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I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful. Initially I dropped out of college to work on internet star

I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful. Initially I dropped out of college to work on internet startups in the 90s. I didn’t make a billion but I learned skills and made a good living and was definitely the highest earner out of all my college friends for at least 10-20 years. But I went to night school and got an undergrad and masters and now work in a field with a lot of very educated people phd/md in a non-bullshit way. And I wouldn’t have had that opportunity without my degrees, even know I had the same skills and knowledge. Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened. Practically, I’m not sure what to advise my kids. I’m leaning toward college because taking out loans and having 60% of the money go to admin staff and mega gyms is just overhead to opening more opportunity. And I think the college route has a higher median outcome as I wrestle with was I lucky or will everyone with skill and obsession in an area be able to support their families.

disposition2 3y ago
Out of curiosity, when you went back to school, did you go to school for computer science or a different degree / area of study?
- prepend 3y ago
  For undergrad I did a business degree specializing in “computer information systems” as I couldn’t find an applicable CS degree. I was a full time architect with 10 years xp and learned really nothing directly useful in work. But the soft skills were kind of nice. Made some relationships too, but they’ve never helped me in work. For masters I went to a very reputable school in my field and studied something new. Learned a lot, but hard to know what’s helped and what didn’t. I think it gave me basic context knowledge in my new field. Made lots of relationships with students, not they helped with work. With faculty led to future work (teaching, volunteer work).
BlandDuck 3y ago
> Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened. It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter. In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being. In reality, HR has limited resources and needs shortcuts to effectively screen applicants. Experience has shown that degrees and grades are useful summary statistics for filtering. It is not "right, and there are obviously Type I and Type II errors in this process.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  > In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being. I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted." Another part is signalling value not to your employer, but to the employer's clients. If you're in law or consulting, the value of an elite degree is more to show the client that your firm's high billing rates are justified. A third factor is that some firms are like clubs, where a de facto caste system exists and people from lesser schools are discriminated against. It's morally wrong, but it happens in many of the elite firms and startups. It takes only a few seconds to legitimately scan through the non-college achievements in order to get a feel for a candidate's true potential. So it should not a real blocker to anyone who is serious about hiring the best people.
  - p_j_w 3y ago
    >I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted." I've been part of the hiring process at multiple companies over the course of a decade now, both at large companies and small ones, and not once has anything like this ever happened. A degree in the field has only ever been used as a filter at the start of the process, and in the small number of times there was a bad hire, no one ever used the candidates degree as an excuse because there was no need to: no one blamed anyone for the fact that a shitty employee was hired.
- LunaSea 3y ago
  > It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter. An open exam process where anyone can take the test and receive a diploma for each individual class. A bit like how professional certifications work. That way, no matter the way you acquired your skills, you can try and get the same diploma. Of course, you would also need to revise what skills and topics are tested to also provide exams for more practical topics usually ignored in colleges.
john-radio 3y ago
A lot of people have stories where they got no respect in their 20s at all, and then they made change X and into their 30s they started getting a lot more respect. But another huge factor in all this is that 20-year-olds just get pushed around a lot, especially in our workplaces.
mbaytas 3y ago
> I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful. A better question IMO is: Is college more useful than the alternatives? College is a huge investment: tens of thousands of dollars, plus 4 years of full-time work. When I went to college in 2007 (not in US, but I digress…) it made sense to go in for a 4-year degree because there were no alternatives. Coursera, Udemy, etc. did not exist. YouTube was just born. And to start with, we didn’t even have broadband in my house or school, that could stream video. It’s a very different world today. The opportunity cost is too great. Even without being a Thiel fellow, there are many alternatives to what you can do with 4 years of your life that will set you up for success – not only educational opportunities but also starting a business, freelancing, etc.
- mbaytas 3y ago
  In fact I think this is a ripe space for opportunities to build new institutions that provide value. The value of college is not only education, but also community. We are seeing, and will continue to see, many new online and IRL ventures that provide community and learning to young people, which will serve them much better than colleges. Buildspace (https://buildspace.so/ https://buildspace.so/) is a beautiful example.
newsclues 3y ago
I am a big believer that many broken parts of society (college, politics) need a full reboot with modern technology in mind. Smartphones and internet have changed how we can and should be learning and voting. But the current experts in charge will resist losing the power they hold.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Voting absolutely has to be paper based, or at the very least leave a physical audit trail. Voting, as it is, works for millions of people on a regular basis, billions actually. And none of the shenenigans going on have anything to do with medium used, and everything with people in power deciding to make voting as hard as possible. There is nothing intetnet tech can bring tonthe table that would improve voting.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 3y ago
Colleges are both broken and functional on many different ways, with different results for each kind of value you want to take from them. They are certainly up for improvement, but throwing everything away and starting back from first principles almost never work for something that complex. "What first principles should it follow" is an open problem by itself.
Balgair 3y ago
I'll repost an older comment of mine here on the Humanities and their struggles: Eidolon is a now defunct online magazine specifically about the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail' essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such, Eidolon's essay is a goldmine. Two things stuck out to me the most: 1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment." 2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark'. The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead. https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14ed6e0bcd1c https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...

