6 ms·

My take: First, depends on definition of "College" and "University" that differs from country to country. But overall, value of University education to improv

My take: First, depends on definition of "College" and "University" that differs from country to country. But overall, value of University education to improve your employability and skillset I think is being questioned by both employers and employees. 1. Some "Blue Collar" skills may withstand the test of automation better than many "White Collar" skills - e.g. I anticipate needing an electrician, contractor, plumber for the next few decades; but hopefully accountant, lawyer, travel agent etc less and less. 2. For "White Collar" skills, well... I went to ComSci university and it's not that it brought no value - but given the time, money, effort and commitment, it was very very low value proposition. I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. (note I wasn't the one going to university for some "Party / Social Experience" - I found many better, more flexible methods than that:). Not going to university is not necessarily the same thing as not wanting to learn and educate and acquire skills. And there is a whole spectrum today between free online education (random Youtube videos, manuals, free university courses etc), bootcamps, practically oriented post-secondary education, and then university. Bottom line: I have two young kids, I want them to succeed, and I want them to be educated - and I don't know if traditional university is something I will encourage them to consider 10 years from now. I honestly don't know however how that translates into a gender gap discussed in the article though; and article doesn't really provide a satisfying answer either :-/

Forge36 5y ago
>I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery Arguably this was the most valuable learning I did as it's the most applicable to my current job. :)
- ryandrake 5y ago
  It’s also one of the most transferable skills you can have. Most everywhere you work will have a bureaucracy to navigate and checkboxes to figure out how to check.
awkward 5y ago
I'm surprised to hear about comp sci students who feel their experience was low value, especially on this website, where you presumably work in the industry. While I picked up very few resume bullet point skills from college, I tend to find that having a comp sci background raises my game. Training in algorithms, complexity, plt and networking has given me a solid footing through my career that lets me tackle the hardest parts of the job. Stack overflow and youtube mostly help with the easy stuff.
- plumeria 5y ago
  Not sure if "ComSci" refers to "Computer Science" or "Communication Science".
- rizzaxc 5y ago
  yeah I'm very thankful I got to be in college for CS. I can't imagine learning all the deep weeds in algo, network and security in a bootcamp or youtube - way too shallow and unstructured. like how could you possibly learn all the things I learned but in 10% of the time
- bmhin 5y ago
  My take here is that it is too easy to look back on what was learned in college and what you use today in comparison to it's source and conclude you've picked up way more on the job and use comparatively little from the formal education. Therefore the value is low. Could you likely have learned everything that you got from your degree on your own while cutting out some of the less practical parts? Almost definitely. Would the person who isn't looking back with 20/20 hindsight know what to cut? I think that is less likely. Would a person without the formal structure of a degree actually gone out and learned all those same things with the same commitment? Some might be able to, but I suspect most would lose interest. Sure your career might have ended up never touching a single networking component that you learned about in school. But maybe you loved that part and if left to your own devices would have forsaken other parts of the education to just deep dive on it. Would that be fine? Maybe. Or maybe you quite like working in the role that you find yourself in. A role that you might have shut the door to very early on without some structure. So I think a mix of hindsight and overestimating a person's ability to just stick with a rigorous learning process that can take months and months (or years) without the benefits of peers, teachers, structure, and accountability leads to this belief. I should mention though that as we are speaking about "value", the ROI on college in America is pretty rough. Even with all those benefits laid out, it is hard to make it too rosey in the face of a hundred thousand dollars of potential debt. Extra so due to the fact that you can acquire a portion of that debt and not even come out the other side with a degree.
