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Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?" Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of applicable skills that landed me a high-paying software engineering job instead of doing the manual labor or trivial office tasks that I was qualified for before college. If you go to a private school to get a history degree then sure, it was 4 years of expensive partying that doesn't leave you any more employable. Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end.

nroach 16y ago
I agree. However, another route would be to take a sum equal to your 1st year college tuition, and use that to seed a bootstrapped startup. Take a year, $20-50k, and see what you can build. If you fail, you still have (ostensibly) three years of college funding left to go, and you can probably pay off that 4th year through hard work by the time you graduate. When you graduate, you have the degree and a really interesting line item on your resume. Of course, this all presupposes that family or savings can fund that $50-200k in the first place. Unfortunately, many students are dependent on loans. Because the government backs student loans, bankers are willing to lend money for school where they won't do so for a startup. If there was a provision that would allow you to get fully-backed "startup loans" that carry the same terms and guarantees as student loans, I firmly believe our economy would be stronger and default rates probably wouldn't be much higher than they are for student loans.
- jtbigwoo 16y ago
  As an eighteen- or nineteen- year old, I would have wasted that money almost instantly. Could it work in reverse with the money arriving in your fourth or fifth year of college? Perhaps a curriculum dedicated to giving students more and more autonomy until they are working almost entirely independently by the fourth year?
- elblanco 16y ago
  My first year of college education was probably about $2000. I'm not sure I could have done much more than pay a couple months rent with that.
cynicalkane 16y ago
I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.) It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to explain why it's valuable to be able to think about math and programming (especially to a math class full of skeptical kids). Essentially, a good liberal arts education transforms your world-view of those subjects the same way a good engineering education does. Just like you shouldn't condemn yourself to reinventing Quicksort when you can be capable of more advanced algorithms, nor should you find yourself reinventing Locke when thinking about politics. It is much better to build on the history of thought instead of being doomed to repeat it (and you'll only repeat it satisfactorily if you're a genius anyway). OK, there are worthless liberal arts educations. But there are also worthless computer science educations, as anyone who's worked with other programmers has discovered.
- fuzzmeister 16y ago
  As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.
  - jerf 16y ago
    Strawman. Very few people are saying that, not enough to worry about. The claim is not that 100% of college should be about teaching useful skills, the claim is that if you're going to be put into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can not be removed by bankruptcy it should probably be the case that more than zero percent of your college time should be spent on a directly-salable skill. Many people are really misunderstanding the argument here. It is not that liberal arts are bad. It is that it is basically large-scale fraud to sell a college degree as best way to a well-paying job and worth the massive undischargable-debt without explaining that the promise really only applies to practical degrees. You are free to complain about how the market only values degrees that produce marketable skills (and I've deliberately phrased it a bit tautologically to make it obvious that it's not really a very compelling complaint), but I still say that if you want people to pursue impractical degrees you need to be doing it by telling them the truth about what they are doing. I will not deny anybody their right to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt chasing their dream, I just want them to do it with eyes wide open.
thisisnotmyname 16y ago
What you say is true, but not the main point of the article. Its a kick-in-the-pants for young smart people to go and actually attempt to create something, instead of waiting for a job to come to them.
prgmatic 16y ago
Agreed. College has definitely changed my view of the world and expanded my mind. And I'm glad I went to an affordable state school. I do, however, believe that past generations had more advantages with their degrees than my generation does.
ahoyhere 16y ago
TL;DR? The essay doesn't knock college at all. It knocks the idea that the kid is better-educated at 21 than his father was, and that he has MORE opportunities because of it. It knocks the sad fact that the kid's father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, but somehow taught the kid that he has to have A Real Job with a Career Ladder and 401k - or nothing at all: "The parents and grandparents, like so many parents today, are disappointed in their son because he's not taking their advice, but in fact their son is taking their advice to its inevitable conclusion: he's holding out for the perfect corporate job." It has, in short, nothing to do with you, your school, or your defensiveness about graduating college. And if you think college graduates today are actually smarter than they were 30 years ago, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken. Their facts may be more up-to-date, however, writing skills, reading skills, and whatnot, are down across the board.
- yalurker 16y ago
  It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma. I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.
  - illumin8 16y ago
    Yes, the basic premise was that college is more expensive now, but that college graduates are not any more educated than they were decades ago.
    - Tamerlin 16y ago
      Experience leads me argue that they are LESS educated now. Look around on the web. Start paying attention to how many people consistently make basic linguistic errors like "loose" when they wanted to say "lose" or use the incorrect homophone for "there" or "it's" to indicate a possessive. Look for actual reasoning -- as opposed to pedantically regurgitating a collection of facts. The sad reality is that getting a degree these days has become a lot easier, and increasingly has very little to do with how smart one is, but rather how skilled one is at cramming for a test. The high demand and low supply in software developers has lead to both higher salaries and lower standards.
The_Igor 16y ago
