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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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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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."
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?
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 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.