avgDev 5y ago
In your 2nd point you state "I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning.", I also felt this way. However, now I would make an argument that it actually gets you ready for the real world. Being a programmer is a lot more than just programming skills. To be successful you need to be able to talk to business people, go through red tape and processes, it is highly unlikely you will just "code". Education shows you can work under many different individuals and satisfy their requirements and processes. You know how to jump over hoops and deal with a bureaucratic process. There is value in that.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I would agree with your general point that communication, understanding process & procedure, etc are useful skills for IT. But that's not what I am talking about. And again, my overall problem with my university experience was inefficiency, which I can only ascribe to lack of care / focus as to actual education. It's not like admin / bureaucracy existed and were paid/incentivized to teach me how to get around them and instill valuable theoretical or practical skills :). It was school of hard knocks, slow and painful and self-guided and frankly hateful; and I don't have to PAY to obtain that self-taught experience - I can be PAID to obtain it :). Or at least, I can pay to obtain it more efficiently, intuitively, with both better understanding and practical tips. What you describe in the last sentence is a gate, and I to this day (20 years later) resent investing so much time, money and energy for a simple gate - sure "there's value in that", but it feels like Stockholm syndrome / rationalization of sunk cost trying to justify it; there are better, and let me say it again, more efficient ways to satisfy same goal. Everybody's experience differs; there are people who enjoyed university and found it a rewarding experience. For myself, much as I love learning and CompSci, as much as I've thrived in IT and still enjoy learning, inasmuch as I now guide and coach my teams on precisely how to communicate to non-IT, look at goals, understand process etc - it was ultimately an extremely inefficient experience. Nowadays, I take classes from vendors, community colleges, online, private instructors in IT and music and photography and whatever... short and long, surface and deep, and I love it all. "Here's money, give me KNOWLEDGE". Whereas, my personal university experience was far different.
the_only_law 5y ago
> I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery I tried going back to school recently, hitting a complete brick wall at every step as a “non-traditional non traditional” applicant. Based on my experience with that I’m convinced out higher education system in the US is nothing except those two things.
alexgmcm 5y ago
I'd argue it's still worthwhile for degrees like Computer Science if only because HR like candidates to have a degree. (Although this is slowly eroding and may change in the next decade or so) But the value of less directly applicable degrees like the humanities, social sciences and arts has decreased a lot. I think in the past simply having been to University, irrespective of the major, was a strong signal. Nowadays graduates are a dime-a-dozen so you'd better have a major that brings real value to your employer. Plus a lot of the younger generations may have older family members who graduated from college yet have little to show for it.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I’m torn on CS degrees, because while a vast majority of what makes up the curriculum is made accessible to anyone with access to modern technology, but there are some bits of field that seem to require either a real world scenario or academic setting to learn. But yeah, I don’t think most degrees don’t provide much value in terms of employment. Even a large chunk of the oh so coveted STEM (notably the S) are probably a crapshoot.
  - alexgmcm 5y ago
    I did Physics and turned out okay (I work in Data Science now) but a lot of that seemed like good fortune. I think the future for CS education could definitely be online courses - the Nand2Tetris course has stuck with me more than anything I did at University, for example. And Prof. Roughgarden's Algorithms courses were similarly high quality. Really I think once online courses work out how to solve the credential problem and actually get taken seriously by employers, the college bubble could burst.
    - the_only_law 5y ago
