5 ms·

College is a waste of time

72 points by bry 15y ago

bry 15y ago
Not sure I agree, but I submitted this article because I'm interested in the inevitable discussion to follow.
bluekeybox 15y ago
> He says college rewards conformity and competition, not collaboration, theory Wow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't know how to teamwork and learn from others. I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others can be counterproductive, in my opinion.
zitterbewegung 15y ago
Looks like a PR stunt to promote his company. Also, to promote whatever Peter Theil is doing.
- noarchy 15y ago
  It may be shameless promotion, but the fact is, he managed to get a platform (CNN) on which to do it. One could argue that he's off to a good start.
  - zitterbewegung 15y ago
    I agree with you on that point but the article seems like fluff in IMHO. That is the point I was trying to make.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
gtaylor 15y ago
Blanket statements like this are foolish. My own college experience had a lot of regurgitation, but whether you make productive use out of your time there is completely within your hands. I was able to do challenging, hands-on research, make connections that lead to my last two jobs, and build a solid resume. However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.
enthalpyx 15y ago
"We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions." -- says the guy writing for .... CNN.com
gte910h 15y ago
I did plenty of group work at Georgia Tech. Built several working robots in teams, a video game, a bus monitoring device, and various other software projects. I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.
- flomincucci 15y ago
  I agree with this. Here, I do PLENTY of group work. Business plans, software, use cases, etc.... EVERYTHING is made in group.
hwang89 15y ago
Hmm... a 19-year old dissing college. This sounds like that little kid in the movie commercial who argues Lebron > Jordan. You weren't there, man.
wccrawford 15y ago
I think he's got a lot of good points. "conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content, rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software development and literature. "competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have their own problems.) "regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization. "theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job. I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless. Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of it.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. When I was in college group projects were extremely common. As were group-projects for clubs. The SW engineering sequence was all group based. The compiler sequence was group project based. OS was group project based. And architecture was group project based. It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization. Is it really? Most of my tests were open book or take home. You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization.
  - jsavimbi 15y ago
    Maybe he should check himself into Northeastern University. It was almost every course that started off teaming oneself up and heading right into the project work as a team. Loners were discouraged from venturing off.
markbao 15y ago
> That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in the real world. Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects and our own organizations. Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in improving the human condition. Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.) He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students do show an improvement. I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else. Your thoughts are welcome.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people, so that there is a big confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else. Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing. And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could have won the Vietnam War in just a few years. 19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.
  - markbao 15y ago
    Yeah, but he is part of the Thiel Fellowship, which I tend to see as a pretty damn smart group of young people. And I know Dale and know that he talks to these "moving forward" type of teens. On the other hand, I'm yet another 19-year-old with an opinion. Yes, I think I know something about what the right decision for college is (and I think it's completely individual), so perhaps I just fall under that category and the above should just be ignored. Not that I think so, of course.
rick888 15y ago
College is more than learning the material, it's also about learning about yourself. Most of the time, it's your first taste of freedom and it's one of the only times where you aren't really a kid anymore and you aren't stuck working in a 9-5. You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not that easy.
dreamdu5t 15y ago
Everybody, jump on the "education is a bubble and a waste" bandwagon!
- nkassis 15y ago
  I was going to say the same thing, there real issues with college and education but the whole debate right now is starting to feel like a lot of sensationalism. I went to college and did Mathematics. Why? Cause it looked cool. Was I good at it? Not really I had a hard time with many of my classes but I enjoyed the material. It was interesting even if useless. It's all about what you want to get out of college. I wanted to learn something interesting. The best part is it wasn't useless at all in the end. Nobody really cares about what your degree is in except for some specific jobs and get it cheap (that even goes for Ivy schools, they are now cheaper than many private sub Ivy schools due to Financial aid).
  - dreamdu5t 15y ago
    Exactly. I get the feeling people are looking at the success of education in financial terms, when the issue is bigger than that. If someone spends $100,000 on school and they don't make that after graduating, people label it as a failure. College's worth shouldn't be evaluated in a purely financial context.
auganov 15y ago
Just don't get too carried away in the whole "college is useless" craze. People that don't need college probably don't need anyone to tell them that. They are already doing that. Probably the result of all those anti-college campaigns will mostly be providing an excuse to ones looking for a silly one. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly talking about the short term effect. In the mid-long run I'm sure we're looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.
ryanisinallofus 15y ago
"Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim..." Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would even have accepted this as actual work. College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I previously thought useless. The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically speaking) serfdom.
rythie 15y ago
College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system) Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good salary. Going to college gets you on that track.
- crs 15y ago
