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Do Geeks Need College?
Manuka writes
"Salon has a neat article
debating the issue of whether college is worth bothering with
for geeks." The article references
an old Slashdot thread
and throws out some interesting comments and statistics
on the subject.
I think this article affirms that the most important part of college, with respect to the IT industry especially, is the emphasis on the learning process. I believe that college is useful (thus the reason I plan to someday finish the degree I started before I dropped out and became a sysadmin ), but not for the common reason. The experience I gained while studying chinese lang & lit is more useful in my everyday work than my IS related classes were, because it was learning a new way to look at things and an indirect emphasis on how to learn.
College is useful for learning other perspectives, be they language, art, music or interior design related, as long as the student studied the process of how to create music or whatever, not just rote memorization of the traits thereof.
I really am surprised to see the article present the unquestioned assumption that the reason for college is to enable you to succeed in a particular career. This is a technical/vocational school vision of college that I do not agree with.
I was a finance major, and that degree helped land me my first job. So from a voc-tech perspective, college helped me wonderfully. My first employer would never have considered me without a degree. For a more pure programming role, having a "resume" that includes hacking accomplishments in high school might be enough to get your foot in the door. Once you've been in the work force any period of time, the college degree drops off the recruiting radar scope. Some employers probably care that you do have one, but few care what it is in or where it is from. Even for one that wants you to have a degree, you can save money by getting it part time at a local college instead of spending big bucks on a full time four year program at a prestigous university.
But I am not satified with the voc-tech view of school. I very much have a vision of the university providing a undergraduate with a classical liberal arts education that enriches the mind, imparts a basic body of knowledge all educated people should have, and prepares the person for a lifetime of continued learning. I wish I had been more oriented towards this when I was in school. Fortunately I am an extremely strong self learner and so today I am able to educate myself despite not getting the best general preparation for it in school. I would like to see this more emphasized than the "learn these skills and you can get a job" curriculum the Salon article seems to be talking about.
GET THIS STRAIGHT PEOPLE: WEB DESIGN IS NOT PROGRAMING!
I wonder if I should emphasize that a little more... Web design is a mix of art and tarditional design. (come to think of it, art is redundant, tarditional design is based on art)
I find no surprize that an interior designer made the transition to web design, since those fields have a lot more in common then web design and computer science. Designers (interior and otherwise) are trained to recignise the humon facotrs that make things both useable and nice, comptuer science people are trained in making a computer work. Web design is not a programing task. Not that interior design will give you everything you need to know about web design, but the underlying theorys are the same even if they are applied much differently, while the underliying theory of programing is not the same.
Anyone can code and everyone does, just like basketweeving.
First off, I want to second Chris Thomas' comments about college.. there really ARE two types, and even though most type 2 universities aren't always perfect [mine isn't], it's better than everything else out there.
..however, I see every reason behind the course curriculum, and see what I can benefit out if it - usually concepts I wouldn't have the time or energy to learn on my own w/o assistance.
Now.. I enjoy university a lot, but I tend to have a different perspective towards school than my peers - many of them are in it for the paper and don't see the point of the courses that we take.
I enjoy what I'm learning because I know it *matters*.. if people in school actually remembered the concepts during a concurrency or OS course, they'd be considered expert programmers (compared to the majority).
Of course, the down side to my enjoyment of school is that I tend to get crappy marks in areas that I'm less passionate about.. CS. I love CS. I ace CS all the time... Math. I like math, but I'm not good at it, and it's pulling me down. So I'm faced with the threat every term of being bumped out of my honours degree to a general degree e... The question is: do I really need MORE CS courses, or have I learned enough that I can just take the easier degree & get out?
I really like higher education, but I think it always comes down to personal choice.. if you want to have a career doing web development, don't go to college. But don't cry if the economy turns sour and you wind up unemployed. If you want to be an expert programmer in enterprise systems, or distributed systems, or graphics, or.. etc, college will do you good, and it provides security.
Soon, having "a job" isn't going to matter as having a "career" and a way of distinguishing yourself from your peers. You have to be able to say - "THIS IS ME, This is why I'm the best at what I do, and this is why I command a high salary." Otherwise your voice will be lost in the herd, and you won't stand out. Contributing free software is uplifting, but not very much so when you're forced to settle for a poor salary because you're just "another C programmer" or another "VB programmer"....
The only way to differentiate yourself is through knowledge - and higher education is one way (not the only way) to get it. I think in future college/univeristy may become obselete because of the rampant incompetence of the majority of them, but that doesn't mean that "higher education" will die - it will just take other forms.
-Stu
Don't go to college to learn to be a better geek. Academic computer science won't turn you into a system administrator, Web designer, or Perl hacker. You won't learn how to optimize a kernel configuration, recover files from a crashed disk, build a fast database, or tell your boss nicely that his ideas about information technology are stupid or violate the laws of physics. You may learn a lot of good theory -- but you could pick that up elsewhere, too.
