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College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

americandreaming.substack.com

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Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#121

Post by iamben »

I had this discussion with a friend a few days ago. We both did CS in the late 90s/early 00s. He said he was telling his kids not to bother with University if they didn't want to (as opposed to being pushed by our parents/teachers as we were - "University is the only route to success").

I was a young 18. 3 years of University helped me grow up in a (relatively!) safe environment, grow a bit more into 'me', make 'adult' friends etc etc. But now I'm not sure I'd recommend it for anyone on 'education' alone. The costs (and subsequent debt) is unreal, and for 85% of the careers my friends went into, University (honestly) wasn't really needed (tech, planning, office work, 'business' things, finance, etc...) - you could definitely get away learning on the job and arguably get further faster. Of course you should probably still go if you want to operate on people or pets, or practice law or something...

The experience was definitely fun, if you want to do it for that, I understand it. Whether that experience would be worth paying for now of course - that's debatable.

But the world has definitely changed since I went. University was sold as the path to a comfortable living. Now you can make a better than solid living selling diet pills on Instagram, or be a troubled teen on Dr. Phil, go viral and earn $53m on OnlyFans 5 years later (https://news.yahoo.com/bhad-bhabie-shares-receipts-claims-22...). Funny old world.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#122

Post by lotsofpulp »

coldpie wrote: post #55
mitchdoogle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One point of view arguing for a non-stem degree is that it teaches you to read, write and think This is where these critiques often go wrong in my opinion. There's no mention of what was learned, what value was gained over that time, because I highly doubt it was nothing. As you mention, there is an aspect of project management in making a film. You have to write a film, you have to select roles for your film, you…

The scam is in convincing (very young) people that they need to pay six figures to acquire those experiences.

The scam is giving six figure loans to very young people with no underwriting at the future taxpayers’ expense. Without that, schools would not be able to charge excessively in the first place.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#123

Post by kbrisso »

I hated school and didn't go to college for a BA in the 80's like everybody else did. I went and took four courses at the community college - electronics, CS 101 and two VB programming classes. The VB programming were taught by a guy who was a contractor during the day. We built this client server pizza order system. I thought it was so cool to build and the teacher must have a really awesome job. Hard work and some luck got me a job with an older guy who used to program by punch cards, it was part time and I did it at nigh why I worked days. He had a lot of patience with me and it paid off for me because I know have been in the industry 22 years. Why did I hate school? I'm dyslexic enough that remembering what I read is hard. I still have a hard time remembering phone numbers. I always did poor in school and disliked it.

What I think college doesn't teach you is how to be an entrepreneur or how to use your degree to get a job and now it's so expensive. Is it worth it? It used to be in the 1980's get a four year degree and boom yo have a great entry level job, it was true, I could have had jobs back then with a BA, my friends all did it and it would have been easy to pay off college debt. Not the case today.

To the OP - if yo want to get into films please don't give up - hard work does pay off, I took that route instead of school.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#124

Post by jmkr »

bingohbangoh wrote: post #33

Chiming in as a recent American college grad... One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes. Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But g…

> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.

Maybe?

I found Philosophy people to be curious, maybe not as curious as I was, but more curious than others I've met. And I'm sure other humanities degrees would say the same. I think curiosity probably comes with passion.

Now I'm dealing with finding programmers I meet to not be curious. Of course there are some very curious programmers, but lately I've been asking people _why_ they don't find programming itself interesting. I mean something more fundamental than "web programming is interesting." Not that it's not interesting (lots of interesting rfcs) but using a framework and doing the request/response isn't.

