weigh out where you want to be in the next 20-30 years. College is hugely, hugely expensive and if you have the drive to build competencies in valuable technical areas outside a traditional classroom setting and do that throughout your work life you can probably make as much or more than a college graduate would make. If, however, you see yourself heading the traditional pathways to management and envision yourself in a CxO chair where you have a ton of responsibility but you're also making a ton of money then go for college because in all probability it will pay off.
First of all, this is a false statement:
"They typically are worse off, because they have amassed all this debt."
No, they are not "typically" worse off. They are "typically" vastly, vastly richer than uneducated people. Student loan debt for an undergraduate degree is extremely low when measured in years-of-marginal-salary. For instance, in 2002 I graduated with $20k in debt, which was about 1 year of marginal earnings when I first graduated, maybe 6 months marginal earnings now. So after that first year (or less), it's been all gravy. An extremely foolish undergrad today could go to, what, $100k at the very top end, which if they are truly foolish is a few years of marginal earnings, meaning for the latter 37 years of their career they will be ahead.
Second of all this pisses me off:
"role models like the billionaire drop-outs who founded Microsoft, Facebook, Dell, Twitter, Tumblr, and Apple"
Superstars have never needed an education to succeed. Eminem didn't need a high school diploma to be a successful rapper, but all those other failed shitty rappers ended up wishing they had one. Guess what? Sometimes people win the lottery, but that doesn't make you smart for counting on being the winner, and it doesn't make others foolish for deciding to build a successful financial life under the assumption that they weren't going to win the lottery.
If you are a one-in-a-ten-million superduperstar, then by all means drop out and be a superstar (and don't call with regrets if you discover that you aren't so super). If you are one of the rest of us 9,999,999, then maybe do the difficult work of going to class and doing your homework.
The Billionaire Boy's club or Millionaire Boy's Club are two artificial carrots we Americans all think are attainable, when we stop using our intelligence and reasoning skills. Success is built on whether or not you truly enjoy the vocation(s) time affords you throughout your llife. If you want to paint so be it. If you want to write so be it. If you want to be the next Tesla so be it. When you're dead the Club isn't going with you. If you are secure in your choices for life that is the greatest success of all.
My former boss, twice over, Steven P. Jobs was too busy trying to applying where he saw the interaction of technology and society headed then where it has been. He immersed himself in it. It fulfilled him in all the areas in which he found interesting. He died without regret. His family is now in-charge with applying their dreams and hopefully dying without regret. The means upon which to do so and how grand varies, but regret cares not for wealth.
I think everyone should go to college. I am a self-taught programmer and regret everyday not finishing my education when I was younger and struggle going to college now in my life to create a more secure future for my family. I do pretty well at my job and have been constantly employed but the no degree thing is always hanging over my head and even though I have had excellent jobs, there are jobs that I would of liked to have had but because of not having a college degree didn't have the opportunity. College only creates more opportunities in a persons life. That being said, I know there are people with PhD's flipping burgers at McDonald's or working at really menial jobs that have college degrees, maybe they have no passion for what they studied or didn't do that well in what they studies, alas though college can't create common sense or the drive to succeed in life. There is also a lot of brainwashing by councilors or society that the more expensive schools offer a better education; Studies have shown that starting salaries and the career paths end up being the same regardless of where people are educated. Bottom line: 1. Go to college 2. Find the cheapest route for college 3. Be passionate about what you study.
I'm seeing a lot on here about education vs connections. I've been in the IT world for a long time and I'm prepared to say that connections are far more important than a degree. Yes, a degree is very helpful. In the beginning. As your career advances connections become much, much more important. Knowing the hiring manager, and having them vouch for your ability, is an enormous advantage. At that point your resume goes to the top of the stack and HR's role is simply to set up the interviews and take care of the on-boarding process once you get hired.
Now all of this assumes that you can actually do the work that is required of the position. But if you can, and you know the people in charge, it's much easier to land the job. What it comes down to is that the hiring manager would rather hire you than someone they don't know. Why? Because they know you and have worked with you before. It's human nature.
Lacking a 4 year education involving OTHER TOPICS that were not job related or of interest, these people never took STATISTICS and therefore do not understand the strong evidence and correlation for college education and earnings power.
Reality is that college educated people were more desirable in the past and it was not merely because of college but ALSO the type of people who would go to college. Now, everybody goes to college and the benefits diminished, it no longer is a filter for an elite class of workers and the metrics provided by the system and the status are not as good as the simple old fashioned classification of having earned degree vs not ever going.