  In my case, my business partner was my college roommate. We also have made a lot of contacts through school that continue to benefit us. Your classes are not the only thing about school that will help you in the future. Like I said in a previous post, college is what you make of it.
- tbrownaw 15y ago
  Most people however are better off as employees however Why is this? We clearly ought to be overall better off since it allows greater specialization and higher productivity, but how much better do more specialized people with fewer choices actually do in general? starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5 Yay for us programmers being FLSA-exempt I suppose...
- jseliger 15y ago
  "College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system)" This isn't really true. Universities got started in the Middle Ages to a) collect what knowledge existed, especially from Greek and Roman sources and b) to a lesser extent, train religious authorities and theologians. In the U.S., universities got going to basically create gentlemen, and later to create scholars and researchers (Menand goes over a lot of this in his book The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university/ http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...). Today, a lot of colleges and college majors focus on creating employees, but that's a relatively recent shift that only began taking place on a large scale circa 1980, as far as I can tell. That's when the number of business majors, relative to the liberal arts and sciences, really takes off in the U.S. I don't know enough about the European situation to comment on it.
bmac27 15y ago
While I agree strongly with most of the author's thesis, the zero sum aspect to this debate is tiresome. And I say this as a dropout myself. Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one. Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments. Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held in equal regard.
crs 15y ago
At the end of the day, College is what you make of it. No one can force you to really get involved, participate in team projects etc. You have to have the internal drive to make the most of your opportunity. It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal. Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  I said this in another post, but I agree completely. Also, this kid apparently went to a Liberal Arts college in the middle of Arkansas, so some of his biases and thoughts about college are going to be based on that.
- dsmithn 15y ago
  In my case he perfectly describes most of my lower division courses. Memorization, no group work, theory. The problem is he's making assumptions about an entire degree based on at most a year of education. At a liberal arts college. Once you get past the prerequisites and basic classwork, it's a world of difference. I feel bad for the people who will be missing out on some truly great educational experiences because this kid couldn't stick it out for more than a few semesters. Few people will have his success rate right out of high school.
synnik 15y ago
This isn't the first anti-college discussion to come up recently... not even the first in the last 24 hours. What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into these arguments that all higher education is worthless. This isn't good logic, much less good advice.
- smokeyj 15y ago
  You're missing the point. It's time to challenge the traditional education business model. This is the digital age where information is cheap -- and college Institutions have no incentive to capitalize on this. They don't want to drive down their costs, why would they? Education should be like any other service and made available to anyone who wants it. Not to the richest kid. Not the kid with the highest GPA. Anyone. No one is arguing specialized education is bad, but there are much more efficient ways of getting there.
  - adestefan 15y ago
    But college isn't about information gathering. And the Internet doesn't make eduction available to anyone. Public libraries make information available to anyone.
    - smokeyj 15y ago
      I agree that information isn't education. I disagree that the internet doesn't make education available -- you have to know where to find it. Now that you told me what college isn't about, what is it about? And why must it be threatened by a modern business model?
- r00fus 15y ago
  There is one thing that the article points out however, that's very important: "College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago" This is insane. Public university tuition has inflated about 360%, while salaries have stayed flat or declined, and unemployment is on the rise. I agree with others that college benefits those who take advantage of what it offers, but when you come out with 6-figure debt, the cost/benefit of "investing in yourself" is seriously in question. The societal fabric in the USA has been under assault by the rich and elite, and public schooling (both k12 and collegiate) is merely one of those threads that's becoming unraveled (by the excessive burden of the profiteers/leeches).
ChiperSoft 15y ago
His statements are absolutely true... about a handful of fields people go to school for: Computer Sciences, absolutely. Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure. Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it. Biology & Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught in a formal setting. Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming and web development.
- ajdecon 15y ago
  I'd leave chemistry off the list: lab work is essential, and very few individuals have the money or the permits to obtain the chemicals you work with in a chem-majors class. I don't know biology well enough to talk, but I suspect that molecular bio at least suffers from the same problems as chem. And you can self-teach physics theory, but experimental physics can require some very specialized and expensive equipment. Not to mention the opportunities to work in research labs, which is where I did most of my education...
  - ChiperSoft 15y ago
    You're right, I should have said "a lot of study, and somebody willing to let you play in their lab."
gabaix 15y ago
in 30 years, we'll be "remember the UnCollege movement? yeah, we really wanted to change the world at that time". definitely a good movement to demand for change in education, will it revolutionize the system? probably not.
ctdonath 15y ago
College shows you can take on a very large multi-year project and finish it. Not a trivial point.
fecklessyouth 15y ago
This article merely proves the point that Thiel's coverage on HN has pounded into the ground: smart, driven kids interested in entrepreneurship don't need college. What seems to be missing from these kinds of discussions is a focus on what kinds of college programs we should be emulating.
larryfreeman 15y ago
