9 ms·

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

113 points by epi0Bauqu 18y ago

kaens 18y ago
I think I can bring another point of view to this discussion. I'm currently 22, and have never been to college. I'm a smart kid, and have always had a passion for learning - but went through some rough times during and after high school that I'm just coming out of. I currently make most of my income from doing simple freelance coding work, and live with a group of people in something of a music / art commune. I would love to go get a formal education, but I wouldn't want to attend a college where I was not being pushed to my fullest. I'm capable of learning on my own, and do so pretty much everyday, but feel that I could benefit greatly from being in an environment where other people are learning the same things, and where there was at least one person who had a lot more experience in whatever field was being studied than the class did. Unfortunately, the vast majority of college courses that I've seen that deal with areas that I currently feel I could spend the rest of my life working with are rather poor. In the town I live in, I know at least one person with a BS in "comp-sci" who had never been exposed to the concept of a finite state machine, never been exposed to the concept of "first class functions", and had no practical experience with anything other than cut-and-paste java development, or similar cut-and-paste php development. I know that this is not the case at every college, but it seems to be becoming more of the norm than not. I'm at a point where I can either continue doing hellishly boring freelance jobs until I make enough money to drop off the map for a while and develop something really useful to a lot of people, or I can go the route of putting myself in debt to go to college with the hopes that I can excel enough to either get noticed / hired by a company that is doing interesting work, or get a job that would allow me to pay off my debt, work for a year or two, and then again start working on software that would be useful to a lot of people. Because of what I've seen of most colleges and their courses in most of the areas that I've been in, I tend to feel that I would be wasting a good four years of my life in most colleges. I have some noticeable gaps in knowledge, specifically in maths, that I would like to fill (and am working on filling, thanks Knuth and friends for writing Concrete Mathematics - it's a wonderful start.) Largely, the question for me is one of quality of education. I do not want to pay people to give me busy work for four years. I don't want to be paying for textbooks on core material that hasn't changed in decades and only differs from the previous versions by what order the chapters are in, or what order the questions are in. What I want to do is learn to the best of my ability, and apply what I learn to the best of my ability. I think that a college environment very well could provide the means for that, but I have serious doubts that it is providing that for most students. Part of me doubts that most colleges even intend to provide that sort of environment. I can see that degrees are starting to matter a lot less, at least in the programming industry. I for one hope that that trend continues, and we get a nice influx of employers who are looking to pay people to learn and apply their learnings to solving practical problems. Anyhow, that's enough about that for now.
greyman 18y ago
For me, it was not. I did study Math, and while most of the knowledge can't be used directly in my daily job as a programmer, and most of the higher math was forgotten, I was taught to think abstractly in several different ways (like algebra, math analysis, statistics, geometry etc.) All of those subject are very beneficial to study, IMHO, even if you don't apply them directly in your job.
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- randome 18y ago
  whether or not they are relevant is besides the point, I think author isn't saying "end 4-year colleges" but rather that we should change how skills are assessed -- so that a 4 year college isn't required ... i.e you can take a test and if you pass thats it. so college could still be a valid route of developing skills (like the ones you said) but not the only route to getting a job.
thomasmallen 18y ago
I'm doing my best to prove that this is true. While I have college credits (about 60), I'm a full-time developer and part-time entrepreneur at 20. So far no need for a degree... That's not to say I'm poorly educated by any means. I have the writing, mathematical, scientific, historical, and artistic skills needed to earn a degree. My knowledge of the Russian canon alone might be enough at a school which offered that major (Russian Literature or even World Literature). It just didn't take me four years in a restrictive environment and an empty wallet to earn it :^)
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  - yan 18y ago
    DC area? I'm about 1/3 between Baltimore and DC
    - jcromartie 18y ago
      Yes, Columbia actually.
      - yan 18y ago
        That's 10 minutes from me. I'm in Columbia almost every day after work though.
- jcromartie 18y ago
  Bravo. Smart people will be smart, no matter what. Smart people with time and energy will educate themselves. Smart people with money (or the willingness to accept debt) will buy a decent education.
ojbyrne 18y ago
The column seems to be entirely from the point of view of an employer looking to screen potential employees. Like it or not, college is about more than job training. For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it, the first part of life away from parents, but still with some security, and about intellectual exploration (answering the question - what exactly do I want to be when I grow up?). Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence. And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.
- mynameishere 18y ago
  For people who enter school for vocational reasons, the sports and parties and alcohol and Shakespeare classes and diversity training and dormitory life and extended vacations and other activities are completely distinct from getting vocational training...ie, they are a complete waste. The 10K+/per year expense is vastly more wasteful than any cert training...
- whacked_new 18y ago
  I find the whole "college is..." or "college is not..." to be a problematic mindset in itself. For example, why not develop social skills in high school? Many of the student leaders I know from college started as high school student leaders. Now we're talking about "HS is..." or "HS is not..." or "HS sucks." Why wait until HS? Now we're talking about MS... then lower school. Then it's just your entire life as an individual. I like the idea of a loose education system where there aren't Nth-grade, Xth-year students, but simply students who have proved themselves in a particular set of studies. For those with the time to study, take one year. For those without, take ten years. Then there won't be any of these ideas of what college should or should not do. It's my personal fantasy. Impractical perhaps?
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    The problem with social skills, is that they're learned in a cultural/social context. For many, the desired quality and kind of context is only available in small doses (with a particular group) whose effect is diluted by the larger context which can only be corrected by moving somewhere else.
jon_dahl 18y ago
This is better than most "college is a waste" articles, but it repeats a common mistake: thinking that people are hired for their skills. When I'm hiring, I don't want someone with a "web design" certificate or a "Python programming" certificate, or (worse) a "sales and marketing" certificate. I want someone who is smart, passionate, loves to learn, thinks creatively, knows how to write, and is enjoyable to work with. These things can't be governed by a certificate system. Of course, they also don't correlate strongly with a college diploma. But there is some correlation, at least with some majors - give me a philosophy major over a business major any day.
- randome 18y ago
