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HN has a subtle anti-college bias, so I want to put my point out there: my college experience was not defined by my classes or by my professors, but by the sere

HN has a subtle anti-college bias, so I want to put my point out there: my college experience was not defined by my classes or by my professors, but by the serendipitous connections that I made by being mixed in with a bunch of smart people who like to tinker. In addition, being a part of an institution makes it much easier to find out about and get access to lines of research and thinking I normally wouldn't have thought about. I entered as a kid who wanted to design chips, and I left an amateur computational linguistics researcher (emphasis on the amateur). This was something I 'fell into,' not something I sought out. Also, if you discover something and want to find out more, emailing the person who worked on it is a great start. If this person happens to be part of your institution, you have a 'free pass' to just email them. Compare to if you were just someone off the street: you have to work harder to get a response. It's a little silly, but a very real effect -- once you're "in" people will be more open to you about their work. This doesn't mean you can't do any of these things if you choose not to go to college, but if you're making that decision then you should know that the experience is more than just 'expensive and ineffective vocational training.'

krmboya 14y ago
Jamie Zawinski (jwz), one of my heroes, is a well accomplished software engineer/hacker, as we would all agree. One fact is that he didn't go to college. I am in my final year of college myself, and I believe there's no one right way of succeeding in your career. EDIT: some re-wording
jfb 14y ago
I don't get the feeling that the bias is particularly subtle. I wouldn't trade my time at Chicago for all the vocational training in the world; but, different strokes &c.
- Retric 14y ago
  The pro collage stance is something like: Spending 4 years at ~19-22 living on your own without a job near a lot of other intelligent 19-22 year olds is a lot of fun. The skills gained are minimal, but the credentials are worth something so why not? But, that's no reason to actually higher someone because they have a collage degree ed:In the computer field. So, yea I am glad I went to collage, but I don't care about degrees when looking for people and I feel little need to subsidize other people going to collage.
  - UK-AL 14y ago
    " skills gained are minimal " - Citation Needed. People keep saying that, but you would not want a self taught engineer.
    - jfb 14y ago
      It's ipso facto false. The argument as I see it arises in how much weight skills that are exclusive to or overwhelming present in a college education should be granted vis a vis skills that can be gained through on-the-job training. That's a perfectly reasonable point of disagreeance.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Compare the productivity of a recent graduate with someone with someone without a degree but with 4 years of job experience and experience is a clear win. Now, in the long term they tend to balance out, but that's hardly a 'win' for the collage degree. PS: Granted, not a scientific study but my sample size is over 30 and the difference is fairly dramatic.
      - UK-AL 14y ago
        And then move person with 4 years of work experience slightly out their comfort zone. Say working on designing locks, to working on designing engines. The mechanical engineer would have a better time. It's one of the reasons vocational/on-the-job educated people end up with lower wages; generally educated people can go where the money is.
        barrkel 14y ago
        People with good contacts, are good at networking, good at marketing, and interested in money go where the money is. A history of creating business value, and a bunch of people who know about it, are a lot better than a general education. This is slightly complicated by the fact that people going to well-known colleges get a head start on the network. A decent education on its own has more dubious value. Most companies want experience. I know that when I evaluate someone, relevant experience is way more important than if or where they went to college.
Zimahl 14y ago
Agreed. The anti-college bias here is astounding. College is an incredible time to learn everything. What are you even interested in? I went to college thinking chemistry or chemical engineering. Found I just didn't like either and moved to computer science. At 18 it's hard to even have a clue. It's hard to feel sorry for the kids coming out of school with loan debt and a sociology degree. That's a career, but you need to know your field is full of people and it's going to be tough to find a job. Kids today need to adjust their expectations. But the article is rubbish. 4 year apprenticeship for an associates and your journeyman card? Fine, anyone can find a machinist school (won't cost $44k per year) and be a machinist but that doesn't make you a materials scientist who came up with the alloy. You aren't going to be doing that without college.
- eshvk 14y ago
  The problem is that young people make stupid mistakes. While you selected a career which will be fruitful and possibly pay off your loan debt, a load of young people make career decisions based on flowery statements like "change the world" or "make a difference" and end up being baristas in Starbucks. There is a certain value inherent in expanding your intellect by going through college, I am not so sure it is worth doing that at the cost of crippling financial debt if you are not absolutely sure where you are going with it. So maybe the solution is to spend a few years mucking out at different things figuring out what you like before blowing through a ton of cash going to college.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Can we have this self-discovery process without the giant 6-figure bill? As someone who went to college myself, I agree that it was a tremendous time for personal growth - it was also expensive as all hell, and I'm lucky I chose a field where paying it off is a piece of cake. In any case, I think there's a false dichotomy here: there's the apprenticeship/trades camp, and the pro-college camp, but really the truth lies somewhere in between. The economy is moving towards knowledge-based jobs, but for the most part people studying for these jobs have completely abdicated their responsibility to seek apprenticeship and mentorship (in the non-regulated sense of those words). A programmer with a CS degree and no internships, no open source, no working under experienced talent, is (nearly) worthless. An English major aspiring to write for magazines who has never published anything nor worked with a professional editor is (probably even more) worthless. The problem here is that so many in the pro-college crowd see a degree as an end-run around having to bust your balls and apprentice with skilled professionals when apprenticeships (or internships if you want to call them that), regardless of college/no-college, is absolutely necessary.
