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Eric Schmidt on Critics Who Say College Isn’t Worth It

48 points by ugwigr 13y ago

Aqueous 13y ago
Thankfully we have another, wiser tech giant to push back against the bad advice of Thiel and Altucher, who seem to think that what happened to them - effectively, winning the lottery, even if they are talented - ought to happen to everybody.
- gress 13y ago
  The argument against college is that it too has become a lottery rather than an investment, one with an unacceptably high ticket price. I'd like to see the distinction made between the historical increase in earnings resulting from a college degree, and the projected increase.
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    I don't know of any data indicating that college "has become a lottery." Life is a lottery; no one is guaranteed health, let alone financial stability or success. College is part of life so it can't guarantee success either. But in every study I've seen, people who complete college are more likely to achieve financial stability than those who do not. So, if it is a lottery, it's one that is biased toward the student.
    - gress 13y ago
      Are those studies backward looking, or forward looking, and does 'financial stability' mean decades paying of debt?
- commandar 13y ago
  This is where it falls apart, in my opinion: >Schmidt vehemently disagrees. “The economic return to higher education over a lifetime produces significant compound greater earnings.” It’s true, on average, economists find that college raises wages by about 15-30 percent. Despite the debt, it’s a wise investment for many students. >When asked about the difficulty in paying for college, Schmidt was adamant: “I appreciate it’s expensive and we need to fix that,” he said, but “figure out a way to do it.” College is expensive because we tell kids that it's going to be this huge windfall so people "figure out a way to do it." The problem is that it's a correlation/causation argument that's turned into an out-of-control feedback loop. College graduates traditionally earned far more because fields that needed a degree were higher-earning. College degrees are absolutely useful for some fields, and, in fact, I lean toward the argument against college being weaker for the more technical fields like typically get discussed here. But the real problem is that we've been telling kids that the only way to do anything with your life is by going to get a four year degree, and as a result we have more graduates and employers are starting to require four year degrees for jobs that have traditionally -- and should be -- vocational in nature. As a society, I think it's absolutely insane to expect these sorts of jobs to suddenly begin creating more value, and thus have higher compensation, simply because the person working it has more outside education. My stance is that we need to sort this out now before it gets any worse. We need to destigmatize vocational education. We need to realize that while some form of higher education is almost always a good thing, a four year degree is complete overkill for many.
  - srl 13y ago
    > We need to destigmatize vocational education. This is a little off-topic, but back in high school, there was a vocational education program clearly considered to be somewhat remedial, tailored for those who had no hope of going to college or otherwise having much success. (Poor minorities, in other words.) Students would spend about half their time in this program, and half their time with the rest of the school. I was not in it, but I eventually learned that the brightest students in many of my classes were in this program. Stigmatized as it was, it worked, and quite well. In fact, it was probably better preparation for college than the regular-track courses (which were actually meant for people who might go to college). I don't pay much attention to education policy (one can't spend time on everything), so I'm not too sure what lessons ought to be drawn from this.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    Schmidt really needs to segment out that "average" rise of 15 to 30 percent. 1. A few fields clearly need education, like medicine or law. Break those out separately. 2. Getting admitted and graduating from college is a strong signal of your employability. Even if college adds absolutely nothing to your skillset, it can increase your value. (Think of getting a perfect score on the SAT.) 3. Being able to put off earning for 4 years is partly a signal of your socioeconomic status. 4. It ignores the people who try to attend college and fail. They are left with debt, the opportunity cost of wages for their time in, and no degree to show to employers. This is separate from the fact that as we have pushed more people to get better degrees, employers have simply increased their job requirements, so you need a college degree to be an office manager. A credential race is a zero-sum game for society as a whole.
- dreamdu5t 13y ago
  I didn't graduate high school or college. I make plenty of money and have a great career. I just got lucky, huh? Rolled the dice and had my life created for me. Did school teach you this false dichotomy?