  Yeah, and I think the point the author makes is that a college degree is just as bad an indicator of that as a certificate with a number on it. If you want someone with those qualities you can interview them and find out.
- un 18y ago
  You could create certification tests for those as well - general knowledge test, creativity test, writing test, personality test
  - jcromartie 18y ago
    I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not. I can see it now: "I'm a certified Awesome Dude."
    - un 18y ago
      No I'm being serious, and "Awesome Dude" is in the eye of the beholder, you can only really judge that in interviewing.
      - kaens 18y ago
        How would you suggest certifying creativity?
  - 18y ago
whacked_new 18y ago
The current system is the continuation of a historical establishment, which is the same with many other human-created systems. They will always be flawed, but humans will also be slow to react to changes; the larger the group, the older the establishment, the more resistant to change. While it is atrociously suboptimal, it's a bit much to call it a waste of time. Incidentally, I happened upon this article this morning and like the idea very much: the Grandes écoles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%89coles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%89coles Does anybody have any related stories to tell?
- jb92 18y ago
  I went to one of these, so i think i know about it. I think it creates another kind of establishment, and not a very likeable one at that. It's very much like the Ivy leagues colleges in the US. People are not out of school that they are already so very certain of their own worth, it's despicable.
krschultz 18y ago
The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational. Why waste money on classes that don't apply for your certificate? Why spend time playing with classes that could lead you to a different certificate when you are already 20% done with this one? Or better yet, why not get a couple princeton review books to pass the test? I passed 35 credits of AP exams in high school, all with 5 out of 5s, and several without taking the course. When I actually took some classes in college based on that, I quickly found out how little you need to know to pass a test.
- un 18y ago
  Requiring everyone to learn some nonpractical things is a waste of societal resources. If some people want to learn something just for the sake of it, they could join reading groups/attend lectures on their own time.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  I met an Irish engineer. He said that all of his classes in college had to do with engineering. If he wanted to study the Classics, the attitude was that he could just go and do that in his own time. Personally, I think this is better. If you try to legislate breadth in your students, then you end up just making a mockery of what you're trying to teach. You end up accomplishing the opposite of what you were trying to do. I spent a few years teaching Computer Science 101/102 as a TA. A whole lot of my students were in Journalism, Communications, or Criminology or some area like that and just trying to get their math requirement out of the way. My conclusion in retrospect: to most of my students, this was largely just a bureaucratic exercise. If you want true students, you need to find the students that have the interest and desire.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational. The problem with this view is that some people just want the vocational part, and bundling it with something they don't want, but for which they will be charged, just makes them worse off. Being able to buy A or B is better than only being able to buy A and B. It would be pretty annoying if some forward-thinking politician realized that a keyboard is worthless without a computer, and unilaterally banned the sale of keyboards that didn't come with a computer. But that would be a terrible plan.
mynameishere 18y ago
A long time ago, books and educated people were extremely scarce. So, it was efficient to group as many books and educated people in the same place so that, in that particular place, they were not scarce. That place is called a "school". The scarcity that gave schools their key advantage is largely gone.
azharcs 18y ago
I just recently saw a video of TED from Sir. Ken Robinson who said School's kill Creativity, Really a great talk and worth seeing. Hope some of you find it useful. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...
art_wells 18y ago
My college degree means nothing on paper professionally, but meant everything to my abilities to meet business and computing challenges. I didn't study computing at all. I don't expect that my experience is much different from others who have Liberal Arts degrees and found joy in technology. I've worked with many people who have degrees and certification in computing and many who don't. As a result of my experience, I've rejected resumes from people who have studied computing and sought professional certifications solely, in preference to people who have English degrees and weird hobbies. Professional experience is supreme, but after that, I want a broad mind to tackle the problems at hand. While that's highly prejudicial, I've found it a very rewarding way to approach a stack of resumes.
- un 18y ago
  Sounds pretty elitist, and your company might suffer for it.
  - art_wells 18y ago
    I'm sure there might be problems with choosing the wrong criteria, but I can't see how "elitism" in itself can be a cause of problems in the hiring process.
    - un 18y ago
      By elitist I meant to say cliquey, you might filter out people you would really excel
      - art_wells 18y ago
        Yes, I can see that as a possible problem. I've seen fewer cliqueness in this crew (prehaps because they all come from varied educational and professional backgrounds), than I have in groups pulled mostly from tech academics and companies.
  - william42 18y ago
    Considering that the maxim for the new millenium is "Safe is risky and risky is safe" I think he might be doing the best thing. All in all, it seems like today the best way to approach things is to be different and his hiring policies are definitely different. Sure, he might fail, but would he be able to succeed if he did the same thing as everything else?
nazgulnarsil 18y ago
merit based hiring is too rational to work in america.
Eliezer 18y ago
I've been saying this, almost to the exact letter, for the last 13 years. Not the "college is a waste of time" part, but the part about "we need to divorce the skill verification from the skill teaching".
- krschultz 18y ago
  That I agree with, but truthfully it is already there. CPA exam, professional engineer exam, bar exam, medical exams. What doesn't have an exam? Marketing, sales? There is a PE exam for computer engineering/science but no one takes it. Just push people to take them and it will accomplish the same thing.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    >What doesn't have an exam? Entry level office job. B.A. or B.S. required. It would be nice to have a GEBA, just like we have a GED. Additionally, you can't take many of the exams you just mentioned without a degree. I.e. the degree and the exams are still married, the exam is just standardized.
  - bokonist 18y ago
    It's not there because all those professional guilds legally require a college degree. It used to be you could just pass the bar and become a lawyer. The bar associations then got laws passed requiring an actual law degrees, so people took inexpensive correspondence courses. The lawyers then fought back by requiring the schools be accredited, and setting minimum rules for face time. Thus you are forced to pay very expensive law school tuition to practice as a lawyer. This pushes up the wages of the current lawyers, who got the law passed. The whole thing is a scam.
    - krschultz 18y ago
      Is it a scam? Do you really want people to be able to get engineering degrees without going through the rigour of a full college education? These are the people who design airplanes and cars and powerplants. Sure maybe it works for Java programming of some BS business app, but most of the exams out there are on fields where screwing up something has major consequences.
steveplace 18y ago
Hooray! Broad generalizations!
kansando 18y ago