In a MBA-as-religion society: job related skills are more important and making money is all that really matters. You're a fool to get a PhD that was a waste of time and money because less educated people make more money than you. Degrees in sociology etc. should be banned because they are not productive. etc. If Bill Gates sacrificed animals in his backyard you should too because he got rich (there is a whole industry of self-help packages built on similar premises.) Many with such beliefs view college no differently than some get-rich-quick style program and will be the first ones to jump ship and scream "rip off!"
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Correspondence school do not have a good reputation. Wonder why? Now we have the internet somehow they are now great? Why do we need to do everything over again just because something was put on a computer? Why are the Correspondence Schools getting away with renaming themselves as universities and even worse-- why are Universities turning into Correspondence Schools?
Job training is the employer's problem. always has been. for trade skills there were trade schools (now called technical colleges.) Employers bitch about every expense and now they are pushing more than ever to externalize their costs and responsibilities that in previous generations was just part of doing business. One would think management and owners were getting pay cuts instead of increasing their income more than at any point in history.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The reason that you need college for so many jobs in the USA is, , , -they require it.
...So now you have US companies that can't do testing on their own (due to the legal hazard) and they raise degree requirements and still complain about idiot graduates, because now college indicates less than it ever did about an applicant's true abilities.
The reason they require it is because, , , -of a 1972 Supreme Court case, Griggs vs. Duke Power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
In summary, what Griggs decided was that if an employer gave ability tests to applicants and the ability tests resulted in racial discrimination, then the company was liable for willfully committing racial discrimination, even if they could show that it was not intentional.
As a result of this case, companies in the USA began to give up doing their own ability testing of applicants, , , and just simply raise the educational requirements instead. "I'm sorry Mr Smith, your resume is excellent but all our cook positions at Burger World require at least a Bachelor's in burger flipping."
In the mean time, US schools began to raise their tuition (as they became the essential gateway into many jobs) and at the same time many began to engage in race-norming (in order to avoid allegations that they were discriminating!) so lower-scoring ethnic applicants were allotted scores that were not justified.
If you go to college just for the diploma, you are doing it wrong.
Next time you will tell me I can be an olympic athlete without training.
The BBC article, Downward mobility haunts US education, presents an interesting observation on post-secondary graduation rates and possible causes and consequences. Granted, there are immeasurable depths of innumerable studies and opinions, but the fact is that it may well be that the current generation will be less well educated than past generations. This will have serious consequences.
Since I started university over 30 years ago, the trend that sees more and more graduate degrees going to international students who are increasingly returning home to move their homelands ahead has been going up and up. See, for example, Absurd U.S. Immigration Policies Amount To Economy Sapping Talent Drain .
All I know is that getting a college/university degree shows one thing -- you can take on a challenge and complete it while working with other people in a collaborative environment with mentors and support people. Sounds a lot like something that would be valuable in a career.
Besides, what has Zuckerberg accomplished besides making money? There is nothing fundamentally new about social media. Its a consequence of the ubiquity of wideband communications...
what about Community Colleges then?
Also the big college do a lot of advertising as well.
I put myself through college and ended up with ZERO debt. Yes, it was a pain and I ate a hell of a lot of ramen (and oranges, to prevent scurvy), but I not only got my degree, but gained much knowledge in fields outside of my major, which have surprisingly proven to be more valuable than my degree.
In my view, a degree in and of itself means nothing, except that hopefully a person is more well-rounded than some "self-made" person who has a very narrow vision of the world. Like unvaccinated people, people without lateral knowledge are bad for society. Without knowledge of history, sociology, literature, engineering, art, music, science, foreign languages, etc., those people will be little more than idiot-savants.
Yeah, right.
Anyone who has the chance to go to Princeton and drops out to work on a "mobile app" is an idiot. Unless they become fabulously rich, in which case they are a rich idiot.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
In the IT you *might* get away with certification. But in general, you CANNOT get employed without a degree. And community colleges/vocational schools in the U.S. basically find every available blue collar occupation, design a curriculum for it, and start offering a degree. Meaning your unskilled labor job suddenly requires an education, and you can bet some jerk paid for the 9 month course. Here are some examples I've encountered recently. These are a few things that are supposed to be ON THE JOB TRAINING at WORST, and at best, unskilled non-requirements. I live in a city of 8,000 and the economy here is in the tank, due to a host of construction jobs that brought in out of town workers who compete with the local available work force directly when they're not actively on their construction assignments. I lost my job and had to start searching for low wage work, and here's what I found out.
