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Telling people they don't "need" to go to university is an act of personal sabotage. The person giving you that advice is either an idiot, or wants to keep you

Telling people they don't "need" to go to university is an act of personal sabotage. The person giving you that advice is either an idiot, or wants to keep you in your place for other reasons. This is an urgent view. The post-hoc justifications of people who either didn't go, or people who did go but want to believe their other accomplishments are more defining - are not valuable to someone who has the means and opportunity to make the investment. The more arbitrary and meaningless having a degree seems, the more important it is to actually get one, because without one, you are subject to the even more arbitrary and meaningless barriers that it will otherwise unlock. You don't know them because you don't get to them until 10y+ after you graduate. A "degree," is in effect the degree of trajectory for the compounding rate of the value of your experience to others, where you don't see the effects until much later. Look at the rate of occurrence of non-degreed people above a certain level of financial success, property ownership, executive management, assets, and opportunity, and then compare them to the very long tail of the hundreds-of-millions other non-degreed people you are in a labour market with. The distribution of that curve looks a lot like lottery winners. Given outcomes are exponentially distributed, should you make an investment, or just play the lottery? Get a degree, or always work for people who have one when you don't. People who think education is mainly about skills and training don't understand what education is. Suffice it to say that a degree is a strategic investment. If you don't know what that means, I recommend investing in your education.

Dumblydorr 6y ago
I don't disagree that degrees and college education are important, but I don't think pointing to wealthy people is good evidence. Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education. The reasons to attend college are more than moneymaking. Social networking, maturation, shared experience, opportunities to expand your knowledge beyond online tutorials, college offers many interesting experiences that going straight to work will not.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education. Yeah there is some serious selection bias there -- Bill Gates' dad was a wealthy lawyer who sent his kid to a private school that had it's own computer systems in the 70s; Jobs lived down the street from one of the founders of HP, etc.
  - Isamu 6y ago
    Right, Gates was relatively well off AND lucky to be hacking at the right time. Jobs was not rich at all but lived in the right general area AND was lucky to have the right interests to make friends with Woz.
    - dekhn 6y ago
      and don't forget that Woz's dad was an EE who brought computer manuals home from Lockheed for Woz to read.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  > Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school It's of course a very nice story that they "dropped out of school", but the truth is more nuanced than that. For example Bill Gates and Elon Musk had school as a backup plan in case their business would fail. So it's not that they dropped out of school to pursue their business, they suspended their school for their business, and still had it as a backup plan. Very different! If their business wouldn't have worked, they would continue their school (which at that point was already an investment, 3 years for Bill Gates if I remember correctly).
  - chadash 6y ago
    Agree completely, but just wanted to point out that Elon Musk has an ivy league bachelor's degree. What he dropped out of was his Ph.D. program, which is more akin to quitting a job than "dropping out of school".
chadash 6y ago
This is so spot on except for this: > You don't know them because you don't get to them until 10y+ after you graduate. I think it's actually much quicker. A degree matters most for your first few jobs after you graduate, and your first few jobs matter a lot for your career.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I feel like this is difficult to quantify. For some people, especially top-tier talent, this is probably true. But I don't think it is necessarily the case for everyone. I started my profession programming career at 18, but went back for a CS degree at around 30. I did notice a difference in the quality of job offers that I received since getting a degree. Prior to my degree, I only ever received job offers from smaller places. Immediately after receiving my diploma, I managed to get a really well paying job at one of the largest tech companies in my city. There's no way of knowing how much of an influence my degree had on this, but I suspect it was critical. This particular company hired people without college degrees. All of my subsequent jobs have been with companies would be out of reach for me without a degree. Times are definitely changing, especially with the rise of bootcamps. And my anecdotes can't be extrapolated to everyone, but I do think there is still value in technical degrees from a university, even for CS.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

I don't disagree that degrees and college education are important, but I don't think pointing to wealthy people is good evidence. Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education. The reasons to attend college are more than moneymaking. Social networking, maturation, shared experience, opportunities to expand your knowledge beyond online tutorials, college offers many interesting experiences that going straight to work will not.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
> Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education. Yeah there is some serious selection bias there -- Bill Gates' dad was a wealthy lawyer who sent his kid to a private school that had it's own computer systems in the 70s; Jobs lived down the street from one of the founders of HP, etc.
- Isamu 6y ago
  Right, Gates was relatively well off AND lucky to be hacking at the right time. Jobs was not rich at all but lived in the right general area AND was lucky to have the right interests to make friends with Woz.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    and don't forget that Woz's dad was an EE who brought computer manuals home from Lockheed for Woz to read.
koonsolo 6y ago
> Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school It's of course a very nice story that they "dropped out of school", but the truth is more nuanced than that. For example Bill Gates and Elon Musk had school as a backup plan in case their business would fail. So it's not that they dropped out of school to pursue their business, they suspended their school for their business, and still had it as a backup plan. Very different! If their business wouldn't have worked, they would continue their school (which at that point was already an investment, 3 years for Bill Gates if I remember correctly).
- chadash 6y ago
  Agree completely, but just wanted to point out that Elon Musk has an ivy league bachelor's degree. What he dropped out of was his Ph.D. program, which is more akin to quitting a job than "dropping out of school".

chadash 6y ago

This is so spot on except for this: > You don't know them because you don't get to them until 10y+ after you graduate. I think it's actually much quicker. A degree matters most for your first few jobs after you graduate, and your first few jobs matter a lot for your career.

mywittyname 6y ago
I feel like this is difficult to quantify. For some people, especially top-tier talent, this is probably true. But I don't think it is necessarily the case for everyone. I started my profession programming career at 18, but went back for a CS degree at around 30. I did notice a difference in the quality of job offers that I received since getting a degree. Prior to my degree, I only ever received job offers from smaller places. Immediately after receiving my diploma, I managed to get a really well paying job at one of the largest tech companies in my city. There's no way of knowing how much of an influence my degree had on this, but I suspect it was critical. This particular company hired people without college degrees. All of my subsequent jobs have been with companies would be out of reach for me without a degree. Times are definitely changing, especially with the rise of bootcamps. And my anecdotes can't be extrapolated to everyone, but I do think there is still value in technical degrees from a university, even for CS.