I went to school for one reason and one reason only because I knew I had to. I picked Psychology as my degree because, at that time, this was the only thing I could imagine studding for 4 years. I worked in IT industry before I started school, while going to school and after graduation. Most of my techy friends discouraged my degree every step of the way. 'Why the hell do you need it? Bill gates never even finished' was the tone of their message. Well, I got my degree and sure I don't really use it in my job. Sure I had a big lump of dissapoitnment in my throat after I graduated and came home to realize the big pay off is not there. However, as lame as this sounds, I learned how to learn. I learned that as pointless as most of my classes were, ones that weren't will stay with me for ever.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  This is what I got out of my lottery-funded education. I went in to get a degree in networking (with a specialization in Linux administration), and ended up getting the most out of the liberal arts stuff. Things I got out of it: Got comfortable with the command line Overcame a lifetime of math phobia (I was content with being math-illiterate before I knew its value) Learned how to write coherent bodies of text Got a primer in economics that helped me understand the chaos in 2008 --- I think too many people go straight to "you don't need college" rather than considering what kind of college they would get the most out of. Anyone would do well to have a simple AAS from a cheap/free technical college. Not everyone needs a PHD or degree from a top-rated institution. If nothing else, everyone should get a basic degree even if they don't have any grand aspirations. It gives you tools to live a better life with whatever you do achieve.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
api 16y ago
It seems to be "beat up on academia year" this year. Yawn. College might occasionally be over-valued in some areas, but it's not useless. Last I checked towns with strong top-tier universities were much healthier economically than towns without.
- AmericanOP 16y ago
  You might want to think about that last point there.
biggitybones 16y ago
Whenever I read these articles debating the value of a college degree (which I think this article isn't about, but that seems to be the way everyone is interpreting it), the argument is always treated as a black and white issue and it's not. There are a few types of people that go through college in different ways. You have intelligent people that have learned how to "excel" well, who fit the bill of the subject of the NY Times article. They get through with a decent GPA, party hard, and get a corporate job. You have intelligent people that thrive in the learning environment that college affords, and they gain a lot out of it. Their work ethic takes them places, and some develop that work ethic in college. I'm one of the latter, so call me biased towards it. Then there are the hard working, intelligent people who feel caged from the curriculum. These are the people who question the value. The problem with the people that already have the strong work ethic and intelligence is that they assume that everyone is like those peers in the first group that simply go through the motions, and its not a question of whether they should have went to school but how they approached it. These are the loudest voices against the higher ed system. It's undoubtedly a broken system, but inherent value exists for some. I think we'll see a revolution in higher education, hopefully sooner than later and ideally these issues are rectified.
feverishaaron 16y ago
I don't see him knocking schooling. Rather, he is criticizing seeking schooling for the sake of schooling. And he has a valid point. There is very little economic benefit, outside of research and some professional fields, to pursue additional degrees.
- mcritz 16y ago
  He did knock Management Degrees… with good reason.
run4yourlives 16y ago
"Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless." Hello, very definition of a straw-man argument. I'm surprised this is rated so high on this site. To reiterate, his thesis is not about college, it is this: "I am offering encouragement to a crop of college kids infantilized by terrible advice from parents and TV who have the freedom and opportunity to try something; while simultaneously describing the only long term solution to America's economic problems: more businesses." Now, you can certainly take issue with the thesis he presents, but there is no point arguing about something unrelated to the point of the article.
kingkawn 16y ago
my dad went to harvard, i didn't. so no, i was not smarter than him.
redrobot5050 16y ago
Counterpoint: The article's point is that these 24 year olds with "respectable degrees" but no opportunities should create their own opportunities. Sure, it may not come with the creature comforts of a management job at a large corporation, but you're also your own boss. I know a lot of people who can't or won't put a price on only answering themselves. To recap: Yes, a degree makes you more employable, but there's more to prospering than being a good employee. Especially as the corporate structure is figuring out that there are too many cogs in the machine.
redrobot5050 16y ago
I wanted to chime in something here: I went to school at a state school "down the street" from CMU in Computer Engineering. It was "what my family could afford" since my father was between jobs. Myself and a CMU grad might have the same degree (B.S. in ECE)but our starting salaries are vastly different. I started out around 40K (w/no bennies) whereas CMU students would probably start closer to 55-60K + bennies. Was this because CMU was also #1 in the world in ECE at the time? Yes, of course. But the point I'm getting at is private school's higher prices often imply that you will receive a better starting offer. Assuming our job markets are equally flexible, it could be 5 years before someone like myself "catches up". Kids like the one from the NYTimes article have been raised to work smarter, not harder. Why spend 5 years paying your dues when name recognition or knowing someone will get you to same place without brow sweat? It's not necessarily a college's fault. They're catering to wealthy entitled people and trying to take as much as they dishonestly can. Likewise, entitled children don't really understand a world that isn't catering to them.
teyc 16y ago
Even Engineering degrees aren't necessarily the solution. It really depends on the times and severity of a recession. I lived in Malaysia through a time when the term "walking engineers" (unemployed engineers) was commonplace. Lots of stories on the net about rocket scientists losing their jobs, and conducting tour buses. What about the name of that guy who's preliminary work on bio-luminescence won someone else a Nobel prize, but he himself is now unemployed? It's human nature to think that we can avoid somebody's misfortune by simply following some known heuristics. It is true only some of the time.
Tamerlin 16y ago
"Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end." Are you sure about that?

