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For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

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Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#71

Post by art_wells »

un wrote: post #63
art_wells wrote: post #14

My college degree means nothing on paper professionally, but meant everything to my abilities to meet business and computing challenges. I didn't study computing at all. I don't expect that my experience is much different from others who have Liberal Arts degrees and found joy in technology. I've worked with many people who have degrees and certification in computing and many who don't. As a result of my experience,…

Sounds pretty elitist, and your company might suffer for it.

I'm sure there might be problems with choosing the wrong criteria, but I can't see how "elitism" in itself can be a cause of problems in the hiring process.

Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#73

Post by astine »

menloparkbum wrote: post #52
stcredzero wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really need that in Programming!

No, we don't. I don't want some guild or certification authority telling me I can't program for a living until I've done 2 years of "journeyman" programming and passed my licensing exams.

I don't know, I can see the education model being useful. I'd rather not have to submit to a guild or union (unlike some friends of mine,) but I can see the value of serving time in a real programming shop with experience and competent (hopefully) individuals as part of one's education. Of course, I think this is called an 'internship' these days.

Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#75

Post by astine »

stcredzero wrote: post #65
menloparkbum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we don't. I don't want some guild or certification authority telling me I can't program for a living until I've done 2 years of "journeyman" programming and passed my licensing exams.

We don't? I've been in a lot of different programming shops as a consultant, mostly in large organizations, and let me tell you -- I don't think a lot of the people out there who are programming really should be. I've had to be the hero far too many times for shops where someone didn't realize doing something was O(n^2) and doing it another way was O(n). The industry doesn't need to the government to penalize non-gui…

He man, I know some neo-guildists if you want me to put you in touch. :P

Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#76

Post by Hexstream »

whacked_new wrote: post #16
ojbyrne wrote: post #4

The column seems to be entirely from the point of view of an employer looking to screen potential employees. Like it or not, college is about more than job training. For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it, the first part of life away from parents, but still with some security, and about intellectual exploration (answering the question - what exactly do I want to be when I grow up?). Perhaps none of t…

I find the whole "college is..." or "college is not..." to be a problematic mindset in itself. For example, why not develop social skills in high school? Many of the student leaders I know from college started as high school student leaders. Now we're talking about "HS is..." or "HS is not..." or "HS sucks." Why wait until HS? Now we're talking about MS... then lower school. Then it's just your entire life as an indi…

I'd definitely love more granular dependencies between courses. Why do you need "Language LV2" before you can tackle "Math LV3"?

Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#77

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

stcredzero wrote: post #45
mattmaroon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's written from that perspective because college degrees are used as a proxy for job training, and most people pursue them so they can get a better job, which makes the system broken. The other benefits of the college experience don't require college anyway, and are cost-prohibitive to a lot of people. I don't think he was arguing that nobody should do 4 years of college. Just that employers need a better vetting s…

From the article: "...bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses." So either the graduate is knowledgeable and the system did its job, or the graduate knows how to be a…

Yeah, but not all organizations just want "a good member of a big bureauratic organization." Some of them actually care about getting (or growing and keeping) high-performing individuals. It's just that people who work at companies like that don't do a lot of complaining online, so they're pretty invisible.

Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#78

Post by trominos »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #39
krschultz wrote: post #11

The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational. Why waste money on classes that don't apply for your certificate? Why spend time playing with classes that could lead you to a different certificate when you are already 20% done with this one? Or better yet, why not get a couple princeton review books to pass the test? I passed 35 credits of AP exams in high school, all with 5 out of 5s,…

The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational. The problem with this view is that some people just want the vocational part, and bundling it with something they don't want, but for which they will be charged, just makes them worse off. Being able to buy A or B is better than only being able to buy A and B. It would be pretty annoying if some forward-thinking politician realized that a…

Yeah, but if college's function of "preparing you for work" is taken over by vocational schools, it's not clear that there will still be a market for our current conception of college.

And I'm sure that a lot of you will say that that's an indication that college is mostly a waste, but I don't think that that follows, necessarily; although I haven't been to college yet I feel vaguely that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I could think of to do otherwise, and certainly that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I would in all likelihood do otherwise.

Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#79

Post by gills »

This is a self-solving problem one way or another.

The employers that use low-information predictors of productivity will go out of business and whatever system the remaining businesses are using will drive the educational system.

Either that, or the inevitably-higher credit standards in the near future will help to give the college system a population haircut, which will weed out quite a few of those who don't really mean it (and unfortunately, some of those who do...).

Re: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

#80

Post by jrsims »

I dropped out of the JC I was attending and just started finding better ways of doing things (read: "developed technical solutions") at each company I worked for, regardless of what the position was. Although I would like to make more money, I trained myself, followed my interests, and now - relatively speaking - I have an above average salary, both for my current position and the region I live in.

College, in my case, was totally unnecessary. Yet I'm a DBA/Developer for a respected Fortune 500 company.

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