> I agree that most education should be learned on the job, but college is a filter to keep the lazy out of jobs that require the dedicated. This is the heart

> I agree that most education should be learned on the job, but college is a filter to keep the lazy out of jobs that require the dedicated. This is the heart of the issue, and I'm not sure you realized you stumbled upon it. First, you acknowledge the only way to "fail out" is to "not care". This itself shows that college doesn't prove capability or learning or anything objective. It only shows that you have to do the right kind of little monkey-dance for your professors, so they'll be satisfied that you're subjugated, and then they'll pass you. More to the point, college was designed to filter out "challenging" individuals (for several definitions of "challenging", most of which are irrelevant for modern work), not incompetent ones. [And small caveat: today, college mainly exists not really to filter, but just to put the nation's youth in indentured servitude]. Anyone who thinks you're filtering for competence when you look at degrees, look no further than this thread. You're filtering for someone who is mainstream and complacent; you're filtering for someone who won't question, let alone challenge, the groupthink. Don't you think it's a big waste to require several years of time and several tens of thousands of dollars in debt just to determine whether or not your candidates are "too lazy to finish a degree"? And as someone who's been blessed to enjoy a successful career (up to this point) without submitting to the subjugation of so-called "higher education", I can say that it's not really a good indicator of laziness. Laziness is not caring that you zapped 4 years of your existence away at 15% efficiency so that when you apply for a desk job at BigCo, they won't say "Sorry, you're obviously qualified, but if we hire someone without a college degree, it will mess up our H1B sponsorships that were partially justified by requiring Americans with college degrees." It takes a lot more legwork to suss out the places that don't have a giant stake up their butt. Self-teaching is hard, but very rewarding, and at the pace that software moves, you should be looking for skill in this as a fundamental quality. It's hard to blame people for going to school these days, with the amount of social pressure around it, but if they seemed to enjoy being herded around too much, and certainly if they consider said herding as a necessary rite of passage before one can entrusted not to drop everything and go to Mexico, it's a big negative in my book.