I think that the college system is terribly broken. In my view, college is broken in 3 ways: 1. It is too expensive -- this severely limits talented people from going to college Hopefully, online, free college lectures will go a long way to remedy this situation. 2. Brilliant PhDs are not able to find jobs in their area This is not about money but about the ability to do research and about the ability for these people to contribute in their chosen fields. 3. The Wrong People are going to college People are going to college because they don't know what else to do and because everyone tells them it's what you should do. College should be optional for jobs. Some of the most brilliant engineers that I have worked with are self-taught without a college degree. You don't need college to be educated and you don't need a college degree to make lots of money. College is the entry point to the academic community which should be regularly enriched by the world's best talent. For many people, it is the ritual, the sports, the experience, and the opportunity to explore ideas for the first time that makes college so worthwhile.
blhack 15y ago
He's missing the point. College isn't entirely about learning things in the classroom, it's four years where young, hopefully creative people get to have almost nothing to do but think and create. The overwhelming majority of people in the world don't get to work in cool offices, on cool problems, with cool co-workers who want to solve difficult problems with them. The majority of us spend our days under fluorescent lights working on mundane business-intelligence type things. Not to say that creativity cannot be found in anything, but sitting in my dorm hacking until all hours of the morning because I didn't really have to go to class is certainly more conducive to creativity than working an 8:00-6:00 and going to bed at 10:00 because I have to be up in the morning. While college might not really offer much in the way of knowledge acquisition (at least until grad school), it would does offer the time to work on things you're passionate about, and network with other people of similar inclinations. I dropped out of college when I was 19, and it was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. For somebody who is already a member of the silicon valley set, this might be good advice, for everybody else this train of thought is parasitic. (I'm not saying that networking and hacking and soforth isn't possible when you're working a "real" job [hell, I spend almost every waking second I'm not spending at my job hacking and writing and networking], I'm just saying that college is a better environment for it)
- narkuok 15y ago
  Part of the problem with college is that it doesn't do a very good job of preparing students to go to work. The value prop for companies is that colleges sorts students, so the best companies can take the best graduates. Part of the problem is that the sorting is broken - the "best" students according to the university aren't the best workers. And the process of college isn't very helpful. As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic. College is great preparation for grad school, which is great preparation for a teaching job. The system serves itself very well, thank you.
  - jseliger 15y ago
    "Part of the problem with college is that it doesn't do a very good job of preparing students to go to work." Depends on what you mean by "work" and what you think the purpose of college is. That's one point of Louis Menand's recent article, "Debating the Value of College": http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110... and his book, The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university/ http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... . Should college prepare people for work, or for general kinds of abstract thinking? At the moment, colleges do both (and neither). The other big problem I see is that the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not. And even if college only filters students ("Theory one" in Menand's article), it does still serve some kind of signaling function. As you note, "As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic." But most programming jobs do still appear to require a college degree. There's probably a reason for that: even if it is too low a bar, it is still a bar that not everyone can hurdle. People capable enough to be self-taught can hurdle it and, ideally, learn more; those not capable enough can't accomplish even that.
erreon 15y ago
Does the education system in the US need to be changed? Absolutely 100% agree that it does. Do 18-19 year old people have the world figured out? Not by a long shot, but they sure think they do.
duopixel 15y ago
The article—appropriately, perhaps—reads like a high school essay from a smart student. Grammatically correct, logical, structured but stiff. I guess the biggest thing that college gave me wasn't knowledge, it was a firing range where I could practice shooting without actually harming anyone. If I think of myself when I was 18-20, if I was actually put into a position of responsibility my net contribution would be negative. There are certainly exceptions, but the net value of an unexperienced 18 year old is negative. He costs more to the company (in mentoring and mistakes) than the value he provides.
chamakits 15y ago
Although he makes some valid points, it seems a bit foolish to me that a 19 year old, who has barely been in college to just flat out deny it's usefulness. I recently graduated, and though there are a lot of things I would change about college, I don't regret going there. I made great connections, made life long friends, and (most importantly) learned a lot. Most of what I learned was because of my own efforts, however, that seed of curiosity that pushed me to learn was usually thanks to something mentioned in a class, or because of a conversation with a professor, or because of me going the extra mile in my projects, or because of the research I had looked to work on. Overall, I'm not saying that you need college to succeed, and I'm not saying that there isn't alot to criticize about college. However, before you knock it down, try it out. You may not regret it.
klbarry 15y ago
I attend Baruch College in NYC, which is a city-funded school. My tuition is <$6000 yearly, and I am extremely happy with my classes. Required courses for the business school include business law, micro and macro economics, calculus, statistics, accounting, and other highly useful courses. The school is in the city, so I've found it very easy to get a marketing position at a start-up while in school. I've gotten to meet and speak to the CFO of JP Morgan and Tommy Hilfiger, and got his daughters input on an idea. Connections with professors have been very useful, and often fascinating. The emphasis on communication intensive courses has noticeably improved my skill. I am extremely happy with my college experience, and would certainly recommend it for the opportunity cost.
dannylipsitz 15y ago
I'm curious to see the success rate of entrepreneurs without college degrees vs. those with degrees, however you might define success and over whatever time horizon. What do you think?
bhangi 15y ago
It is useful to distinguish between two issues -- the usefulness of a college education and the cost of said education. The costs of a college education in the US today are completely unjustifiable IMHO and I agree with those who say that there surely must be better use for your money. On the other hand, it seems that dismissing college education itself qua education is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's leave aside the question of whether a college education improves your critical thinking -- I claim that a good college education properly trains you in the fundamentals that you need to master before going on to doing greater things. The obvious caveat is that there are a whole bunch of vocations for which such training has little or no value -- I get that. But do we really want to create a society where a whole generation has little or no training to invent, for example, the next breakthrough transistor technology?