- Receptionist. This is answering calls and making photocopies. It's a 2 year degree plan at my local CC. Fuckin bullshit. I need a degree now, that costs $4,000 of mine and taxpayer money, to answer your god damn phone?
- Construction tech (I actually did this work. It's where you haul around materials dropped at a job site, manually. Yes, now they "educate" you to lift sheet metal and carry it 50 feet. After the CC introduced THAT degree, I was no longer considered employable versus the guys who shelled out for the degree.)
- Vet tech (this is where you wash out cages of animals the vets keep. Your job is to clean up poop. Literally. Rather than spend the 48 hours training you to do it, they'd rather hire someone who picked up the 2 semester "degree" from the local CC.)
- Solar energy tech (this is someone who, using pre-fab hardware, places solar panels on a house, in a field, etc etc. The job is to place a screw to attach the solar panel to its frame. That's it. You run around with a cordless drill with a socket attached to it. They will hire someone with a solar tech "degree" over someone who does not have one.) - Stocking/inventory tech. (This is someone who takes things and puts them onto shelves at retailers.) I applied for one of these jobs and was asked, by a straight face, if I had any education that qualified me for this job.
So don't tell me you don't need a degree to work. Even the most bullshit mindless jobs now require the distinction of a college education.
people with disabilities do better in tech schools / hands on learning but that is not what most college settings are.
A college setting is not the best away for all to learn and by locking out people like that you end of with people who can do much more are setting on SSI / SSD and maybe working as a bag boy.
The approach proposed is that it teaches you a trade. The problem is that you will likely quickly cap out on salary and opportunity. Much like a plumber can get a license in a year or so and start making 30-50K... that's pretty much the max (unless you start your own business).
In the tech field, there is always another kid coming along with more current skills and willing to work at a starter salary.
Ideally, a college education teaches you how to learn... not merely a trade.
If you're looking to learn a trade, the 10-week "truck driver training school" approach might work.
Of course, there are the few rare exceptions where a non-college graduate has gone on to great things. But for the vast major of people a good solid education is more likely to equip them for a lifetime career than gambling on starting a hit business.
Although the original posted pointed out a handful of successful non-college graduates, I'm guessing that there are millions of non-college graduate failures that you've never heard of.
non college is not dropping out there are other ways to learn then just setting in a class room for years learning a lot of stuff.
We need to have more trades like learning there are lot's parts of the tech / It field that you can only real learn in a hands on setting and there is other stuff that is better suited into a drop in / at your own pace classes.
I would get a UoP (or other) degree if for one thing and one thing only. To check off "College Graduate" off the form, to get by Personnel Department check list to the people actually making the decisions. AND I would tell the interviewer the same, if he asked. However, I'm lucky enough to not had to at this point in time. But I am considering a move up into management and that almost seems like a "must have" regardless of the rest of my skills set.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Some of us need the Socratic Dialog. I was driven to learn about mathematics. I had real drive and read a LOT. I was smart. Yay me. I managed to mis-learn a heck of a lot that way. It wouldn't have been so bad later on but I mis-learned some basic things. It was unpleasant and time consuming to go back and edit out what I got wrong and I needed someone outside my own head. I couldn't see what's wrong in my own head alone. Sadly, even in college, that kind of teaching isn't available so much but it's golden.
I can say as an ITT grad that they are bloodsuckers. They will come to your house sell you on getting an education, then fill out all your financial aid paperwork for you and promise this everlasting job mill that they don't deliver. I gave up trying to find a job through them when I was unemployed after their retarded career service department kept removing me from the job email list... So yea doing something completely different from what I went to school for and stuck with a debt that sucks my pay from working near minimum wage while I learn a new career job set.
And the only reason I landed this job is because of who I knew.
As a recipient of Education Lottery money which is paying a nice chunk of my tuition, I agree with PROMOTING your message.
Buy those tickets, folks! They send OTHER PEOPLE to college!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77
Hear hear. I would agree that sometimes college is a little too soon. I for one started out involuntarily dragging my way hobbling through college in a nearly constant state of academic probation, miserable and loathing the subjects I had to deal with. Yet a year and a half after graduating, when I voluntarily returned to study a different field, I enjoyed the material even with my considerably heavier assignments and wound up on the dean's honor list.
...one of the things they teach you about in college is the value of anecdotal evidence...
