6 ms·

Don't believe these people. A university education (especially in CS) will introduce you to A LOT of people and opportunities in your field, will expand your te

by jtaby 16y ago

Don't believe these people. A university education (especially in CS) will introduce you to A LOT of people and opportunities in your field, will expand your technical horizon, and will force you to learn things you wouldn't have otherwise learnt on your own. In my opinion, all the anti-university hate is from people who are too lazy to make the most of their university education on their own and expect their money and degree to magically earn them money after graduation. School will open doors for you, it's up to you to pick which one to walk through. Personally, I went to a top-10, big-10 school. If you wanted to go into research, you had that opportunity. If you wanted a silicon valley internship, you had that opportunity, if you wanted a startup position, you had that opportunity. The money is optional, if you can stick to federal grants/loans, you can consolidate them all into a single payment, and when you get your job out of college, start paying it off, as far as I can tell, it's the private, non fed loans that should be avoided like the plague. I loved my school, I loved my college life, I loved my friends, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

derefr 16y ago
I keep hearing this, but I see no reason to justify paying exorbitant amounts of money for it. Why couldn't you get the same opportunities just by living on/near a university campus and actively meeting people? Universities are not matchmaking services; if they were, they wouldn't hire professors, just staff TAs to teach undergraduate classes from material composed by corporate research labs (where all the actual Ph.Ds would work).
- swolchok 16y ago
  College students meet each other in ways that exclude non-students. For example, a significant portion of the top EECS undergraduates at Michigan spend a good amount of their social lives with a particular honor society. This society is, of course, entirely closed to non-students. Another group that doesn't leave campus all that much? Graduate students. You can't just waltz into University buildings and be all "sup dawg???". People are at least pretending to do work, you won't be able to access the network, you won't have common classes to complain about together, etc. etc. We're somewhat suspicious of non-students, too.
  - derefr 16y ago
    > People are at least pretending to do work, you won't be able to access the network, you won't have common classes to complain about together, etc. etc. We're somewhat suspicious of non-students, too. Those are social-status problems [and thus, I could answer snarkily, amenable to social engineering.] A University is a clique of people who pay a lot of money to attend a University. If the only technical advantage everyone gets from paying the money is access to the lectures, and in the long run the lectures aren't what matter, then why is anyone paying the money? "University", in that sense, seems to be a Prisoner's Dilemma set up by lecturers to rob students. No one individual can stop paying, because it excludes them, even though the group as a whole would be better off if they all just rented a few apartment buildings together instead of paying massive amounts of tuition.
    - swolchok 16y ago
      It may not be just the lectures that matter, but I definitely learned a lot and developed technical maturity as a result of my courses. Could I have learned them on my own if I had known exactly what to study? Maybe. Were there bad courses along with good ones? Yes. Are there bad students that still get degrees? Yep. Was it worthless? Absolutely not. Example experience that could not have been had outside college, by definition: after taking the introductory computer science with perhaps more enthusiasm than was wise in my first semester, I TAed the course for my remaining 5 semesters. Obviously, my experience was not typical. On the other hand, if your experience is typical, then you certainly need to learn from courses rather than trying to do it all through self-study.
      - hga 16y ago
        "after taking the introductory computer science with perhaps more enthusiasm than was wise in my first semester" That'll teach you ^_^. MIT's new core courses are so teaching intensive the department is enlisting undergraduates to help and I think it's generally been possible for a few undergraduates to get some formal teaching experience of that sort. I've always done some teaching informally and found the experience to be extremely valuable, it teaches you all sorts of things including a much better understanding of the subject itself.
- philwelch 16y ago
  They still function as a better matchmaking service than what you'd accomplish by pretending to be a student, I bet. Unless you were really good at pretending to be a student.
- davi 16y ago
  When you're in a good class with other smart people, you get to see their brains in action. You end up talking about interesting things with the classmates you like, and who like you. This is the foundation of a genuine intellectual network. It is difficult to obtain this seed network in any other way, except perhaps by email in a hopping open source project, or by getting into an interesting clique like Y Combinator.
  - derefr 16y ago
    True—I think I just have a problem with the fact that the University is the one in control of it. If, instead, the social network was the core organization and free to join, and the students rented out/purchased the buildings and equipment, and hired the lecturers and administrative staff, I can imagine it costing a might bit less and having a much tighter feedback loop in instructor, student, and course quality. (Plus, matchmaking would be made an explicit goal, rather than assumed.)
    - rick888 16y ago
      "True I think I just have a problem with the fact that the University is the one in control of it. If, instead, the social network was the core organization and free to join, and the students rented out/purchased the buildings and equipment, and hired the lecturers and administrative staff, I can imagine it costing a might bit less and having a much tighter feedback loop in instructor, student, and course quality. (Plus, matchmaking would be made an explicit goal, rather than assumed.)" Students generally don't have any money. Even if those same students put all the money into your new group idea, there would need to be some form of central administration that manages all of the hiring, courses, etc. Also, it's not really free to join if the students need to rent the buildings, equipment, and lecturers (and wouldn't be fair to the ones that pay if it was).
      - derefr 16y ago
        1. Student loans and such—all the machinery students today use to get their tuitions—would still exist; they'd just be given directly to the student. 2. It would be a workers' cooperative, with the labor being learning. 3. Joining and participating would be different steps. The network would be free to join, but each class would still cost money, raised and pooled to create the class (in the fashion of groupon.com)

