College is extremely expensive and probably not right for everyone, but it's a different experience. Should 18-year-olds be learning what it takes to program in

College is extremely expensive and probably not right for everyone, but it's a different experience. Should 18-year-olds be learning what it takes to program in the real world? Absolutely. I think that computer programming education shouldn't start in college, but much earlier. That doesn't mean that being active on Github is a substitute for the liberal arts experience. All that said, liberal arts education isn't about getting a job. It's about learning, by studying history and philosophy and literature, the critical thinking skills that you'll need if you want to lead and to make complex decisions that effect other people. (It's also a lifelong process; you need to keep learning and maintain an interest in that stuff or it doesn't count. If you never crack a book after graduating from college, you probably shouldn't have gone in the first place.) And yes, I firmly believe that you're not qualified to be in any higher leadership position if you don't have some education (possibly pursued on one's own-- it doesn't need to be a 4-year degree-- but autodidacts are rare) in the liberal arts. College is also about learning how to learn. Well, actually, people shouldn't need schooling to learn that, so it's more accurate to say that it's a time to dedicate oneself fully to improving one's ability to learn. The actual learning has to be a lifelong process. If your curiosity stops at college, you missed the point. The problem with the college degree is that when you give people a leadership education and then there aren't appropriate jobs, they get really pissed and clamor about how they were fucked over. And they're kinda right, too. That's what we have now: a society where people spend half a house on a leadership education and then struggle even to get regular entry-level jobs.