Do I need to go to university?

Why electrician? My father is a licensed (but not union) electrician and I used to work as his assistant when I was a teenager. The job was pretty boring, mostly driving to job sites, running cables, wiring them up, etc. It never struck me as an intellectually stimulating job. He had a book with a bunch of formulas in it (called Ugly's, iirc) that I would read while driving to sites sometimes, but it was plug-and-chug algebra.

> This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance to writing JavaScript for a living.

High school dropout here, no uni degree, I can write more than just JS thanks. I know C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, ruby, Typescript, Go. I know DDD, SOLID, TDD, and AOP. I have forgot more about Linux than most people will learn in a lifetime and I did all of it without attending one uni course. I come from a poverty background, grew up in a trailer park, got fucked up on all sorts of drugs and didn't do well in school. Some time in my early 20's I had a revelation that I was nobody and I was going to die poor and alone if I didn't get my act together. Sadly with my piss poor grades there was no way I was going to get a scholarship to pay my way through college, my family just made enough that I couldn't get finaid easily either. So I decided to wing it. I looked in the newspaper for high paying jobs, decided I wanted to be Systems Administrator, and looked up the skills required to be one. Did I get a sysadmin job? Hell no, I worked my way up from Help Desk to PC Tech, to Network Tech, to Systems Tech, to Systems Admin, to DevOps, and then to Sr. Software Developer, I'm now a Principal Engineer.

Here's the deal, I know bright people who made it through college and I know stupid people who made it through college, but I also know bright people who have worked their way up from the bottom, like myself. I've been working my way up since 2003. My personal opinion is that Uni is not only not for everyone, but that perhaps some industries, including software engineering, may work better on the guild system than in a class room.

Not to be pedantic, but more than "6" figures = >6 figures = 7 figures or more.

If you make $100,000 through $999,999, then you make six figures.

More than six figures implies $1,000,000 or more.

It’s weird in the UK. I think framing it as a £50k (ish) loan is bad but also the loan structure is bizarre. It’s basically a tax on being a graduate which for some reason is higher (over the 30 years you have it) for people who make a medium amount of money than for people who make a smaller or higher amount of money.

Ultimately it doesn’t particularly punish people for getting a degree which isn’t worth much because if their degree isn’t worth much then they are less likely to have to pay much of the tax. And I think people are still statistically better off going even if you take the tax into account.

I find it weird because I can’t work out what it is trying to punish. At least with income tax there are arguments that better paid people are able to contribute more and so they should. But with the student “loans” it seems like it’s trying to discourage people from getting a degree which confers them a moderate advantage in income. It doesn’t seem to discourage degrees that are in some sense not worth the government’s money. I guess one way to look at it is that they wanted something that looked like loans but wasn’t burdensome and also had an interest rate that wouldn’t go to 0 if the base interest rates were very low and that’s how we ended up with the system.

It’s also means tested which seems fair but I think can be quite hard for the families on the various boundaries.

>I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom.

I think the vast majority has technically learned maths and physics outside the college classroom. The teaching quality I'm getting at my university isn't the greatest (bar a few exceptions), and I find myself regularly going to Khan Academy or 3blue1brown to understand a concept better. This is learning outside the classroom!

In a lot of ways, I find universities to be assessment centres and certificate issuers. Not in all ways of course, certain aspects such as labs, coordination of group projects, someone to ask questions to get back to you instantly, are all things which cannot be replaced in any circumstance. But when it comes to the dry theoretical stuff, I'm not sure why I would go to a lecture if I know I can get a better quality of teaching somewhere else online.

Of course this is only true for a few subjects (maths and entry level physics/engineering). I unfortunately have to rely on the lectures provided for the more specialist modules I'm being assessed on (such as heat transfer and chemical engineering principles). This is mainly so that I can comply with the teacher's specific assessment criteria and the terminology/definitions/textbook/ordering they use. I may be able to find heat transfer explanations somewhere else online, and they probably would explain things better, but they wouldn't help much when it came time to use the terminology that the lecturer expects you to use during an assessment, or if you're expected to use the equation sheet that the teacher made for you and expects you to use.