Go to college to learn about culture, or history, or philosophy, or literature. Go to college to sit up late nights screaming at your best friends about what an idiot Rene Descartes was. Go to college to watch your best friends do the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Go to college to find out what the hell this postmodernism thing is that Larry Wall's always on about. Go to college to refute postmodernism, and to be called postmodern for doing it. Go to college to meet people who will be impressed with your intelligence instead of thinking of it as threatening.
Don't go to an easy college, and don't go to a place that lets you get by doing nothing but technical stuff. Go to a place that makes you do a lot of heavy reading and writing. Take tough courses. Learn to write well; not only will it help when your boss asks you to document your project, but it'll also help you sound better on Slashdot and USENET. Don't scorn "well-roundedness" or "communications skills"; the stars of geek culture are no bunch of illiterates.
Study music. Music, as Pythagoras demonstrated, is a form of mathematics, and musicians, like hackers, keep pounding on their work in search of the Right Thing. Study psychology and sociology. They represent our attempts to figure out how the systems called the human mind and human society work, so that we can make them work better.
Read Nietzsche. Refute your parents' religion. Then refute your refutation.
Get into politics. Which politics don't really matter -- be a socialist, or a libertarian, or even a Republican if you have to. Go to activist events. Take politics courses. Insist on bringing up free software in the middle of your classes. Derive the Debian Free Software Guidelines from the works of John Locke.
(Damn. I'm rambling. I sound like that fake Kurt Vonnegut graduation address email forward that whoever-it-was turned into a song. Use sunscreen.)
I learned more in first 6 months of work than in 4 yrs of school.
I thought the first year of college was not going to teach me much exept how to heat networks of resistors and was quite boring; however, the next few years took full use of what I thought was worthless. Building amplifiers and logic circuits turned into state machines and then 8 bit computers built and programmed from scratch. College gave me the theory and time to become an expert and specialize in the engineering area I was good.
I also worked through college. Work also gave me opportunities, but it was the novelty of my skills I gained from college that opened doors at work. The degree also adds value when things like downsizing take place and they had to score our backgrounds in different areas. Believe me, a college degree really counts!
>If college were cheap and fun, everyone would be
>doing it.
Whoa, that would be a tragedy. An educated public, how... revolutionary (I mean that in every sense of the word, I feel leftist today ).
*sigh* We need to change our viewpoint. The fact that people consider it a "piece of paper" is pretty sad, because that's not what it's meant to be. But it seems as if that is what it has become in a very real sense.
Why do some of us get MSCE's when we hate Windows NT and know that that cert means nothing? It doesn't make WinNT behave any nicer for us... we get it because jumping through that hoop is a neat trick that impresses some people who don't know what a stupid pet trick it is...
A degree, by itself, has no meaning. It's a tool, you get out of it what you put into it.
If you have a PhD, but you're a schmuck, don't expect me to treat you like anything but Dr. Schmuck, esq.
If you're a hippie with no shoes, but you can hack C and talk to me about Milton and Kuhn, you're a pretty cool guy in my book. I might want to work with you.
Forget about all the rest of it... just try to pursue the goal that makes you a better person. If you're two years into school and still have no idea why you're doing it, drop out. Life is too short to waste...
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
If people knew better how to open doors to the kinds of jobs they want, then your argument doesn't work. The reason why a college degree is needed is because everybody acts the same--like a herd of cattle. They send out resumes (moo!). Not to managers they know, or to managers who know them, but to some faceless HR dept (moooo). Of course a degree is handy then. How else to tell apart the Bovines?
So how to get a job then? How does RedHat hire folks? Do they put ads in local papers. No. They hire people they know. They don't scrummage through thousands of resumes looking for Linux kernel hackers. They turn to their employees, who say "Sure, that blizzard guy knows this stuff. We should hire him". The idea is that they hire people who they know can do the work.
Get good at what you do. Find companies that do what you do. Let them know who you are. Then a degree is just a piece of paper.
college taught me cs history that helped me understand where we've been.
it taught me theory that made java old hat when i first saw it four years later.
it taught me practical things, so that the technical side of developing was easy.
it taught me subjects outside of cs, which sadly included ethics. (sad that it was outside, not that it was something i learned)
it exposed me to other cultures, and other people.
i suppose it would be better to say that "i learned," rather then "it taught." college provided me with access to those things, it was up to me to take them.
it might not be for everyone, but i find it interesting to note that bill gates dropped out and has spent the past 20 years reinventing the wheel badly. linus completed his degree and (due to licensing issues) recreated a well known wheel and used it to sringboard experiments in not very well known wheels: scheduling, memory management (well researched in low memory eras, but not well covered in high memory situations) and smp.
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I was a Classical Civilization (Latin) major as an undergrad. I took very low level and basic 1 computer related course (Electrical Engineering, actually). I then worked for a year at a Talent/Literary Agency. I'm now working as a developer at a defense contractor and simultaneously in a Master's program in CS.
I can't compare myself to someone who did not go to college, since there are none employed here, but I do notice that I grasp certain concepts much faster and sometimes in a different way than some of the straight EE/CS grads, mostly due to my language and Humanities background. It's not all positive, since I do need to work harder to get the initial concepts, but things like requirements, OOAD and algorithms are just clear, logical, and distinct writing -- that is to say, they do not differ drastically from good writing.