      One of my personal questions around CS education is topics like HPC. Lets say I want to learn how to work on HPC problems. There's only really two ways tats going to happen. Working in an industry role on those sort of problems (which won't happen unless you already have that sort of background) or learning in in an academic setting (i.e. a University program) I don't think self teaching via online courses or otherwise are realistic in this scenario because I as an individual don't have access to either the infrastructure or problem-sets at the sort of scale to work on this thing.
solatic 5y ago
> I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. You'd be surprised how much more valuable the skillset of navigating bureaucracy is to the skillset that a million websites are trying to teach you for free.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Oh I agree; but see my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543015 In short: it's not like university sets out to TEACH you how to navigate bureaucracy, and it's not like they necessarily succeed.
rizzaxc 5y ago
to me, universities havve to be very very cheap to be worth it, since most of bachelor level knowledge is now free on the internet. universities will still have value as children's first serious research institution, and personally I see that as a very good reason to send my future kids there. if they dont like it, no problem the financial hit should be minor; not to mention they will get to grow as a person in a somewhat professional setting. universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > since most of bachelor level knowledge is now free on the internet. Most of the knowledge is out there sure, but the knowledge is hardly what’s important here. Most well-paid white collar professions still require that credentials (and even poorly laid white-collar professions on that note) I could spend a lifetime reading about engineering and following program curriculum to a point, but it’s unlikely I’d ever be hired in most engineering fields.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  > universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper You've completely misunderstood the point of university and the piece of paper. The reasons to go to University ranked: 1. To signal to employers that you are the type of person who can solve difficult challenges with minimal oversight 2. To build your network 3. To learn 4. Social events The piece of paper is far from irrelevant, it's your signal to employers that you're a successful person. MOOCs and bootcamps can't replace that. Employers don't like apprenticeships because once they're over the employees leave for greener pastures. Even if they confirm you're self trained via leetcode or whatever they still can't be sure that you're able to do the other stuff that a job entails.
  - gjhh244 5y ago
    The problem is that there are a lot more "successful people" with a degree nowadays, but not that much more demand. Thus the value of nearly all degrees is lower now than decades ago. Only ones with difficult entry (like medicine) really hold their value. Even CS degree is fairly useless without hobby projects or working experience. Many university programs exist simply to make money, or in European publicly funded institutions because of arbitrary government targets for raising education level in general population. Nothing to do with actual demand or applicable skills in workforce.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
The Computer Science experience in university is just so different compared to the other engineering disciplines. The incoming students have such widely different starting points in terms of skill, ability, and familiarity. In my class I had people who could basically program as a full time job. A security guru who embodied the 'hackerman' stereotype. And of course, people who had literally only made "hello world" websites in Netscape Composer. I personally had done some programming in BASIC and Java but was by no means comfortable with OOP. It is so difficult to design a curriculum that accommodates such a wide range of experience. One of my professors told me that he shares the same challenges as some of the Arts teachers. Because, they too, get students who run the gamut from amateur to masters-level. And some of those painters or musicians are better than the professors themselves. One of the ways to accommodate this is to teach a lot more about theory. Things you would not learn if you had taught yourself. The upside is that you are more likely to teach all the students something new. The downside is some of the students think the theoretical stuff is not valuable because they won't get to apply it very often. I for instance, know about Big-O but in practical terms I know I shouldn't nest loops and let some standard library implement a nlog(n) sort for me.

