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College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

americandreaming.substack.com

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Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#101

Post by throwaway0a5e »

sleepdreamy wrote: post #58

I went to a no-name community college. I have zero debt, I make a livable wage. I work in IT. It can be done, you don't need to go the traditional route anymore unless you can get into a prestigious school. Prestigious schools are worth the connections/friends you will make. Always take it if you are offered to go to Harvard, Princeton, MIT etc; If you get into your regular state college etc then just do 2 years comm…

>Prestigious schools are worth the connections/friends you will make. Always take it if you are offered to go to Harvard, Princeton, MIT etc;

Are they?

One of my good friends went to Harvard. He was of a rural blue collar background (he got his admissions file and it had some real gems in it). The only lasting connections he made there were the handful of other people of blue collar backgrounds he crossed paths with in his degree and he has stated he doesn't really think the network was worth the suffering of living in the Boston area for 4yr. It's not like he met a bunch of people who were going to go on to have rocket ship careers in high finance. He met a bunch of people who were going to parlay that Harvard piece of paper into a stable white collar existence.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#102

Post by throwaguey »

bingohbangoh wrote: post #33

Chiming in as a recent American college grad... One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes. Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But g…

> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.

Agreed here.

> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.

Don't think it's quite so simple to draw the line here. Or, at least, my anecdata doesn't support this. As someone who teaches undergraduate students in STEM at a public ivy, who mostly has friends in comparable positions in the humanities (poetry, creative writing, that kinda thing), when we chat about the goings-on in our respective classes we all come to the same conclusion regardless of academic background: students are just incurious in general. Not all, but most. 80%-90% maybe. They spend a lot of effort optimizing exactly to the requirements of every assignment, treating the work as transactional – I check the boxes, you award the points. This forces teachers to adapt their teaching style to a different set of expectations.

Teaching any material past purely practical knowledge for the exam is usually met with blank stares. While this could certainly say more about my rhetorical abilities as lecturer than it does about "kids these days", it's pretty clear to see that college in the US has become nothing more than a glorified credentialing institution. I wonder if this doesn't have something to do with the way public schools are run, mostly teaching to the test and thus preparing students how to retain only the information necessary for success by that metric.

If our cultural expectation of college is that it provides job training and nothing else, then students' attitudes (consciously or not) are going to reflect that.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#103

Post by platz »

ylhert wrote: post #68
platz wrote: post #35

But one of the special-sauce weapons of the West/US is all these people attempting to make a go of it at creative arts which benefits our economy in the long run compared to super-rigid societies that don't encourage experimentation. Throw enough darts at the board, and a bunch will turn out winners for the benefit of all. A bunch will turn out losers though (anecdote provided by OP). It's probably a losing wager for…

I agree for the most part, but I don’t think many of these creative endeavors are helped by college (and the costs/debt it brings). In fact, there is a counter argument that perhaps there would be more successful creatives if we did not push everyone to go to college and take on lots of debt; they would have more time, energy, and money that they could more directly apply towards the pursuit of those creative dreams

by what mechanism can they directly apply towards the pursuit

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#104

Post by WkndTriathlete »

yarky wrote: post #64
koheripbal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it teaches you to read, write and think." Most people learn that by grade 10. College should be for highly specialized skill learning.

> Most people learn that by grade 10. We wish! Most of the students I've known outside of stem will make sure they prove you wrong ;)

Basic reading, writing, and thinking are definitely high school skills. College should be teaching _critical thinking_. (I learned how to critically think shortly after starting my Honors Physics I class after mostly skating through high school.)

Sadly, it seems that 80% of college grads somehow never learn critical thinking. In my experience, non-STEM classes are not very good at teaching critical thinking, but perhaps that was just an artifact of the university I attended.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#105

Post by adam_arthur »

jonahrd wrote: post #23

There's something extremely depressing about how popular this attitude of "college is a bad ROI, do something else with your time" is. For sure, in the US currently there aren't many alternatives, so this might be practical advice for the current situation. But that isn't how this argument is framed most of the time. Instead, it's often more akin to "poor suckers going to college, haha I beat the system!" as if skipp…

You can do an 8 week coding bootcamp and make 6 figures afterwards, or you can spend 100k and 4 years to do the same.

Seems obvious to me that the current college system is hugely antiquated and misaligned with student interests. The main thing perpetuating it is cultural attitudes, which does a huge disservice to the youth IMO

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#106

Post by toomuchtodo »

coldpie wrote: post #91
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nuke student loan debt Do people who paid theirs off, get their money back?