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    The point is, on average you will fare better with a college degree than without. If you pick 18th century Russian literature as your degree, well that's a different story...
    - batoure 13y ago
      People always want to give literature students a hard time. But do you know where they end up by the numbers? One answer, law school... they love to read old incomprehensible stuff and are obsessed with research. I'm in software development I make a good living, my significant other makes way more than me... what did she study in undergrad... >18th century Russian literature
      - learc83 13y ago
        They go to law school because there aren't a lot of other options, not because literature prepared them for law school. Some degrees just aren't worth very much unless you plan on going further than a bachelors. Russian literature is one of those. Also law school isn't the ticket to a well paid job that it used to be, and it's very expensive.
        batoure 13y ago
        I think that is a pretty jaded statement. What if instead of being able to get a CS degree, degrees in engineering were required to be spun around a topic. So that you left college with a degree in "Mid Nineties Adventure Games". On the surface you might examine this course of study to be completely useless. Very few adventure games exist any more. But to spend 4 years trying to truly understand the topic you would have to learn to code to see how that code interacts with visual and artistic objects to understand the history of the business model and examine ideas of story and context and finally to understand why the industry moved passed it. No one would expect that you would go out and build your own game, but in that course of study maybe you discovered that there was a piece you were good at , the code and that in understanding it through the vehicle of something you were interested in you found a passion for a profession. Would you say that people with that degree that went on to work at X big startup were doing it because they had no other options? No you would say "wow she's a brilliant coder.... and a little weird if you get her talking about adventure games" Maybe the realities are that we need to make CS, that is basically vocational training, have a little more liberal arts to it.
- randomdata 13y ago
  Something else to consider: I'm not sure about the data from the USA, but in Canada, the university enrolment rate is 50%, but the graduation rate is closer to 25%. It is clear you can push large segments of the population into college, but that doesn't mean they will be successful at it. Is that still a gain for the individual and society?
knappador 13y ago
If you want to use Google scholar to its fullest, go to college campus.
RexRollman 13y ago
The problem isn't that college isn't worth doing, it's just too fucking expensive. The amount of debt we are asking people to assume is simply too great.
- bane 13y ago
  College isn't all that expensive. Private and out of state college is. There's a prejudice that you have to go to Stanford or Harvard or whatever to do well in life, and places like Google have perpetuated this problem for a long time by not only just hiring people who went to the more expensive options, they've only done job fairs and hiring outreach at these places. It's a vicious cycle. So people who could be spending $40k on their local state university are spending $200k just to get a crack at a place like Google. $40k over 4 years is not that much, and the earning potential of people after that more than makes up for it. And then guess what? Google, in a moment of stark reflection, looks at the data and realizes that the performance of the few folks who went to the cheaper school and still managed to get hired is about the same as the folks who sold a kidney to get through <preferred tier-1 school>. This image, that you need to get into a top-20 school to make it in life perpetuates all the way down into high school and it needs to stop. Kids need to focus on just getting into college, not getting into an Ivy League school, and companies need to start hiring from the local state universities, not just the approved list of top schools the founders went to.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    But if the founders/companies are selecting for people from top schools, regardless of whether or not that is rational in itself then it still makes sense for students to try and go to top schools.
    - bane 13y ago
      I don't disagree about the rationality of students aiming for those schools. But it's a vicious cycle. The complaint that "college is too expensive" is only true if people only go to expensive colleges. But "college" in general isn't really all that expensive. Some colleges are, and the problem is that this has been where top-companies have been traditionally recruiting from. My assertion is that if top companies stop using "expensive schools with gamed USNews rankings" as proxies for "places to find good employees", then students won't feel as much need to go to those overpriced schools in the first place.
wudf 13y ago
On the spectrum of college students, the lower economic end is where the viability of such expensive higher education comes into question. Statistics describing the entire population do not support an argument relating to this subset. Not only that, but the closing strawman of "all you care about" is unrealistic. If only it were as simple as deciding to "Go to college" then I don't think this discussion would be taking place. Eric Schmidt's words are great for those who do have a choice, but to everyone else, he's out of touch.