College is a place where you learn to learn, or should be...
- kaens 18y ago
  I would think that people should be learning to learn much younger than college-age, but that's an entirely different can of worms.
- un 18y ago
  A better way to teach how to learn to learn, would be to teach a class in exactly that. The motivational speaker industry does a better job in "meta" subjects, such as "getting things done", "how to be successful", than college does. Paul Graham's essays for startups are more effective than college courses in entrepreneurship.
- bbgm 18y ago
  Agreed. Seeing comments here and elsewhere, one wonders if people actually care about quality education just because it's a good thing? How about access lab facilities, the ability to interact with other smart people, hopefully to learn from good teachers, or do quality research? College and grad school was all that for me. Was it perfect. Not at all, but given a choice, I'd do it again.
pleasehelp 18y ago
Most people don't have a reasonable alternative at the time.
azharcs 18y ago
I personally think college-education is over rated as of today. The only reason education worked as a good model was because there was scarcity of Information and this information could be obtained only if you paid tons of money and joined college. Today times have changed drastically, a guy sitting in remote part of Africa(with a basic internet connection) can obtain the same information which the guy in Stanford or MIT is trying to obtain. Colleges surely had advantages a decade back like Mentors, Teachers, Abundant Information, Labs, Job Guarantee. But today Internet is replacing all these one by one and colleges today can't guarantee jobs. Unless colleges start offering something really substantial else they will have a tough time competing with internet educated population which is growing day by day.
- un 18y ago
  I would go further to say that the current system is disadvantaging rich countries immensely. I typical person without a college degree is likely to think he shouldn't even attempt to seek work such as IT (it's for those college educated types), and instead heads into the local service economy (further depressing wages there), instead of earning money for the country in globally based economy.
  - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
    The certification system he's talking about would massively accelerate global outsourcing of US jobs. ISO 9000 certification in the 80s and 90s played a huge role in sending US manufacturing overseas. People were reluctant to believe that factories in various second and third world countries could be just as good. Then the certs proved pretty well that they were! Same deal now with personnel. Employers are sometimes reluctant to believe Indians or Vietnamese are on par with a four year American college grad. Sufficiently standard tests would prove they are. In other words, the US has coasted on reputation in a lot of ways and empirical approaches can damage that reputation.
    - un 18y ago
      But you're assuming outsourcing is bad for individuals in the US, whereas most indications are the opposite, it increases their wealth. The point about the nongrad IT worker is that he would be able to create more wealth than he would as a local service worker (in the same way as offshore workers do). Increasing production (and hence wealth) from all workers, whether offshore or in US is better for society than allowing inefficiencies and protectionism to prevail.
time_management 18y ago
College is an aspect of upper- and upper-middle-class life (formerly) that has replicated on account of the status and advantage once conferred by the college degree. Now it's a requirement for a large set of jobs, most of which wouldn't even be considered desirable. Is college a massive waste of time and money for a lot of people? Probably. I think it's useless and unfair to put a person through college and then have him end up in a job that does not involve the level of autonomy and intellectual challenge that college led him to expect. Since society has not evolved to the point where good jobs are abundant, it's hard to see any good reason for more than 5-10% of people to have college educations. One has to examine the motivations behind the proliferation of higher education. The far left supports widespread college education under the belief that if lower- and middle-class people have the benefit of a liberal education, they'll demand good jobs and become "Angry Young (Wo/)Men" if they don't get them and, therefore, evolve into revolutionaries who will overthrow the status quo. The corporate right likes it because the colleges provide companies with a sorting mechanism, the costs of which are paid by the people being sorted rather than the corporate "users". The center supports widespread college education under the guise of increasing social equality. It's obvious that an idea with such support from both the wings and the center will be implemented. Also, there are the goals of the academics. In the 1950s, professors widely believed that a merger between the academy and the larger capitalistic society would improve their social position. As they saw it, rule of society by educational institutions seemed to be the next logical step after rule by the church until the Enlightenment, by governments up to World War I, and finally by business corporations in the XX-c. They got their desired "merger" but Mammon, being larger and meaner, won and turned the academy to its needs, rather than vice versa.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  "turned the academy to its needs" -- nay, it practically started out that way!
- un 18y ago
  Sounds like we need to end the tenure system and get the academic "pigs" off their high horses!
msluyter 18y ago
I'm torn between two somewhat incompatible visions: 1. College should train you for some sort of career and should do so in the most rigorously objective way possible. In this view, certifications provide the gold standard of objectivity. 2. College should help you become well rounded, responsible adults. By which I mean, able to reason about complex issues, having some background in history, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, a basic understanding of subjects that affect our lives, such as economics, etc... In other words, the sort of people who desire to remain informed about political events, who could weigh several candidates for office and be able to apply some sort of selection criteria beyond a mere gut instinct. In other words, the sort of people that keep democracy on track.
- un 18y ago
  In the UK, the higher education system is as you desribed in point 1, you get a degree in exactly your subject. yet they have no shortage of people who can debate on the issues you mention in point 2.
vaksel 18y ago
Well its probably true, look at most liberal arts majors, they spend 4 years learning and then go back to the same job at GAP because they can't find any job in their field. It seems like going to college is a requirement now, where people go there because its expected of them. They don't go to learn, they go there to put in the time(like in highschool)
Alex3917 18y ago
"A passing [CPA exam] score indicates authentic competence" This is misleading, because the word authentic has a specific meaning in psychometrics. It means that the evaluation of competence is based off of things like observations, student journals, portfolios, inquiry projects, exhibits, hands-on activities, essays, performances, etc. A standardized test score is not considered to be an authentic measure of competence.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  What makes you think the author was talking strictly in terms of psychometrics? I assumed he was using common vernacular. Wouldn't it be odd for him to use such a technical term in the middle of an opinion piece in the WSJ?
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    Well he is probably the world's most famous psychometrician and the article is about psychometrics. I suspect he is using the word incorrectly on purpose because he doesn't like the definition. It's kind of like if a famous conservative wrote a book about the flat tax and titled the book Progressive Taxation.
    - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