I think above is probably due to I am passionate about programming/comp sci, and others probably are passionate about other things.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#125

Post by [deleted] »

TimPC wrote: post #50
christophilus wrote: post #20

My advice: go somewhere cheap, and get a practical degree. I went to CCU for most of my college career (back when it had just become a standalone university). Wasn't (still isn't) prestigious, but with scholarships, was entirely free for me, and it had the added benefit of attracting some decent professors who had retired to the beach and still wanted to teach part time. Today, for in-state tuition, it's around $47K…

$47K for the degree itself leads to much larger debt if you're in the sizeable contingent of students that also needs to pay for things like a place to live and meals rather than relying on parents. You're paying $12K/year for the degree and likely $18K/year for rent and another $18K or so for other expenses. If you're making $30K/year from a part time job and paying $4K of that to taxes. you end up with a $22K/year…

[deleted]

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#126

Post by mitchdoogle »

RappingBoomer wrote: post #5

if you read around on the internet, in various and sundry forums, there is a rising acknowledgement among people that maybe their friends who accidentally got their girlfriend pregnant in high school and then got married and started working right away were the lucky ones... at the time it seemed as if those friends had messed up royally, but in hindsight, looking back over time and it seems as if the ones who got a g…

Anecdotes are fun, but the statistics paint a better picture.

It's not as interesting to say "My friend graduated college in 4 years, got a good job, and now he owns a 4BR house, and his wife stays at home raising their two kids"

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#127

Post by throwaway6734 »

omarhaneef wrote: post #9

One point of view arguing for a non-stem degree is that it teaches you to read, write and think. And there is some logic to that thought. Even if you spend 4 years just learning about, say, Sociology, you have to read up on a debate, summarize the background, have an opinion, be challenged and so forth. And you are on your way to 10k hours. Now film school might have a component of that, or maybe it is teaching you h…

>Perhaps the film school should add some courses on networking, fund raising and an internship at film shoots?

My wife went to film school and it had all of these things. The experience was expensive, but she left school with a good network and job opportunities

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#128

Post by the_only_law »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #114
the_only_law wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had gone to college I might have ended up with a social life and probably wouldn’t have done much better/worse economically. I have this current theory that there are a lot of domain/industries even in software development are made much harder to get into for the “uneducated” because the companies tend to source less experienced employees exclusively through university hiring pipelines. Now I have no qualms abso…

Great point about the pipeline. One of the big reasons I went back to grad school was so that I could reenter the pipelines via internships. Luckily it ended up working out

Yeah it really started to come together when all my friends with literally no experience ended up getting picked up by companies working on really cool projects who won’t even engage with me.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#129

Post by xhkkffbf »

dragonwriter wrote: post #110
xhkkffbf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, the modern CS curriculum is still pretty dated. It's not that the courses are bad, they're just not that helpful. For instance, I like understanding how compilers work, but I'm never going to be on a compiler-building team. Nor will many of us because everyone just uses LLVM. But it's a big part of the curriculum. And the theory stuff is intriguing, but the modern machine doesn't behave like a Turing Machine an…

You seem to be complaining that your CS program is outdated because it teaches CS instead of Software Engineering or the programming trade. Kind of like complaining that a Material Science curriculum is dated because it teaches Material Science instead of Civil Engineering or the construction trade.

Your point seems kind of circular. CS can't be dated because you have a list of what is considered CS and your list is a single source of truth.

But I wasn't arguing about terminology. I was just pointing out that many of the big, required courses in CS aren't that useful. Or maybe not as useful as the professors might imagine them to be.

So call it whatever you like. I'm just agreeing that the curriculum is dated.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#130

Post by sologoub »

throwaguey wrote: post #102
bingohbangoh wrote: post #33

Chiming in as a recent American college grad... One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes. Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But g…

> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. Agreed here. > I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities. Don't think it's quite so simple to draw the line here. Or, at least, my anecdata doesn't support this. As someone who teaches undergraduate students in STEM at a public ivy, who mostly has friends in comparabl…

Wow, as someone who went to a much more humble institution than an ivy school, that sounds terrible. We did have some kids like that in my classes, but our groups were small and somehow more than half of us truly wanted to engage with the subjects and I look back very fondly in the “luxury” to sit around debating the ins and outs of Plato’s allegory of the cave and how the Matrix (a recent movie at the time) seemed to portray the same theme and story.
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