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College was my biggest mistake

stevecorona.com

161–170 of 192 posts

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with anti-college sentiment as long as it's not anti-learning sentiment. College and structured, traditional, classroom based learning works for some people and it slows others down. All of the material learn in a CS degree can't be learned independently outside of college. Any benefit college gives to a person is going to be subjective and highly anecdotal, like "professor interaction" or being around like-…

I don't know that anyone says it is the "only" way. The real claim is that college offers a significant advantage which it would be foolish to turn down. Hard to say how most High School students would be able to accurately gauge that college would be useless for them ahead of time, except if they already couldn't handle academics.

"The real claim is that college offers a significant advantage which it would be foolish to turn down."

That sure makes it sound like it's the only way.

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#162
post #13

The most interesting thing about this is the feedback loop. These kind of stories seem to strike a chord and in turn more people will post about this. Yet the discussion always goes along the same lines. The problem is that all of these are unavoidably anecdotal in nature and thus something that is basically impossible to discuss. Sure, it might have worked out for some and might not have worked out for others. The p…

I think these types of posts are becoming popular because we all grew up under the belief that college was the only way to become successful, and it's becoming increasingly clear that not only is that not true, it can be harmful in some cases. This is a big shift from the thinking of previous generations and probably amplified by the current looming student loan crisis and poor economy. Yes, college works for some an…

Good point.

The US alternatives to college are terrible, particularly if you didn't have money/access. Trade schools are almost fraudulent (and not like Canada, which at least encourages vocations) and the whole entrepreneur out of high school mindset seems downright irresponsible (I would hope there's a better pipeline for ambitious world-changers than just going through the school of hard knocks).

And the worst part of the discussion is it's not even informed. Like, you will never see anyone in these threads recommend joining the military. I joined the military 2 years after college, but had I been informed of my opportunities earlier (say, in high school), I would have definitely joined the military right out of high school and then done college later, once I was ready for it and had GI Bill benefits to use.

All that said, college went okay for me. I don't really know of anyone in my circles that didn't get at least something productive out of going to college, based on where they are now, over a decade later.

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#163
post #118
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job lead I got from my college advisor alone was worth the opportunity cost. And the humanities classes opened my mind up in ways wikipedia just can't dream of.

If you hadn't gone to college you would have been doing something else during those years and you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else. You can know that the job lead you got was good, but you have no way of knowing that your lead was better than you might have gotten by going to a jobs fair or some sort of special-interest convention or local community center. And note that you could have ta…

you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else.

I'm not sure this is really true. I wasn't out of school yet, I had very few contacts. In fact after that first job I was effectively out of work for 9 months. College let me go to classes a bit, study a bit, and do whatever I wanted the rest of the time, while still getting the benefits of a huge professional network at the end.

Hitting up job fairs for months on end was equally effective as following up on a single email my advisor sent me.

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#164
post #125
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job lead I got from my college advisor alone was worth the opportunity cost. And the humanities classes opened my mind up in ways wikipedia just can't dream of.

Well, I guess you could take a humanities class...or, you could, you know, get a library card. Believe it or not, there are actually sources of information outside of wikipedia and $1000000000/credit college courses. Amazing, right?

I'm not talking about sources of information. I mean someone who knows what books in that library are worth reading. And honestly, I don't remember 90% of the "information" I learned in college, but I learned a ton of new ways of approaching information that I don't think I would have learned except by example.

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#165
post #13

The most interesting thing about this is the feedback loop. These kind of stories seem to strike a chord and in turn more people will post about this. Yet the discussion always goes along the same lines. The problem is that all of these are unavoidably anecdotal in nature and thus something that is basically impossible to discuss. Sure, it might have worked out for some and might not have worked out for others. The p…

I think these types of posts are becoming popular because we all grew up under the belief that college was the only way to become successful, and it's becoming increasingly clear that not only is that not true, it can be harmful in some cases. This is a big shift from the thinking of previous generations and probably amplified by the current looming student loan crisis and poor economy. Yes, college works for some an…

You have a point there, especially when you name the economic situation, which arguably changes behaviour patterns.