      I'm really not trying to pick a fight, but isn't this just the common use of rhetoric and re-definition that one would find in commentary? I think your example is a great one. The conservative would then proceed to argue that his definition of "progressive taxation" is adequate for the discussion at hand. I'm probably just making a big deal out of nothing. I'm just flummoxed at why his own technical field's definition has anything to do with communication directed at a non-technical audience. Perhaps he used it like that to get the response you gave? That would make sense.
sh1mmer 18y ago
The most valuable part of college for me (in terms of my career prospects) was not the degree I got, although it was a good degree. The most valuable thing about college for me was the support, money, facilities that the college provided to me while I was there. They enabled me to do plenty of things I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. When I was at college I worked on plenty of OSS, created a web site for Nasa, and contributed to the W3C. My school paid for me to fly to a number of W3C conferences as scholarship. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the university library which was many times vaster and better resourced than any library I've had at any employer since. Any technical book I wanted that they didn't have would normally turn up within a matter of weeks. Add to that a 24hr computing campus with access to mainframes around the clock. I got to experiment because I could keep my own hours and get time on the interesting hardware at 3am when sensible people were in bed. University is not just about a degree. As many other people here have said it's about the experience (I met my wife in college) and the learning, in an environment which allows it.
- un 18y ago
  What about the children of poorer families who don't have the luxury of going to college. The above would be fine if parents/students were paying the full cost of the facilities, but in most cases its government/charity subsidized.
  - sh1mmer 18y ago
    I'm British so the government paid the vast majority of my University fees. The rest were paid for by government loans, which I am now paying back. It really is possible for poorer families to have kids in University in Britain. It's a shame that isn't true everywhere.
    - zandorg 18y ago
      I got on a UK degree course just before they started charging. My only loan was a student one, paying for booze and rent.
stcredzero 18y ago
I think someone should start a secret society of young women enrolled in institutions of higher learning. The upperclassmen leaders of these secret societies would observe the freshmen males, searching for individuals of exceptional potential hampered by extreme awkwardness and sexual insecurity. They'd arrange to ensnare these freshmen in a series of relationships as a part of a program to groom them for leadership and to inoculate them against misogyny. Maybe they could call themselves the "Bene Gesserit?"
arupchak 18y ago
I'm sure most of us know that good test performance does not always equal good job performance. Whenever I see a resume in front of me that has a score on a test (ie. GRE score) I almost always get disinterested in the candidate, even if the test is related to the job. I do think that these test scores can show a level of competency in showing one's ability to study/work hard for a test and do well. However, doing well on a professional test does not mean you would be good at working in that profession. I'm sure we all know people from college/school who were great at testing/studying and getting good grades but still have a hard time in non-academic environments. College is only as useful as you want it to be. If you want to 'coast' for four years and meet/network with a lot of people, do it. If you want to study your tail off in a difficult field and try and get a good job afterward, do it. Just do not complain afterward that college did not prepare you to get a job or that college did not make enough friends for you afterward.
t0pj 18y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553
gills 18y ago
This is a self-solving problem one way or another. The employers that use low-information predictors of productivity will go out of business and whatever system the remaining businesses are using will drive the educational system. Either that, or the inevitably-higher credit standards in the near future will help to give the college system a population haircut, which will weed out quite a few of those who don't really mean it (and unfortunately, some of those who do...).
- sofal 18y ago
  Sometimes the illusion of competence is the only thing you need to succeed.
jrsims 18y ago
I dropped out of the JC I was attending and just started finding better ways of doing things (read: "developed technical solutions") at each company I worked for, regardless of what the position was. Although I would like to make more money, I trained myself, followed my interests, and now - relatively speaking - I have an above average salary, both for my current position and the region I live in. College, in my case, was totally unnecessary. Yet I'm a DBA/Developer for a respected Fortune 500 company.
Jaytee 18y ago
Great article, though my day-dreamed educational system would be a little bit different. But who is to say which one's better until you implement them. On the same note, High school and middle school are pretty much a waste of time. In fact, any kind of system that categorize kids into homogeneous age groups are socially and psychologically unhealthy. How can kids learn form their peers if all of them have just about the same exposure and experience in the world? That's why we have all these angsty kids, because no knows better. I've been teaching on the side for a few years. And from my experience, when I mix kids of different ages, they assume instinctual responsibilities (almost tribal). Older kids become more authoritative and care-giving. Younger kids become more attentive and respectful. This kind of social learning is both top-down and bottom-up. I understand the importance of school as a social environment. But if it's going to be homogeneous and unrepresentative of the real world, no real social skills will come out of it. Don't take my word for it. I'm sure we all have interacted with college grads who are clueless about the real world.
- riahi 18y ago
  Reminds me of Montessori classrooms with mixed age-groups.
invisible 18y ago
College degrees should be your GPA with the degree title underneath. I guess it's a hard sell for college when your degree is only worth something significant when it has a 3.5 or greater on it though...
milwaukeegreeny 18y ago
Good article. Fact of the matter is that academia has evolved over the decades into an ideologigal monolith. A stifling regiment of ideological political correctness. In current times most young people would be well advised to avoid Universities and Colleges. After 4 years of classes they come out dumber than when they went in.
Prrometheus 18y ago
The example of certification-based credentials mentioned in the article, the CPA exam, is a bad one since you have to have a bachelor's degree in order to take the exam. It doesn't matter if you could ace it on your first try, most state accountancy boards require 150 hours of college credit before you can take the CPA. This restricts the supply of accountants and keeps accountant salary high. There was a movement a few years back to increase the requirement to a full Master's degree. It's totally unnecessary to be a good accountant.
icco 18y ago
I think this is a little excessive. It really implies that someone got a strong high school education. A lot of the public high schools where I grew up sent a small portion of students to college just because the school system was hurting very much. Most students didn't feel like they had learned much until after their first years in college or a stint at the local junior college.
jordiculous 18y ago
College, more than being proof of a person's intelligence, is proof that you can jump through the hoops deemed appropriate by your "higher ups" (aka professors). Understandably, some employers consider this a desirable trait in employees. I call those employers Fascists :P

