6 ms·

Poll: What's your level of educational attainment

35 points by daniel-cussen 17y ago

chasingsparks asked for a poll of educational attainment. Sounds interesting. Here goes.

tjr 17y ago
Never stop learning.
- scottw 17y ago
  Amen. This should be titled "What's your level of formal educational attainment." I know more than a few people who never graduated from college and have far more education than I do.
  - daniel-cussen 17y ago
    I agree, but it's too late to change the title.
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  At least when programming is involved college was a complete (and predicted) waste of time. Only a couple of years ago, some 5 years after college, I found there are programming languages worth learning, books worth reading and paradigms worth exploring. Also made me feel like a complete waste of space, but that's a different thing (and arguably a good one).
  - benmathes 17y ago
    It sounds like you may have gone to the wrong college. Over my three years of programming for both enterprise-y SaS companies and agile little tech startups in the valley the most consistently helpful knowledge I have came from my courses in college. If you're doing it right, you shouldn't necessarily study the implementation details of Current Technology, but the theoretic underpinnings of Past, Current, and Future programming. As an example: most people who code in javascript probably don't cite familiarity with lambdas and closures as a relevant and highly-useful skill, but I certainly would. After I submit this comment I'm going to return to my web app that uses closures to bridge the gap between the DOM and the javascript variable environment. Outcome: awesome. Could you do it with a Javascript for Dummies book? Probably not. I have this guy to thank: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/ http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/
    - kapauldo 17y ago
      yeah, this is right. you don't need any college if you just want to be a programmer, but if you want to cool stuff that provably optimal, you need a degree for that. the theoretical foundation for anything (and especially CS) is wondeful and interesting and immeasurably valuable, but completely unnecessary for a vocational coder. if you want to be more than a vocational coder, college, and even masters and phd are absolutely worth doing.
      - enjo 17y ago
        I'm going to quibble: You don't need a degree for that. I do agree that you need a solid understanding of computing fundamentals. However, you hardly "need" a degree for that. Far to many college drop-outs have built hugely scalable and highly optimized systems for that.
        benmathes 17y ago
        You're just arguing semantics. You're both saying "you need the knowledge you'll gain from earning a good degree".
        kapauldo 17y ago
        i'll agree with this. i'm just trying to dissuade young people from dropping out of college to "pursue their dreams." CS is not obvious or trivial stuff, even though learning to scrap together a website in Rails might be. and the two are not the same.
    - radu_floricica 17y ago
      Lambdas and closures in college? Yup, I definitely went to the wrong one. Well, more like I went to the best my small east-european country (Romania) had to offer, which proved not good enough by far.
      - eru 17y ago
        Perhaps you should have studied math instead? The education system in Rumania should have a longer experience teaching math. (But then I only know the German way to teach math at university --- which is very formal, and prepares better for programming than most computer science courses I have heard of.)
apgwoz 17y ago
Some graduate work, now it's all informal education
gr366 17y ago
Who feels like they got the most out of their particular level of educational attainment? With years of hindsight now, I believe I could have made a lot more of my educational career — delving in to things that really interested me rather than simply completing homework assignments and beating the curve on tests. The amount of available time you have as a full-time student is massively underappreciated.
- nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
  There are also plenty of very useful things that I learned in my degree that I never would have been interested enough to learn on my own. Subjects like project management, requirements gathering, and other sorts of non-coding topics are extremely handy to have experience and education with, but not "sexy" enough for (most) people to really learn about them in their free time.
- yardie 17y ago
  Here here. I underestimated how much time is worth. Spent my free time hacking things to get it just right because I didn't have the money. Now I have more disposable cash and not enough time. This is why iTunes Store makes money even though cheaper alternatives are around. I could spend the time and download it from some website or I could spend 2 minutes and get it from Apple.
tialys 17y ago
I did a survey on this a few months ago. The results are posted at http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0JYLXE2M2ZJU05jZU0xWHFBS0E6MA http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0J....
genieyclo 17y ago
I wonder how people will interpret this. For example, if there are 3 upvotes for "Some High School", does this mean that some 33 year olds completed some high school and dropped out? Or does it mean that there are some high schoolers who have yet to finish but aren't dropping out?
- abefortas 17y ago
  In my case it means the latter.
stakent 17y ago
Another question: What part of your knowledge comes from formal education? In my case its at most 20%. Edit: typo
- genieyclo 17y ago
  I could say that there was very little I learned from formal education until the 10th grade. I happen to learn some new concepts in Chemistry Honors and Algebra Honors then, but until that point little else. The vast majority of what I know and have learned is from self-taught knowledge from reading from books and the internet.
  - stakent 17y ago
    I suspect there is the pattern: very limited knowledge obtained during formal education, most as self education. Help those self-educating? I know, the path is a little beaten by, for example, certification programs. Is there business opportunity? Maybe.