I don't think that a discipline -- be it science or humanities -- can advance or make major developments solely from within. New points of view -- wherever they come from -- need to address old problems; someone who is trained in a discipline is also trained in a certain way of looking at problems. It's only when an outsider tries to understand a problem that you get a truly new point of view. That's not to say that EE and CS grads are not useful or productive with respect to advancing CS -- far from it. I am talking more about broadbased interests and experience than education. You can be a CS major, for example, and still enjoy reading Classics, just as you can be a Classics major and enjoy programming; it is this cross-disciplinary approach that leads to revolutions.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that no matter what you major in, or even if you go to college (which I highly recommend), you need to be aware of the big picture of the world, and have interests outside of your work. The worst engineers here are some of the Electrical Engineers who are only concerned about their small component, with little or no concern about how the widget fits in with the
I've hired a bunch of computer-oriented employees, and find that many people entering the job market have a slightly skewed perception of their degree's value. They try to find the degree that will give them the maximum number of facts that will overlap with the facts they think they need for a desired job. They don't realize that any job worth doing will not be based on a static pool of facts or abilities. Those are the 7-Eleven jobs. They barely pay anything.
Employers want people who can learn, who are flexible, and who can gracefully handle getting dumped with a bunch of work, when machines are down and customers are screaming. Unfortunately there is no degree in this. There are, however, killer degrees which drown you in work. Employers realize that anyone who made it through this type of degree had to at least perservere in the face of a gigantic mountain of learning, lectures and labs.
Someone who never made it through one of these degrees may do just as well at a job, but it's a bit more of a crap shoot, unless you can find a parallel, concrete achievement that shows their tenacity. Employers often take the easy way out and just insist on the degree.
OK - my bias: I'm a SysAdmin. Most of my friends are developers.
My overall experience is that I (and most of the good sysadmins I know) have a far larger repetoir of computer knowledge than the developers I know. The distinction here is breadth vs. depth. Sysadmins tend to be a huge repository for bits of knowledge (most admins I know are excellent at Trival Pursuit), since you never know when that little tidbit is going to be needed. Developers are by their nature more focused and tend to ignore info that isn't really germaine to their job. It's the old generalist vs. specialist argument.
I'm not saying that I'm better than the developers, or that my knowledge is somehow more valuable. It's important to do my job. Theirs is important to do theirs. We couldn't switch positions and do anywhere as well in our new places.
And yes, I can tell a good developers from a great one, and have no problem identifying a poor one (he's the one standing in front of my cube all day).
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
College is a nice place to start from ground zero if you have no experience in coding (or some other computer tech pursuit), but no amount of schooling can give you talent you don't have in the first place.
.02
In my career, I've seen plenty of people with degrees (some advanced) in the field who couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I've also seen people with training in wildly divergent fields, indeed, some with no degree at all, who were and are outstanding software engineers. The only common threads I've seen is that you must have the talent for it, and that you have to love it enough to work your tail off.
In my view, most CS departments are set up to train people to be CS grad assistants instead of software engineers in industry. In my opinion, schools should offer degrees in software engineering in addition to those in computer science. It's important to face another fact as well; 5 yrs after you get your degree, if you expect to continue to glide along on your knowledge that you gained in school without continuous self education, you're going to be dead meat in the field. A degree is a START, not an end unto itself.
Also, for the previous poster that said his degree would be important when he was 45. It's a lot more important at the start of your career than when you have experience. I haven't been seriously quizzed about my educational status in at least 7 or 8 yrs.
Also, in keeping with my comment about talent, I'd also love to eventually see apprenticeship programs for coders. I'm sure there are people out there with the talent to do coding or other computer tech tasks. There are certainly opportunities for people, and I don't think a 35 yr old should be expected to quit his present job and go to school full time for 4 yrs to check them out, if they display the talent.
Just my
College is a nice place to start from ground zero if you have no experience in coding (or some other computer tech pursuit), but no amount of schooling can give you talent you don't have in the first place.
.02
In my career, I've seen plenty of people with degrees (some advanced) in the field who couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I've also seen people with training in wildly divergent fields, indeed, some with no degree at all, who were and are outstanding software engineers. The only common threads I've seen is that you must have the talent for it, and that you have to love it enough to work your tail off.
In my view, most CS departments are set up to train people to be CS grad assistants instead of software engineers in industry. In my opinion, schools should offer degrees in software engineering in addition to those in computer science. It's important to face another fact as well; 5 yrs after you get your degree, if you expect to continue to glide along on your knowledge that you gained in school without continuous self education, you're going to be dead meat in the field. A degree is a START, not an end unto itself.
Also, for the previous poster that said his degree would be important when he was 45. It's a lot more important at the start of your career than when you have experience. I haven't been seriously quizzed about my educational status in at least 7 or 8 yrs.