mbrameld 13y ago
Are there any studies available on the difference in career earnings of grads vs non-grads in the same career? I don't doubt that a random college graduate earns 30% more over their lifetime than a random non-college graduate, but what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without?
- svenkatesh 13y ago
  >what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without? Maybe I'm misinterpreting your question, but the way you phrased it, there's already some survivorship bias -- the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter; this ignores people who don't have a degree but want to get a job in programming.
  - randomdata 13y ago
    Degrees come with their own survivorship bias. Every level of the education system seeks to filter out those who are less capable in certain areas. This makes the "college graduates earn 30% more" meaningless, because most people are not capable of succeeding in college in the first place, and whatever causes that probably also prevents them from succeeding in the workplace, statistically speaking. I think where the parent was going is, if you took two people who are equal in every single way, except for one acquiring a college degree, how would their lifetime earnings differ?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    > the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter Very true. Its all about signaling (hence "or equivalent experience" although I believe that to be bullshit; each year of experience should count as 2-3 years in school). I have no college education, and dropped out of high school in 1999/2000 to pursue my career. I had to sell myself hard to get in the door, but once there, I've never been asked for a degree after my first job (junior admin->senior admin->built/sold webhosting company->managed hosting division for consulting company->data taking for LHC->director of technology->news network startup). I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime where companies value experience more than a piece of paper when the amount of experience is <5 years. The whole education process, at least for the technology field, should be revamped towards apprenticeship.
hooda 13y ago
Eric might think that college is worth it but the guys who are running those colleges (Deans) think otherwise. => UC Berkeley B-School Dean:"Half of the business schools in this country could be out of business in 10 years - or five. Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/online-programs-could-erase-half-of-u-dot-s-dot-business-schools-by-2020 http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/online-progr... Problems with college is not only HIGH college tuition fees but also number of years wasted in the institution. If you are 'self motivated learner' then you can learn on web. This is especially true for software courses. Other courses like electrical and mechanical engineering might -still- need college education as colleges have requisite infrastructure for those fields.
- leoc 13y ago
  Postgraduate courses like (US) law school and business school are much further gone though; undergraduate ones aren't as bad, yet at least. If Eric Schmidt had said that law school was worth it I think his audience might have been incapacitated with laughter.
jokoon 13y ago
The real answer is not so simple. Overall, for society, it's always better to have an education. But if the price goes up, it means you won't get the education you might want, so you'll get something less expensive, but if you go for it, it's hard to say that might suit you, and if it doesn't, you will lose interest and drop out. It's always better to keep on, but if you get an education because of economic pressure, it has its ups and downs. It fulfills the concept of supply and demand, but not your dreams. I don't think education, like healthcare, should be applied the principles of a market. And again, education is a very tricky social problem to solve. You want it, but it's not distributed in the best fashion.
- nilved 13y ago
  Education and college aren't synonymous. People are learning to avoid college because it's just one inefficient method of education: it requires a large investment of time, a monumental investment of cash, and very often doesn't provide satisfactory instruction. You're not asking me, but I would say that contemporary colleges are less about education and more about unloading debt on students.
  - adamors 13y ago
    > Education and college aren't synonymous Especially now, when you can cover a lot of ground on your own. As a programmer at least. And I'm not even talking about MOOCs, but other resources that are available to a lot of people for either free or for a fraction of the price.
  - jokoon 13y ago
    So I guess the root problem is that we need more skills in our society, so we need college to teach those things. That's becoming truer in the last decades.
sunseb 13y ago
