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Do I need to go to university?

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Re: Do I need to go to university?

#161

Post by toomanybeersies »

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%”.

If you're in India (and I'd imagine most other developing countries), getting a degree is one of the most surefire methods of ensuring that you live a good life.

It's much less the case in Western countries, especially here in Australia, where tradespeople tend to earn on-par or more than white collar professionals.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#162

Post by JoeAltmaier »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #161
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%”.

If you're in India (and I'd imagine most other developing countries), getting a degree is one of the most surefire methods of ensuring that you live a good life. It's much less the case in Western countries, especially here in Australia, where tradespeople tend to earn on-par or more than white collar professionals.

Yes! Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the price of a plumber or other trade, I say "Yeah! Where do they get off, wanting to earn a living? Why can't they just live in a van down by the river like their parents?!"

I'm perfectly happy to pay a competent trade for good work, at whatever rate gets me out of painting/plumbing/pumping sewage.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#163

Post by VMisTheWay »

toyg wrote: post #61
VMisTheWay wrote: post #50

30 year old here, I'm considering a new degree in computer science to add to my chem Engineering degree. I have 12 years casual programming experience. My work experience has been design Engineering, which is a low 6 figure job. I also live in an area with an old industry that's getting Engineers outsourced. I'm considering a comp sci degree so I can get into embedded, or electrical engineering, AI, or pretty much an…

I don’t think you need a degree for that sort of career shift. Just get a short training course and start building stuff and applying for jobs. University degrees are, fundamentally, a mark of status and patience: “this guy had enough money and willpower to sit through years of drudgery, so it’s safe to hire him to do the same for us”. After a few years nobody cares what the degree was actually about, particularly in…

I have projects that people consider impressive already. Here is what I've been told from various managers-

>Only hire computer scientists

>I don't have relevant work experience (which means taking a 60k/yr web dev job to begin my career?)

>My projects are good, but I need to contribute to open source projects.

The reason for the degree is to get access to high quality programming jobs rather than 60k/yr web dev. Not to mention, I imagine I'll learn everything about security and algorithms which I'm sure are weaknesses.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#164

Post by toomanybeersies »

juped wrote: post #110
sdan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.

Be sure to get the 4.0 GPA too - it's very nice to have for surprisingly long. Absolutely don't "challenge yourself". You can do that when you're not being graded on it.

I haven't been asked what my GPA was since I got my first graduate job (which was a follow on from my internship), which is very convenient because I graduated with a shocking GPA.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#165

Post by bachmeier »

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…

I grew up on a farm. Went to a school in the countryside the first eight years. Went to high school on the Standing Rock Reservation.

I can with certainty say I did not have everything I needed to go off and have the best possible career. Not all of us were born into that type of situation.

I would not have become an economist without going to college and taking an economics class to fulfill a requirement. It was so right for me that I even got a PhD. Needless to say, that would not have happened if I had stuck around to take over my dad's excavating business or the family farm. [Edit: I was a licensed sewer and water installer before I graduated high school, so I was in a better place than a lot of high school grads.]

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#166

Post by throwaway9191a »

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…

> You don't need to go to university. We will always need garbage collectors and street sweepers, and remember, anyone can write bad software. Vendors continue to try to make it easier to do so.

This is why so many Americans view university as an elitist institution :) I agree about high school. High school is why I decided the education system was not for me (right or wrong, it was just a horrible experience).

I learned #1 while cold calling businesses to sell phone systems. You have to talk to people, make friends, and genuinely understand why companies operate the way they do. You can learn how large the world is without sitting in a classroom.

I learned #2... well in every job I've had.

What I feel I missed by not finishing university was the time to deeply understand a single subject. But then again, I was taking classes all over the spectrum. Maybe I was never meant for a deep understanding of a single subject.

OTOH, as far as recommending non-traditional paths, I wouldn't for my kids. I am extremely self driven. I never realized that most people are not this way.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#167

Post by blaser-waffle »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #157
motohagiography wrote: post #153

Telling people they don't "need" to go to university is an act of personal sabotage. The person giving you that advice is either an idiot, or wants to keep you in your place for other reasons. This is an urgent view. The post-hoc justifications of people who either didn't go, or people who did go but want to believe their other accomplishments are more defining - are not valuable to someone who has the means and oppo…

I don't disagree that degrees and college education are important, but I don't think pointing to wealthy people is good evidence. Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education. The reasons to attend college are mo…

> Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education.

Yeah there is some serious selection bias there -- Bill Gates' dad was a wealthy lawyer who sent his kid to a private school that had it's own computer systems in the 70s; Jobs lived down the street from one of the founders of HP, etc.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#168

Post by GoblinSlayer »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #41
mvind wrote: post #14

I think the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs. This is a perk that not a lot of jobs in the real world offers. Almost nowhere else in a person's life are you given such an opportunity to invest in ones interests. But I'm biased towards going to uni, since I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university.

> I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university You are, of course, doubly fortunate. > the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs The hypothetical awakening of a person's intelligence is a battle against much more dominant social conditioning. And then students self-select for narrowness of perspective in a programme. As you…

To go to STEM a person shouldn't be very social to begin with, so social conditioning traditionally doesn't register with them as a problem.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#169

Post by toomanybeersies »

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.

I get asked what university I attended, and when I tell them they always follow by asking where it is, as it's a foreign no-name university with no particular international standing. I'm always asked more as a curiosity than because they're judging me.

As far as undergraduate degrees go, most universities teach you the same thing, the only difference is that some universities are more selective in who can attend than others. I learned the same material at the University of Canterbury down at the bottom of the world in New Zealand as what undergrads learn at Stanford.

I guess it's a bit different if you live in a country where there's competitive university entry, in New Zealand most universities simply require that finished high school to enter, you pick you university for lifestyle reasons (usually either because it's close to home or because you want to escape home). I've discovered that here in Australia there's much more of a hierarchy of which university you attended, as admissions are much more competitive. I guess that's what happens when you have 6 universities in the same city.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#170

Post by throwaway9191a »

analog31 wrote: post #156
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…

I was going to make the snap judgment that HN happens to be popular among computer programmers, an occupation that is fairly unique in terms of providing lucrative indoor work without strictly needing college training. Many of the programmers of my generation (graduated high school in 1982) have little or no formal training in programming. I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroo…

High school was a total disaster. I talked my way into the co-op program, and got an internship at a security company. I was only taking 4 classes my senior year. I did go to college for almost 12 weeks, but it wasn't working out.

I am honestly jealous of the people who say they valued their university experience. I really wish I could have enjoyed formal education that much.

My life was funded by the ability to walk into software development jobs. If I were born 5 years later, I would be a different (probably non-functioning) person.

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