Killah911 15y ago
Where I grew up, entreprenuership without a college degree meant being on the other side of the law. Without my Ivy League degree I'm afraid, most of the people I know now would be clamoring about ending my food stamp benefits. College was often boring, and I sucked at Technical Writing, but I'd never have the opportunities if I "unColleged" myself. Maybe if I grew up in the same neighborhood as I live in now, I'd think like him too. For many kids growing up in the inner cities, places where "local VCs" will litterally take your knee caps, college is a much wiser choice.
atacrawl 15y ago
I left college two months ago because it rewards [...] competition rather than collaboration Let me get this straight -- the whole premise of the Thiel Fellowship seems to be to get bright kids out of the doldrums of higher education and into the real world where they can start competitive businesses, and yet this kid says he doesn't like college because it rewards competition?! And, I don't really agree with that premise in the first place. If anything, college rewards the appearance of collaboration -- when I was college, I ended up in numerous group projects where at least one person was completely worthless and contributed nothing besides their name on the written report's cover page.
Mc_Big_G 15y ago
I've never heard of anyone learning thermodynamics/static/mechanical design/fluid dynamics/heat transfer/etc from a group of people gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other (other than in a school). Technological advancement has a lot to do with "improving the human condition" and the majority of significant advances come from those who have been through higher education.
s00pcan 15y ago
I'm not going to make any comments regarding the article, but this is a topic I've been annoyed with for some time now. From 2000 to 2004 I spent a lot of my time getting better at building websites, starting with learning HTML on my own before taking a class on it at school in 2004. I excelled in the only programming class available at my high school, easily keeping up with the second year students. When I graduated I had several websites using PHP/MySQL and was still building my skills every day. For my senior project I was asked to show everyone my passion and demoed a website I had created with a content management system and showed the code. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I got stuff done and everyone around me thought I was really good at what I did. This was never something I bragged about, I have always been completely aware of how little I understand about everything. Then I went to apply for college. I had wild dreams of just picking classes that interested me and taking them, learning all sorts of complicated tools and programming languages. Imagine my surprise when I instead was asked to take basic math, english and other uninteresting refresher courses. I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't know what the program I wanted was called so I ended up in a CIS program. I lost most of my passion for programming and making websites at that time. I switched schools, got an internship that turned into a job, but it's just a completely worthless experience for me. I'm visiting in an advanced HTML class right now and they are going over techniques I used EIGHT YEARS AGO. I used these skills in my high school HTML class where no one else could. Worse, these skills they are teaching are now outdated and trivial. The LAMP stack isn't hot and new anymore, and now I just get annoyed when people get excited about being able to use it because it is so basic and trivial to use. It deeply saddens me that I've wasted my time at college; I could have instead worked on personal projects for the past 6 years since starting and I would have not wasted money on tuition, student loans and my time on worthless classes like I'm still taking. When I bring up how little I've gotten out of my education that I've paid tens of thousands of dollars for the response I get is "You'll have a degree that you can show to future employers!" Sorry, I'd rather have a portfolio of work than something that just shows I have had minimal experience at trivial applications of a variety of subjects. I used to be passionate on doing personal projects and all of the skills necessary towards my goals in life, then I went to college and had all of that ambition sucked out of me, replaced with worthless boring classes that wasted my time. You're probably thinking "why not just work on these projects while going to school/work for the past six years?" I could have, but those around me made it seem like college and working were more important. The mindset became "I'm going to college and working, what more do you want?" My parents didn't realize that I will probably make every dollar for the rest of my life using a computer. Instead, they just saw someone wasting their time on a computer and berated me at every opportunity. I'm just now realizing that I need to quit listening to those people and need to just work on whatever seems valuable to me.
euroclydon 15y ago
I'm officially calling the nocollege movement a bubble and a direct byproduct of the tech bubble. Tech is hot and for some sound reasons, no doubt, but there aren't enough fundamentals to justify the same folks who used to think higher education was the ticket to prosperity now thinking it's starting a software business straight out of school. If I were graduating high school this year, I'd go counter cyclical and get the PhD, hoping to land the comfortable government job and ride out the depression there.
omouse 15y ago
...says CNN which has hosts read Twitter status updates.
Florin_Andrei 15y ago
NPR disagrees: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/24/136612905/new-study-estimates-the-worth-of-college-majors http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/24/136612905/new...
goldmab 15y ago
The author is 19 years old, so I'm guessing he dropped out pretty early. I don't think he was actually in college long enough to even know that it was a waste of time for him. I loved college, especially a lot of the stuff that happened well after I turned 19. I feel really lucky that college forced me to learn so much stuff. Otherwise my mind would have gotten stuck in a narrower path.
gruseom 15y ago
It just occurred to me that the anti-college backlash follows inevitably from the decline of the classical liberal arts education. Since "education" is now, in our society's view, nothing more than job training, why bother with it at all? Just skip it and go straight to the job, or start your own business. No "education" required. Education as civilizing self-development is something other than schooling and training, but our institutions have abandoned that, if they ever provided it in the first place. I think they did use to, but only for a tiny elite.