More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications. https://www.coursera.org/ https://www.coursera.org/ https://www.edx.org/ https://www.edx.org/ http://moocs.epfl.ch/ http://moocs.epfl.ch/ (here we can find a good Scala course, the teacher is the language creator himself)
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications. Except actual certifications attached to MOOCs generally aren't free.
gkoberger 13y ago
I once spoke at a conference for teens, where I was literally the only pro-college speaker. My original talk wasn't even about college; I made up a talk on the spot after hearing how anti-college everyone else was. Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup. Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college. College isn't for everyone, and it's definitely a broken system. However, it's about more than just about the classes -- spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.
- zavi 13y ago
  > spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world. It depends on the school. Most colleges aren't exactly an intellectual environment where people talk about singularity and high tech over lunch. I'll have much better luck finding a qualified cofounder just living in the Bay Area and going to meetups than at your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford.
  - gkoberger 13y ago
    In that case, it's not that college isn't right for you, it's that you're not at the right college. I live in the Bay Area now and have gone to many meetups, and I have to unequivocally disagree that it's better than college for meeting people.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford I don't know why you think the intellectual tenor would be different at those colleges. My respect for Stanford took a major hit when I saw this: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1907908-stanford-band-forms-snapchat-logo-during-rose-bowl-halftime-show http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1907908-stanford-band-for... There are pockets of intellectualism at any college, but the truth is that American culture is just not very intellectual, and among the business elite there's a pronounced antiintellectualism. You're going to find more philistines than intellectuals at any college in the U.S. and, yes, that includes the top ones. Technology people aren't an exception to this. The old Silicon Valley nerds had at least an interest in history and literature and art. They weren't experts, but they agreed that it was important. The new business-oriented pseudonerds? Narrowly specialized in one technical field ("social graph logistics") and complete ignoramuses about everything else. Does that mean one shouldn't go to Harvard or Stanford? Of course not. It's great for the resume and there are a lot of connections to be made. But if you think that you're going to be discussing high intellectual concepts with most people meet-- or that the people bringing the connections and the people with high intellectual interests will have any overlap whatsoever-- you'll be disappointed.
rohanpai 13y ago
Google, please make up your mind http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top-college-graduates/ http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top...
- johnkpush 13y ago
  Nowhere in this article does it say "Don't go to college".
dalek2point3 13y ago
Its interesting to note that even a ton of the Thiel fellows, while dropped out of college, came from prestigious colleges before they accepted the fellowship. I have a friend here at MIT who accepted the Thiel fellowship, and I dont see how she would've ended up getting access to cutting edge biological research if she wasnt here, and being at MIT was certainly a plus for the fellowship application, a pure signalling effect.
snowwrestler 13y ago
Zuckerberg and Gates did not skip college, they dropped out of college. Big difference. Even Steve Jobs, who I'm not sure ever actually matriculated anywhere, spoke glowingly of a college calligraphy course he audited--and was a huge proponent of education, including college.
- leoc 13y ago
  Jobs did matriculate at Reed. He was allowed to hang about and audit on campus for quite a long time after he formally dropped out, though. The problem, though, is that increasing US college costs increasingly rule out going to college to find yourself and maybe leaving without a degree. An increasing proportion of undergraduates must graduate in a timely fashion, with a degree that employers care for, or else they'll be crushed by undischargeable college debt for the foreseeable future. Obviously this wasn't a risk for Gates or el Zuck, but they're increasingly less typical in this.
shmerl 13y ago
Such pricing on higher education is not a scam, it's a rip off. No matter what Eric Schmidt says, these prices are just crazy. People should not go in debt to gain education.
throwwit 13y ago
Funny... just read this article today: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/career-advice/life-at-work/is-a-degree-becoming-a-drawback/article17496365/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/ca... with the notable quote, "...recounting an exchange with one software CEO who avoids hiring candidates with advanced software engineering degrees since they are likely to expect higher wages." And anecdotally from what I've seen... there seems to be a push lately to crowd the potential pool of job applicants in a couple of fields.