  - ekiru 17y ago
    My so-far limited formal education(I'm a senior in high school) itself has taught me some things about biology and chemistry and medicine that I might not have learned purely of my own motivation, but in the case of chemistry, I learned most of that by reading the textbook and then doing other things in class and ignoring the teacher. In the case of my biology class, I wasn't motivated enough to read the textbook(or to take it to class or home, for that matter), so I took notes and did other things in class and learned it. In the case of anatomy and physiology(the source of aforementioned medical knowledge), we don't have textbooks, so as in biology, I take the notes and otherwise don't pay attention in class but still learn it. Calculus is something I did not from my formal education; however, I was taking the course when I learned it. I had wanted to learn it for a while(my first attempt was at around 8 years old, but I saw the strange notation and didn't realize the text explained it), but I had yet to actually do so. In part, this was because I didn't have any books on the subject and the wikipedia article didn't seem like a very good introduction. When I received my textbook for the course, I learned differential calculus. After a while, I got bored and learned integral calculus. I got bored again and learned how to do iterated integrals and partial differentiation. I'm glad I got bored so often during that year because the course itself only got us through definite integrals. In American secondary education, I think that the main educational utility is from the provision of textbooks to the students. That has been, at least, the main utility of my school to me(other than exposure to such things as the creative writing and theatre clubs). My school is, however, a particularly bad public school in a very poor small rural town. It's possible that other formal education may be much better(I certainly hope that the college I attend next fall will utterly change my mind about formal education).
Eliezer 17y ago
Huh. I'm mildly surprised that I'm the first click on "Other". (That's "no high school", for those of you who've never looked me up in Wikipedia.) -- Eliezer Yudkowsky PS: I used to be shyer about this, but I'm now sufficiently convinced that Something Is Rotten In Education that I'm willing to go around presenting myself as a case in point. Certainly going through life Outside the System is extremely difficult and inconvenient, but the high yields if you can do so are an important fact about the overall health of the system. I'm not advocating that everyone should drop out before high school, but they might be able to take the data into account in other decisions, like how much effort to invest in high grades in college versus extracollegiate self-education.
- tpyo 17y ago
  How did you escape that terrible, terrible prison?
  - Eliezer 17y ago
    ...I honestly don't know. I just didn't go. No truant officers ever showed up that I heard anything about.
  - bkovitz 17y ago
    I also dropped out of high school. I just stopped showing up, and spent my days writing code. Way better education than classes. About truant officers: One day, walking along the sidewalk at 10:00 a.m. or so, I saw a truant officer walking along the sidewalk, too, in the opposite direction. He spotted a different teenager, also walking along, and arrested him. I think the truant officers ignored me for two reasons: because I didn't look like a truant, and because I lived near a college campus. I didn't have a computer of my own, so I went to the college campus and wrote code there every day. I probably looked like a "precocious" college student (I was 15, and probably appeared 13). BTW, I never saw any difficulty later in life due to dropping out of high school. I've never seen anyone look at anyone's grades on a résumé or job application, never had anyone give a damn about my lack of credentials. And now I'm a Ph.D. student.
pinko 17y ago
I have a B.A. from a good school (and some graduate school work at a great school) but never made it past the ninth grade in high school, nor did I ever get any kind of high-school equivalency. So you can't assume these are always cumulative.
- daniel-cussen 17y ago
  I agree, it's even generally preferred if it's not cumulative, but yeah, click other or click the highest you got to. I guess i should have added "some grad school".
mixmax 17y ago
I got kicked out of one college because I never turned up for class, and when I did it was with a hangover. I thought it was boring as hell. Got kicked out of another for pretty much the same reasons. Went to the exams anyway (you can actually do that in Denmark, but the curriculum is harder) and got pretty good grades. Went on to study economics, but dropped out because I thought it was bollocks on a piedestal and most of the professors didn't really know what they were talking about. Besides I was busy being a rave promoter, and found it to be more fun than school. Interestingly I've always been the go-to guy for obscure information, business strategy and solving hard problems. Maybe that says something about the education system?
- eru 17y ago
  At least you do not have mandatory schooling in Denmark. In Germany the state does not force you to get an education --- it forces you to go to school.
- buugs 17y ago
  Maybe you were just in the wrong degree as I've seen different studies are catered to different kinds of students (though the going to class thing is a motivation issue.)
dabent 17y ago
Grad school dropout.
Mz 17y ago
I voted "other". Associated of Arts in Humanities. Certificate in GIS (equivalent to graduate level work). Certificate in something my employer required and sent me to. A few classes short of a bachelor's -- and have been for several years. No bachelor's plus graduate equivalent work in something most folks haven't heard of means I'm simultaneously overqualified and underqualified for just about any job I might apply for. Time to start my own thing, I guess.
tyrmored 17y ago
I'm a psychology graduate, but I work in web development now.