Yeah, I guess bagging college works for the rare 1-in-a-billion future billionaire. But for everyone else, college is a place of great growth of knowledge, breadth of mind and experience, social maturation, and preparation for anything and everything. Yeah, college does not guarantee success. But not going to college virtually assures lack of success. Don't listen to this drivel. --JSt
I went to college and graduated with around $40k in debt. I spent the next few years eliminating that debt while also buying a house and starting to pay off the loan. My degree had no relevance at all to my career which was launched by the part time job I had to pay living costs while studying.
Through most of my career (I'm 36 now) I have earned enough to live comfortably and invest wisely. My college degree has been useful to convince employers that I have the necessary thinking skills to perform my white collar job but I see as many people in my profession doing as well (or better) than me with either no degree or a degree that they picked up in their 30s or 40s. I'm very glad I completed my degree, it taught me how to think critically and write cohesively. When I'm recruiting people for my team I look for these abilities and have found that writing ability is a scare commodity.
These days I have small children and earn enough for my wife to comfortably be a stay at home mom. I also have enough money available through my investments (mainly in property) to retire at age 45 on a modest but comfortable income. I have this because I sat down when I was 20 and calculated how much equity I would need to retire at 45 and made a twenty five year plan to reach it. I bought my first rental property in 1997 and we have picked another up every year or two since then, all funded out of our modest disposable income. We live fairly simply but still manage to afford great holidays and lots of gadgets to play with. My achievement is not unique, I know plenty of plumbers, builders, civil servants, farmers and IT guys in more or less the same position as me. The one thing we have in common is a plan and a desire to live well within our means.
As a Harvard graduate, I wish more people wouldn't go to college. Things are outrageously competitive among the motivated.
As an adjunct professor, I wish more people wouldn't go to college. There are way too many kids in college that clearly shouldn't be there.
The socialist education system is one of the things I like here in Norway: all universities are funded by the state, so there are no tuitions. You only have to cover your living expenses while studying, and the state provides student loans for that purpose. These student loans are interest-free for the duration of your studies, and upon graduation, 40% of the loans are converted to a scholarship.
This doesn't only cover studies in Norway. If you're a Norwegian citizen and get accepted to a high-profile university abroad, like Harvard or MIT, you accumulate the equivalent of $20000 per year in tuition loans, while the state covers the rest of the tuition with a scholarship.
I did a humanities degree, and the course materials (books) were a relatively small part of the cost, plus I seldom went to lectures. It was the small tutorial groups that were the key thing about the course, and that is impossible to duplicate for free online until we get some sort of AI tutor software.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Having considered the options presented here, I just thought of an alternative to college. Just imagine if the big tech companies got together and started their own online university solely devoted to STEM majors. That would include Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Facebook, Yahoo!, etc. In between them they are sitting on more than $100 billion of cash, which is enough to start an Ivy-league university of their own. They could disrupt higher education and supply themselves with plenty of STEM graduates that meet their needs as employees, in addition to funding research through a college-like organization. They could work their way through the accreditation process so that it is a "real" degree and not just a collection of online classes. And they could make use of it for their own ongoing employee education. Just think of the possibilities...
For most jobs, there are plenty of people who can capably perform it in the world. 99% of the world fall into this category. Looking at outliers such as Zuckerberg and Gates is idiotic. Even though individual hiring decisions often don't go to the person who might be best qualified, it often goes to the person who is qualified enough - which they judge through an arbitrary bar such as a college degree. Blunt as though this method might be, it still is quite efficient consideirng the computational complexity of the problem. Anecdotal example: I work at an ostensibly prestigious consulting firm, and the work I do is simple and generic enough that almost anyone could do it. The hiring policy however revolves around best talent from best schools. Is it needed? No. It probably works well as a marketing tool for the firm's services, but even so it's not a great system. Question to ask is if this was an optimisation problem, would it be better to create a system with massive overhead that matches people to jobs with 100% accuracy, or one with 95% accuracy and some wastage?
You pay $200,000 and all those lost nights of sleep just to draw a paycheck? I wonder if maybe employer associations sponsoring apprenticeships and OJT would be a more viable route for those that want a job...I myself loath working for the other person so a college degree would only serve to better me as a person and I would never go in debt for it.
...seems like there is an underlying lesson in the comments.