nchuhoai 14y ago
I don't think you need to be anti-college to be able to criticize the cost explosion of college. I agree, the most valuable part of college are the ones outside the class room (the only reason why i am still in college), but ask yourself this: Would you still go if it costs 1000 for your family? Would you still go if it costs 100000 for your family? Would you still go if it costs 10000000 for your family? Different people have different abilities to pay for college, so its really not that unreasonable to look for and discuss alternatives with the rising cost of college 4x over inflation. The same way you experience in anti-college bias, I sense a feeling of entitlement from pro-college: It's like you have to go to college to be worth anything, and if you dont go, you are less of a well-rounded, worthy human being. Unfortunately, higher education in the US becomes more and more a matter of money and not ability.
- wickedchicken 14y ago
  > I sense a feeling of entitlement from pro-college: It's like you have to go to college to be worth anything, and if you dont go, you are less of a well-rounded, worthy human being. I try to work against that, and perhaps I come up short. What could you recommend?
  - nchuhoai 14y ago
    Having thoughtful, and considerate responses like these definitely helps. In my view there are two arguments within this discussion: Does college provide useful skills for later and is college worth these skills? I think sometimes both camps tends to talk parallel to each other. Yes there are a lot of anti-college people who believe college doesnt even provide anything useful, but I think its safe to say that thats not true. That being said, concentrating on the cost-aspect is I think a lot more crucial and fruitful. And thats where my feeling of entitlement from the pro-college side comes in. We don't need your explanations of how college is an awesome place. It just makes people who can't afford college very angry, since the college degree is already so immensely dogmatized as a requirement for 'good' jobs. It's a bit like saying having an iPhone is really cool, beneficial and everything. However, if there is a huge price gap to other phones, I don't it would be unreasonable to recommend cheaper, maybe less capable phones or ask for cheaper phones. The problem with college in the US really is that it is used as a credential and almost absolute requirement for upward social mobility.
jdc 14y ago
> Also, if you discover something and want to find out more, emailing the person who worked on it is a great start. +1 to this. I've emailed people from other institutions for the source code behind their research and gotten it. Never hurts to ask.
snambi 14y ago
Yes, I agree, college is where I learned the most and at the highest pace, but not in classrooms or from professors. Mostly from classmates and other students, juniors and seniors. There is no place like college.
Androsynth 14y ago
Im anti-college, I believe that engineers and computer scientists should go to college, but programmers shouldn't. The majority of programmers aren't computer scientists. I am anti-college for two reasons: 1-I didn't have the outside-the-class experience you did. In fact I think this is a situation where the top students naturally congregate together, in college and then on HN, and don't really have an understanding of what the non-top students go through. Most of them aren't making connections with other tinkerers. 2-I got a EE degree, but in my late 20's I become a professional programmer. I was instantly better than almost every other CS major I was working with. The majority of programming is closer to craftmanship than to Engineering. I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned. (by the way, if your counter-argument is 'well I did VERY_HARD_THING_X within my companies app, and I would never have learned how to do this without my CS degree', I would say you may be a computer scientist, but also the vast majority of programmers arent doing this.) The fact is, you go to college to earn a degree that says 'you are properly trained in this field to get a job'. Any profession that can be learned outside of an expensive college environment, should be. Any argument that involves 'well you also get these nice benefits on the side' is irrelevant. If you are a smart go-getter, you would have met those tinkerers no matter what path you took. You would have done the same as an 18 year old apprentice programmer at Google.
- jshowa 14y ago
  >> I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned. Does this mean that there will be more code I have to fix as a result of my CS degree? I've still got people at my job that write loops with no early exit when they are searching. I learned that as a freshman. They write code that iterates through the entirety of arrays, constantly, which is a complete waste most of the time. Hell, I've got people that justify writing memory intensive code due to the computers abundant memory because they don't even realize that program space is limited by the kernel. I can thank my OS class for that. The point is, do you want to waste time looking up basic stuff on Google all your life, or do you want to get hands on, spend time studying things from a reliable source, and not have to look up things online and write crappy code just to get by?
randomdata 14y ago
I consider myself pro-college, but I do feel you are wasting your time if your only concern is about post-graduation employment opportunities. For that, your time would be much better spend focusing on employment. I find it disturbing how many have to resort to showing a correlation between income and education just to sell the institution. It seems like the value in education should be enough to make it worthwhile, even if you end up being a barista when it is all said and done. I feel the subtle anti-college bias you speak to is just that. It is not the college itself that is the problem, just the attitude that you have to go to college to get a high paying job, which is demonstrated over and over again to not be true.
jes5199 14y ago
> the serendipitous connections that I made by being mixed in with a bunch of smart people who like to tinker. You're lucky - some colleges have that atmosphere, and many do not. At 18 I certainly wasn't capable of picking that sort of environment on purpose, and no one around me knew how to advise me. So I tried a few different colleges, and didn't find anything that I cared about, and just started working instead. Fortunately there are other places to meet those communities of people. Sometimes you'll go to an event and half of them went to college together - at MIT or Reed or Grinnell or Bard or UC Berkeley or Mudd or some other random place (most of which I had never heard of when I was looking at colleges). But the other half are just random people like me, who jumped into this culture at age 23 or 30 or whatever. And the handfull of years that they knew each-other way back when matter less and less over time.