So did I. No, we don't, but it will still benefit you. When your peers are less beholden to their jobs because of their debt shackles, they can ask more of their employers, which will also raise your working conditions. Sometimes life isn't 100% fair, and that sucks and I'm sorry. But looking at it objectively, it's still an improvement for you. (And, "I suffered, so others must suffer, too" isn't a great way to set…

Thank you for being a knowledgeable, decent human participating in a democracy. More of this is needed all around.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#107

Post by throwaway6734 »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #16

I'll offer one anecdote of counter-college hate. I went to a local state school, graduated in three years with winter and summer classes, commuted for the second and third, worked the whole time, and came out with a very small amount of debt (maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember). I made friends in college, I was able to get into a great job via an internship that I got from the school job fair, and got…

Somewhat similar experience:

* Went to a local state school on a scholarship plus 50k loans. Paid off the loans over a few years. Was never really a terrible burden even when I was making * Worked over the summers

* Got to study abroad for 6 months, made a very strong group of friends, and met my wife

* Got to pursue anything I was interested before finally settling on CS

My default state is that my children will be attending college.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#108

Post by horsawlarway »

kitd wrote: post #51
shortstuffsushi wrote: post #16

I'll offer one anecdote of counter-college hate. I went to a local state school, graduated in three years with winter and summer classes, commuted for the second and third, worked the whole time, and came out with a very small amount of debt (maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember). I made friends in college, I was able to get into a great job via an internship that I got from the school job fair, and got…

(maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember) How long ago was it? I only ask because my eldest child is currently at university, and I believe the experience I had in the 1980s and she has now are fundamentally different. The academic, financial and employment landscape has changed a lot in the past 20-30 years, and that creates different pressures for both students and institutions. I now firmly believe doin…

I graduated in 2012 from a state school - The average cost per year across my 5 years was ~11k. More in the first two years when I lived on campus and ate at the dining halls - less in the last 3, when I had a friends group to pick roommates from and moved off campus.

My co-op income in the last 3 years completely covered costs for those years, and I worked as an intern and took on-campus jobs the first two years to cover those, in combination with financial aid (HOPE).

It's slightly more now (I just checked tuition for the 2021 year, it's ~12k, so the total yearly cost would probably be around 15k now), but still SO MUCH BETTER than paying private or out of state rates.

---

My advice

- Live on campus for at least a year if you can, you end up with a much better social group, and more contacts in general. Plus no car/vehicle/commute expenses.

- Take every job you can get while doing it (I interned in labs, taught classes, and then jumped into the co-op program as early as possible)

- Live with as many roommates as you can tolerate, and move off campus once you know some folks (we split a house rental 6 ways)

- Don't fuck around. I consistently took the limit for class hours (or within an hour of the limit) and did not have to re-take any classes. The first rule is: Go to your damn classes, you're at a job, not a spa. If you can't make it to your classes, reconsider if college is for you.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#109

Post by brimble »

koheripbal wrote: post #42
omarhaneef wrote: post #9

One point of view arguing for a non-stem degree is that it teaches you to read, write and think. And there is some logic to that thought. Even if you spend 4 years just learning about, say, Sociology, you have to read up on a debate, summarize the background, have an opinion, be challenged and so forth. And you are on your way to 10k hours. Now film school might have a component of that, or maybe it is teaching you h…

"it teaches you to read, write and think." Most people learn that by grade 10. College should be for highly specialized skill learning.

They really, really don't.

IMO even most college graduates can't read or write worth a damn. Possibly they can think, but it's hard to tell.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#110

Post by dragonwriter »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #73
brk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dropped out of college in the early 90s when many of the CS programs were teaching dated material. It was the best decision of my life, no way I'd be where I am if I had waited to graduate before getting started into a career. IMO, college is one of many possible options to success. They all have trade offs, and there is no universal answer that fits all of the addressable market. If you do not go to college, you h…

Alas, the modern CS curriculum is still pretty dated. It's not that the courses are bad, they're just not that helpful. For instance, I like understanding how compilers work, but I'm never going to be on a compiler-building team. Nor will many of us because everyone just uses LLVM. But it's a big part of the curriculum. And the theory stuff is intriguing, but the modern machine doesn't behave like a Turing Machine an…

You seem to be complaining that your CS program is outdated because it teaches CS instead of Software Engineering or the programming trade.

Kind of like complaining that a Material Science curriculum is dated because it teaches Material Science instead of Civil Engineering or the construction trade.

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