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Do I need to go to university?

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Re: Do I need to go to university?

#141

Post by geomark »

toyg wrote: post #94
geomark wrote: post #79

Lots of anecdotes here. So I will add mine. I did a 2 year technical diploma program and went to work as an electronics technician. I was good, got promoted fast, started fixing a lot of mistakes the degreed engineers were making. I got pretty far without a degree but eventually hit a ceiling because credentialism was strong at the company. So I went back to college, a good private college, paid for by my employer. I…

You were also lucky to have an understanding employer who was happy to invest on your growth. A lot of people can't get approval to do a one-week, job-relevant, practical training course, let alone sponsor years of higher education.

Very true. I had several bosses who really fought for me, both for promotions to positions that a non-degreed person never held, and for approval of educational reimbursement. Although regarding the latter, it was a defense contractor and they get reimbursed by the government for those costs. So there were really no cases where someone pursuing a relevant degree would be turned down for reimbursement.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#142

Post by nostrebored »

yawboakye wrote: post #59

What’s missing from the conversation is the nature of the university. It makes this piece uniquely applicable to, say, the top 100 universities in the world. Let me throw in an African perspective, a hand grenade depending on who you ask. I’d argue that in the current economy where global mobility should be an intentional goal of any education, they (most African universities) pay negative dividends in both power in…

As someone who has interviewed applicants in Africa, I would double down on this. There are certain universities that may signal quality (e.g. University of Cape Town), but a lot of universities seem to have graduates that do well in spite of them.

I have lost track of the number of candidates I interviewed (and voted to hire!) who couldn't answer questions about their completed coursework, but could give in depth rundowns of the inner workings of something like embedded system software because of their extra curricular work.

After a while, I could notice trends from universities that were actually teaching their students incorrect information, providing the negative dividends you were talking about.

It's sad and frustrating. In an African context I think you're spot on that self taught candidates have often used their time more effectively.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#143

Post by [deleted] »

sokoloff wrote: post #120
inapis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now. Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degre…

How can college be necessary for 95% of the population when somewhere south of 50% attend now? I’m a significant proponent of college attendance for social and educational reasons, but even with that bias, I don’t agree with “necessary for 95%”.

[deleted]

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#144

Post by mam2 »

laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

Yes and it's also a really cool human experience

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#145

Post by sokoloff »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #122
sokoloff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can college be necessary for 95% of the population when somewhere south of 50% attend now? I’m a significant proponent of college attendance for social and educational reasons, but even with that bias, I don’t agree with “necessary for 95%”.

Because their lives suck now, and college would have alleviated that. That they didn't (have the chance to ) go is part of the point I believe. But yeah it was worded strangely.

College would have alleviated it for four years during college. I’m not convinced that the job market transforms quickly to absorb twice as many people in jobs we think of today as “college required”.

I’m not sure what the correlation between income (or other life outcomes) is between “attended college” vs “would typically have chosen college but took another route” but I suspect it’s a lot smaller than between that latter group and the “was never even considering college” group.

It’s not clear for an individual who “should” attend college how important the decision to actually attend is. I seem to recall studies that suggested there was a much stronger correlation between applying to Harvard than there was between that and attending Harvard.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#146

Post by logicchains »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #129
anonymoushn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an additional 45% of the population go to college, will society create hundreds of millions of high-paying jobs for them?

For most of my career, nobody 'created' a job for me. I went out and figured out something useful to do, did it, and made a living. And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Why would we wish that on ourselves? How does that improve the world? Even worse, the implied understanding that our society cannot function without an uneducat…

>And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people?

Have you been involved much in hiring? I suspect if you had it would disabuse you of the notion that university is effective at producing "capable, educated, useful people".

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#147

Post by mdorazio »

WalterBright wrote: post #60
sdan wrote: post #32

I'm a senior in high school and decided to. I started a startup and got invited for a YC interview(got rejected) and am onto another startup which is raising soon. Despite how much success/failure/I learn I endure, college name matters... a lot. I snuck into Nuro's open house last year and found they exclusively invited Harvard/Stanford/MIT students (I can say this because I was a minor at the time of signing their N…

> college name matters Nobody ever asks me what college I attended. Nobody cares.

Converse anecdote: people constantly ask me what college I attended and what I majored in, nearly 15 years into my career. Senior jobs now are also strongly looking for advanced degrees on top of that. My experience has been that in the U.S., outside of software the importance of college is very high for most professional jobs.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#148

Post by take_a_breath »

donw wrote: post #95
laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

My university education was... varied. I have two bachelors' degrees, one in Mathematics, and one in Japanese. Those two programs were night-and-day in terms of rigor. The mandatory "general education" classes were an absolute waste of time, and accounted for over a third of the cost of my college education. It would have been more productive to spend that money on Pokemon cards. The reality is, for a lot of people,…

To be clear, being self-taught doesn’t mean they didn’t go to university. It could be that their university experience put them in a better position to self-teach.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#149

Post by toomanybeersies »

laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

The most important things I gained from university weren't vocational knowledge or my degree. I don't use most of what I learned at university at my job and never will, and beyond putting it on my resume, and after my first grad job no employer has actually looked at my degree, it's a requirement on plenty of jobs but I could absolutely get away with lying about having a degree with no real consequences. I could definitely do my job without having gone to university and I'm not a JS dev building misc CRUD apps (not to belittle people who do that for a living).

It's hard to put into words, but university was a unique experience for me that was instrumental in helping me grow to become the person I am today. Finishing high school and then going to a coding bootcamp for a few months before joining the workforce just wouldn't have provided that space for me to "discover myself", for lack of a better term.

That's not to say that everybody should go to university, although I definitely benefited from it and don't regret it at all, I was definitely railroaded into tertiary education by my parents and teachers. And that's not to say that university is the only place where I would've experienced the kind of personal growth that I did. I have plenty of friends who went into trades and completed apprenticeships (actually more than went to university), and most of them don't regret doing that either.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#150

Post by jmvoodoo »

bregma wrote: post #139

I went to university. I did not receive any job training at university. It is not design for job training and I did not expect to receive job training. I am not a job. I am not a career. I learned two important things at university that I doubt I could have picked up otherwise. 1. I learned how broad knowledge is. I learned about things I did not even know I did not know about. Some of these things I learned in class…

Wow. This is shamefully elitist. No, you did not need to go to university to learn those two things. There are plenty of people that have learned them from other life experiences. Also, some of the worst code I've ever had the pleasure of reading was written by people with graduate degrees.

I myself didn't graduate, because the allure of starting a company was too strong. Here I am 20 years later advising people with degrees. If you are dedicated enough and creative enough (in the hacker kind of way) you can become skilled in just about anything you want.

However without a degree there are doors that are closed to you. For example the UC system will not even consider you for an MBA if you don't have an undergraduate degree. Don't even bother applying. Other private institutions will consider you but you need to be absolutely exceptional to get in.

I use that just as one example. People with a degree (especially a good degree) can stroll into an opportunity that I have to work 10X harder to to get. That said, once I'm in I tend to outperform my peers simply because I'm used to a world set on "hard mode" at all times.

Another thing I'm lacking are the deep friendships and connections that people who have a degree seem to have. That, to me, is the biggest loss from skipping a degree. Despite significant effort I don't seem to be able to make that part up.

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