nroach 16y ago

I agree. However, another route would be to take a sum equal to your 1st year college tuition, and use that to seed a bootstrapped startup. Take a year, $20-50k, and see what you can build. If you fail, you still have (ostensibly) three years of college funding left to go, and you can probably pay off that 4th year through hard work by the time you graduate. When you graduate, you have the degree and a really interesting line item on your resume. Of course, this all presupposes that family or savings can fund that $50-200k in the first place. Unfortunately, many students are dependent on loans. Because the government backs student loans, bankers are willing to lend money for school where they won't do so for a startup. If there was a provision that would allow you to get fully-backed "startup loans" that carry the same terms and guarantees as student loans, I firmly believe our economy would be stronger and default rates probably wouldn't be much higher than they are for student loans.

jtbigwoo 16y ago
As an eighteen- or nineteen- year old, I would have wasted that money almost instantly. Could it work in reverse with the money arriving in your fourth or fifth year of college? Perhaps a curriculum dedicated to giving students more and more autonomy until they are working almost entirely independently by the fourth year?
elblanco 16y ago
My first year of college education was probably about $2000. I'm not sure I could have done much more than pay a couple months rent with that.

cynicalkane 16y ago

I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.) It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to explain why it's valuable to be able to think about math and programming (especially to a math class full of skeptical kids). Essentially, a good liberal arts education transforms your world-view of those subjects the same way a good engineering education does. Just like you shouldn't condemn yourself to reinventing Quicksort when you can be capable of more advanced algorithms, nor should you find yourself reinventing Locke when thinking about politics. It is much better to build on the history of thought instead of being doomed to repeat it (and you'll only repeat it satisfactorily if you're a genius anyway). OK, there are worthless liberal arts educations. But there are also worthless computer science educations, as anyone who's worked with other programmers has discovered.