113 points by epi0Bauqu 18y ago

kaens 18y ago

I think I can bring another point of view to this discussion. I'm currently 22, and have never been to college. I'm a smart kid, and have always had a passion for learning - but went through some rough times during and after high school that I'm just coming out of. I currently make most of my income from doing simple freelance coding work, and live with a group of people in something of a music / art commune. I would love to go get a formal education, but I wouldn't want to attend a college where I was not being pushed to my fullest. I'm capable of learning on my own, and do so pretty much everyday, but feel that I could benefit greatly from being in an environment where other people are learning the same things, and where there was at least one person who had a lot more experience in whatever field was being studied than the class did. Unfortunately, the vast majority of college courses that I've seen that deal with areas that I currently feel I could spend the rest of my life working with are rather poor. In the town I live in, I know at least one person with a BS in "comp-sci" who had never been exposed to the concept of a finite state machine, never been exposed to the concept of "first class functions", and had no practical experience with anything other than cut-and-paste java development, or similar cut-and-paste php development. I know that this is not the case at every college, but it seems to be becoming more of the norm than not. I'm at a point where I can either continue doing hellishly boring freelance jobs until I make enough money to drop off the map for a while and develop something really useful to a lot of people, or I can go the route of putting myself in debt to go to college with the hopes that I can excel enough to either get noticed / hired by a company that is doing interesting work, or get a job that would allow me to pay off my debt, work for a year or two, and then again start working on software that would be useful to a lot of people. Because of what I've seen of most colleges and their courses in most of the areas that I've been in, I tend to feel that I would be wasting a good four years of my life in most colleges. I have some noticeable gaps in knowledge, specifically in maths, that I would like to fill (and am working on filling, thanks Knuth and friends for writing Concrete Mathematics - it's a wonderful start.) Largely, the question for me is one of quality of education. I do not want to pay people to give me busy work for four years. I don't want to be paying for textbooks on core material that hasn't changed in decades and only differs from the previous versions by what order the chapters are in, or what order the questions are in. What I want to do is learn to the best of my ability, and apply what I learn to the best of my ability. I think that a college environment very well could provide the means for that, but I have serious doubts that it is providing that for most students. Part of me doubts that most colleges even intend to provide that sort of environment. I can see that degrees are starting to matter a lot less, at least in the programming industry. I for one hope that that trend continues, and we get a nice influx of employers who are looking to pay people to learn and apply their learnings to solving practical problems. Anyhow, that's enough about that for now.

greyman 18y ago

For me, it was not. I did study Math, and while most of the knowledge can't be used directly in my daily job as a programmer, and most of the higher math was forgotten, I was taught to think abstractly in several different ways (like algebra, math analysis, statistics, geometry etc.) All of those subject are very beneficial to study, IMHO, even if you don't apply them directly in your job.

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randome 18y ago
whether or not they are relevant is besides the point, I think author isn't saying "end 4-year colleges" but rather that we should change how skills are assessed -- so that a 4 year college isn't required ... i.e you can take a test and if you pass thats it. so college could still be a valid route of developing skills (like the ones you said) but not the only route to getting a job.

thomasmallen 18y ago

I'm doing my best to prove that this is true. While I have college credits (about 60), I'm a full-time developer and part-time entrepreneur at 20. So far no need for a degree... That's not to say I'm poorly educated by any means. I have the writing, mathematical, scientific, historical, and artistic skills needed to earn a degree. My knowledge of the Russian canon alone might be enough at a school which offered that major (Russian Literature or even World Literature). It just didn't take me four years in a restrictive environment and an empty wallet to earn it :^)

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- yan 18y ago
  DC area? I'm about 1/3 between Baltimore and DC
  - jcromartie 18y ago
    Yes, Columbia actually.
    - yan 18y ago
      That's 10 minutes from me. I'm in Columbia almost every day after work though.
jcromartie 18y ago
Bravo. Smart people will be smart, no matter what. Smart people with time and energy will educate themselves. Smart people with money (or the willingness to accept debt) will buy a decent education.

ojbyrne 18y ago

The column seems to be entirely from the point of view of an employer looking to screen potential employees. Like it or not, college is about more than job training. For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it, the first part of life away from parents, but still with some security, and about intellectual exploration (answering the question - what exactly do I want to be when I grow up?). Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence. And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.

mynameishere 18y ago
For people who enter school for vocational reasons, the sports and parties and alcohol and Shakespeare classes and diversity training and dormitory life and extended vacations and other activities are completely distinct from getting vocational training...ie, they are a complete waste. The 10K+/per year expense is vastly more wasteful than any cert training...
whacked_new 18y ago
I find the whole "college is..." or "college is not..." to be a problematic mindset in itself. For example, why not develop social skills in high school? Many of the student leaders I know from college started as high school student leaders. Now we're talking about "HS is..." or "HS is not..." or "HS sucks." Why wait until HS? Now we're talking about MS... then lower school. Then it's just your entire life as an individual. I like the idea of a loose education system where there aren't Nth-grade, Xth-year students, but simply students who have proved themselves in a particular set of studies. For those with the time to study, take one year. For those without, take ten years. Then there won't be any of these ideas of what college should or should not do. It's my personal fantasy. Impractical perhaps?
- stcredzero 18y ago
  The problem with social skills, is that they're learned in a cultural/social context. For many, the desired quality and kind of context is only available in small doses (with a particular group) whose effect is diluted by the larger context which can only be corrected by moving somewhere else.

jon_dahl 18y ago

This is better than most "college is a waste" articles, but it repeats a common mistake: thinking that people are hired for their skills. When I'm hiring, I don't want someone with a "web design" certificate or a "Python programming" certificate, or (worse) a "sales and marketing" certificate. I want someone who is smart, passionate, loves to learn, thinks creatively, knows how to write, and is enjoyable to work with. These things can't be governed by a certificate system. Of course, they also don't correlate strongly with a college diploma. But there is some correlation, at least with some majors - give me a philosophy major over a business major any day.