The increasingly stultifying "Corporate America" scene values "networking" over talent and ability (herein noted by remarks such as "getting past the human resources department"); that has consequences: Managerial incompetence must be concealed with offshore production and continual M&A activity. A startup might do well to filter hiring based on raw intelligence rather than "well-known school" and, in particular, make damned sure that potential candidates do NOT have preexisting "connections" that lead to the internecine politics that destroy from within...i.e., if the new hire has an Ivy League or well-known B-school degree, show 'em the door...
lolll...unless, or course, you're looking to turn'n'burn...that is, your intention is to unload into the hands of those who have money and/or connections to money but no brains. It is amazing how many individuals come out of Ivy League schools with degrees and connections but who are literally as dumb as rocks...George W. Bush, for instance, has a BA from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.
A fact which might also suggest that they do not teach the finer points of ethics in the Ivy League schools - a consideration any idealistic startup would do well to keep in mind.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I don't tell people not to go to college because the odd Silicon Valley guy made it big.
I tell people to think twice about college because you can't walk into a coffee shop without being served by someone who *did* go to college and can't find a job in their field.
I guess a college counselor had some mod points, huh? Or maybe one of you RIAA goons.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Colleges have made use of the myth that you can’t get a job unless you have a college education."
This seems to be the premise of the piece, and it is incorrect. (James makes similar claims in his other books). There are plenty of jobs out there that don't require a college education and colleges don't make use of any myth concerning them. ie colleges don't claim you need a college degree to be a toilet cleaner. There are also plenty of jobs out there that require a college/university education and you can't practise without one. For instance, Medical Doctor.
I know heaps of people in IT who have no formal qualifications. But, at an interview for a developer, if there are two candidates who are about equal in skill it is more likely you'll get the job if you have a BCompSc than without. It can become the deciding factor. Also, what do we consider a college education? In computer networking, if you have Cisco certifications you'll get a lot further than someone without. (I know from experience). But, you can go through some colleges to get these qualification and you can also go through some other learning establishments to do courses or you can self study and just sit the exam. Different people will benefit from each of the methods available. I've never ever heard a college claim you can't work in computer networking without doing the Cisco certs through them. A BCompSc doesn't seem to matter in networking, in fact, I know no one in networking who has a BCompSc (but I assume they exist out there somewhere). About half the developers where I work have BCompSc. The other half didn't fall into the positions. Some started somewhere else and slowly moved into IT, whilst others did minor college courses to get themselves started.
The only time I ran into a prejudice against people not having a BCompSc was an agency in Sydney who only wanted people with degrees on their books. They rejected me at the time claiming I couldn't have been in IT as at the time I was studying for a BCompSc (part time) and hadn't completed it. At the time I was also working as a Database Admin. But, at the universities/colleges I've attended, not one of them ever made the claim that having a degree guaranteed me a job, nor did they claim not having a degree meant I couldn't get a job. So, which colleges/universities are making this claim? I think it is more a generalisation that some people have. Also, a lot of certifications now only last three years. I've done certifications through both colleges and other 'learning establishments' and as I've moved around between job, the need for them waned so I didn't keep them up to date. At present on paper it looks like I've done virtually no study at all. A college degree at least lasts forever, and if you are going into a field where a degree helps, then even if you start in the industry without one, it would be worth it to get one along the way part time. But, in some areas, such as computer networking, a degree is almost worthless and certification (Cisco, Juniper, Nortel etc) are worth a lot more as they are more relevant than a BCompSc which is more general.
Point here is, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to be a medical doctor (and I have friends who did this), then 'yes' you require a degree. If you are going to do something that doesn't require a degree, then no, and I've never heard a college/university claim you need a college education for the jobs that don't require them.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
If you're Ivy League drop out you can "sell first, build later."
Rest of us have to "build first, sell later."
Casteism
Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg cannot build another Microsoft, Dell Computers, Facebook.
With college degree you can get another job.
Casteism
I am a victim of the ruse that college will give you success. I have in my arsenal one AAS in Computer Systems/Networks, almost one in Computer Programming and 2 years for a BA in Game Design.
Where do I work? At a POS tree service as a "Computer tech" but in all reality I am just a gopher getting paid barely above minimum wage... and I got this job almost 10 years after graduating college and extensive shoot downs.Every day here is an exercise in patience because my boss thinks he is a genius because he knows how to break the law and not get caught.
So all my hard work in college and extensive searches in IT jobs netted me a shit job working for a crook and a defaulted student loan.
Yeah. A college degree really isn't a guarantee for success for anybody. Unless you work for the crap colleges or the Federal Student Loan offices of course.