35 points by daniel-cussen 17y ago

chasingsparks asked for a poll of educational attainment. Sounds interesting. Here goes.

tjr 17y ago

Never stop learning.

scottw 17y ago
Amen. This should be titled "What's your level of formal educational attainment." I know more than a few people who never graduated from college and have far more education than I do.
- daniel-cussen 17y ago
  I agree, but it's too late to change the title.
radu_floricica 17y ago
At least when programming is involved college was a complete (and predicted) waste of time. Only a couple of years ago, some 5 years after college, I found there are programming languages worth learning, books worth reading and paradigms worth exploring. Also made me feel like a complete waste of space, but that's a different thing (and arguably a good one).
- benmathes 17y ago
  It sounds like you may have gone to the wrong college. Over my three years of programming for both enterprise-y SaS companies and agile little tech startups in the valley the most consistently helpful knowledge I have came from my courses in college. If you're doing it right, you shouldn't necessarily study the implementation details of Current Technology, but the theoretic underpinnings of Past, Current, and Future programming. As an example: most people who code in javascript probably don't cite familiarity with lambdas and closures as a relevant and highly-useful skill, but I certainly would. After I submit this comment I'm going to return to my web app that uses closures to bridge the gap between the DOM and the javascript variable environment. Outcome: awesome. Could you do it with a Javascript for Dummies book? Probably not. I have this guy to thank: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/ http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/
  - kapauldo 17y ago
    yeah, this is right. you don't need any college if you just want to be a programmer, but if you want to cool stuff that provably optimal, you need a degree for that. the theoretical foundation for anything (and especially CS) is wondeful and interesting and immeasurably valuable, but completely unnecessary for a vocational coder. if you want to be more than a vocational coder, college, and even masters and phd are absolutely worth doing.
    - enjo 17y ago
      I'm going to quibble: You don't need a degree for that. I do agree that you need a solid understanding of computing fundamentals. However, you hardly "need" a degree for that. Far to many college drop-outs have built hugely scalable and highly optimized systems for that.
      - benmathes 17y ago
        You're just arguing semantics. You're both saying "you need the knowledge you'll gain from earning a good degree".
        kapauldo 17y ago
        i'll agree with this. i'm just trying to dissuade young people from dropping out of college to "pursue their dreams." CS is not obvious or trivial stuff, even though learning to scrap together a website in Rails might be. and the two are not the same.
  - radu_floricica 17y ago
    Lambdas and closures in college? Yup, I definitely went to the wrong one. Well, more like I went to the best my small east-european country (Romania) had to offer, which proved not good enough by far.
    - eru 17y ago
      Perhaps you should have studied math instead? The education system in Rumania should have a longer experience teaching math. (But then I only know the German way to teach math at university --- which is very formal, and prepares better for programming than most computer science courses I have heard of.)

apgwoz 17y ago

Some graduate work, now it's all informal education

gr366 17y ago

Who feels like they got the most out of their particular level of educational attainment? With years of hindsight now, I believe I could have made a lot more of my educational career — delving in to things that really interested me rather than simply completing homework assignments and beating the curve on tests. The amount of available time you have as a full-time student is massively underappreciated.

nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
There are also plenty of very useful things that I learned in my degree that I never would have been interested enough to learn on my own. Subjects like project management, requirements gathering, and other sorts of non-coding topics are extremely handy to have experience and education with, but not "sexy" enough for (most) people to really learn about them in their free time.
yardie 17y ago
Here here. I underestimated how much time is worth. Spent my free time hacking things to get it just right because I didn't have the money. Now I have more disposable cash and not enough time. This is why iTunes Store makes money even though cheaper alternatives are around. I could spend the time and download it from some website or I could spend 2 minutes and get it from Apple.

tialys 17y ago

I did a survey on this a few months ago. The results are posted at http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0JYLXE2M2ZJU05jZU0xWHFBS0E6MA http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0J....

genieyclo 17y ago

I wonder how people will interpret this. For example, if there are 3 upvotes for "Some High School", does this mean that some 33 year olds completed some high school and dropped out? Or does it mean that there are some high schoolers who have yet to finish but aren't dropping out?

abefortas 17y ago
In my case it means the latter.

