Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People

Experience matters much more than degree in the web dev/ops field. The tricky issue with foregoing college is you have to get experience first, and without experience you likely won't get a corporate position. Networking, open source activity, volunteering, freelancing, and personal projects can help to get that first foot in the door. A year of real experience is more important than 4 years of college, imho.

With the right networking and projects in the high school years, you can have a position waiting on you and then have 4 years experience under your belt before you'd have graduated college. For some people, this will make more sense (and cents) than the college route.

There's a lot of people with college degrees waiting tables, but very few people with software or operations experience have a hard time finding work, regardless of their college education status.

Getting admitted is a proxy for an IQ test. Getting through is a proxy for being able to grind on tasks. Both are useful job skills. (My job is intellectually satisfying, but also involves writing reports that really can be described as a grind.)

Like the NBA, all college should be "one-and-done".

https://medium.com/@timrpeterson/all-college-should-be-one-a...

The article is written from the perspective of someone who has not enjoyed the benefits of a college education: The premise is that at ~17 years old (or any age), people know what to learn and how to learn it.

Good college educations require a diversity of classes so students can learn from and about the incredible diversity of valuable ideas and knowledge. The belief that you already know what you want and can dismiss the rest is ignorant and arrogant (usually one follows the other). If you believe that, you most need a college education -- open-mindedness, an intellectual humility, and the desire to seek challenges to your ideas are hallmarks of the well-educated and are major benefit of good college educations; the more I learn the more humble I become! As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

College has requirements regarding what and how you learn because they know more about it than you do, and would be shortchanging you if they did otherwise. Does a good developer let clients design their own solutions or let them choose bad ones? The educators are experts in their fields and in education; they have experience with thousands (at large universities, even millions) of people getting educations, research on learning, and much more. What do you know about it? I'm not saying that their ideas are all correct, correct for you, or shouldn't be challenged, but it's foolish to discard them wholesale.

The DIY hacker myth is exciting -- people will do it all themselves -- it's the old American rugged individualism. People who follow it limit themselves to their own imaginations, rather than the combined imaginations of a university full of smart people (including fellow students). You can't even imagine what you don't know; if you are dismissing whole fields then you are not even looking.

College is not for everyone, but that's a meaningless truism used as an excuse. The more intellectually able and curious you are, the more an institution full of very smart highly-educated people, experts in their fields, willing to spend months teaching you, waiting for you to walk into their offices and ask them questions, should appeal to you.

Well, naturally everything you learn in college is well-known and available very cheaply. The question is how are you going to know what there is out there? I was pretty set on Engineering, and I knew it had something to do with math and something to do with technology, but there's plenty of things that I hadn't seen until I started: Control Theory, Materials, etc.

It's also not easy to know which things are considered important, and which are considered marginal. What should a course in economics contain? If I were to look at the things I've read on the internet, it would be half Austrian Economics, and barely any micro.

There's also a cost issue. Let's start with time. When I look back, everything academic in college could have been squeezed into 2 years. (Three terms of 8 weeks for 4 years.) Now I wouldn't say I'd have a better idea of what to do at age 20 rather than age 22, but looking back I'd rather have the 2 years. I've found numerous ways to do the other stuff you do in college. It's much easier to socialize when you are making a bit of money. And much easier to get a good mix of people when you're not constrained to people roughly your own age, doing something very similar. (Of course you aren't forced to hang out with people at your institution. You just assume you should.)

Then there's money. When I went, the UK system was cheap. Now it's 9K GBP, which is a lot for many people. The US system is quite pricey. There are plenty of stories about people who owe $100K, which really ties your hands when it comes to what to do after. You can't even declare bankruptcy, so you'd better not take too big risks.