randome 18y ago
Yeah, and I think the point the author makes is that a college degree is just as bad an indicator of that as a certificate with a number on it. If you want someone with those qualities you can interview them and find out.
un 18y ago
You could create certification tests for those as well - general knowledge test, creativity test, writing test, personality test
- jcromartie 18y ago
  I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not. I can see it now: "I'm a certified Awesome Dude."
  - un 18y ago
    No I'm being serious, and "Awesome Dude" is in the eye of the beholder, you can only really judge that in interviewing.
    - kaens 18y ago
      How would you suggest certifying creativity?
- 18y ago

whacked_new 18y ago

The current system is the continuation of a historical establishment, which is the same with many other human-created systems. They will always be flawed, but humans will also be slow to react to changes; the larger the group, the older the establishment, the more resistant to change. While it is atrociously suboptimal, it's a bit much to call it a waste of time. Incidentally, I happened upon this article this morning and like the idea very much: the Grandes écoles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%89coles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%89coles Does anybody have any related stories to tell?

jb92 18y ago
I went to one of these, so i think i know about it. I think it creates another kind of establishment, and not a very likeable one at that. It's very much like the Ivy leagues colleges in the US. People are not out of school that they are already so very certain of their own worth, it's despicable.

krschultz 18y ago

The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational. Why waste money on classes that don't apply for your certificate? Why spend time playing with classes that could lead you to a different certificate when you are already 20% done with this one? Or better yet, why not get a couple princeton review books to pass the test? I passed 35 credits of AP exams in high school, all with 5 out of 5s, and several without taking the course. When I actually took some classes in college based on that, I quickly found out how little you need to know to pass a test.

un 18y ago
Requiring everyone to learn some nonpractical things is a waste of societal resources. If some people want to learn something just for the sake of it, they could join reading groups/attend lectures on their own time.
stcredzero 18y ago
I met an Irish engineer. He said that all of his classes in college had to do with engineering. If he wanted to study the Classics, the attitude was that he could just go and do that in his own time. Personally, I think this is better. If you try to legislate breadth in your students, then you end up just making a mockery of what you're trying to teach. You end up accomplishing the opposite of what you were trying to do. I spent a few years teaching Computer Science 101/102 as a TA. A whole lot of my students were in Journalism, Communications, or Criminology or some area like that and just trying to get their math requirement out of the way. My conclusion in retrospect: to most of my students, this was largely just a bureaucratic exercise. If you want true students, you need to find the students that have the interest and desire.
byrneseyeview 18y ago
The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational. The problem with this view is that some people just want the vocational part, and bundling it with something they don't want, but for which they will be charged, just makes them worse off. Being able to buy A or B is better than only being able to buy A and B. It would be pretty annoying if some forward-thinking politician realized that a keyboard is worthless without a computer, and unilaterally banned the sale of keyboards that didn't come with a computer. But that would be a terrible plan.

mynameishere 18y ago

A long time ago, books and educated people were extremely scarce. So, it was efficient to group as many books and educated people in the same place so that, in that particular place, they were not scarce. That place is called a "school". The scarcity that gave schools their key advantage is largely gone.

azharcs 18y ago

I just recently saw a video of TED from Sir. Ken Robinson who said School's kill Creativity, Really a great talk and worth seeing. Hope some of you find it useful. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...

art_wells 18y ago

My college degree means nothing on paper professionally, but meant everything to my abilities to meet business and computing challenges. I didn't study computing at all. I don't expect that my experience is much different from others who have Liberal Arts degrees and found joy in technology. I've worked with many people who have degrees and certification in computing and many who don't. As a result of my experience, I've rejected resumes from people who have studied computing and sought professional certifications solely, in preference to people who have English degrees and weird hobbies. Professional experience is supreme, but after that, I want a broad mind to tackle the problems at hand. While that's highly prejudicial, I've found it a very rewarding way to approach a stack of resumes.

un 18y ago
Sounds pretty elitist, and your company might suffer for it.
- art_wells 18y ago
  I'm sure there might be problems with choosing the wrong criteria, but I can't see how "elitism" in itself can be a cause of problems in the hiring process.
  - un 18y ago
    By elitist I meant to say cliquey, you might filter out people you would really excel
    - art_wells 18y ago
      Yes, I can see that as a possible problem. I've seen fewer cliqueness in this crew (prehaps because they all come from varied educational and professional backgrounds), than I have in groups pulled mostly from tech academics and companies.
- william42 18y ago
  Considering that the maxim for the new millenium is "Safe is risky and risky is safe" I think he might be doing the best thing. All in all, it seems like today the best way to approach things is to be different and his hiring policies are definitely different. Sure, he might fail, but would he be able to succeed if he did the same thing as everything else?

nazgulnarsil 18y ago

merit based hiring is too rational to work in america.

Eliezer 18y ago

I've been saying this, almost to the exact letter, for the last 13 years. Not the "college is a waste of time" part, but the part about "we need to divorce the skill verification from the skill teaching".

krschultz 18y ago
That I agree with, but truthfully it is already there. CPA exam, professional engineer exam, bar exam, medical exams. What doesn't have an exam? Marketing, sales? There is a PE exam for computer engineering/science but no one takes it. Just push people to take them and it will accomplish the same thing.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  >What doesn't have an exam? Entry level office job. B.A. or B.S. required. It would be nice to have a GEBA, just like we have a GED. Additionally, you can't take many of the exams you just mentioned without a degree. I.e. the degree and the exams are still married, the exam is just standardized.
- bokonist 18y ago
  It's not there because all those professional guilds legally require a college degree. It used to be you could just pass the bar and become a lawyer. The bar associations then got laws passed requiring an actual law degrees, so people took inexpensive correspondence courses. The lawyers then fought back by requiring the schools be accredited, and setting minimum rules for face time. Thus you are forced to pay very expensive law school tuition to practice as a lawyer. This pushes up the wages of the current lawyers, who got the law passed. The whole thing is a scam.
  - krschultz 18y ago
    Is it a scam? Do you really want people to be able to get engineering degrees without going through the rigour of a full college education? These are the people who design airplanes and cars and powerplants. Sure maybe it works for Java programming of some BS business app, but most of the exams out there are on fields where screwing up something has major consequences.