Forge36 5y ago

>I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery Arguably this was the most valuable learning I did as it's the most applicable to my current job. :)

ryandrake 5y ago
It’s also one of the most transferable skills you can have. Most everywhere you work will have a bureaucracy to navigate and checkboxes to figure out how to check.

awkward 5y ago

I'm surprised to hear about comp sci students who feel their experience was low value, especially on this website, where you presumably work in the industry. While I picked up very few resume bullet point skills from college, I tend to find that having a comp sci background raises my game. Training in algorithms, complexity, plt and networking has given me a solid footing through my career that lets me tackle the hardest parts of the job. Stack overflow and youtube mostly help with the easy stuff.

plumeria 5y ago
Not sure if "ComSci" refers to "Computer Science" or "Communication Science".
rizzaxc 5y ago
yeah I'm very thankful I got to be in college for CS. I can't imagine learning all the deep weeds in algo, network and security in a bootcamp or youtube - way too shallow and unstructured. like how could you possibly learn all the things I learned but in 10% of the time
bmhin 5y ago
My take here is that it is too easy to look back on what was learned in college and what you use today in comparison to it's source and conclude you've picked up way more on the job and use comparatively little from the formal education. Therefore the value is low. Could you likely have learned everything that you got from your degree on your own while cutting out some of the less practical parts? Almost definitely. Would the person who isn't looking back with 20/20 hindsight know what to cut? I think that is less likely. Would a person without the formal structure of a degree actually gone out and learned all those same things with the same commitment? Some might be able to, but I suspect most would lose interest. Sure your career might have ended up never touching a single networking component that you learned about in school. But maybe you loved that part and if left to your own devices would have forsaken other parts of the education to just deep dive on it. Would that be fine? Maybe. Or maybe you quite like working in the role that you find yourself in. A role that you might have shut the door to very early on without some structure. So I think a mix of hindsight and overestimating a person's ability to just stick with a rigorous learning process that can take months and months (or years) without the benefits of peers, teachers, structure, and accountability leads to this belief. I should mention though that as we are speaking about "value", the ROI on college in America is pretty rough. Even with all those benefits laid out, it is hard to make it too rosey in the face of a hundred thousand dollars of potential debt. Extra so due to the fact that you can acquire a portion of that debt and not even come out the other side with a degree.

avgDev 5y ago

In your 2nd point you state "I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning.", I also felt this way. However, now I would make an argument that it actually gets you ready for the real world. Being a programmer is a lot more than just programming skills. To be successful you need to be able to talk to business people, go through red tape and processes, it is highly unlikely you will just "code". Education shows you can work under many different individuals and satisfy their requirements and processes. You know how to jump over hoops and deal with a bureaucratic process. There is value in that.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
I would agree with your general point that communication, understanding process & procedure, etc are useful skills for IT. But that's not what I am talking about. And again, my overall problem with my university experience was inefficiency, which I can only ascribe to lack of care / focus as to actual education. It's not like admin / bureaucracy existed and were paid/incentivized to teach me how to get around them and instill valuable theoretical or practical skills :). It was school of hard knocks, slow and painful and self-guided and frankly hateful; and I don't have to PAY to obtain that self-taught experience - I can be PAID to obtain it :). Or at least, I can pay to obtain it more efficiently, intuitively, with both better understanding and practical tips. What you describe in the last sentence is a gate, and I to this day (20 years later) resent investing so much time, money and energy for a simple gate - sure "there's value in that", but it feels like Stockholm syndrome / rationalization of sunk cost trying to justify it; there are better, and let me say it again, more efficient ways to satisfy same goal. Everybody's experience differs; there are people who enjoyed university and found it a rewarding experience. For myself, much as I love learning and CompSci, as much as I've thrived in IT and still enjoy learning, inasmuch as I now guide and coach my teams on precisely how to communicate to non-IT, look at goals, understand process etc - it was ultimately an extremely inefficient experience. Nowadays, I take classes from vendors, community colleges, online, private instructors in IT and music and photography and whatever... short and long, surface and deep, and I love it all. "Here's money, give me KNOWLEDGE". Whereas, my personal university experience was far different.

the_only_law 5y ago

> I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery I tried going back to school recently, hitting a complete brick wall at every step as a “non-traditional non traditional” applicant. Based on my experience with that I’m convinced out higher education system in the US is nothing except those two things.

alexgmcm 5y ago

I'd argue it's still worthwhile for degrees like Computer Science if only because HR like candidates to have a degree. (Although this is slowly eroding and may change in the next decade or so) But the value of less directly applicable degrees like the humanities, social sciences and arts has decreased a lot. I think in the past simply having been to University, irrespective of the major, was a strong signal. Nowadays graduates are a dime-a-dozen so you'd better have a major that brings real value to your employer. Plus a lot of the younger generations may have older family members who graduated from college yet have little to show for it.