stakent 17y ago

Another question: What part of your knowledge comes from formal education? In my case its at most 20%. Edit: typo

genieyclo 17y ago
I could say that there was very little I learned from formal education until the 10th grade. I happen to learn some new concepts in Chemistry Honors and Algebra Honors then, but until that point little else. The vast majority of what I know and have learned is from self-taught knowledge from reading from books and the internet.
- stakent 17y ago
  I suspect there is the pattern: very limited knowledge obtained during formal education, most as self education. Help those self-educating? I know, the path is a little beaten by, for example, certification programs. Is there business opportunity? Maybe.
- ekiru 17y ago
  My so-far limited formal education(I'm a senior in high school) itself has taught me some things about biology and chemistry and medicine that I might not have learned purely of my own motivation, but in the case of chemistry, I learned most of that by reading the textbook and then doing other things in class and ignoring the teacher. In the case of my biology class, I wasn't motivated enough to read the textbook(or to take it to class or home, for that matter), so I took notes and did other things in class and learned it. In the case of anatomy and physiology(the source of aforementioned medical knowledge), we don't have textbooks, so as in biology, I take the notes and otherwise don't pay attention in class but still learn it. Calculus is something I did not from my formal education; however, I was taking the course when I learned it. I had wanted to learn it for a while(my first attempt was at around 8 years old, but I saw the strange notation and didn't realize the text explained it), but I had yet to actually do so. In part, this was because I didn't have any books on the subject and the wikipedia article didn't seem like a very good introduction. When I received my textbook for the course, I learned differential calculus. After a while, I got bored and learned integral calculus. I got bored again and learned how to do iterated integrals and partial differentiation. I'm glad I got bored so often during that year because the course itself only got us through definite integrals. In American secondary education, I think that the main educational utility is from the provision of textbooks to the students. That has been, at least, the main utility of my school to me(other than exposure to such things as the creative writing and theatre clubs). My school is, however, a particularly bad public school in a very poor small rural town. It's possible that other formal education may be much better(I certainly hope that the college I attend next fall will utterly change my mind about formal education).

Eliezer 17y ago

Huh. I'm mildly surprised that I'm the first click on "Other". (That's "no high school", for those of you who've never looked me up in Wikipedia.) -- Eliezer Yudkowsky PS: I used to be shyer about this, but I'm now sufficiently convinced that Something Is Rotten In Education that I'm willing to go around presenting myself as a case in point. Certainly going through life Outside the System is extremely difficult and inconvenient, but the high yields if you can do so are an important fact about the overall health of the system. I'm not advocating that everyone should drop out before high school, but they might be able to take the data into account in other decisions, like how much effort to invest in high grades in college versus extracollegiate self-education.

tpyo 17y ago
How did you escape that terrible, terrible prison?
- Eliezer 17y ago
  ...I honestly don't know. I just didn't go. No truant officers ever showed up that I heard anything about.
- bkovitz 17y ago
  I also dropped out of high school. I just stopped showing up, and spent my days writing code. Way better education than classes. About truant officers: One day, walking along the sidewalk at 10:00 a.m. or so, I saw a truant officer walking along the sidewalk, too, in the opposite direction. He spotted a different teenager, also walking along, and arrested him. I think the truant officers ignored me for two reasons: because I didn't look like a truant, and because I lived near a college campus. I didn't have a computer of my own, so I went to the college campus and wrote code there every day. I probably looked like a "precocious" college student (I was 15, and probably appeared 13). BTW, I never saw any difficulty later in life due to dropping out of high school. I've never seen anyone look at anyone's grades on a résumé or job application, never had anyone give a damn about my lack of credentials. And now I'm a Ph.D. student.

pinko 17y ago

I have a B.A. from a good school (and some graduate school work at a great school) but never made it past the ninth grade in high school, nor did I ever get any kind of high-school equivalency. So you can't assume these are always cumulative.

daniel-cussen 17y ago
I agree, it's even generally preferred if it's not cumulative, but yeah, click other or click the highest you got to. I guess i should have added "some grad school".

mixmax 17y ago

I got kicked out of one college because I never turned up for class, and when I did it was with a hangover. I thought it was boring as hell. Got kicked out of another for pretty much the same reasons. Went to the exams anyway (you can actually do that in Denmark, but the curriculum is harder) and got pretty good grades. Went on to study economics, but dropped out because I thought it was bollocks on a piedestal and most of the professors didn't really know what they were talking about. Besides I was busy being a rave promoter, and found it to be more fun than school. Interestingly I've always been the go-to guy for obscure information, business strategy and solving hard problems. Maybe that says something about the education system?

eru 17y ago
At least you do not have mandatory schooling in Denmark. In Germany the state does not force you to get an education --- it forces you to go to school.
buugs 17y ago
Maybe you were just in the wrong degree as I've seen different studies are catered to different kinds of students (though the going to class thing is a motivation issue.)

dabent 17y ago

Grad school dropout.

Mz 17y ago

I voted "other". Associated of Arts in Humanities. Certificate in GIS (equivalent to graduate level work). Certificate in something my employer required and sent me to. A few classes short of a bachelor's -- and have been for several years. No bachelor's plus graduate equivalent work in something most folks haven't heard of means I'm simultaneously overqualified and underqualified for just about any job I might apply for. Time to start my own thing, I guess.

tyrmored 17y ago

I'm a psychology graduate, but I work in web development now.