72 points by bry 15y ago

bry 15y ago

Not sure I agree, but I submitted this article because I'm interested in the inevitable discussion to follow.

> He says college rewards conformity and competition, not collaboration, theory Wow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't know how to teamwork and learn from others. I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others can be counterproductive, in my opinion.

zitterbewegung 15y ago

Looks like a PR stunt to promote his company. Also, to promote whatever Peter Theil is doing.

noarchy 15y ago
It may be shameless promotion, but the fact is, he managed to get a platform (CNN) on which to do it. One could argue that he's off to a good start.
- zitterbewegung 15y ago
  I agree with you on that point but the article seems like fluff in IMHO. That is the point I was trying to make.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

gtaylor 15y ago

Blanket statements like this are foolish. My own college experience had a lot of regurgitation, but whether you make productive use out of your time there is completely within your hands. I was able to do challenging, hands-on research, make connections that lead to my last two jobs, and build a solid resume. However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.

enthalpyx 15y ago

"We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions." -- says the guy writing for .... CNN.com

gte910h 15y ago

I did plenty of group work at Georgia Tech. Built several working robots in teams, a video game, a bus monitoring device, and various other software projects. I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.

flomincucci 15y ago
I agree with this. Here, I do PLENTY of group work. Business plans, software, use cases, etc.... EVERYTHING is made in group.

hwang89 15y ago

Hmm... a 19-year old dissing college. This sounds like that little kid in the movie commercial who argues Lebron > Jordan. You weren't there, man.

wccrawford 15y ago

I think he's got a lot of good points. "conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content, rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software development and literature. "competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have their own problems.) "regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization. "theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job. I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless. Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of it.

kenjackson 15y ago
I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. When I was in college group projects were extremely common. As were group-projects for clubs. The SW engineering sequence was all group based. The compiler sequence was group project based. OS was group project based. And architecture was group project based. It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization. Is it really? Most of my tests were open book or take home. You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization.
- jsavimbi 15y ago
  Maybe he should check himself into Northeastern University. It was almost every course that started off teaming oneself up and heading right into the project work as a team. Loners were discouraged from venturing off.

markbao 15y ago

> That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in the real world. Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects and our own organizations. Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in improving the human condition. Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.) He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students do show an improvement. I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else. Your thoughts are welcome.

kenjackson 15y ago
I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people, so that there is a big confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else. Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing. And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could have won the Vietnam War in just a few years. 19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.
- markbao 15y ago
  Yeah, but he is part of the Thiel Fellowship, which I tend to see as a pretty damn smart group of young people. And I know Dale and know that he talks to these "moving forward" type of teens. On the other hand, I'm yet another 19-year-old with an opinion. Yes, I think I know something about what the right decision for college is (and I think it's completely individual), so perhaps I just fall under that category and the above should just be ignored. Not that I think so, of course.

rick888 15y ago

College is more than learning the material, it's also about learning about yourself. Most of the time, it's your first taste of freedom and it's one of the only times where you aren't really a kid anymore and you aren't stuck working in a 9-5. You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not that easy.

dreamdu5t 15y ago

Everybody, jump on the "education is a bubble and a waste" bandwagon!

nkassis 15y ago
I was going to say the same thing, there real issues with college and education but the whole debate right now is starting to feel like a lot of sensationalism. I went to college and did Mathematics. Why? Cause it looked cool. Was I good at it? Not really I had a hard time with many of my classes but I enjoyed the material. It was interesting even if useless. It's all about what you want to get out of college. I wanted to learn something interesting. The best part is it wasn't useless at all in the end. Nobody really cares about what your degree is in except for some specific jobs and get it cheap (that even goes for Ivy schools, they are now cheaper than many private sub Ivy schools due to Financial aid).
- dreamdu5t 15y ago
  Exactly. I get the feeling people are looking at the success of education in financial terms, when the issue is bigger than that. If someone spends $100,000 on school and they don't make that after graduating, people label it as a failure. College's worth shouldn't be evaluated in a purely financial context.

auganov 15y ago

Just don't get too carried away in the whole "college is useless" craze. People that don't need college probably don't need anyone to tell them that. They are already doing that. Probably the result of all those anti-college campaigns will mostly be providing an excuse to ones looking for a silly one. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly talking about the short term effect. In the mid-long run I'm sure we're looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.

ryanisinallofus 15y ago

"Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim..." Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would even have accepted this as actual work. College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I previously thought useless. The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically speaking) serfdom.

rythie 15y ago

College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system) Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good salary. Going to college gets you on that track.