the_only_law 5y ago
I’m torn on CS degrees, because while a vast majority of what makes up the curriculum is made accessible to anyone with access to modern technology, but there are some bits of field that seem to require either a real world scenario or academic setting to learn. But yeah, I don’t think most degrees don’t provide much value in terms of employment. Even a large chunk of the oh so coveted STEM (notably the S) are probably a crapshoot.
- alexgmcm 5y ago
  I did Physics and turned out okay (I work in Data Science now) but a lot of that seemed like good fortune. I think the future for CS education could definitely be online courses - the Nand2Tetris course has stuck with me more than anything I did at University, for example. And Prof. Roughgarden's Algorithms courses were similarly high quality. Really I think once online courses work out how to solve the credential problem and actually get taken seriously by employers, the college bubble could burst.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    One of my personal questions around CS education is topics like HPC. Lets say I want to learn how to work on HPC problems. There's only really two ways tats going to happen. Working in an industry role on those sort of problems (which won't happen unless you already have that sort of background) or learning in in an academic setting (i.e. a University program) I don't think self teaching via online courses or otherwise are realistic in this scenario because I as an individual don't have access to either the infrastructure or problem-sets at the sort of scale to work on this thing.

solatic 5y ago

> I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. You'd be surprised how much more valuable the skillset of navigating bureaucracy is to the skillset that a million websites are trying to teach you for free.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
Oh I agree; but see my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543015 In short: it's not like university sets out to TEACH you how to navigate bureaucracy, and it's not like they necessarily succeed.

rizzaxc 5y ago

to me, universities havve to be very very cheap to be worth it, since most of bachelor level knowledge is now free on the internet. universities will still have value as children's first serious research institution, and personally I see that as a very good reason to send my future kids there. if they dont like it, no problem the financial hit should be minor; not to mention they will get to grow as a person in a somewhat professional setting. universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper

the_only_law 5y ago
> since most of bachelor level knowledge is now free on the internet. Most of the knowledge is out there sure, but the knowledge is hardly what’s important here. Most well-paid white collar professions still require that credentials (and even poorly laid white-collar professions on that note) I could spend a lifetime reading about engineering and following program curriculum to a point, but it’s unlikely I’d ever be hired in most engineering fields.
colinmhayes 5y ago
> universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper You've completely misunderstood the point of university and the piece of paper. The reasons to go to University ranked: 1. To signal to employers that you are the type of person who can solve difficult challenges with minimal oversight 2. To build your network 3. To learn 4. Social events The piece of paper is far from irrelevant, it's your signal to employers that you're a successful person. MOOCs and bootcamps can't replace that. Employers don't like apprenticeships because once they're over the employees leave for greener pastures. Even if they confirm you're self trained via leetcode or whatever they still can't be sure that you're able to do the other stuff that a job entails.
- gjhh244 5y ago
  The problem is that there are a lot more "successful people" with a degree nowadays, but not that much more demand. Thus the value of nearly all degrees is lower now than decades ago. Only ones with difficult entry (like medicine) really hold their value. Even CS degree is fairly useless without hobby projects or working experience. Many university programs exist simply to make money, or in European publicly funded institutions because of arbitrary government targets for raising education level in general population. Nothing to do with actual demand or applicable skills in workforce.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

The Computer Science experience in university is just so different compared to the other engineering disciplines. The incoming students have such widely different starting points in terms of skill, ability, and familiarity. In my class I had people who could basically program as a full time job. A security guru who embodied the 'hackerman' stereotype. And of course, people who had literally only made "hello world" websites in Netscape Composer. I personally had done some programming in BASIC and Java but was by no means comfortable with OOP. It is so difficult to design a curriculum that accommodates such a wide range of experience. One of my professors told me that he shares the same challenges as some of the Arts teachers. Because, they too, get students who run the gamut from amateur to masters-level. And some of those painters or musicians are better than the professors themselves. One of the ways to accommodate this is to teach a lot more about theory. Things you would not learn if you had taught yourself. The upside is that you are more likely to teach all the students something new. The downside is some of the students think the theoretical stuff is not valuable because they won't get to apply it very often. I for instance, know about Big-O but in practical terms I know I shouldn't nest loops and let some standard library implement a nlog(n) sort for me.