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Don't Glorify Dropping Out

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Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#91

Post by runT1ME »

araneae wrote: post #31
enjo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: First off, I don't have a college degree. I have something like 102 hours, so I'm a year'ish short. That said, I'm always a bit wary of hiring folks who don't have (at least) a liberal arts education of some kind. I don't really care about the computer science, engineering, physics part of the degree. I care about the part of college that prepares you to learn. I care about the breadth of experience tha…

I'd be wary of hiring a college drop-out simply because college can be a filter for stick-to-it-ness. Only a very few college drop-outs do so because they can do better elsewhere; the majority do it because they've failed. And they don't believe that can get back on their feet. I came close to dropping out, but I'm really glad I didn't- because managing to come back showed me that effort really matters and that I hav…

I don't understand, are you implying that graduating college is an immense challenge that proves you have a tremendous amount of gumption?

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#92

Post by T-R »

I doubt that many HN users are really offended by the idea that their degree could be worthless - if it really is, they probably came by that conclusion on their own.

The resume/interview process is broken, too, but I think most people would consider it poor judgement to explicitly invest in those who didn't get through it.

If he really felt like the degree is just a poor indicator of performance, there would be more discussion about what metric serves as a good alternative, or focus on improving the current metric. Instead, with the age limit, he asserts that degrees are a negative indicator, which makes it sound more like he's purposefully making a poor investment to give a voice to those who have contempt for those who finished college.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#93

Post by [deleted] »

krschultz wrote: post #38
araneae wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be wary of hiring a college drop-out simply because college can be a filter for stick-to-it-ness. Only a very few college drop-outs do so because they can do better elsewhere; the majority do it because they've failed. And they don't believe that can get back on their feet. I came close to dropping out, but I'm really glad I didn't- because managing to come back showed me that effort really matters and that I hav…

I think the questino of why you dropped out is a huge one. If you dropped out becuase you wanted to start the next big thing and fail, why didn't you go back? You can go back for the next 7 years and pick up where you left off. So if you are a college drop out, I am far more inclined to think it was because you couldn't hack it than becuase you tried to go big.

[deleted]

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#94

Post by dhume »

astrofinch wrote: post #88
krschultz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perception that "IT'S ALL AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET" is a strictly CS thing. Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free. Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could h…

>Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free. Here are 5 freely available introductory calculus books. http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/03/04/028253.shtml

I don't think anyone is claiming that there aren't freely available resources for learning the basics of other fields, so this isn't much of a counterexample.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#95

Post by Eliezer »

krschultz wrote: post #52
TomOfTTB wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is there's nothing you get from college that you couldn't get for free somewhere else (Internet for info and Industry gatherings for social aspects). College puts it together in a nice, easy to digest package but they vastly over charge for it. The college model is still based around a philosophy from the 1800s when they were the sole providers of information.

The perception that "IT'S ALL AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET" is a strictly CS thing. Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free. Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could h…

Can the self-taught doctor apply Bayes's Theorem correctly, unlike doctors with degrees? Is the self-taught doctor a fan of evidence-based medicine? I'll take them.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#96

Post by pjscott »

runT1ME wrote: post #91
araneae wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be wary of hiring a college drop-out simply because college can be a filter for stick-to-it-ness. Only a very few college drop-outs do so because they can do better elsewhere; the majority do it because they've failed. And they don't believe that can get back on their feet. I came close to dropping out, but I'm really glad I didn't- because managing to come back showed me that effort really matters and that I hav…

I don't understand, are you implying that graduating college is an immense challenge that proves you have a tremendous amount of gumption?

