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Don't Glorify Dropping Out

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Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#101

Post by pjscott »

krschultz wrote: post #46
watty wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that cost of college is too much - but you're not forced to go to a private or out of state school. In-state colleges are not terribly expensive, especially considering how many scholarships are available. As for getting the same experiences by not going, that's just silly. Sure the information is available online but it's not the same as actively participating in a lecture.

Come on, I'm sure Wikipedia holds office hours on hard topics right? I spent a lot of time banging my head against the book (that you can buy from Amazon) and Googling, but eventually you run into things that only a professor's lecture, office hours, or your fellow classmates will teach you. That is what you are paying for. If you haven't run into that, you aren't taking classes that are hard enough or you are a geni…

This is why I would love to see colleges move to a hybrid model, where they handle the things they're good at -- office hours, discussions, providing a community, that sort of thing -- and use the internet for stuff like delivering canned lectures.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#103

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #19
watty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College isn't broken, it's just not for everyone. I don't regret my 4 years one bit, it was the best period of my life. I had some amazing social and educational experiences that I wouldn't have received had I not attended - who knew religion and geology could be so interesting? Most importantly I received a CS degree which helped me transition into the real world and be successful today. You may feel it was a waste…

The point is there's nothing you get from college that you couldn't get for free somewhere else (Internet for info and Industry gatherings for social aspects). College puts it together in a nice, easy to digest package but they vastly over charge for it. The college model is still based around a philosophy from the 1800s when they were the sole providers of information.

I keep reading this on HN and it's blatantly untrue.

Just one example of many from my college experience: one day after my Digital Devices class I described a concept to my professor that I was having trouble with. I was a poor student and couldn't afford a logic probe to do my own experiments with so I figured I'd build one with the parts I had on hand.

He then spent the next 2 hours carefully deconstructing my design, showing me why it didn't work, how I could force it to work, and in the end what a much better design approach would be.

In the 20+ years since, for all the time I've spent on BBSs, Usenet sci.electronics.* , and now web-based electronics forums, I have never seen anyone provide the depth and breadth of understanding that I got that day (OK: one person on Circuit Cellar comes to mind). And bear in mind that this not an isolated incident -- I made sure to get my money's worth by asking my share of dumb questions :-)

Sure, we all try to help each other online and some of us are pretty good at it. But at a good school professors are expert, paid to teach and love doing it, and have both the time and the motivation to do so. Random strangers online seldom have either and very rarely have both.

Can colleges do better? Absolutely. But to claim that you could "get it all for free somewhere else" so completely misses the point that it's frustrating.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#104

Post by enjo »

nostrademons wrote: post #71
enjo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I intentionally used the word "exposed":) I can't really recall very many specifics from my world literature classes either. However my psychology class taught me that the exposure to those novels and their concepts informs my decision making in some small way even today.

Wait, so you believe that your world literature classes inform your decision making because your psychology class told you so ? I'm somewhat ambivalent on the question of whether my liberal arts education actually made a difference in my life, but "because I heard it in psych class" would be at the very bottom of my reasons to believe so. If you're going to hold the opinion that a liberal education teaches you how to…

I'll respond in two ways.

First of all, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

However, yes I do take much of what I've learned at face value. After all, it would be foolish to take years of expert research and toss it out because I personally didn't conduct it. Unless it runs wildly counter to my personal experience, I have no real reason not to trust it as the best scientific explanation at a given time. Thankfully my personal experience most certainly corraborates it.

There is a world of difference between healthy skepticism (consistently questioning scientific theory through empirical observation) and doubting for doubting sake. I haven't personally verified that the earth orbits the sun, but I'm pretty sure we have that one right after all.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#106

Post by mithaler »

pjscott wrote: post #98
mithaler wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really resent the unexplained blanket assertion that "college is broken". If it's hard-hitting enough for you to post as a rebuttal, it's hard-hitting enough for you to explain your reasoning for. I had a useful, fulfilling, transformative college experience that challenged my preconceptions and taught me how to reason and appreciate complexity; I will readily admit to the financial privilege I enjoyed going in, bu…

Would you prefer the term "blatantly sub-optimal" in place of "broken"? Let's list off a few ways: * Big lecture classes, where a professor delivers canned lectures to enormous crowds of people as though we still lived before the invention of online video and the printing press. As far as I can tell, this is strictly inferior to having a really good teacher record lectures, then put them online. Preferably with an op…

I will not dispute that those are problems. I will dispute whether they're issues with all colleges.

I went to a liberal arts school, and a good one. I was never in a large lecture class (my CS101 class had 12 students in it), professors were mandated to have regular office hours and email availability to meet with students outside of classes for extra discussions and help, workloads were reasonably balanced over time, and no one really cared about grades or GPAs as long as they weren't so low that you got put on probation. (It goes without saying that we also didn't have anything resembling class rank, which is an awful concept in all possible ways.) In other words, none of those were issues in my college experience.

Thus, to me, that sounds more like an argument that "X College is broken" than "college is broken". Do some colleges offer sub-optimal educational experiences? I wouldn't doubt it. Do all of them? Clearly not, for those reasons at least.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#107

Post by Kutta »

krschultz wrote: post #52
TomOfTTB wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is there's nothing you get from college that you couldn't get for free somewhere else (Internet for info and Industry gatherings for social aspects). College puts it together in a nice, easy to digest package but they vastly over charge for it. The college model is still based around a philosophy from the 1800s when they were the sole providers of information.

The perception that "IT'S ALL AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET" is a strictly CS thing. Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free. Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could h…

"It's all available on the internet" might be almost true if you consider P2P and rapidshare likes.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#108

Post by Mz »

dasil003 wrote: post #23

> But there's something to be said for a degree as employability insurance. There's something to be said for going out and learning how to get things done and build a business as well. A college degree is hardly insurance for anything. It's clear this guy doesn't have any actual experience with startups. He rattles off the usual talking points: > startups can be as profitable as a few are, only because the great majo…

> But there's something to be said for a degree as employability insurance.

There's something to be said for going out and learning how to get things done and build a business as well. A college degree is hardly insurance for anything.

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I grew up with the idea that you went to college to make sure you could be "successful", careerwise. I was inspired to drop out of college by two individuals I knew who had bachelor's degrees, had gone on to pursue yet more college, in one case had a mountain of student loans, and both were delivering newspapers. One was still living with mom in his thirties. The other was kind of pimping out his wife (not as a prostitute, I just mean he was "supportive" of her career so she would pay his student loans and support him while he remained a total effin loser). I felt like I could deliver newspapers without a degree and would be money ahead for not having the student loans. I went back to college when I had some idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#109

Post by runT1ME »

pjscott wrote: post #96
runT1ME wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, are you implying that graduating college is an immense challenge that proves you have a tremendous amount of gumption?

It's not a terrifically high threshold of intelligence or determination, but it is a threshold. A lot of people drop out of college, for various reasons, and so a college degree does act as a filter.

Yes, and a job where you're hiring mass quantities of commodity labor, having a threshold is great. However, when recruiting for quite a specialized position, having a low and arbitrary 'threshold' seems counter productive.

Re: Don't Glorify Dropping Out

#110

Post by astrofinch »

dhume wrote: post #94
astrofinch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free. Here are 5 freely available introductory calculus books. http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/03/04/028253.shtml

I don't think anyone is claiming that there aren't freely available resources for learning the basics of other fields, so this isn't much of a counterexample.

Free graduate-level graph theory book that I found when I was interested in graph theory: http://diestel-graph-theory.com/basic.html
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