College: The biggest scam we'll ever buy

Private collage + faculty dependent tuition concession, jerks. :) Nice education, no debt. But we can't all be faculty dependents.

The computer-science parts were helpful but not super-helpful; Real Experience was more helpful. The art minor was fun. I learned to appreciate some other things like the mandatory English courses a while after I stopped taking them. I don't know how to make students like my past self better appreciate those things in advance so as to take advantage of them. I think it's a bit of a problem for most students.

I never crammed for a test. Aside from courses that I liked (like History and English) I never took anything outside of CS. I dropped out after ~ 3 years to write software for a living.

This worked okay in 1982. I don't know if it would work now. I /do/ know that when I interview someone I never really look at their degree or coursework except as a starting point to figure out if they're a good hire.

There are two other people within fifty feet of me who have a similar educational story. We work at a very large company and you've probably used our products.

As far as I'm concerned, college is what you make of it. If you're going there purely for a degree and you don't learn anything useful, that's going to be a problem. If you go and learn something and can demonstrate that, you're good. I don't care if you went to Podunk or MIT, I don't care if you have the piece of paper or not; if you have the chops, you've won.

I think I might have some perspective to comment on education. I dropped out of a large public institution in a technical program to work in industry for a while. Many of my motivations were similar to the authors complaints.

Is education a scam? I think it is what you make it out to be. If you major in Communications and spend all night fratting it up, then yes you could have a case that education was not useful to you. Even then you are deriving utility because you are practicing your people skills and creating a network useful in your future career.

I don't find his complaints about scut work particularly compelling. It happens in industry. Get used to it and stop whining.

I think that the biggest problem nowadays is that we immediately push students to college right after high school. For a subset of highly motivated students, this is the right move and they often thrive in college. I do think the majority could benefit from a year or two to find themselves. A semi-mandatory national service program might be a great idea since it would carve out a time for this express purpose. Students would no longer feel they were behind if they did not immediately enter college. The time spent in college would also be spent more productively.

Ultimately I plan on going back to school. I think there are something like six genealogical hops between Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mills. For better or worse, the most brillant minds who produce the ideas which civilization are based around or usually found in universities. One simply cannot get that kind of personal mental exposure to them in industry.

Maybe you should consider transferring then? College is there to increase your breadth of knowledge. Ask yourself how many of your friends who never went to college critically analyze the world around them or have well thought out discussions about things bigger than themselves (cosmos, patterns in the world, science, etc). Remember, SA is the exception!

Creativity comes from limits (and knowledge). In art schools, students are told to only use certain materials for a reason. Why do you think we have coding competitions where the winner has the fewest lines of code or can do the most in 48 hours?

While I can understand your viewpoint, it just sounds like you need to either change your major or school or both. I went to a university where we had to co-op (read lots of internships that didn't involve getting coffee) and my core classes depended on mostly group projects solving problems. It is precisely because of this education and my breadth of knowledge that I have ideas connecting completely unrelated ideas.

I think college is like better business bureau. A scam. You can learn everything you want yourself for free, instead of going to a college and pay an enormous amount of money for it. Especially now with the Internet, most materials you find online are multiple times better quality than what you get at college. Most graduates need to receive considerable additional training when they join a company. Bottom line is:

You don't go to college to learn; you go to college to get a paper certificate that you can show to others.

It's the problem of signalling and unfortunately, there's no easy solution for it. Colleges profit from the information imbalance and lack of trust in the job market. Some people recommend that instead of your certificates, your past projects should make up your resume. But then you get a catch 22 because others won't risk starting a project with you, unless they can see that you're capable from your resume. The only way to break out of this is the people you're going to work with must already know your abilities beforehand. Hence, you can start a start-up with your close friends or on your own, or become a vice president by knowing the right people at a company. For everything else, you need a resume for which Colleges are the gate keepers. And they won't give away that power for free. So enjoy your debt.

Signalling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

Better Business Bureau Scam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw

p.s. I can't say that the free market can sort college tuition fees out or colleges should be regulated by governments.