48 points by ugwigr 13y ago

Thankfully we have another, wiser tech giant to push back against the bad advice of Thiel and Altucher, who seem to think that what happened to them - effectively, winning the lottery, even if they are talented - ought to happen to everybody.

gress 13y ago
The argument against college is that it too has become a lottery rather than an investment, one with an unacceptably high ticket price. I'd like to see the distinction made between the historical increase in earnings resulting from a college degree, and the projected increase.
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  I don't know of any data indicating that college "has become a lottery." Life is a lottery; no one is guaranteed health, let alone financial stability or success. College is part of life so it can't guarantee success either. But in every study I've seen, people who complete college are more likely to achieve financial stability than those who do not. So, if it is a lottery, it's one that is biased toward the student.
  - gress 13y ago
    Are those studies backward looking, or forward looking, and does 'financial stability' mean decades paying of debt?
commandar 13y ago
This is where it falls apart, in my opinion: >Schmidt vehemently disagrees. “The economic return to higher education over a lifetime produces significant compound greater earnings.” It’s true, on average, economists find that college raises wages by about 15-30 percent. Despite the debt, it’s a wise investment for many students. >When asked about the difficulty in paying for college, Schmidt was adamant: “I appreciate it’s expensive and we need to fix that,” he said, but “figure out a way to do it.” College is expensive because we tell kids that it's going to be this huge windfall so people "figure out a way to do it." The problem is that it's a correlation/causation argument that's turned into an out-of-control feedback loop. College graduates traditionally earned far more because fields that needed a degree were higher-earning. College degrees are absolutely useful for some fields, and, in fact, I lean toward the argument against college being weaker for the more technical fields like typically get discussed here. But the real problem is that we've been telling kids that the only way to do anything with your life is by going to get a four year degree, and as a result we have more graduates and employers are starting to require four year degrees for jobs that have traditionally -- and should be -- vocational in nature. As a society, I think it's absolutely insane to expect these sorts of jobs to suddenly begin creating more value, and thus have higher compensation, simply because the person working it has more outside education. My stance is that we need to sort this out now before it gets any worse. We need to destigmatize vocational education. We need to realize that while some form of higher education is almost always a good thing, a four year degree is complete overkill for many.
- srl 13y ago
  > We need to destigmatize vocational education. This is a little off-topic, but back in high school, there was a vocational education program clearly considered to be somewhat remedial, tailored for those who had no hope of going to college or otherwise having much success. (Poor minorities, in other words.) Students would spend about half their time in this program, and half their time with the rest of the school. I was not in it, but I eventually learned that the brightest students in many of my classes were in this program. Stigmatized as it was, it worked, and quite well. In fact, it was probably better preparation for college than the regular-track courses (which were actually meant for people who might go to college). I don't pay much attention to education policy (one can't spend time on everything), so I'm not too sure what lessons ought to be drawn from this.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Schmidt really needs to segment out that "average" rise of 15 to 30 percent. 1. A few fields clearly need education, like medicine or law. Break those out separately. 2. Getting admitted and graduating from college is a strong signal of your employability. Even if college adds absolutely nothing to your skillset, it can increase your value. (Think of getting a perfect score on the SAT.) 3. Being able to put off earning for 4 years is partly a signal of your socioeconomic status. 4. It ignores the people who try to attend college and fail. They are left with debt, the opportunity cost of wages for their time in, and no degree to show to employers. This is separate from the fact that as we have pushed more people to get better degrees, employers have simply increased their job requirements, so you need a college degree to be an office manager. A credential race is a zero-sum game for society as a whole.
dreamdu5t 13y ago
I didn't graduate high school or college. I make plenty of money and have a great career. I just got lucky, huh? Rolled the dice and had my life created for me. Did school teach you this false dichotomy?
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  The point is, on average you will fare better with a college degree than without. If you pick 18th century Russian literature as your degree, well that's a different story...
  - batoure 13y ago
    People always want to give literature students a hard time. But do you know where they end up by the numbers? One answer, law school... they love to read old incomprehensible stuff and are obsessed with research. I'm in software development I make a good living, my significant other makes way more than me... what did she study in undergrad... >18th century Russian literature
    - learc83 13y ago
      They go to law school because there aren't a lot of other options, not because literature prepared them for law school. Some degrees just aren't worth very much unless you plan on going further than a bachelors. Russian literature is one of those. Also law school isn't the ticket to a well paid job that it used to be, and it's very expensive.
      - batoure 13y ago
        I think that is a pretty jaded statement. What if instead of being able to get a CS degree, degrees in engineering were required to be spun around a topic. So that you left college with a degree in "Mid Nineties Adventure Games". On the surface you might examine this course of study to be completely useless. Very few adventure games exist any more. But to spend 4 years trying to truly understand the topic you would have to learn to code to see how that code interacts with visual and artistic objects to understand the history of the business model and examine ideas of story and context and finally to understand why the industry moved passed it. No one would expect that you would go out and build your own game, but in that course of study maybe you discovered that there was a piece you were good at , the code and that in understanding it through the vehicle of something you were interested in you found a passion for a profession. Would you say that people with that degree that went on to work at X big startup were doing it because they had no other options? No you would say "wow she's a brilliant coder.... and a little weird if you get her talking about adventure games" Maybe the realities are that we need to make CS, that is basically vocational training, have a little more liberal arts to it.
randomdata 13y ago
Something else to consider: I'm not sure about the data from the USA, but in Canada, the university enrolment rate is 50%, but the graduation rate is closer to 25%. It is clear you can push large segments of the population into college, but that doesn't mean they will be successful at it. Is that still a gain for the individual and society?

knappador 13y ago

If you want to use Google scholar to its fullest, go to college campus.

RexRollman 13y ago

The problem isn't that college isn't worth doing, it's just too fucking expensive. The amount of debt we are asking people to assume is simply too great.