fuzzmeister 16y ago
As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.
- jerf 16y ago
  Strawman. Very few people are saying that, not enough to worry about. The claim is not that 100% of college should be about teaching useful skills, the claim is that if you're going to be put into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can not be removed by bankruptcy it should probably be the case that more than zero percent of your college time should be spent on a directly-salable skill. Many people are really misunderstanding the argument here. It is not that liberal arts are bad. It is that it is basically large-scale fraud to sell a college degree as best way to a well-paying job and worth the massive undischargable-debt without explaining that the promise really only applies to practical degrees. You are free to complain about how the market only values degrees that produce marketable skills (and I've deliberately phrased it a bit tautologically to make it obvious that it's not really a very compelling complaint), but I still say that if you want people to pursue impractical degrees you need to be doing it by telling them the truth about what they are doing. I will not deny anybody their right to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt chasing their dream, I just want them to do it with eyes wide open.

thisisnotmyname 16y ago

What you say is true, but not the main point of the article. Its a kick-in-the-pants for young smart people to go and actually attempt to create something, instead of waiting for a job to come to them.

prgmatic 16y ago

Agreed. College has definitely changed my view of the world and expanded my mind. And I'm glad I went to an affordable state school. I do, however, believe that past generations had more advantages with their degrees than my generation does.

ahoyhere 16y ago

TL;DR? The essay doesn't knock college at all. It knocks the idea that the kid is better-educated at 21 than his father was, and that he has MORE opportunities because of it. It knocks the sad fact that the kid's father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, but somehow taught the kid that he has to have A Real Job with a Career Ladder and 401k - or nothing at all: "The parents and grandparents, like so many parents today, are disappointed in their son because he's not taking their advice, but in fact their son is taking their advice to its inevitable conclusion: he's holding out for the perfect corporate job." It has, in short, nothing to do with you, your school, or your defensiveness about graduating college. And if you think college graduates today are actually smarter than they were 30 years ago, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken. Their facts may be more up-to-date, however, writing skills, reading skills, and whatnot, are down across the board.

yalurker 16y ago
It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma. I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.
- illumin8 16y ago
  Yes, the basic premise was that college is more expensive now, but that college graduates are not any more educated than they were decades ago.
  - Tamerlin 16y ago
    Experience leads me argue that they are LESS educated now. Look around on the web. Start paying attention to how many people consistently make basic linguistic errors like "loose" when they wanted to say "lose" or use the incorrect homophone for "there" or "it's" to indicate a possessive. Look for actual reasoning -- as opposed to pedantically regurgitating a collection of facts. The sad reality is that getting a degree these days has become a lot easier, and increasingly has very little to do with how smart one is, but rather how skilled one is at cramming for a test. The high demand and low supply in software developers has lead to both higher salaries and lower standards.

The_Igor 16y ago

I went to school for one reason and one reason only because I knew I had to. I picked Psychology as my degree because, at that time, this was the only thing I could imagine studding for 4 years. I worked in IT industry before I started school, while going to school and after graduation. Most of my techy friends discouraged my degree every step of the way. 'Why the hell do you need it? Bill gates never even finished' was the tone of their message. Well, I got my degree and sure I don't really use it in my job. Sure I had a big lump of dissapoitnment in my throat after I graduated and came home to realize the big pay off is not there. However, as lame as this sounds, I learned how to learn. I learned that as pointless as most of my classes were, ones that weren't will stay with me for ever.

mkr-hn 16y ago
This is what I got out of my lottery-funded education. I went in to get a degree in networking (with a specialization in Linux administration), and ended up getting the most out of the liberal arts stuff. Things I got out of it: Got comfortable with the command line Overcame a lifetime of math phobia (I was content with being math-illiterate before I knew its value) Learned how to write coherent bodies of text Got a primer in economics that helped me understand the chaos in 2008 --- I think too many people go straight to "you don't need college" rather than considering what kind of college they would get the most out of. Anyone would do well to have a simple AAS from a cheap/free technical college. Not everyone needs a PHD or degree from a top-rated institution. If nothing else, everyone should get a basic degree even if they don't have any grand aspirations. It gives you tools to live a better life with whatever you do achieve.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

api 16y ago

It seems to be "beat up on academia year" this year. Yawn. College might occasionally be over-valued in some areas, but it's not useless. Last I checked towns with strong top-tier universities were much healthier economically than towns without.