It's not a terrifically high threshold of intelligence or determination, but it is a threshold. A lot of people drop out of college, for various reasons, and so a college degree does act as a filter.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#97

Post by Eliezer »

gxti wrote: post #30
lhnn wrote: post #3

This man offering the scholarship to 'stop-outs' won't instantly make the university system collapse. If I had a great idea and an investor was $100k confident in the monetization of it, I would probably drop out, too. The author's whole premise is that dropping out is universally bad and should be discouraged, and that staying in school is universally good. Neither are true. The article also misses the point: Where…

> The author's whole premise is that dropping out is universally bad and should be discouraged, and that staying in school is universally good. No, the entire premise is in the title: Don't encourage kids to drop out. If they want to do it, they'll do it, and good on them for it. The last paragraph even argues against "extreme points of view" which would suggest that interpreting the article as "they say drop out, do…

No, the premise is, don't glorify dropouts. Sort of a giveaway that it might be about prestige.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#98

Post by pjscott »

mithaler wrote: post #70
Eliezer wrote: post #12

Reminder: People who think of themselves as getting prestige from their college education may view something that challenges the prestige of college as an attack on their hard-won status. Reminder 2: College is broken. It needs challenging.

I really resent the unexplained blanket assertion that "college is broken". If it's hard-hitting enough for you to post as a rebuttal, it's hard-hitting enough for you to explain your reasoning for. I had a useful, fulfilling, transformative college experience that challenged my preconceptions and taught me how to reason and appreciate complexity; I will readily admit to the financial privilege I enjoyed going in, bu…

Would you prefer the term "blatantly sub-optimal" in place of "broken"? Let's list off a few ways:

* Big lecture classes, where a professor delivers canned lectures to enormous crowds of people as though we still lived before the invention of online video and the printing press. As far as I can tell, this is strictly inferior to having a really good teacher record lectures, then put them online. Preferably with an option to play them at 1.4--2x speed. This would also free up time and resources to focus on the parts of the educational experience where college can be better than online lecture videos plus a textbook.

* Often, a whole class of people has to proceed through a set list of topics in lock-step. Some people will find this too slow, and others too fast, for any given topic. What if you want some time to really think through a particular topic? There's no time; you've got to go on to the next thing. And then at the end of the semester, there's a flurry of activity as people finish up final projects and study for exams, and then BAM! It's over!

* The workload tends to be heavily skewed to the end of the semester, so people seldom have enough time to devote to finishing projects properly. This has caused no end of frustration.

* People are crazy-focused on grades, often at the expense of their education. Grades are a clumsy proxy for learning. It's like trying to measure someone's happiness by how much they smile: there's a correlation, sure, but telling someone to smile more is not the best way to make them happier.

I could list more, but that should be enough for starters. Would you dispute the claim that such a system is at least a little broken? Or, if you prefer, blatantly sub-optimal?

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#99

Post by pjscott »

YooLi wrote: post #39

People (here at HN) seem to be relating not needing a college degree to not needing a computer science degree. There is a huge difference though with degrees for pre-med (biology, bio-chem, etc.), electrical engineering, civil engineering, nuclear engineering, etc. You definitely need those degrees if that's the field you are pursuing.

I have an electrical engineering degree, and looking back on it, there's really not much there that you couldn't learn just fine from the Internet -- if the material were readily available, and there were a community of people learning EE online. In order for that to happen, though, EE education would need to get its act together, and change quite a bit.

It's frustrating to see how much better education could be, if only more fields would start using the internet properly.

(Fun fact: I don't have a CS degree, but I'm taking graduate-level CS classes and doing fine. I know that CS it something you can learn well from the internet. I know what it feels like to learn the equivalent of an undergraduate degree online. And EE could be that way, too.)

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#100

Post by pjscott »

alexwestholm wrote: post #13

The article is written by a Ph.d. That probably means he's got a vested interest in people staying in school...

I doubt he's motivated by a financial interest, if that's what you're suggesting. What he certainly has a stake in is maintaining the social status that college degrees give you. He put years into getting a PhD, and if he's teaching undergrads, that means he devotes a lot of time to helping other people get college degrees. To someone in his position, "glorifying dropouts" devalues his accomplishments and his work, at least in the eyes of others.
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