krmboya 14y ago

Jamie Zawinski (jwz), one of my heroes, is a well accomplished software engineer/hacker, as we would all agree. One fact is that he didn't go to college. I am in my final year of college myself, and I believe there's no one right way of succeeding in your career. EDIT: some re-wording

jfb 14y ago

I don't get the feeling that the bias is particularly subtle. I wouldn't trade my time at Chicago for all the vocational training in the world; but, different strokes &c.

Retric 14y ago
The pro collage stance is something like: Spending 4 years at ~19-22 living on your own without a job near a lot of other intelligent 19-22 year olds is a lot of fun. The skills gained are minimal, but the credentials are worth something so why not? But, that's no reason to actually higher someone because they have a collage degree ed:In the computer field. So, yea I am glad I went to collage, but I don't care about degrees when looking for people and I feel little need to subsidize other people going to collage.
- UK-AL 14y ago
  " skills gained are minimal " - Citation Needed. People keep saying that, but you would not want a self taught engineer.
  - jfb 14y ago
    It's ipso facto false. The argument as I see it arises in how much weight skills that are exclusive to or overwhelming present in a college education should be granted vis a vis skills that can be gained through on-the-job training. That's a perfectly reasonable point of disagreeance.
  - Retric 14y ago
    Compare the productivity of a recent graduate with someone with someone without a degree but with 4 years of job experience and experience is a clear win. Now, in the long term they tend to balance out, but that's hardly a 'win' for the collage degree. PS: Granted, not a scientific study but my sample size is over 30 and the difference is fairly dramatic.
    - UK-AL 14y ago
      And then move person with 4 years of work experience slightly out their comfort zone. Say working on designing locks, to working on designing engines. The mechanical engineer would have a better time. It's one of the reasons vocational/on-the-job educated people end up with lower wages; generally educated people can go where the money is.
      - barrkel 14y ago
        People with good contacts, are good at networking, good at marketing, and interested in money go where the money is. A history of creating business value, and a bunch of people who know about it, are a lot better than a general education. This is slightly complicated by the fact that people going to well-known colleges get a head start on the network. A decent education on its own has more dubious value. Most companies want experience. I know that when I evaluate someone, relevant experience is way more important than if or where they went to college.

