Is University Necessary? A professor debates a student.

If you are a sophomore or junior in college right now, and you get a job offer doing (for example) Ruby on Rails, you will likely learn nothing in your final years of college that will help you with doing Ruby on Rails in that job.

But maybe the job will involve more than just a web frontend to a database. Maybe you will will need to optimize a solution somewhere, and you'll think, "Hey, I bet I could use simulated annealing for that". Or you'll think, "Hey, I could write a simple grammar to solve this just like the first problem in my compilers class". Or "I can simulate the system variance by convolving the individual component variances" and thus you'll be able to provision your system better. Or whatever.

Sure, you could have figured out how to do all of these by carefully reading wikipedia. But how would you have even known the right questions without having been exposed to the material?

And then, of course, there's that next job ten years from now, that isn't Ruby on Rails. It's something else, maybe even in a different problem domain altogether, where the Ruby on Rails expertise doesn't give you any advantage. Wouldn't it be nice to have a good solid grounding in a wider base of material?

Several times in my career, I've been brought in to tackle a problem that has been vexing other (and maybe even better) programmers, and I've said, "Well, I don't know much about it, but I think we could solve that problem using X", where X is algorithm or technique I learned in graduate school. It is great to be able to have those moments, and I know had I not gone to school (and gotten my MS) I would not have those insights.

Since gailees's counterpoint is pretty lackluster, let me offer a different one:

University was never meant to be a system of general education. But because of the prestige garnered by graduates, it slowly began to be a status symbol. Instead of being a system of truly advanced knowledge, it has become an extra pipe on the education system, bringing to the table little intrinsic value. The concept of the university, in short, has been eroded by its growing recognition of the incapacity of its students. And because the university has access to funding that the public school system does not, it was able to expand itself to attempt to meet these needs; the price it paid was a loss of vision.

Entire swaths of the university curriculum should be torn out and moved into high schools, which in turn need to be re-conceived to produce fully-grown adults who find the choice between going to college and going to work to be a real choice. In such a world, the university is not at all necessary: it is where you go for that above-and-beyond level of intellectual rigor, but that is not a requirement for all people. Professor Holloway talks about the discipline and structure a university provides, but I ask why this is absent in the halls before one reaches university. For it must be, else these particular characteristics would not define the common student's need.

The university is necessary only because it is our latest patchwork fix on a system that is a conglomeration of patchwork fixes itself. If only Professor Holloway had advocated his ideas for secondary education, and considered the implications of such reform on the university due to the consequent changes in the nature of the applicant, I would have agreed with him fully.

The OP himself is trying to sway the argument with 'Appeal to Adventure' (not really a defined fallacy but appeal to emotion). For instance the call to take the blue pill is a reference to what the Hero of a very popular movie didn't do. The OP equates post college life with an un-heroic life.

There is a visible disconnect with the views in the arguments. They are more open and accepting at the start and get more emotional at the end. To state an example, the author mentions that 'school is in no way a negative experience...' and later mentions that 'Sure, school might maximize one’s chances of living a stable, moderately successful life with two and a half kids, a modest house, and a job. But is that really what we want? Does our generation want to forego pursuing our passions in order to be part of a shrinking, mundane “middle” class?', which seems to point that schools leave you passionless.

The OP also uses arguments that cannot be proved or argued against. For instance "Not that dropping out of school ensures success, but had Bob or say, Mark Zuckerberg, stayed in school, we could all still be hanging out on Myspace." What this statement assumes, is that (1) School didn't help Mark Zuckerberg, (2) He wouldn't have been able to build FB if he had waited to finish school (3) No one else could have come up with an alternative to MySpace, university student or otherwise. I am not dissecting the argument just for the sake of it, but I am arguing that the OP is selective about his dataset. Yes there are Mark Zuckerbergs, but there are Larry Pages as well.

It's not relevant to the argument if there is only a weak implication that going to University would change the ignorant part, not to mention that he provides no backing to the idea that if you go to college you will "grow up" and become less ignorant. This smacks of a circular argument without actually evidence.

I'm recycling a comment I made two weeks ago because it's relevant here, and it saves me the typing and thought-bandwidth of retyping the exact same thing in a slightly different way.

The absolute worst thing I've ever done for myself was to go to college. I had a 50% scholarship towards one of THE top electrical engineering schools in the country (not MIT, but you'd be in the right state if you were guessing), and I toughed it out for four years. Due to financial aid f&ckery, I made the choice to drop out with around half a year of credits left to complete my BS. I had my own IT consulting business at the time, and I made a pretty decent run of it for about a year at which point I realized I was a MUCH better 'technology person' than 'business person'. I made the jump to full-time sysadmin for other companies at that time, and haven't looked back since. NONE of the skills I use today (either in my 'day job' as a nix sysadmin or 'real job' as a musician/bandleader) came from my college experience. I had over $100k worth of debt (slightly less now, almost 10 years later) and no degree. If I had to do it all over again, I would've skipped college entirely, gone straight into the 'failed' consulting business, and taken the extra four years of earnings instead of the staggering amount of debt. I have never once felt limited due to my lack of degree. The fact that I don't have one is easily eclipsed by what I've achieved professionally, and companies have had no problem bringing me on at top dollar (according to the various sysadmin salary surveys I read) to do my thing.

I'm not saying my path is for everyone, and as always Your Mileage May Vary. However, if I had a time machine I'd go back and slap my younger self around until he decided to forgo college entirely :-) In my experience, it wasn't worth it - from the 'you NEEEEEED a degree to get a good job!' perspective AND the 'crushing amounts of debt' perspective.