bane 13y ago
College isn't all that expensive. Private and out of state college is. There's a prejudice that you have to go to Stanford or Harvard or whatever to do well in life, and places like Google have perpetuated this problem for a long time by not only just hiring people who went to the more expensive options, they've only done job fairs and hiring outreach at these places. It's a vicious cycle. So people who could be spending $40k on their local state university are spending $200k just to get a crack at a place like Google. $40k over 4 years is not that much, and the earning potential of people after that more than makes up for it. And then guess what? Google, in a moment of stark reflection, looks at the data and realizes that the performance of the few folks who went to the cheaper school and still managed to get hired is about the same as the folks who sold a kidney to get through <preferred tier-1 school>. This image, that you need to get into a top-20 school to make it in life perpetuates all the way down into high school and it needs to stop. Kids need to focus on just getting into college, not getting into an Ivy League school, and companies need to start hiring from the local state universities, not just the approved list of top schools the founders went to.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  But if the founders/companies are selecting for people from top schools, regardless of whether or not that is rational in itself then it still makes sense for students to try and go to top schools.
  - bane 13y ago
    I don't disagree about the rationality of students aiming for those schools. But it's a vicious cycle. The complaint that "college is too expensive" is only true if people only go to expensive colleges. But "college" in general isn't really all that expensive. Some colleges are, and the problem is that this has been where top-companies have been traditionally recruiting from. My assertion is that if top companies stop using "expensive schools with gamed USNews rankings" as proxies for "places to find good employees", then students won't feel as much need to go to those overpriced schools in the first place.

wudf 13y ago

On the spectrum of college students, the lower economic end is where the viability of such expensive higher education comes into question. Statistics describing the entire population do not support an argument relating to this subset. Not only that, but the closing strawman of "all you care about" is unrealistic. If only it were as simple as deciding to "Go to college" then I don't think this discussion would be taking place. Eric Schmidt's words are great for those who do have a choice, but to everyone else, he's out of touch.

mbrameld 13y ago

Are there any studies available on the difference in career earnings of grads vs non-grads in the same career? I don't doubt that a random college graduate earns 30% more over their lifetime than a random non-college graduate, but what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without?

svenkatesh 13y ago
>what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without? Maybe I'm misinterpreting your question, but the way you phrased it, there's already some survivorship bias -- the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter; this ignores people who don't have a degree but want to get a job in programming.
- randomdata 13y ago
  Degrees come with their own survivorship bias. Every level of the education system seeks to filter out those who are less capable in certain areas. This makes the "college graduates earn 30% more" meaningless, because most people are not capable of succeeding in college in the first place, and whatever causes that probably also prevents them from succeeding in the workplace, statistically speaking. I think where the parent was going is, if you took two people who are equal in every single way, except for one acquiring a college degree, how would their lifetime earnings differ?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  > the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter Very true. Its all about signaling (hence "or equivalent experience" although I believe that to be bullshit; each year of experience should count as 2-3 years in school). I have no college education, and dropped out of high school in 1999/2000 to pursue my career. I had to sell myself hard to get in the door, but once there, I've never been asked for a degree after my first job (junior admin->senior admin->built/sold webhosting company->managed hosting division for consulting company->data taking for LHC->director of technology->news network startup). I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime where companies value experience more than a piece of paper when the amount of experience is <5 years. The whole education process, at least for the technology field, should be revamped towards apprenticeship.

hooda 13y ago

Eric might think that college is worth it but the guys who are running those colleges (Deans) think otherwise. => UC Berkeley B-School Dean:"Half of the business schools in this country could be out of business in 10 years - or five. Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/online-programs-could-erase-half-of-u-dot-s-dot-business-schools-by-2020 http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/online-progr... Problems with college is not only HIGH college tuition fees but also number of years wasted in the institution. If you are 'self motivated learner' then you can learn on web. This is especially true for software courses. Other courses like electrical and mechanical engineering might -still- need college education as colleges have requisite infrastructure for those fields.

leoc 13y ago
Postgraduate courses like (US) law school and business school are much further gone though; undergraduate ones aren't as bad, yet at least. If Eric Schmidt had said that law school was worth it I think his audience might have been incapacitated with laughter.

jokoon 13y ago

The real answer is not so simple. Overall, for society, it's always better to have an education. But if the price goes up, it means you won't get the education you might want, so you'll get something less expensive, but if you go for it, it's hard to say that might suit you, and if it doesn't, you will lose interest and drop out. It's always better to keep on, but if you get an education because of economic pressure, it has its ups and downs. It fulfills the concept of supply and demand, but not your dreams. I don't think education, like healthcare, should be applied the principles of a market. And again, education is a very tricky social problem to solve. You want it, but it's not distributed in the best fashion.