Also, in keeping with my comment about talent, I'd also love to eventually see apprenticeship programs for coders. I'm sure there are people out there with the talent to do coding or other computer tech tasks. There are certainly opportunities for people, and I don't think a 35 yr old should be expected to quit his present job and go to school full time for 4 yrs to check them out, if they display the talent.
Just my
Oh, I had to take non-DC circuit analysis too; transient signals are very important in integrated circuits, and integrated circuit design is a part of Comp. Eng.. However, I didn't have to take some of the hairier Elec courses, from Fields and Waves on up.
We have the good fortune of using C under Solaris on Sun workstations for most of our programming work.
What I really want to do is design an OS that will blow Microsoft out of the water. Of course learning how the CPU decodes a machine-language instruction through a microprogram has little to do with this (too low level). Neither does anything having to do with Java (too high level). Methinks I should have been a Computer Scientist, but there probably isn't a scholarship for those.
Actually, both of those are at least tangentially significant for OS design. Comp. Eng. should cover OS design, as it falls right in its area of influence (the layer where hardware and software meet). Comp. Sci. would teach you OS design, but there would be a vast amount of high-level and theoretical stuff thrown at you as well. Comp. Eng. focuses more on practical application, as opposed to the high reaches of theory (though we still get a bit of it).
For OS design, I strongly recommend the excellent textbook that we had in our OS course. Assuming it hasn't changed over the past year or so, it is:
William Stallings
Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, 3rd Edition
Of course, that only coveres half of the OS (the kernel). For driver programming, I'd suggest finding semi-decent documentation on Linux drivers and picking apart drivers in your own copy of Linux. BeOS is another good platform on which to learn driver development; there are a few good reference sites that cover its driver architecture.
There are a lot of aspects of OS design that I would have taken quite a while to find out about on my own. I know what a page table is now, and how several process scheduling algorithms work, and the merits and drawbacks of each. As well as a large amount of low-level detail about what's involved in implementing a microkernel, c/o the labs we had to do. I could have picked up all of this by spending a year taking apart the Linux kernel, but out in the working world, it's hard to find the time for major undertakings like that (I know, as I'm working now).
In summary, I was given useful information about this in my CE courses. My sympathies re. NT and Java
Type number one is a place where people go to drink and have sex. The professors range from mediocre to truly incompetent, and nobody really learns a whole lot even if they do pay attention in class and do all of the coursework. People who have been through one of these colleges generally say that college is a waste of time. In a college like this, I agree - it is.
Type number two is different. The professors actually know what they're talking about, and many are quite bright indeed. The coursework is actually challenging. No matter how smart you are, you'll be picking up new concepts and then working your butt off to prove that you understand them. The courses that you are taking are relevant to your chosen career and teach you things that you will use after you graduate. You also learn how to learn, as many others have pointed out. I have the good fortune to be at a university like this, and it has proven invaluable for my work in the software industry.
A complaint that I sometimes hear from people who don't like college is that none of the courses are interesting. IMO, this isn't necessarily a problem with the college (though it can be for the first type of college). I was very lucky, and chose exactly the right course stream; my courses match my interests almost perfectly. But, if I'd chosen Electrical Engineering instead of Computer Engineering, I'd be stuck doing analog circuit analysis when what I really want to do is design ICs. This would not only have presented problems after graduation, but would have made my coursework alternately difficult and boring.
My advice for those pondering college is to think carefully about what they want to learn about, and to pick a good school at which to learn. This might mean a hideously expensive school, or it might not. However, if you pick a bad college or university, your time there will be a dead loss.
Likewise, picking your field is important. If you choose incorrectly, you will be forced to work your butt off learning things that just don't interest you. Don't be afraid to change fields once you have already enrolled; it's better to lose a year than to stick with something you don't like and lose four years. It will still be worth it.
If you do find a good college or university and manage to get into a field that truly interests you, then IMO you will almost certainly find post-secondary education to be worthwhile.
Despair not, valiant college student, for thou are on the path most righteous!
The one thing that seems to be missing from these discussions is this:
You're not there to learn useful skills. You're there to learn to think.
ASM on s 68k is BS, sure, you'll never use it. But you need the concept of assembler, and that 68k is as good a tool as any. I learned on a VAX, seen any around?
Come for a little walk with me...
But now, with my VAX ASM experience, I see the value of Hungarian notation, and I see why it's worthless in C++. I know that this is not critical knowledge, but actually it is. In the 'real world' we write more documentation than code - sad to say. If we're lucky, we get to write the docs that dictate how we write code.
Shmoe #1 writes: We should standardize on Hungarian notation because that's what M$ uses.
Shmoe #2 (me) writes: We should use human readable naming conventions, because we can write maintainable code that way, there is no learning curve required for the naming convention, the IDE will keep the data types and function return values straight for us - in short we do a better job faster.
Manager calls both Shmoes into office - Explain this difference of opinion, he says.
Shmoe #2 can talk intelligently about the value of Simonyi's notation, and why it is not applicable (but only habitual) in a high-level language like C++ and especially our language du jour Java.
Shmoe #1 can only say: It's what M$ uses.
