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Comment by Simon321 | Hacker News Reader

To people recommending trades, there's nothing wrong with trades, but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise. The environment also naturally stimulates and values learning, gathering knowledge and understanding. You can learn how to become a better person and think more critically.

Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the people swallowing it, this seems more important than ever before.

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Some downsides of trades I have not seen mentioned yet are that many of them are hard on the body and/or somewhat risky. So you don't have as long a useful career as in most professions. My dad was a carpenter and I worked with him a few summers when I was young. He asked me how many 50-year-old roofers I had seen during those summers. A friend of his told me there is a reason you never see old welders and painters.

I agree that college should be for education and not 'to get a job'. But until the cost of college in the US comes back down to reality, it's going to fail the cost-benefit analysis.

I had a fantastic experience at college 25+ years ago. I went to a small liberal arts school, learned how to read and think well. I really appreciated that experience.

When I graduated with my degree in philosophy I went on to run a small climbing gym. I was able to jump into software development during the first internet bubble, where start-ups needed warm bodies who can learn quickly. Fortunately, I had scholarships and graduated with minimal debt. So...it all worked out pretty well. I'm not sure it's worth taking on crushing debt for that experience without a guarantee of a job.

That said, not every person is wired to go to college. There are plenty of trades that can foster the some sort of collegial experiences, if you find the right the person to train you. There are very thoughtful craftspeople out there.

>but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.

I hear this line parroted all the time, and it just rings so hollow. I can't remember any optional classes that I took in undergrad.

> You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.

I’m not so sure. Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?

> Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?

You don't. However, college isn't just a list of books to read, it also includes practical exercises and, most importantly, accountability mechanisms, and there is plenty of evidence that accountability mechanisms tend to improve performance.

Unless college has changed since I went (to a pretty average state school), you can do all that, but the default seemed to be to start off in a program that sounds cool, realize the science classes are too hard, change to an easier major a couple times, finish off your gen-eds with some random survey classes where you just have to write a couple short papers compatible with the professor's world-view, and stumble your way into a bachelor's degree.

The most interesting college classes I took tolerated non-majors reluctantly, if at all. The expectation was that people who were there to be "well-rounded humans" weren't going to take the course seriously.

From my time at college, any 'critical thinking' seemed to mostly be a way to spread the college's accepted narrative, which contains its own brand of disinformation.

Plenty of that misinformation is being swallowed and spread by people who went to college, so it's not clear that helped.

Plenty of that misinformation is being indoctrinated in people at college.

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