crs 15y ago
In my case, my business partner was my college roommate. We also have made a lot of contacts through school that continue to benefit us. Your classes are not the only thing about school that will help you in the future. Like I said in a previous post, college is what you make of it.
tbrownaw 15y ago
Most people however are better off as employees however Why is this? We clearly ought to be overall better off since it allows greater specialization and higher productivity, but how much better do more specialized people with fewer choices actually do in general? starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5 Yay for us programmers being FLSA-exempt I suppose...
jseliger 15y ago
"College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system)" This isn't really true. Universities got started in the Middle Ages to a) collect what knowledge existed, especially from Greek and Roman sources and b) to a lesser extent, train religious authorities and theologians. In the U.S., universities got going to basically create gentlemen, and later to create scholars and researchers (Menand goes over a lot of this in his book The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university/ http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...). Today, a lot of colleges and college majors focus on creating employees, but that's a relatively recent shift that only began taking place on a large scale circa 1980, as far as I can tell. That's when the number of business majors, relative to the liberal arts and sciences, really takes off in the U.S. I don't know enough about the European situation to comment on it.

bmac27 15y ago

While I agree strongly with most of the author's thesis, the zero sum aspect to this debate is tiresome. And I say this as a dropout myself. Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one. Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments. Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held in equal regard.

crs 15y ago

At the end of the day, College is what you make of it. No one can force you to really get involved, participate in team projects etc. You have to have the internal drive to make the most of your opportunity. It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal. Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".

juiceandjuice 15y ago
I said this in another post, but I agree completely. Also, this kid apparently went to a Liberal Arts college in the middle of Arkansas, so some of his biases and thoughts about college are going to be based on that.
dsmithn 15y ago
In my case he perfectly describes most of my lower division courses. Memorization, no group work, theory. The problem is he's making assumptions about an entire degree based on at most a year of education. At a liberal arts college. Once you get past the prerequisites and basic classwork, it's a world of difference. I feel bad for the people who will be missing out on some truly great educational experiences because this kid couldn't stick it out for more than a few semesters. Few people will have his success rate right out of high school.

synnik 15y ago

This isn't the first anti-college discussion to come up recently... not even the first in the last 24 hours. What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into these arguments that all higher education is worthless. This isn't good logic, much less good advice.

smokeyj 15y ago
You're missing the point. It's time to challenge the traditional education business model. This is the digital age where information is cheap -- and college Institutions have no incentive to capitalize on this. They don't want to drive down their costs, why would they? Education should be like any other service and made available to anyone who wants it. Not to the richest kid. Not the kid with the highest GPA. Anyone. No one is arguing specialized education is bad, but there are much more efficient ways of getting there.
- adestefan 15y ago
  But college isn't about information gathering. And the Internet doesn't make eduction available to anyone. Public libraries make information available to anyone.
  - smokeyj 15y ago
    I agree that information isn't education. I disagree that the internet doesn't make education available -- you have to know where to find it. Now that you told me what college isn't about, what is it about? And why must it be threatened by a modern business model?
r00fus 15y ago
There is one thing that the article points out however, that's very important: "College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago" This is insane. Public university tuition has inflated about 360%, while salaries have stayed flat or declined, and unemployment is on the rise. I agree with others that college benefits those who take advantage of what it offers, but when you come out with 6-figure debt, the cost/benefit of "investing in yourself" is seriously in question. The societal fabric in the USA has been under assault by the rich and elite, and public schooling (both k12 and collegiate) is merely one of those threads that's becoming unraveled (by the excessive burden of the profiteers/leeches).

ChiperSoft 15y ago

His statements are absolutely true... about a handful of fields people go to school for: Computer Sciences, absolutely. Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure. Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it. Biology & Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught in a formal setting. Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming and web development.

ajdecon 15y ago
I'd leave chemistry off the list: lab work is essential, and very few individuals have the money or the permits to obtain the chemicals you work with in a chem-majors class. I don't know biology well enough to talk, but I suspect that molecular bio at least suffers from the same problems as chem. And you can self-teach physics theory, but experimental physics can require some very specialized and expensive equipment. Not to mention the opportunities to work in research labs, which is where I did most of my education...
- ChiperSoft 15y ago
  You're right, I should have said "a lot of study, and somebody willing to let you play in their lab."

gabaix 15y ago

in 30 years, we'll be "remember the UnCollege movement? yeah, we really wanted to change the world at that time". definitely a good movement to demand for change in education, will it revolutionize the system? probably not.

ctdonath 15y ago

College shows you can take on a very large multi-year project and finish it. Not a trivial point.

fecklessyouth 15y ago

This article merely proves the point that Thiel's coverage on HN has pounded into the ground: smart, driven kids interested in entrepreneurship don't need college. What seems to be missing from these kinds of discussions is a focus on what kinds of college programs we should be emulating.

larryfreeman 15y ago

I think that the college system is terribly broken. In my view, college is broken in 3 ways: 1. It is too expensive -- this severely limits talented people from going to college Hopefully, online, free college lectures will go a long way to remedy this situation. 2. Brilliant PhDs are not able to find jobs in their area This is not about money but about the ability to do research and about the ability for these people to contribute in their chosen fields. 3. The Wrong People are going to college People are going to college because they don't know what else to do and because everyone tells them it's what you should do. College should be optional for jobs. Some of the most brilliant engineers that I have worked with are self-taught without a college degree. You don't need college to be educated and you don't need a college degree to make lots of money. College is the entry point to the academic community which should be regularly enriched by the world's best talent. For many people, it is the ritual, the sports, the experience, and the opportunity to explore ideas for the first time that makes college so worthwhile.