by jtaby 16y ago

derefr 16y ago

I keep hearing this, but I see no reason to justify paying exorbitant amounts of money for it. Why couldn't you get the same opportunities just by living on/near a university campus and actively meeting people? Universities are not matchmaking services; if they were, they wouldn't hire professors, just staff TAs to teach undergraduate classes from material composed by corporate research labs (where all the actual Ph.Ds would work).

swolchok 16y ago
College students meet each other in ways that exclude non-students. For example, a significant portion of the top EECS undergraduates at Michigan spend a good amount of their social lives with a particular honor society. This society is, of course, entirely closed to non-students. Another group that doesn't leave campus all that much? Graduate students. You can't just waltz into University buildings and be all "sup dawg???". People are at least pretending to do work, you won't be able to access the network, you won't have common classes to complain about together, etc. etc. We're somewhat suspicious of non-students, too.
- derefr 16y ago
  > People are at least pretending to do work, you won't be able to access the network, you won't have common classes to complain about together, etc. etc. We're somewhat suspicious of non-students, too. Those are social-status problems [and thus, I could answer snarkily, amenable to social engineering.] A University is a clique of people who pay a lot of money to attend a University. If the only technical advantage everyone gets from paying the money is access to the lectures, and in the long run the lectures aren't what matter, then why is anyone paying the money? "University", in that sense, seems to be a Prisoner's Dilemma set up by lecturers to rob students. No one individual can stop paying, because it excludes them, even though the group as a whole would be better off if they all just rented a few apartment buildings together instead of paying massive amounts of tuition.
  - swolchok 16y ago
    It may not be just the lectures that matter, but I definitely learned a lot and developed technical maturity as a result of my courses. Could I have learned them on my own if I had known exactly what to study? Maybe. Were there bad courses along with good ones? Yes. Are there bad students that still get degrees? Yep. Was it worthless? Absolutely not. Example experience that could not have been had outside college, by definition: after taking the introductory computer science with perhaps more enthusiasm than was wise in my first semester, I TAed the course for my remaining 5 semesters. Obviously, my experience was not typical. On the other hand, if your experience is typical, then you certainly need to learn from courses rather than trying to do it all through self-study.
    - hga 16y ago
      "after taking the introductory computer science with perhaps more enthusiasm than was wise in my first semester" That'll teach you ^_^. MIT's new core courses are so teaching intensive the department is enlisting undergraduates to help and I think it's generally been possible for a few undergraduates to get some formal teaching experience of that sort. I've always done some teaching informally and found the experience to be extremely valuable, it teaches you all sorts of things including a much better understanding of the subject itself.
philwelch 16y ago
They still function as a better matchmaking service than what you'd accomplish by pretending to be a student, I bet. Unless you were really good at pretending to be a student.
davi 16y ago
When you're in a good class with other smart people, you get to see their brains in action. You end up talking about interesting things with the classmates you like, and who like you. This is the foundation of a genuine intellectual network. It is difficult to obtain this seed network in any other way, except perhaps by email in a hopping open source project, or by getting into an interesting clique like Y Combinator.
- derefr 16y ago
  True—I think I just have a problem with the fact that the University is the one in control of it. If, instead, the social network was the core organization and free to join, and the students rented out/purchased the buildings and equipment, and hired the lecturers and administrative staff, I can imagine it costing a might bit less and having a much tighter feedback loop in instructor, student, and course quality. (Plus, matchmaking would be made an explicit goal, rather than assumed.)
  - rick888 16y ago
    "True I think I just have a problem with the fact that the University is the one in control of it. If, instead, the social network was the core organization and free to join, and the students rented out/purchased the buildings and equipment, and hired the lecturers and administrative staff, I can imagine it costing a might bit less and having a much tighter feedback loop in instructor, student, and course quality. (Plus, matchmaking would be made an explicit goal, rather than assumed.)" Students generally don't have any money. Even if those same students put all the money into your new group idea, there would need to be some form of central administration that manages all of the hiring, courses, etc. Also, it's not really free to join if the students need to rent the buildings, equipment, and lecturers (and wouldn't be fair to the ones that pay if it was).
    - derefr 16y ago
      1. Student loans and such—all the machinery students today use to get their tuitions—would still exist; they'd just be given directly to the student. 2. It would be a workers' cooperative, with the labor being learning. 3. Joining and participating would be different steps. The network would be free to join, but each class would still cost money, raised and pooled to create the class (in the fashion of groupon.com)