steveplace 18y ago

Hooray! Broad generalizations!

kansando 18y ago

College is a place where you learn to learn, or should be...

kaens 18y ago
I would think that people should be learning to learn much younger than college-age, but that's an entirely different can of worms.
un 18y ago
A better way to teach how to learn to learn, would be to teach a class in exactly that. The motivational speaker industry does a better job in "meta" subjects, such as "getting things done", "how to be successful", than college does. Paul Graham's essays for startups are more effective than college courses in entrepreneurship.
bbgm 18y ago
Agreed. Seeing comments here and elsewhere, one wonders if people actually care about quality education just because it's a good thing? How about access lab facilities, the ability to interact with other smart people, hopefully to learn from good teachers, or do quality research? College and grad school was all that for me. Was it perfect. Not at all, but given a choice, I'd do it again.

pleasehelp 18y ago

Most people don't have a reasonable alternative at the time.

azharcs 18y ago

I personally think college-education is over rated as of today. The only reason education worked as a good model was because there was scarcity of Information and this information could be obtained only if you paid tons of money and joined college. Today times have changed drastically, a guy sitting in remote part of Africa(with a basic internet connection) can obtain the same information which the guy in Stanford or MIT is trying to obtain. Colleges surely had advantages a decade back like Mentors, Teachers, Abundant Information, Labs, Job Guarantee. But today Internet is replacing all these one by one and colleges today can't guarantee jobs. Unless colleges start offering something really substantial else they will have a tough time competing with internet educated population which is growing day by day.

un 18y ago
I would go further to say that the current system is disadvantaging rich countries immensely. I typical person without a college degree is likely to think he shouldn't even attempt to seek work such as IT (it's for those college educated types), and instead heads into the local service economy (further depressing wages there), instead of earning money for the country in globally based economy.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  The certification system he's talking about would massively accelerate global outsourcing of US jobs. ISO 9000 certification in the 80s and 90s played a huge role in sending US manufacturing overseas. People were reluctant to believe that factories in various second and third world countries could be just as good. Then the certs proved pretty well that they were! Same deal now with personnel. Employers are sometimes reluctant to believe Indians or Vietnamese are on par with a four year American college grad. Sufficiently standard tests would prove they are. In other words, the US has coasted on reputation in a lot of ways and empirical approaches can damage that reputation.
  - un 18y ago
    But you're assuming outsourcing is bad for individuals in the US, whereas most indications are the opposite, it increases their wealth. The point about the nongrad IT worker is that he would be able to create more wealth than he would as a local service worker (in the same way as offshore workers do). Increasing production (and hence wealth) from all workers, whether offshore or in US is better for society than allowing inefficiencies and protectionism to prevail.

time_management 18y ago

College is an aspect of upper- and upper-middle-class life (formerly) that has replicated on account of the status and advantage once conferred by the college degree. Now it's a requirement for a large set of jobs, most of which wouldn't even be considered desirable. Is college a massive waste of time and money for a lot of people? Probably. I think it's useless and unfair to put a person through college and then have him end up in a job that does not involve the level of autonomy and intellectual challenge that college led him to expect. Since society has not evolved to the point where good jobs are abundant, it's hard to see any good reason for more than 5-10% of people to have college educations. One has to examine the motivations behind the proliferation of higher education. The far left supports widespread college education under the belief that if lower- and middle-class people have the benefit of a liberal education, they'll demand good jobs and become "Angry Young (Wo/)Men" if they don't get them and, therefore, evolve into revolutionaries who will overthrow the status quo. The corporate right likes it because the colleges provide companies with a sorting mechanism, the costs of which are paid by the people being sorted rather than the corporate "users". The center supports widespread college education under the guise of increasing social equality. It's obvious that an idea with such support from both the wings and the center will be implemented. Also, there are the goals of the academics. In the 1950s, professors widely believed that a merger between the academy and the larger capitalistic society would improve their social position. As they saw it, rule of society by educational institutions seemed to be the next logical step after rule by the church until the Enlightenment, by governments up to World War I, and finally by business corporations in the XX-c. They got their desired "merger" but Mammon, being larger and meaner, won and turned the academy to its needs, rather than vice versa.

stcredzero 18y ago
"turned the academy to its needs" -- nay, it practically started out that way!
un 18y ago
Sounds like we need to end the tenure system and get the academic "pigs" off their high horses!

msluyter 18y ago

I'm torn between two somewhat incompatible visions: 1. College should train you for some sort of career and should do so in the most rigorously objective way possible. In this view, certifications provide the gold standard of objectivity. 2. College should help you become well rounded, responsible adults. By which I mean, able to reason about complex issues, having some background in history, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, a basic understanding of subjects that affect our lives, such as economics, etc... In other words, the sort of people who desire to remain informed about political events, who could weigh several candidates for office and be able to apply some sort of selection criteria beyond a mere gut instinct. In other words, the sort of people that keep democracy on track.

un 18y ago
In the UK, the higher education system is as you desribed in point 1, you get a degree in exactly your subject. yet they have no shortage of people who can debate on the issues you mention in point 2.

vaksel 18y ago

Well its probably true, look at most liberal arts majors, they spend 4 years learning and then go back to the same job at GAP because they can't find any job in their field. It seems like going to college is a requirement now, where people go there because its expected of them. They don't go to learn, they go there to put in the time(like in highschool)

Alex3917 18y ago

"A passing [CPA exam] score indicates authentic competence" This is misleading, because the word authentic has a specific meaning in psychometrics. It means that the evaluation of competence is based off of things like observations, student journals, portfolios, inquiry projects, exhibits, hands-on activities, essays, performances, etc. A standardized test score is not considered to be an authentic measure of competence.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
What makes you think the author was talking strictly in terms of psychometrics? I assumed he was using common vernacular. Wouldn't it be odd for him to use such a technical term in the middle of an opinion piece in the WSJ?
- Alex3917 18y ago
  Well he is probably the world's most famous psychometrician and the article is about psychometrics. I suspect he is using the word incorrectly on purpose because he doesn't like the definition. It's kind of like if a famous conservative wrote a book about the flat tax and titled the book Progressive Taxation.
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    I'm really not trying to pick a fight, but isn't this just the common use of rhetoric and re-definition that one would find in commentary? I think your example is a great one. The conservative would then proceed to argue that his definition of "progressive taxation" is adequate for the discussion at hand. I'm probably just making a big deal out of nothing. I'm just flummoxed at why his own technical field's definition has anything to do with communication directed at a non-technical audience. Perhaps he used it like that to get the response you gave? That would make sense.