Zimahl 14y ago

Agreed. The anti-college bias here is astounding. College is an incredible time to learn everything. What are you even interested in? I went to college thinking chemistry or chemical engineering. Found I just didn't like either and moved to computer science. At 18 it's hard to even have a clue. It's hard to feel sorry for the kids coming out of school with loan debt and a sociology degree. That's a career, but you need to know your field is full of people and it's going to be tough to find a job. Kids today need to adjust their expectations. But the article is rubbish. 4 year apprenticeship for an associates and your journeyman card? Fine, anyone can find a machinist school (won't cost $44k per year) and be a machinist but that doesn't make you a materials scientist who came up with the alloy. You aren't going to be doing that without college.

eshvk 14y ago
The problem is that young people make stupid mistakes. While you selected a career which will be fruitful and possibly pay off your loan debt, a load of young people make career decisions based on flowery statements like "change the world" or "make a difference" and end up being baristas in Starbucks. There is a certain value inherent in expanding your intellect by going through college, I am not so sure it is worth doing that at the cost of crippling financial debt if you are not absolutely sure where you are going with it. So maybe the solution is to spend a few years mucking out at different things figuring out what you like before blowing through a ton of cash going to college.
potatolicious 14y ago
Can we have this self-discovery process without the giant 6-figure bill? As someone who went to college myself, I agree that it was a tremendous time for personal growth - it was also expensive as all hell, and I'm lucky I chose a field where paying it off is a piece of cake. In any case, I think there's a false dichotomy here: there's the apprenticeship/trades camp, and the pro-college camp, but really the truth lies somewhere in between. The economy is moving towards knowledge-based jobs, but for the most part people studying for these jobs have completely abdicated their responsibility to seek apprenticeship and mentorship (in the non-regulated sense of those words). A programmer with a CS degree and no internships, no open source, no working under experienced talent, is (nearly) worthless. An English major aspiring to write for magazines who has never published anything nor worked with a professional editor is (probably even more) worthless. The problem here is that so many in the pro-college crowd see a degree as an end-run around having to bust your balls and apprentice with skilled professionals when apprenticeships (or internships if you want to call them that), regardless of college/no-college, is absolutely necessary.

nchuhoai 14y ago

I don't think you need to be anti-college to be able to criticize the cost explosion of college. I agree, the most valuable part of college are the ones outside the class room (the only reason why i am still in college), but ask yourself this: Would you still go if it costs 1000 for your family? Would you still go if it costs 100000 for your family? Would you still go if it costs 10000000 for your family? Different people have different abilities to pay for college, so its really not that unreasonable to look for and discuss alternatives with the rising cost of college 4x over inflation. The same way you experience in anti-college bias, I sense a feeling of entitlement from pro-college: It's like you have to go to college to be worth anything, and if you dont go, you are less of a well-rounded, worthy human being. Unfortunately, higher education in the US becomes more and more a matter of money and not ability.