disposition2 3y ago

Out of curiosity, when you went back to school, did you go to school for computer science or a different degree / area of study?

prepend 3y ago
For undergrad I did a business degree specializing in “computer information systems” as I couldn’t find an applicable CS degree. I was a full time architect with 10 years xp and learned really nothing directly useful in work. But the soft skills were kind of nice. Made some relationships too, but they’ve never helped me in work. For masters I went to a very reputable school in my field and studied something new. Learned a lot, but hard to know what’s helped and what didn’t. I think it gave me basic context knowledge in my new field. Made lots of relationships with students, not they helped with work. With faculty led to future work (teaching, volunteer work).

BlandDuck 3y ago

> Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened. It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter. In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being. In reality, HR has limited resources and needs shortcuts to effectively screen applicants. Experience has shown that degrees and grades are useful summary statistics for filtering. It is not "right, and there are obviously Type I and Type II errors in this process.

hackerlight 3y ago
> In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being. I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted." Another part is signalling value not to your employer, but to the employer's clients. If you're in law or consulting, the value of an elite degree is more to show the client that your firm's high billing rates are justified. A third factor is that some firms are like clubs, where a de facto caste system exists and people from lesser schools are discriminated against. It's morally wrong, but it happens in many of the elite firms and startups. It takes only a few seconds to legitimately scan through the non-college achievements in order to get a feel for a candidate's true potential. So it should not a real blocker to anyone who is serious about hiring the best people.
- p_j_w 3y ago
  >I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted." I've been part of the hiring process at multiple companies over the course of a decade now, both at large companies and small ones, and not once has anything like this ever happened. A degree in the field has only ever been used as a filter at the start of the process, and in the small number of times there was a bad hire, no one ever used the candidates degree as an excuse because there was no need to: no one blamed anyone for the fact that a shitty employee was hired.
LunaSea 3y ago
> It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter. An open exam process where anyone can take the test and receive a diploma for each individual class. A bit like how professional certifications work. That way, no matter the way you acquired your skills, you can try and get the same diploma. Of course, you would also need to revise what skills and topics are tested to also provide exams for more practical topics usually ignored in colleges.

john-radio 3y ago

A lot of people have stories where they got no respect in their 20s at all, and then they made change X and into their 30s they started getting a lot more respect. But another huge factor in all this is that 20-year-olds just get pushed around a lot, especially in our workplaces.

mbaytas 3y ago

> I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful. A better question IMO is: Is college more useful than the alternatives? College is a huge investment: tens of thousands of dollars, plus 4 years of full-time work. When I went to college in 2007 (not in US, but I digress…) it made sense to go in for a 4-year degree because there were no alternatives. Coursera, Udemy, etc. did not exist. YouTube was just born. And to start with, we didn’t even have broadband in my house or school, that could stream video. It’s a very different world today. The opportunity cost is too great. Even without being a Thiel fellow, there are many alternatives to what you can do with 4 years of your life that will set you up for success – not only educational opportunities but also starting a business, freelancing, etc.

mbaytas 3y ago
In fact I think this is a ripe space for opportunities to build new institutions that provide value. The value of college is not only education, but also community. We are seeing, and will continue to see, many new online and IRL ventures that provide community and learning to young people, which will serve them much better than colleges. Buildspace (https://buildspace.so/ https://buildspace.so/) is a beautiful example.

newsclues 3y ago

I am a big believer that many broken parts of society (college, politics) need a full reboot with modern technology in mind. Smartphones and internet have changed how we can and should be learning and voting. But the current experts in charge will resist losing the power they hold.

hef19898 3y ago
Voting absolutely has to be paper based, or at the very least leave a physical audit trail. Voting, as it is, works for millions of people on a regular basis, billions actually. And none of the shenenigans going on have anything to do with medium used, and everything with people in power deciding to make voting as hard as possible. There is nothing intetnet tech can bring tonthe table that would improve voting.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

marcosdumay 3y ago

Colleges are both broken and functional on many different ways, with different results for each kind of value you want to take from them. They are certainly up for improvement, but throwing everything away and starting back from first principles almost never work for something that complex. "What first principles should it follow" is an open problem by itself.

Balgair 3y ago

I'll repost an older comment of mine here on the Humanities and their struggles: Eidolon is a now defunct online magazine specifically about the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail' essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such, Eidolon's essay is a goldmine. Two things stuck out to me the most: 1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment." 2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark'. The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead. https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14ed6e0bcd1c https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...