sh1mmer 18y ago

The most valuable part of college for me (in terms of my career prospects) was not the degree I got, although it was a good degree. The most valuable thing about college for me was the support, money, facilities that the college provided to me while I was there. They enabled me to do plenty of things I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. When I was at college I worked on plenty of OSS, created a web site for Nasa, and contributed to the W3C. My school paid for me to fly to a number of W3C conferences as scholarship. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the university library which was many times vaster and better resourced than any library I've had at any employer since. Any technical book I wanted that they didn't have would normally turn up within a matter of weeks. Add to that a 24hr computing campus with access to mainframes around the clock. I got to experiment because I could keep my own hours and get time on the interesting hardware at 3am when sensible people were in bed. University is not just about a degree. As many other people here have said it's about the experience (I met my wife in college) and the learning, in an environment which allows it.

un 18y ago
What about the children of poorer families who don't have the luxury of going to college. The above would be fine if parents/students were paying the full cost of the facilities, but in most cases its government/charity subsidized.
- sh1mmer 18y ago
  I'm British so the government paid the vast majority of my University fees. The rest were paid for by government loans, which I am now paying back. It really is possible for poorer families to have kids in University in Britain. It's a shame that isn't true everywhere.
  - zandorg 18y ago
    I got on a UK degree course just before they started charging. My only loan was a student one, paying for booze and rent.

stcredzero 18y ago

I think someone should start a secret society of young women enrolled in institutions of higher learning. The upperclassmen leaders of these secret societies would observe the freshmen males, searching for individuals of exceptional potential hampered by extreme awkwardness and sexual insecurity. They'd arrange to ensnare these freshmen in a series of relationships as a part of a program to groom them for leadership and to inoculate them against misogyny. Maybe they could call themselves the "Bene Gesserit?"

arupchak 18y ago

I'm sure most of us know that good test performance does not always equal good job performance. Whenever I see a resume in front of me that has a score on a test (ie. GRE score) I almost always get disinterested in the candidate, even if the test is related to the job. I do think that these test scores can show a level of competency in showing one's ability to study/work hard for a test and do well. However, doing well on a professional test does not mean you would be good at working in that profession. I'm sure we all know people from college/school who were great at testing/studying and getting good grades but still have a hard time in non-academic environments. College is only as useful as you want it to be. If you want to 'coast' for four years and meet/network with a lot of people, do it. If you want to study your tail off in a difficult field and try and get a good job afterward, do it. Just do not complain afterward that college did not prepare you to get a job or that college did not make enough friends for you afterward.

t0pj 18y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553

gills 18y ago

This is a self-solving problem one way or another. The employers that use low-information predictors of productivity will go out of business and whatever system the remaining businesses are using will drive the educational system. Either that, or the inevitably-higher credit standards in the near future will help to give the college system a population haircut, which will weed out quite a few of those who don't really mean it (and unfortunately, some of those who do...).

sofal 18y ago
Sometimes the illusion of competence is the only thing you need to succeed.

jrsims 18y ago

I dropped out of the JC I was attending and just started finding better ways of doing things (read: "developed technical solutions") at each company I worked for, regardless of what the position was. Although I would like to make more money, I trained myself, followed my interests, and now - relatively speaking - I have an above average salary, both for my current position and the region I live in. College, in my case, was totally unnecessary. Yet I'm a DBA/Developer for a respected Fortune 500 company.

Jaytee 18y ago

Great article, though my day-dreamed educational system would be a little bit different. But who is to say which one's better until you implement them. On the same note, High school and middle school are pretty much a waste of time. In fact, any kind of system that categorize kids into homogeneous age groups are socially and psychologically unhealthy. How can kids learn form their peers if all of them have just about the same exposure and experience in the world? That's why we have all these angsty kids, because no knows better. I've been teaching on the side for a few years. And from my experience, when I mix kids of different ages, they assume instinctual responsibilities (almost tribal). Older kids become more authoritative and care-giving. Younger kids become more attentive and respectful. This kind of social learning is both top-down and bottom-up. I understand the importance of school as a social environment. But if it's going to be homogeneous and unrepresentative of the real world, no real social skills will come out of it. Don't take my word for it. I'm sure we all have interacted with college grads who are clueless about the real world.

riahi 18y ago
Reminds me of Montessori classrooms with mixed age-groups.

invisible 18y ago

College degrees should be your GPA with the degree title underneath. I guess it's a hard sell for college when your degree is only worth something significant when it has a 3.5 or greater on it though...

milwaukeegreeny 18y ago

Good article. Fact of the matter is that academia has evolved over the decades into an ideologigal monolith. A stifling regiment of ideological political correctness. In current times most young people would be well advised to avoid Universities and Colleges. After 4 years of classes they come out dumber than when they went in.

Prrometheus 18y ago

The example of certification-based credentials mentioned in the article, the CPA exam, is a bad one since you have to have a bachelor's degree in order to take the exam. It doesn't matter if you could ace it on your first try, most state accountancy boards require 150 hours of college credit before you can take the CPA. This restricts the supply of accountants and keeps accountant salary high. There was a movement a few years back to increase the requirement to a full Master's degree. It's totally unnecessary to be a good accountant.

icco 18y ago

I think this is a little excessive. It really implies that someone got a strong high school education. A lot of the public high schools where I grew up sent a small portion of students to college just because the school system was hurting very much. Most students didn't feel like they had learned much until after their first years in college or a stint at the local junior college.

jordiculous 18y ago

College, more than being proof of a person's intelligence, is proof that you can jump through the hoops deemed appropriate by your "higher ups" (aka professors). Understandably, some employers consider this a desirable trait in employees. I call those employers Fascists :P