Shmoe #2 writes draft that get's read by upper management --> name recognition.
Shmoe #2 gets to be team leader (bonus!)
All because Shmoe #2 had to learn assembler on the VAX, and knows that when you only have one data type, naming conventions matter, but when you have lots of code, readability matters.
So, even though it seems like BS now, it will prove very valuable after you earn your B.S. And those things that seem like useless drivel now, will click into place, at the most unexpected moments, and pay off in spades.
So suck it up, log off, and get your arse to class. You're missing drivel that might save your job someday.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Tuche'..
You're right, but there's a reason for it being expensive - it keeps people out, leaving only those with the means (or excellent grades) to even contend for the degree.. It isn't fair, or right, or anything, but neither is evolution, or big rocks falling out of the sky. It just is.
And as for customer friendly... Well, FEH!
Zen buddist monks are not consumer friendly, neither are dojo masters, drill seargants or the tutors of world class pianists. They turn out champions by making them overcome adversity.
If college were cheap and fun, everyone would be doing it.
Some people lack the grades, and can't even get in - and a good thing, since the world can only support so many pointless grads.
Some can't hack the pay - for those that are able minded it's truly too bad. I've seen briliant minds flip burgers, it's a shame. Those that smoke their Pell grants deserve to dig ditches.
Those that have the grades and the money, but do not navigate the burocracy well, well, they're probably better off dropping out and becoming experts in their own right. They may bet branded as non-team-players by their managers, and as anit-social by their coworkers, but they have absolute respect as alpha geeks in the office.
In Europe (Eastern) where higher education is purely merit based, there is a true tragedy. Many Ph.D's are working as salespeople and plumbers, because anyone can get an education if they want to. Here in the US, if you can't pay, you can';t play, and this acts as a safety valve to curb Graduate overpopulatioon.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Since you left school before getting the degree, you can not speak on the value of having one. Having the degree is not the same as going to college for 3 years.
You can run a marathon in the best time ever, and stop 10 feet before the finish line. That way, you know how tough the run is, but you just don't know how that medal feels around your neck.
If you spent $60k on 3 years of school, don't ever attempt to manage money. You can go to a state school at half that amount, and have much less anxiety about walking away from it without actually finishing the job. At $10k/semester, if you quit before seeing it through, sorry to say, you changed jobs a week before deadline. You should have felt that things were not right after the first semester, rather than beating your head against the wall of the Ivory Tower.
Don't ever admit it to an employer, they'll see you as a quitter and as someone who doesn't have the guts to follow through with a committment.
If daddy had given me $60k for school, I would have had a Ph.D. to show for it, and I'd be set for life - I'd be able to pay him back in a year, and still have my bills paid.
As it is, I worked full time while taking full time semesters, and am now working on a Masters in CS. My employer knows that I'm stubborn as hell, and that education means the world to me. My signing bonus included full graduate tuition in one the country's best engineering schools. If I didn't stick it out as an undergrad, I'd never have this option.
It is not judgemental and shortsighted of an employer to look for a degree - it shows a desire to learn, and more importantly it shows fidelity to commitment.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
You, my friend, sound socialist - That's a compliment. Yes, you're absilutely right, giving everyone the opportunity to realize their potential is best for society in general.
:)
Unfortunatelly, I don' think the human race is quite ready for the world on the other side of that door. I know I'm not.
There's just not enough money to reward all those brilliant minds - unless you're willing to live on satisfaction alone. I'm not, I like toys.
You mention bad times. Who makes the decision which neurosurgeons should flip burgers? Do they do it for the same pay? What about the career burger flippers? Where do they go?
It's not fair, but the financially selective US system works. Well, at least it worked for me. I hope it works for everyone. But I also hope no one ever gets cancer. All I can do is care for me and my loved ones. If I can help someone I feel is especially gifted, I will, but not at the cost of my kids. I mean, even if they're stupid, they're mine, right? I need to do best by them.
I intend to make a lot of money in my lifetime. When I'm done, I intend to set aside an account to feed a scholarship for other former hasbeens that didn't quit. That's my contribution.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Is not very important to you. It's just a piece of paper, right?
/.
I have a little metal ring in my pocket. On it are flat little piece of metal, with teeth. Worthless and useless, right? Too thin to cut food, too thick to pick your nails. Oddly, they fit locks. I can easily get into rooms and cars that are otherwise inaccessible to me.
I can secure my house against thieves, get into my car and drive myself to my job. I can get into my office, in which lay confidential and propriatary materials. I can check my PO box for mail.
I wouldn't have any of these things without my keys. And, I wouldn't have any of them without my degree.
A college education opens doors.
It teaches structured thinking, but most geeks already have that skill. We've argued the value of a college education and the experience of University ad nauseum here on
It turns out that it's a unary argument. One can not make an informed decision about it, since you either do or do not have the experience. A comparison can not be made, since it would be like men trying to compare their experience of manhood with the experience of being a woman. We do not have the means to be objective here.
