3 ms·

> You attend college to learn and grow, not to pass an HR screening. What? No. I attended college because it let me be hired nearly everywhere with much less h

> You attend college to learn and grow, not to pass an HR screening. What? No. I attended college because it let me be hired nearly everywhere with much less hassle than having to "work my way up" - nearly everything I learned was useless or rapidly obsolete (if it wasn't obsolete as it was taught). >You don't attend college for a degree you attend it for the knowledge and experience you gain - a degree is worthless, it can't be resold if a bank were to "take posession" of it. Except to HR, which is frequently where it matters the most, in actual dollars It sure would be nice if a college education was about learning and growth and discovering oneself and all the hoopla they feed you during visits and orientation, but it's a structured credentialing system that involves professors for some reason, and it's effectively mandatory for making an above-median wage.

sodafountan 8y ago
You just accurately described many of the problems in this world. For the record though I don't have a degree myself and I've never been denied for it during the HR screening process, I'm a developer and I use my existing work to market myself. I understand that in other fields this is either very hard to do or near impossible (Doctors, for example, could never do that). In an ideal world, if we could restructure society, we'd have corporations take on the burden of educating their workforce entirely - for instance perhaps out of high school if you were interested in being an accountant you'd intern or do a 2 year rigorous learning/onboarding process at company X where you'd agree to work for less or stay on for Y amount of years. I think a system like that would work a lot better for a lot of people and ultimately bring the cost of higher education down for the people who simply can't avoid it.
chrisco255 8y ago
It's not even close to mandatory for making above median wages. You can make over median being a mechanic, a firefighter, cop, truck driver, oil rig worker, plumber, carpenter, retail manager, salesperson, software developer etc etc.
throwawayjava 8y ago
> It sure would be nice if a college education was about learning and growth and discovering oneself and all the hoopla they feed you during visits and orientation, but it's a structured credentialing system that involves professors for some reason, and it's effectively mandatory for making an above-median wage. College is what you make of it. It's 4 years to spend at least half of your waking hours learning new things. You can waste a bunch of that time and still get a credential with vanishing return, or you can invest all of that time in building highly valuable skills (while also getting the credential). N=1: I was offered a $70K coding job out of high school. I made over 4x that amount at my first software job after graduation. They definitely weren't paying 4x more because of my degree, and most of my graduating class was making less than 100K. But it would have taken me longer than 4 years to get those skills and knowledge if I were working full time. More importantly, I would have had very few options a few years later when I got bored/burned-out with programming and decided to move into research. College is a space to develop your human capital. The official curriculum is there as a guide and baseline, but it's your responsibility to use your course project time and especially free time in an effective way to build on top of that curriculum. Unfortunately, very few students understand this.

sodafountan 8y ago

You just accurately described many of the problems in this world. For the record though I don't have a degree myself and I've never been denied for it during the HR screening process, I'm a developer and I use my existing work to market myself. I understand that in other fields this is either very hard to do or near impossible (Doctors, for example, could never do that). In an ideal world, if we could restructure society, we'd have corporations take on the burden of educating their workforce entirely - for instance perhaps out of high school if you were interested in being an accountant you'd intern or do a 2 year rigorous learning/onboarding process at company X where you'd agree to work for less or stay on for Y amount of years. I think a system like that would work a lot better for a lot of people and ultimately bring the cost of higher education down for the people who simply can't avoid it.

chrisco255 8y ago

It's not even close to mandatory for making above median wages. You can make over median being a mechanic, a firefighter, cop, truck driver, oil rig worker, plumber, carpenter, retail manager, salesperson, software developer etc etc.

throwawayjava 8y ago

> It sure would be nice if a college education was about learning and growth and discovering oneself and all the hoopla they feed you during visits and orientation, but it's a structured credentialing system that involves professors for some reason, and it's effectively mandatory for making an above-median wage. College is what you make of it. It's 4 years to spend at least half of your waking hours learning new things. You can waste a bunch of that time and still get a credential with vanishing return, or you can invest all of that time in building highly valuable skills (while also getting the credential). N=1: I was offered a $70K coding job out of high school. I made over 4x that amount at my first software job after graduation. They definitely weren't paying 4x more because of my degree, and most of my graduating class was making less than 100K. But it would have taken me longer than 4 years to get those skills and knowledge if I were working full time. More importantly, I would have had very few options a few years later when I got bored/burned-out with programming and decided to move into research. College is a space to develop your human capital. The official curriculum is there as a guide and baseline, but it's your responsibility to use your course project time and especially free time in an effective way to build on top of that curriculum. Unfortunately, very few students understand this.