AmericanOP 16y ago
You might want to think about that last point there.

biggitybones 16y ago

Whenever I read these articles debating the value of a college degree (which I think this article isn't about, but that seems to be the way everyone is interpreting it), the argument is always treated as a black and white issue and it's not. There are a few types of people that go through college in different ways. You have intelligent people that have learned how to "excel" well, who fit the bill of the subject of the NY Times article. They get through with a decent GPA, party hard, and get a corporate job. You have intelligent people that thrive in the learning environment that college affords, and they gain a lot out of it. Their work ethic takes them places, and some develop that work ethic in college. I'm one of the latter, so call me biased towards it. Then there are the hard working, intelligent people who feel caged from the curriculum. These are the people who question the value. The problem with the people that already have the strong work ethic and intelligence is that they assume that everyone is like those peers in the first group that simply go through the motions, and its not a question of whether they should have went to school but how they approached it. These are the loudest voices against the higher ed system. It's undoubtedly a broken system, but inherent value exists for some. I think we'll see a revolution in higher education, hopefully sooner than later and ideally these issues are rectified.

feverishaaron 16y ago

I don't see him knocking schooling. Rather, he is criticizing seeking schooling for the sake of schooling. And he has a valid point. There is very little economic benefit, outside of research and some professional fields, to pursue additional degrees.

mcritz 16y ago
He did knock Management Degrees… with good reason.

run4yourlives 16y ago

"Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless." Hello, very definition of a straw-man argument. I'm surprised this is rated so high on this site. To reiterate, his thesis is not about college, it is this: "I am offering encouragement to a crop of college kids infantilized by terrible advice from parents and TV who have the freedom and opportunity to try something; while simultaneously describing the only long term solution to America's economic problems: more businesses." Now, you can certainly take issue with the thesis he presents, but there is no point arguing about something unrelated to the point of the article.

kingkawn 16y ago

my dad went to harvard, i didn't. so no, i was not smarter than him.

redrobot5050 16y ago

Counterpoint: The article's point is that these 24 year olds with "respectable degrees" but no opportunities should create their own opportunities. Sure, it may not come with the creature comforts of a management job at a large corporation, but you're also your own boss. I know a lot of people who can't or won't put a price on only answering themselves. To recap: Yes, a degree makes you more employable, but there's more to prospering than being a good employee. Especially as the corporate structure is figuring out that there are too many cogs in the machine.

redrobot5050 16y ago

I wanted to chime in something here: I went to school at a state school "down the street" from CMU in Computer Engineering. It was "what my family could afford" since my father was between jobs. Myself and a CMU grad might have the same degree (B.S. in ECE)but our starting salaries are vastly different. I started out around 40K (w/no bennies) whereas CMU students would probably start closer to 55-60K + bennies. Was this because CMU was also #1 in the world in ECE at the time? Yes, of course. But the point I'm getting at is private school's higher prices often imply that you will receive a better starting offer. Assuming our job markets are equally flexible, it could be 5 years before someone like myself "catches up". Kids like the one from the NYTimes article have been raised to work smarter, not harder. Why spend 5 years paying your dues when name recognition or knowing someone will get you to same place without brow sweat? It's not necessarily a college's fault. They're catering to wealthy entitled people and trying to take as much as they dishonestly can. Likewise, entitled children don't really understand a world that isn't catering to them.

teyc 16y ago

Even Engineering degrees aren't necessarily the solution. It really depends on the times and severity of a recession. I lived in Malaysia through a time when the term "walking engineers" (unemployed engineers) was commonplace. Lots of stories on the net about rocket scientists losing their jobs, and conducting tour buses. What about the name of that guy who's preliminary work on bio-luminescence won someone else a Nobel prize, but he himself is now unemployed? It's human nature to think that we can avoid somebody's misfortune by simply following some known heuristics. It is true only some of the time.

Tamerlin 16y ago

"Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end." Are you sure about that?