But, without a doubt, that little piece of paper opens doors. Some people without it get quite lucky, but they are a significant exception to an otherwise unnoticed majority. Most people who do not have the degree, do not get as far as those with the degree. It's not flame-bait, it's fact.
Without a degree, you start as a tech, and you need to prove yourselv constantly, to advance. With the degree, you start at a higher level, and if you continue to prove yourself to advance, you advance faster and higher.
Bill Gates' success not withstanding, a significant majority of executives, CEOs, CIOs, managers and others who make lots of money, is college educated, (sadly) with business degrees that exceed the Bachelor level.
Get your keys. You don't have to use them, you can still use a crowbar or a credit card to open those doors, but keys make it a) easier, and b) socially acceptable.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
There are three aspects in evaluating college education.
#1. The value of education without reference to practicality.
#2. The value of the degree as representing that education.
#3. The value of the relationships one forms in the process of getting #1 or #2
In the case of most people, the education has a value as experience but that never relates to financial benefit...
The other 2 items are where the financial value can be measured..
The top tier lawschool average salary after graduation can be $30000 dollars greater (or more) than the second tier school.
The reason for this is that when someone hires from a school based on the degree they are saying "I need predictable value based on my investment. As I see 0 job experience I need to evaluate based not on any qualification but on the statistical likelyhood that someone from a school I am familiar with as a good school will be like the majority of other people from that school.
I am a high school and college drop out who gets hired by people who are looking for things that NO ONE ELSE HAS DONE. Finding someone who is educated in doing things others have done is of no worth.
While a college education might benefit me (by giving me a broader range of experience and skills including communication, and more contacts with people who might hire me or contribute talent in my projects) it is not a good indicator of my core value, which is technical in nature and yet is not expressedly formalized as an engineer or other professional might be.
In truth college has many merits, but few are financial. I have always considered my college education a luxury that I could seek when my financial responsibilities were relatively settled. I enjoy learning and enjoy being in a group of people learning. However I don't see how my philosophy degree would help in anything beyond bio-ethics (which I dread)...
What sort of degree would you want for someone in this so called WEB industry? The ability to type? Clearly design is not primary as we can see from the high quantity of really nasty looking poorly behaved web pages. Clearly no technical skill is necessary as there is negligible difficulty in producing web pages that are no more than glorified word-processed desktop published contentless dribble.
The fact is that it isn't surprising that people are evaluating this talent as not requiring college. What is surprising is that people think that a task that will eventually be simple enough for a 5 year old to do, is also a good career choice...
As to the comp-sci degree, I was told 10 years ago that it wasn't a good criteria. I was told the masters was the lowest level one should consider as showing some merit in the field...
I thought this might have changed when I stated this recently to a number of my peers (I am modest to include anyone really as my peer... Although I hope that when I am tried for whatever they catch me at, that I will be able to have ya'll exclusively on the jury...)
The response was, are you kidding? A masters is worth garbage...
So I gather it is still the same...
As to college as a source of a free internet account... That is like saying your car came with a free radio antenna...
I never finished although I worked very hard at it. In the end the lure of the real world and projects overseas took me away from school and I never returned. I regret not finishing my CS degree yet at the same time I know that the best course of action is the course I find myself on. The opportunities presented to me now have absolutely nothing to do with my education and my lack of a formal degree has not been criticized by anyone from venture capitalists to my business partners.
:)
I think school does different things for different people. There is no real 'universal constant' in terms of what is best. For entrepreneurial people college life will never be enough and they will know that. However, there are tons of people who don't have that drive and whose sole goal is to 'learn that computer stuff' so that they can get a good secure job with benefits. This is especially true as CS becomes more a of a business style major with people involved who have no passion for it and just want the big jobs that everyone says 'knowing computers' will give you. This was the worst things about college, dealing with the fruits who were involved in CS purely for the financial aspects.
That said, the 3 years of college I did attend really taught me a lot and got me started. It served as an introduction to how things are 'supposed' to be done. I have always written code but the concepts and styles I was introduced to in school have left a lasting impact. Its like literature and writing in a way, you have to know whats been done to do your best work and college is a great venue to learn about what others have accomplished and give you building blocks to construct the future with. It showed me a deeper level of understanding and also gave me a map of the landscape. The concepts I was introduced to are concepts that would have never shown their ugly heads to me otherwise and I have benefited greatly from them. The mind boggles at what I would have seen had I finished.
So, different strokes for different folks I think. A lot of it depends on personality type and individual drive/motivation. Me, I enjoyed college and want to finish but I know that my path to success has be driven more by my internal drive, ambition and intelligence then a document I recieved as credit for time spent.
Lastly, I bet Salon wrote this article specifically to get a Slashdot effect going
I started playing with computers in 6th grade, and by the time I graduated high school, I knew BASIC, 6502 assembly, and Pascal, and had quite a bit of programming experience.
But I lacked any theoretical framework.
College changed that. It gave me the big picture. I could see not only how things worked, but why they worked that way.
Of course, I also learned a bunch of new languages, and was exposed to new OS environments, but I would have picked those up on my own eventually. I don't think I can say the same of the theoretical understanding.