wickedchicken 14y ago
> I sense a feeling of entitlement from pro-college: It's like you have to go to college to be worth anything, and if you dont go, you are less of a well-rounded, worthy human being. I try to work against that, and perhaps I come up short. What could you recommend?
- nchuhoai 14y ago
  Having thoughtful, and considerate responses like these definitely helps. In my view there are two arguments within this discussion: Does college provide useful skills for later and is college worth these skills? I think sometimes both camps tends to talk parallel to each other. Yes there are a lot of anti-college people who believe college doesnt even provide anything useful, but I think its safe to say that thats not true. That being said, concentrating on the cost-aspect is I think a lot more crucial and fruitful. And thats where my feeling of entitlement from the pro-college side comes in. We don't need your explanations of how college is an awesome place. It just makes people who can't afford college very angry, since the college degree is already so immensely dogmatized as a requirement for 'good' jobs. It's a bit like saying having an iPhone is really cool, beneficial and everything. However, if there is a huge price gap to other phones, I don't it would be unreasonable to recommend cheaper, maybe less capable phones or ask for cheaper phones. The problem with college in the US really is that it is used as a credential and almost absolute requirement for upward social mobility.

jdc 14y ago

> Also, if you discover something and want to find out more, emailing the person who worked on it is a great start. +1 to this. I've emailed people from other institutions for the source code behind their research and gotten it. Never hurts to ask.

snambi 14y ago

Yes, I agree, college is where I learned the most and at the highest pace, but not in classrooms or from professors. Mostly from classmates and other students, juniors and seniors. There is no place like college.

Androsynth 14y ago

Im anti-college, I believe that engineers and computer scientists should go to college, but programmers shouldn't. The majority of programmers aren't computer scientists. I am anti-college for two reasons: 1-I didn't have the outside-the-class experience you did. In fact I think this is a situation where the top students naturally congregate together, in college and then on HN, and don't really have an understanding of what the non-top students go through. Most of them aren't making connections with other tinkerers. 2-I got a EE degree, but in my late 20's I become a professional programmer. I was instantly better than almost every other CS major I was working with. The majority of programming is closer to craftmanship than to Engineering. I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned. (by the way, if your counter-argument is 'well I did VERY_HARD_THING_X within my companies app, and I would never have learned how to do this without my CS degree', I would say you may be a computer scientist, but also the vast majority of programmers arent doing this.) The fact is, you go to college to earn a degree that says 'you are properly trained in this field to get a job'. Any profession that can be learned outside of an expensive college environment, should be. Any argument that involves 'well you also get these nice benefits on the side' is irrelevant. If you are a smart go-getter, you would have met those tinkerers no matter what path you took. You would have done the same as an 18 year old apprentice programmer at Google.

jshowa 14y ago
>> I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned. Does this mean that there will be more code I have to fix as a result of my CS degree? I've still got people at my job that write loops with no early exit when they are searching. I learned that as a freshman. They write code that iterates through the entirety of arrays, constantly, which is a complete waste most of the time. Hell, I've got people that justify writing memory intensive code due to the computers abundant memory because they don't even realize that program space is limited by the kernel. I can thank my OS class for that. The point is, do you want to waste time looking up basic stuff on Google all your life, or do you want to get hands on, spend time studying things from a reliable source, and not have to look up things online and write crappy code just to get by?

randomdata 14y ago

I consider myself pro-college, but I do feel you are wasting your time if your only concern is about post-graduation employment opportunities. For that, your time would be much better spend focusing on employment. I find it disturbing how many have to resort to showing a correlation between income and education just to sell the institution. It seems like the value in education should be enough to make it worthwhile, even if you end up being a barista when it is all said and done. I feel the subtle anti-college bias you speak to is just that. It is not the college itself that is the problem, just the attitude that you have to go to college to get a high paying job, which is demonstrated over and over again to not be true.

jes5199 14y ago

> the serendipitous connections that I made by being mixed in with a bunch of smart people who like to tinker. You're lucky - some colleges have that atmosphere, and many do not. At 18 I certainly wasn't capable of picking that sort of environment on purpose, and no one around me knew how to advise me. So I tried a few different colleges, and didn't find anything that I cared about, and just started working instead. Fortunately there are other places to meet those communities of people. Sometimes you'll go to an event and half of them went to college together - at MIT or Reed or Grinnell or Bard or UC Berkeley or Mudd or some other random place (most of which I had never heard of when I was looking at colleges). But the other half are just random people like me, who jumped into this culture at age 23 or 30 or whatever. And the handfull of years that they knew each-other way back when matter less and less over time.