blhack 15y ago

He's missing the point. College isn't entirely about learning things in the classroom, it's four years where young, hopefully creative people get to have almost nothing to do but think and create. The overwhelming majority of people in the world don't get to work in cool offices, on cool problems, with cool co-workers who want to solve difficult problems with them. The majority of us spend our days under fluorescent lights working on mundane business-intelligence type things. Not to say that creativity cannot be found in anything, but sitting in my dorm hacking until all hours of the morning because I didn't really have to go to class is certainly more conducive to creativity than working an 8:00-6:00 and going to bed at 10:00 because I have to be up in the morning. While college might not really offer much in the way of knowledge acquisition (at least until grad school), it would does offer the time to work on things you're passionate about, and network with other people of similar inclinations. I dropped out of college when I was 19, and it was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. For somebody who is already a member of the silicon valley set, this might be good advice, for everybody else this train of thought is parasitic. (I'm not saying that networking and hacking and soforth isn't possible when you're working a "real" job [hell, I spend almost every waking second I'm not spending at my job hacking and writing and networking], I'm just saying that college is a better environment for it)

narkuok 15y ago
Part of the problem with college is that it doesn't do a very good job of preparing students to go to work. The value prop for companies is that colleges sorts students, so the best companies can take the best graduates. Part of the problem is that the sorting is broken - the "best" students according to the university aren't the best workers. And the process of college isn't very helpful. As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic. College is great preparation for grad school, which is great preparation for a teaching job. The system serves itself very well, thank you.
- jseliger 15y ago
  "Part of the problem with college is that it doesn't do a very good job of preparing students to go to work." Depends on what you mean by "work" and what you think the purpose of college is. That's one point of Louis Menand's recent article, "Debating the Value of College": http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110... and his book, The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university/ http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... . Should college prepare people for work, or for general kinds of abstract thinking? At the moment, colleges do both (and neither). The other big problem I see is that the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not. And even if college only filters students ("Theory one" in Menand's article), it does still serve some kind of signaling function. As you note, "As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic." But most programming jobs do still appear to require a college degree. There's probably a reason for that: even if it is too low a bar, it is still a bar that not everyone can hurdle. People capable enough to be self-taught can hurdle it and, ideally, learn more; those not capable enough can't accomplish even that.

erreon 15y ago

Does the education system in the US need to be changed? Absolutely 100% agree that it does. Do 18-19 year old people have the world figured out? Not by a long shot, but they sure think they do.

duopixel 15y ago

The article—appropriately, perhaps—reads like a high school essay from a smart student. Grammatically correct, logical, structured but stiff. I guess the biggest thing that college gave me wasn't knowledge, it was a firing range where I could practice shooting without actually harming anyone. If I think of myself when I was 18-20, if I was actually put into a position of responsibility my net contribution would be negative. There are certainly exceptions, but the net value of an unexperienced 18 year old is negative. He costs more to the company (in mentoring and mistakes) than the value he provides.

chamakits 15y ago

Although he makes some valid points, it seems a bit foolish to me that a 19 year old, who has barely been in college to just flat out deny it's usefulness. I recently graduated, and though there are a lot of things I would change about college, I don't regret going there. I made great connections, made life long friends, and (most importantly) learned a lot. Most of what I learned was because of my own efforts, however, that seed of curiosity that pushed me to learn was usually thanks to something mentioned in a class, or because of a conversation with a professor, or because of me going the extra mile in my projects, or because of the research I had looked to work on. Overall, I'm not saying that you need college to succeed, and I'm not saying that there isn't alot to criticize about college. However, before you knock it down, try it out. You may not regret it.

klbarry 15y ago

I attend Baruch College in NYC, which is a city-funded school. My tuition is <$6000 yearly, and I am extremely happy with my classes. Required courses for the business school include business law, micro and macro economics, calculus, statistics, accounting, and other highly useful courses. The school is in the city, so I've found it very easy to get a marketing position at a start-up while in school. I've gotten to meet and speak to the CFO of JP Morgan and Tommy Hilfiger, and got his daughters input on an idea. Connections with professors have been very useful, and often fascinating. The emphasis on communication intensive courses has noticeably improved my skill. I am extremely happy with my college experience, and would certainly recommend it for the opportunity cost.

dannylipsitz 15y ago

I'm curious to see the success rate of entrepreneurs without college degrees vs. those with degrees, however you might define success and over whatever time horizon. What do you think?

bhangi 15y ago

It is useful to distinguish between two issues -- the usefulness of a college education and the cost of said education. The costs of a college education in the US today are completely unjustifiable IMHO and I agree with those who say that there surely must be better use for your money. On the other hand, it seems that dismissing college education itself qua education is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's leave aside the question of whether a college education improves your critical thinking -- I claim that a good college education properly trains you in the fundamentals that you need to master before going on to doing greater things. The obvious caveat is that there are a whole bunch of vocations for which such training has little or no value -- I get that. But do we really want to create a society where a whole generation has little or no training to invent, for example, the next breakthrough transistor technology?

