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I sort of want to just say Poppycock to this. How many billionaire dropouts do you know? I don't know any myself. OK, fine if you happen to be connected in SV a

I sort of want to just say Poppycock to this. How many billionaire dropouts do you know? I don't know any myself. OK, fine if you happen to be connected in SV and know MZ or whatever then you're an outlier. These billionaire dropouts like Zuckerberg and Gates, ... where did they drop out from? Although I don't think it makes a lot of sense to equivocate those two, it will suffice for now. I don't think times have changed that much. Learning purely from these things is also going to be likely only for autodidacts. There happen to be many of autodidacts in our little world (or at least autodidactic enough to put together a website in Rails or something) but this is not true of that many people. In fact, how far do you get with this online stuff? Not far, if you look at most places like Khan and so forth, you're talking about sophomore, maybe junior year stuff for the most part. OK, sure there's the occassional machine learning course that gets popular online that a lot of people that don't have any sort of mathematical background take and can say they are a part of the "cool kids" group, but let's be honest. Even then, we're still talking about this small segment of autodidactic or semi-autodidactic types. A lot gets said of "big bad college" and how the "fresh new hip information revolution trumps traditional learning" but I don't see it. Sure, you could put up a few tutorials about learning to make Hello World in Javascript but I'm just not seeing this education revolution here.

randomdata 14y ago
I feel you've perhaps read too far into what I wrote. The fact is that the vast majority of the population couldn't care less about education. The only reason they go to college at all is because they've been told that they won't be able to find a job without it. With people like Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Gates frequently in the news as of late, people are starting to question those long-held beliefs. They see that people are successful without the education, despite what they've learned to not be true. The stigma of not going to college is starting to lift as a result. Knowing those famed people personally is completely irrelevant here. If spending a couple of months reading up on Rails will get you a decent job, that's exactly what people will do. They really do not care about deep CS topics. They care about providing a decent home and comfortable living conditions. That is it. I respect the academics, but you are as rare as the autodidacts.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I didn't really read too much. Again where did Gates and Zuckerberg drop out from? We're not talking about East Savanah Technical College here. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg are the worst examples you could pick to show that people are shedding long held beliefs about education. They are outliers in several different senses.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    Who cares where they dropped out from? All people hear is "you must have a degree to be successful" and then they hear "oh, these people didn't have degrees and are still successful." You give too much credit to believe the vast majority of people actually consider the backgrounds of these so-called outliers. These are the same people who previously bought into the "you must have a degree" line in the first place.

randomdata 14y ago

I feel you've perhaps read too far into what I wrote. The fact is that the vast majority of the population couldn't care less about education. The only reason they go to college at all is because they've been told that they won't be able to find a job without it. With people like Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Gates frequently in the news as of late, people are starting to question those long-held beliefs. They see that people are successful without the education, despite what they've learned to not be true. The stigma of not going to college is starting to lift as a result. Knowing those famed people personally is completely irrelevant here. If spending a couple of months reading up on Rails will get you a decent job, that's exactly what people will do. They really do not care about deep CS topics. They care about providing a decent home and comfortable living conditions. That is it. I respect the academics, but you are as rare as the autodidacts.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
I didn't really read too much. Again where did Gates and Zuckerberg drop out from? We're not talking about East Savanah Technical College here. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg are the worst examples you could pick to show that people are shedding long held beliefs about education. They are outliers in several different senses.
- randomdata 14y ago
  Who cares where they dropped out from? All people hear is "you must have a degree to be successful" and then they hear "oh, these people didn't have degrees and are still successful." You give too much credit to believe the vast majority of people actually consider the backgrounds of these so-called outliers. These are the same people who previously bought into the "you must have a degree" line in the first place.