nilved 13y ago
Education and college aren't synonymous. People are learning to avoid college because it's just one inefficient method of education: it requires a large investment of time, a monumental investment of cash, and very often doesn't provide satisfactory instruction. You're not asking me, but I would say that contemporary colleges are less about education and more about unloading debt on students.
- adamors 13y ago
  > Education and college aren't synonymous Especially now, when you can cover a lot of ground on your own. As a programmer at least. And I'm not even talking about MOOCs, but other resources that are available to a lot of people for either free or for a fraction of the price.
- jokoon 13y ago
  So I guess the root problem is that we need more skills in our society, so we need college to teach those things. That's becoming truer in the last decades.

sunseb 13y ago

More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications. https://www.coursera.org/ https://www.coursera.org/ https://www.edx.org/ https://www.edx.org/ http://moocs.epfl.ch/ http://moocs.epfl.ch/ (here we can find a good Scala course, the teacher is the language creator himself)

dragonwriter 13y ago
> More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications. Except actual certifications attached to MOOCs generally aren't free.

gkoberger 13y ago

I once spoke at a conference for teens, where I was literally the only pro-college speaker. My original talk wasn't even about college; I made up a talk on the spot after hearing how anti-college everyone else was. Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup. Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college. College isn't for everyone, and it's definitely a broken system. However, it's about more than just about the classes -- spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.

zavi 13y ago
> spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world. It depends on the school. Most colleges aren't exactly an intellectual environment where people talk about singularity and high tech over lunch. I'll have much better luck finding a qualified cofounder just living in the Bay Area and going to meetups than at your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford.
- gkoberger 13y ago
  In that case, it's not that college isn't right for you, it's that you're not at the right college. I live in the Bay Area now and have gone to many meetups, and I have to unequivocally disagree that it's better than college for meeting people.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford I don't know why you think the intellectual tenor would be different at those colleges. My respect for Stanford took a major hit when I saw this: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1907908-stanford-band-forms-snapchat-logo-during-rose-bowl-halftime-show http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1907908-stanford-band-for... There are pockets of intellectualism at any college, but the truth is that American culture is just not very intellectual, and among the business elite there's a pronounced antiintellectualism. You're going to find more philistines than intellectuals at any college in the U.S. and, yes, that includes the top ones. Technology people aren't an exception to this. The old Silicon Valley nerds had at least an interest in history and literature and art. They weren't experts, but they agreed that it was important. The new business-oriented pseudonerds? Narrowly specialized in one technical field ("social graph logistics") and complete ignoramuses about everything else. Does that mean one shouldn't go to Harvard or Stanford? Of course not. It's great for the resume and there are a lot of connections to be made. But if you think that you're going to be discussing high intellectual concepts with most people meet-- or that the people bringing the connections and the people with high intellectual interests will have any overlap whatsoever-- you'll be disappointed.

rohanpai 13y ago

Google, please make up your mind http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top-college-graduates/ http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top...

johnkpush 13y ago
Nowhere in this article does it say "Don't go to college".

dalek2point3 13y ago

Its interesting to note that even a ton of the Thiel fellows, while dropped out of college, came from prestigious colleges before they accepted the fellowship. I have a friend here at MIT who accepted the Thiel fellowship, and I dont see how she would've ended up getting access to cutting edge biological research if she wasnt here, and being at MIT was certainly a plus for the fellowship application, a pure signalling effect.

snowwrestler 13y ago

Zuckerberg and Gates did not skip college, they dropped out of college. Big difference. Even Steve Jobs, who I'm not sure ever actually matriculated anywhere, spoke glowingly of a college calligraphy course he audited--and was a huge proponent of education, including college.

leoc 13y ago
Jobs did matriculate at Reed. He was allowed to hang about and audit on campus for quite a long time after he formally dropped out, though. The problem, though, is that increasing US college costs increasingly rule out going to college to find yourself and maybe leaving without a degree. An increasing proportion of undergraduates must graduate in a timely fashion, with a degree that employers care for, or else they'll be crushed by undischargeable college debt for the foreseeable future. Obviously this wasn't a risk for Gates or el Zuck, but they're increasingly less typical in this.

shmerl 13y ago

Such pricing on higher education is not a scam, it's a rip off. No matter what Eric Schmidt says, these prices are just crazy. People should not go in debt to gain education.

throwwit 13y ago

Funny... just read this article today: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/career-advice/life-at-work/is-a-degree-becoming-a-drawback/article17496365/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/ca... with the notable quote, "...recounting an exchange with one software CEO who avoids hiring candidates with advanced software engineering degrees since they are likely to expect higher wages." And anecdotally from what I've seen... there seems to be a push lately to crowd the potential pool of job applicants in a couple of fields.