Killah911 15y ago

Where I grew up, entreprenuership without a college degree meant being on the other side of the law. Without my Ivy League degree I'm afraid, most of the people I know now would be clamoring about ending my food stamp benefits. College was often boring, and I sucked at Technical Writing, but I'd never have the opportunities if I "unColleged" myself. Maybe if I grew up in the same neighborhood as I live in now, I'd think like him too. For many kids growing up in the inner cities, places where "local VCs" will litterally take your knee caps, college is a much wiser choice.

atacrawl 15y ago

I left college two months ago because it rewards [...] competition rather than collaboration Let me get this straight -- the whole premise of the Thiel Fellowship seems to be to get bright kids out of the doldrums of higher education and into the real world where they can start competitive businesses, and yet this kid says he doesn't like college because it rewards competition?! And, I don't really agree with that premise in the first place. If anything, college rewards the appearance of collaboration -- when I was college, I ended up in numerous group projects where at least one person was completely worthless and contributed nothing besides their name on the written report's cover page.

Mc_Big_G 15y ago

I've never heard of anyone learning thermodynamics/static/mechanical design/fluid dynamics/heat transfer/etc from a group of people gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other (other than in a school). Technological advancement has a lot to do with "improving the human condition" and the majority of significant advances come from those who have been through higher education.

s00pcan 15y ago

I'm not going to make any comments regarding the article, but this is a topic I've been annoyed with for some time now. From 2000 to 2004 I spent a lot of my time getting better at building websites, starting with learning HTML on my own before taking a class on it at school in 2004. I excelled in the only programming class available at my high school, easily keeping up with the second year students. When I graduated I had several websites using PHP/MySQL and was still building my skills every day. For my senior project I was asked to show everyone my passion and demoed a website I had created with a content management system and showed the code. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I got stuff done and everyone around me thought I was really good at what I did. This was never something I bragged about, I have always been completely aware of how little I understand about everything. Then I went to apply for college. I had wild dreams of just picking classes that interested me and taking them, learning all sorts of complicated tools and programming languages. Imagine my surprise when I instead was asked to take basic math, english and other uninteresting refresher courses. I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't know what the program I wanted was called so I ended up in a CIS program. I lost most of my passion for programming and making websites at that time. I switched schools, got an internship that turned into a job, but it's just a completely worthless experience for me. I'm visiting in an advanced HTML class right now and they are going over techniques I used EIGHT YEARS AGO. I used these skills in my high school HTML class where no one else could. Worse, these skills they are teaching are now outdated and trivial. The LAMP stack isn't hot and new anymore, and now I just get annoyed when people get excited about being able to use it because it is so basic and trivial to use. It deeply saddens me that I've wasted my time at college; I could have instead worked on personal projects for the past 6 years since starting and I would have not wasted money on tuition, student loans and my time on worthless classes like I'm still taking. When I bring up how little I've gotten out of my education that I've paid tens of thousands of dollars for the response I get is "You'll have a degree that you can show to future employers!" Sorry, I'd rather have a portfolio of work than something that just shows I have had minimal experience at trivial applications of a variety of subjects. I used to be passionate on doing personal projects and all of the skills necessary towards my goals in life, then I went to college and had all of that ambition sucked out of me, replaced with worthless boring classes that wasted my time. You're probably thinking "why not just work on these projects while going to school/work for the past six years?" I could have, but those around me made it seem like college and working were more important. The mindset became "I'm going to college and working, what more do you want?" My parents didn't realize that I will probably make every dollar for the rest of my life using a computer. Instead, they just saw someone wasting their time on a computer and berated me at every opportunity. I'm just now realizing that I need to quit listening to those people and need to just work on whatever seems valuable to me.

euroclydon 15y ago

I'm officially calling the nocollege movement a bubble and a direct byproduct of the tech bubble. Tech is hot and for some sound reasons, no doubt, but there aren't enough fundamentals to justify the same folks who used to think higher education was the ticket to prosperity now thinking it's starting a software business straight out of school. If I were graduating high school this year, I'd go counter cyclical and get the PhD, hoping to land the comfortable government job and ride out the depression there.

omouse 15y ago

...says CNN which has hosts read Twitter status updates.

Florin_Andrei 15y ago

NPR disagrees: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/24/136612905/new-study-estimates-the-worth-of-college-majors http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/24/136612905/new...

goldmab 15y ago

The author is 19 years old, so I'm guessing he dropped out pretty early. I don't think he was actually in college long enough to even know that it was a waste of time for him. I loved college, especially a lot of the stuff that happened well after I turned 19. I feel really lucky that college forced me to learn so much stuff. Otherwise my mind would have gotten stuck in a narrower path.

gruseom 15y ago

It just occurred to me that the anti-college backlash follows inevitably from the decline of the classical liberal arts education. Since "education" is now, in our society's view, nothing more than job training, why bother with it at all? Just skip it and go straight to the job, or start your own business. No "education" required. Education as civilizing self-development is something other than schooling and training, but our institutions have abandoned that, if they ever provided it in the first place. I think they did use to, but only for a tiny elite.