There are already several excellent comments on the value of college, and probably many many more who write in to add support to the belief
'I don't need college, I can learn anything I want to about programming in the real world'
That's true, if programming, by analogy, is a skill no higher than a technician; someone tells you what they need and when, and you do it.
There are absolutely lots of things that cannot be learned except by college, unless you are a genius along the ranks of Feynman, Newton, or Einstein. If you were that smart though, you'd probably in college with 2 or 3 degrees, right?
I'm not trying to insult people who haven't gone to college(yet), I'm making a point to those people who are considering and wavering. As mentioned in other posts, there are plenty of things you learn in college that isn't taught, ethics among them, but there are just as many things you won't be able to figure out in the real world. Predicate calculus, program correctness, and big O complexity. Or semiconductor physics, and why transistors act the way they do, and how an entrepreneurial physicist/engineer can take advantage of their quirks and unleash the next big(say a thin flat light cheap LCD) thing on the world. Or even math, and alternatives to 2d linear algebra; 3d or 4d math...
The best things one learns are from classes not related to your main interests, but from which if one makes the effort, can be applied to your main interests in new and uniquely satisfying ways...
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
College is useful. Technology courses in college are less than useful. The point of college is not to learn specific facts -it is to learn technique, a mode of thinking, or a style. This is why I am a philosophy major instead of a CS major -because this is how philosophy students and professors approach college. Is doing exhaustive research on a paper discussing the disparity between the fictional Socrates and the historical Socrates useful because of what I said in my paper. Of course not, but the process of writing, researching, and defending one's work is. (the CS classes I take for my minor in computer science don't get this; instead the classes and assignments concentrate on making us do a problem a certain way, instead of allowing us the freedom to discover our own methods {which is why I got into Linux in the first place})
Am I going to become a philosopher? It's not likely -my plan is go to graduate school for IS--, but the process of studying has taught me, most how to adapt.
(on a more abstract level, I think sometimes that the entire system of undergraduate majors and Pre- tracks is a silly, stupid process which prevents many people from getting an education)
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
CS in college does not teach you how to program in C/C++/Java/Pascal/Whatever. You should consider yourself fortunate if the technical skills you picked up in college classes permits you to instantly take up a job. College teaches you the CONCEPTS of programming. You achieve a breadth of knowledge that prepares you to learn whatever skill is necessary.
You are taught programming languages in college to provide a platform for studying the deep concepts of software development; algorithms, lifecycles, teamwork, and design patterns (to name a few)
If you want to be hired out of college, then during college you should be teaching yourself current languages. The only mechanism that a college provides for gaining vocational knowledge is the coop/intern program.
I'll probably get flamed over this remark, but I haven't met a programmer who does not have any formal college CS background who is worth a damn when it comes to large application organization, the discipline is just not there.
Anybody can throw some lines of code together and accomplish a task...it takes a rigorous background in CS to start thinking in terms of design patterns.
e to the i pi equals negative one
I'm not sure what they're teaching in colleges these days, so I may be off base...
You get a CS or CE degree for more than just learning a programming language. First of all, you learn *how* to program in a way that "Sams in 21 Days" just can't teach you. You learn core skills such as designing hashes. And very importantly, you're forced to study topics that you otherwise would not. You also attain (depending on the college) a real education.
If you're skipping college to startup your own business, go for it. This will give you more education than any college ever could. But if you're skipping just so that you can start work as a developer, think again. Take that job, but take it part time while you're attending classes.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
College is critical for life perspective. This cannot be underestimated in the face of money or fame. If you talk to almost anyone in mid-life now, they'll tell you that they envy college students because of the exciting access to information, intellectual resources, social scenarios, and freedom of choice. These things diminish quickly as one enters the "real world" and gains more responsibilities than just ordering the pizza to sustain an all-night frat house Quake game. In college, students must take all the oppurtunities presented to them and mold themselves into better, more prepared people for the real world. Would any of us say that Bill Gates is exactly a well rounded individual??
Many people who leave college early to pursue high-powered technical positions argue that they can always go back to college, but that these computer oppurtunities are fleeting. Well, not to keep harping on perspective, but give me a break! First of all, most will NEVER go back to school, because they've moved to a new stage in their lives with new responsibilities that make it too difficult to be a student again, and they've lost all those oppurtunities to study outside their field, to meet other students, and have the college experience that we all know and love. Furthermore, the computer industry will ALWAYS be there. Make yourself into a better, more intelligent, more qualified person now, and oppurtunities will come banging at your door. If you want to advance through the ranks, and really make a difference in the industry, it will help not only to have that piece of paper called the diploma, but also to have so many of the skills that paper should represent for you.
Work hard and study the industry, and hold down god jobs while in school, but don't drop out. It's too good an oppurtunity to miss.
Three major reasons:
(1) It's fun! You get to lead a (mostly) independent lifestyle, meet friends and chicks, and have free time to do interesting things.