To expand a bit more on my previous "anecdotal in nature" point though, I think that the articles we see here are not just anecdotal, they are also overgeneralising. I reckon CS is one of the few areas that lends itself most to showing qualification in a way other than presenting a degree.

Normally, the degree signifies the consensus that you have done a certain amount of work and passed a certain set of requirements. In CS (amongst some other things), this can also be shown to a potential employer by showing them your actual coding work, prototypes, programs, scripts, websites etc. Here then, the degree becomes less of an issue because you can show proficiency in a different way.

This however does only work in a limited area of expertise, such as design, art, programming, journalism (to a degree) etc. For most other purposes, a degree is still a certificate of (baseline) proficiency, so saying "college becomes irrelevant" (not that you did) is overly broad and only partially true under certain circumstances.

Now I know HN is mostly programmers, CS students, maths students, some designers etc., as can be seen by the outright hostile attitude towards the humanities displayed by some of the other comments to this submission (especially further up), but it still peeves me to see people inductively draw conclusions from their own experience, ultimately concluding "how things are", thereby implying "for everyone".

[edit] spelling [/edit]

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#166
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is full of people who think this is impossible, but it's not. I pretty much did that when I was in school, and I had about a 60% chance of an A and a 30% chance of a B, according to my GPA. I wasn't quite as quick as the poster -- the total amount of effort I put into a course probably amounted to 2-3 days of work, including time spent in classes and exams. But, I knew people who were easily an order of m…

No, its still not possible. There is a big difference between dedicating 10 weeks of thought and consideration to plumb the depths of a subject and simply being able to fake that effort in order to pass a test for a grade. You and the OP did the latter. Nothing wrong with it but in the end you're just fooling yourself, your professors, and anyone who puts value in your degree.

Since there are (currently) four replies that express the same sentiment, let me just reply to everyone here, to avoid making this thread tediously long.

I admit it's possible I'm fooling myself, but it's the way a lot of people are saying -- that I just skated by on easy courses and missed out on the material in the hard courses. I actually got my As mostly in the advanced undergrad and grad classes. Most of my Bs came in my last year, when I had to go back and take all the intro classes I skipped in order to meet graduation requirements. The math department was fine with, e.g., letting me skipping undergrad abstract algebra because I'd taken graduate matrix analysis (which requires grad algebra), but the engineering department wouldn't let me skip intro e-mag even though I'd taken high powered diode lasers (which, IIRC, required grad e-mag II).

A lot of the Bs came in "easy" classes where the average grade on exams was 85-90. I never did enough problems to stop making mistakes, so I got an 85-90 on pretty much all my exams, which is only good for a B if that's average. The classes that I did really well in were the ones where professors asked questions on exams that required real original thought; the average grade on one of those exams might be something like 30 or 50, but I'd still get an 85-90 most of the time. The one way I selected courses that were "easy" was that I chose professors who made homework a small part of the grade, so I wouldn't fail just for not doing any homework.

Someone else mentioned Ramanujan. Well, I'm not a genius, and I know that. One of my high school friends got a silver in the international math Olympiad, and he didn't even think he was good at math because his little brother was a lot better (and his little brother later got a gold). I'm not even close to that, and even those guys aren't in the same league as Ramanujan, but I read pretty quickly and I have a decent memory for abstract concepts. I think whether or not people are sure the original poster is full of crap depends on who they hung out with in high school and college. Frankly, I was the dumbest of my close friends in high school, and about average among my college friends. When I look at my high school and college friends, any of them could have done this (with the exception of the guy who never made mistakes because he was slow and methodical, even on easy stuff), so it's not obvious to me that the original poster is just spouting off, even if it seems obvious to everyone else.

The math olympiad friend I mentioned above would go through the text for his classes and do every problem in the book before the class started. That took him a few of weeks. Someone mentioned that an engineering problem set takes more than an afternoon. That's probably true for a lot of people, but problem sets in engineering and math don't take much time if you know how to do them. The limiting factor is how quickly you come up with a solution, which can be pretty much instantaneous. There are some exceptions -- I remember some VLSI questions that basically amounted to doing a SPICE simulation by hand. And most labs are, unfortunately, gated by the amount of tedious work you have to do.

On the comment that my experience doesn't count because I'm an outlier, well what's P(guy makes original blog post | not an outlier) vs. P(guy makes original blog post | is an outlier)? I don't have any idea, but neither does anyone else here, and yet every other poster seems to be completely certain that the guy who wrote the original post is full of it. I'm not even saying that it's likely that the guy is credible; I'm just saying it's possible.

I can also believe that someone who's capable of doing that would fail out, because I almost did the same thing in high school. IIRC, my GPA was about 1.6 when I applied to colleges. I only managed to get into a decent school because I was lucky enough to be from a state that had a decent state school that had a policy of letting anyone in with an ACT score above some threshold (32 or 34, I forget which). And even then, I almost didn't got my admission rescinded by failing to graduate. A lot of teachers in my HS had a policy of giving people As in their class if they got a 5 on the AP exam. I got a 4 on the AP chemistry exam, and a big fat F in the class. I'd failed enough classes that I didn't have enough credits to graduate without AP Chem. The chemistry teacher didn't know that, but he was still nice enough to change my grade to a C when he saw that I got a 4. Thanks Mr. Swanson. I don't know what would have ended up happening if I failed out of high school. I spent most of my time in college in libraries, just reading. In theory, I could have done that even without being a student, but I doubt I would have.

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#167
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is full of people who think this is impossible, but it's not. I pretty much did that when I was in school, and I had about a 60% chance of an A and a 30% chance of a B, according to my GPA. I wasn't quite as quick as the poster -- the total amount of effort I put into a course probably amounted to 2-3 days of work, including time spent in classes and exams. But, I knew people who were easily an order of m…

I'm just going to do what most people won't and just say I don't believe it. Sure it is possible. But is it likely that you're the one? Now what you're talking about is an extreme outlier . I don't believe you spent 2 days worth work on a non-trivial course and produce A or near A level work. People are promoting this anti-college line with utter propaganda and lies. It's one thing to debate whether college is for ev…

It can be done sometimes, I done it for my 4th year OS course. Pretty much a day of cramming, sleepless night + uppers + .. = A-. Trouble is I remembered or learned absolutely nothing from it. For the record I loved university, but that particular course was taught by a prof who had no business teaching anything to anyone(great researcher absolutely terrible teacher) so I could not bring myself to come to class

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#168
I am astounded at the cost of college, just some 10 years after I started school. My first semester at a decent State university cost me something like $900. I even had a scholarship for enough to cover that semester from doing well on some standardized test. By the time I finished school a few years later It was about $1700 a semester (maybe not exactly, but close to double).

I can't imagine paying $44k for a bachelors degree in any subject. If that $44k only covers tuition, not books or cost of living, it is insane.

Why is going to a community college for the first one or two years of your higher education experience never promoted? It gives you a chance to see if you'll enjoy that 'college experience', you'll get to sit in a wide range of classes or relatively little money and if you want to continue you can then transfer out. I didn't take this path, but if I had to do it again I would.

Re: College was my biggest mistake

#170
post #41

I think this link started out as a post here on hn[1]. I'm not sure why the author insists on using $175k in debt as a strawman for the discussion. In the earlier thread on HN he stated that $100k, not $175k, was the actual debt figure he was confronted with. It is unfortunate because the discussion of higher-ed/debt is an important topic (I dropped out of law school for similar reasons) and the inflated debt figure…

because I dropped out after two years. if i finished all four, it'd be way more.

You: "Luckily, I left after my 2nd year and only walked away with $50k in student loans."

Me: "Why did two years cost $50k but four years costs $175k? (2/4 != 50/175)"

You: "No one really pays sticker price for college. I had some grants, financial aid, and (like someone else mentioned), the co-op program helped pay for some of my tuition."

Me: "If nobody pays sticker price for college why did you use the sticker price when discussing how much debt you chose not to accept?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332885

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