(2) It'll improve your thinking. I tend to believe that education's value is not in acquiring information, but in training (think gym) for the mind. In college you'll be forced to think in a more-or-less organized way about more-or-less different subjects. Majors do not matter -- some of the smarter people I know took classics as majors.
(3) That piece of paper that the college gives you in the end is quite important. Other people tend to be very disimpressed when you cannot produce it.
The major qualifier: all this applies only if you go to a good, preferably a top college. Going through a top 10 college is very worthwhile experience. If you college didn't make it into top 200 or so, don't bother. Read books instead.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I used to think that a degree didn't matter in the slightest. However, after working with a number of programmers with no degree (or a completely irrelevent degree), it does seem to make a difference.
Especially if they're in a leadership position, like a team leader or manager. Programming is rarely about coding nowadays, and although I know enough people who spent their early years in their bedrooms coding, I don't know of anyone who spent them learning about software engineering paradigms.
Sure, most of the time at Uni is completely and utterly wasted.. I'm not sure any of the lectures I went to actually taught me anything. In fact, most of them 'un-taught' me. However, the process of doing coursework and team projects taught me a lot more than I thought.
Most of my geek-related knowhow is derived from stuff I learned at college. I ddin't learn it from the staff though. They were mostly on another planet; caught up in their research and out of touch with the students.
I became the geek I am today through hanging around in a computer lab with other geeks. We learned off each other. A lot of them had their own Linux boxes and thus knew tons about sysadmining. They were able to pass that knowledge along to those of us who didn't admin our own boxes. I spent a lot of time at college just messing about with Unix, compiling and installing software; just getting a "feel" for the system. If I ever got stuck, there were a whole bunch of other geeks in the room to help me. In my final year, I knew enough to help the proto-geeks in the years below me.
(the degree I managed to scrape through came in handy when I started applying for jobs too :-)
Case in point: me. MIT makes us take 8 humanities classes in order to graduate (among other general requirements which are common across all majors). I got talked into taking a music history class. That class changed my life and opened a whole world of possibilities for me. I'm still a CS major, but I plan to minor (or at least concentrate) in music, all due to this one class that I took more or less because I "had to."
I'm currently taking a writing class (again, one of the core requirements), and it's really opened my eyes to a lot of literature (I highly recommend Moravec for those geeky types).
Sure, I do a lot of learning in my field as well, but if that's all I got, I'd feel a bit cheated. After 2 years here, I can say with confidence that I feel I have grown as a person, and I'm only halfway done.
Like the majority of college students, I went right to college from high school. In retrospect, it would have done me no harm whatsoever to have asked my college admissions office to defer my admission for one year (or two) so that I could have done something -- worked, volunteered, served in the military, what-have-you -- which would have given me a taste of the real world before I went to college. My understanding is that most colleges are relatively generous about granting such deferments; high school students who are confronting this dilemma might look into it.
This is a big pet peeve of mine. Years ago, I entered college as a Computer Science major. I went through the entire first semester never using or even seeing a computer. The Engineering department felt it was more important that I get a solid foundation in traditional engineering skills -- so I took courses like "Engineering Drafting".
Well, at least I could DRAW a computer.
I ended up changing majors and eventually graduated with a Political Science degree.
Five years ago, I happened to find a course catalog for that college. I checked the CompSci program and found that C programming was a GRADUATE course. You had to pay them for four years to get a degree, then pay even more to learn how to do anything USEFUL in the real world.
IMHO, the real problem is that colleges are trying to gouge their students. They are using the prestige of being a college to overcharge people, waste their time with pointless courses, excuse horrible instructors, and generally treat students -- the people PAYING their salaries -- like dirt. Maybe it's time for them to wake up, look at the real world, and ask if what they are doing is relevant.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
College did several things for me. I was a geek through and through prior to entering college, but college opened up whole new avenues for me that there is no way I could have explored otherwise. Things like building a microprocessor would have been out of the question, or playing around with GL on an SGI (prior to Open GL).
Many of the things I learned in college were invaluable, besides just that piece of paper. Other things were not very valuable. There were a number of classes that were basically a waste of time, but that was just preparing me for the real world.
Perhapse it depends on the college. I just interviewed a new college grad for an entry-level embedded programming job, yet the grad couldn't perform simple things. I asked about the difference between a linked list and a binary tree and how they relate to Big-O notation when searching. No answer. I asked the grad to write a C function to convert an integer to an ASCII string. Again, the grad was at a total loss.
For those who say they got nothing out of college, either you didn't want anything out of college or you were some super genious before entering. Either that or you went to some brain-damaged college.
Prior to college I had done a fair amount of programming and exploration. I knew 80x86 assembly cold and all the main data types used. In college I was able to greatly build on my experiences. Also, that piece of paper has been useful since it allows me to get a lower insurance rate.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I can understand if you're frustrated that college graduates can't write a routine to print a number in octal, but if you're only allowing them to use printf, that's insane. College isn't a place where a student should learn all the useless minutae of various languages -- that's what reference manuals are for. College is more about theory than "practical knowledge", and I doubt knowing how to use printf to print octal numbers even counts as "practical".