College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life
americandreaming.substack.com
americandreaming.substack.com
College can still be affordable. The specific college you want, the one that other people have heard of outside an eight-county radius, dorm living the whole time, out-of-state tuition, famous professors, guest lecturers whose names are well-known... well, probably not.
Just checked, the one I went to is about $18k/yr now, in-state tuition & fees. That's roughly an inflation-rate increase since when I went. You'll likely have some debt without scholarships or parental help, but a college job can keep that under control. CLEP out of a couple early classes, take advantage of that tuition being flat-rate rather than per-hour(!), and it's very manageable. Start at a community college and transfer, and the numbers look even better.
This is purely from a software development context and obviously doesn’t apply outside, but Given that choice is almost just eschew college period. I have not seen good quality programs at a small schools and I imagine you also lose out in quality of employer sourcing, networking etc.
The time cost alone would make it seem that it’s better just to break into the field without education. It’s not easy, but it’s not particularly difficult either.
I definitely see your point and - as an european outsider - understand and agree with you. However, I think your perspective is strictly linked to the US experience. University should not only be a place to pursue a career, or at least they should not advise it as such. It's a formation experience in different aspects. Obviously, your perspective change when it's so financially demanding.
How long ago was it? I only ask because my eldest child is currently at university, and I believe the experience I had in the 1980s and she has now are fundamentally different. The academic, financial and employment landscape has changed a lot in the past 20-30 years, and that creates different pressures for both students and institutions.
I now firmly believe doing a vocational, or at least employment-friendly, course at a local college or university, and probably living at home as a result is the best course of action for most students.
My co-op income in the last 3 years completely covered costs for those years, and I worked as an intern and took on-campus jobs the first two years to cover those, in combination with financial aid (HOPE).
It's slightly more now (I just checked tuition for the 2021 year, it's ~12k, so the total yearly cost would probably be around 15k now), but still SO MUCH BETTER than paying private or out of state rates.
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My advice
- Live on campus for at least a year if you can, you end up with a much better social group, and more contacts in general. Plus no car/vehicle/commute expenses.
- Take every job you can get while doing it (I interned in labs, taught classes, and then jumped into the co-op program as early as possible)
- Live with as many roommates as you can tolerate, and move off campus once you know some folks (we split a house rental 6 ways)
- Don't fuck around. I consistently took the limit for class hours (or within an hour of the limit) and did not have to re-take any classes. The first rule is: Go to your damn classes, you're at a job, not a spa. If you can't make it to your classes, reconsider if college is for you.
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 absolutely tearing into the current implementation of higher education, but I’ve spent most of my life as an observer and I definitely see now some huge benefits of higher education outside a piece of paper and lectures.
My biggest frustration is that non-traditional students (outside a single demographic being ex-military) are thrown to the wayside or straight up scammed by otherwise legitimate colleges. When I first started looking at going back I was dumbfounded when schools were more interested in my high school disciplinary record and not really interested in my established professional and experience.
One popular state research university near me started offering online programs for “professional and non traditional students” but the only degrees offered are “useless liberal arts degrees” (think degrees that are used as the punchline in political slurring battles) or “made up” degrees that aren’t remotely related to any on-campus program, are often worse than the aforementioned liberal arts degreee and are designed for no other reason but to extract money from poor people. A lot of them also have jumped in the bootcamp hype. I can’t tell you how much spam I’ve seen from universities wanting me to join the Cybersecurity bootcamp.
Again this is not your typical For-profit university, this is a respected state school with best on the nation programs in certain areas.
lol what? Do high schools even have those records anymore a decade plus after the fact?
Everything about the undergrad process seems designed for a 17/18 year old kid who spent the last 4 years grooming themselves for that specifically.
It makes sense of course, as that’s probably the majority of people starting undergrad, but it does suck for anyone else, especially since the system is very bureaucratic and inflexible. See: how the financial aid system determines your dependent status, hint it’s not what the IRS says. It was pretty akward the first time I v tried to go back, and informed adult who had been on my own for some years at that point having to call up my father and see if he was willing to give me all sorts of sensitive information because despite have it paid my own since 18, the education system related me “dependent”. The only logic behind your status is if you’re under 24 or not (with leniency only for extreme situations such as being an orphan, homeless, or having both parents incarcerated)
I also attended a local state school, graduated in 5 years, but doing a co-op program every other semester the last 3, making decent money at the time ($17 an hour) and getting real work experience.
I left with no debt, 2 years of real work experience, and a solid degree from a respected university (GA Tech).
The college debate is so messy because the outcome is highly dependent on what you want out of it.
I think for most of the arts - if you want to practice that art, you're far better off skipping college. The folks teaching there are not practitioners, they're professors in the subject. They will help you become an academic in the space, and that's likely not what you're after.
- Chose affordable option to my situation (private but religious school that I was then an adherent of)
- Graduate school after a few years working in industry; PhD so route was "paid for" with starvation wages. Had two kids during the process. Worked to supplement. Took loans but paid off w/in two years (interest rate stacking put that at the highest return).
- Success in industry came by hard work and by being genuine with colleagues and coworkers as to my capabilities, desires, etc.
I came from a poorer/low middle class background. College was a real improvement for my situation, and for others I've kept in touch with over the years from my hometown or similar situations.
Not all of us went into the highest middle class type roles, and some of us married into families with high assets or got lucky with astute business acumen. But those dice rolls aside, college was a qualitative net positive.
Graduation years were late 2000s undergrad, mid 2010s grad. So, not too far removed from the current experience.
The author says that for STEM college often seems of value, but for students without the skill or aptitude to pursue high-skill degrees that exit into a pool of job opportunities it is awash.
If you are not already wealthy spending large sums of debt on a degree that won’t get you paid more is objectively luxury spending at the negative cost of your future self. How many degrees increase income earning potential?
On the flip side, it’d be straw that broke the camels back for my social life. I’d go from being one of the youngest people everywhere I go go probably one of the oldest.
It was mid-2000s, I lucked out and graduated and got a job just prior to the great recession and for a few reasons this was a huge boost for me as I had a limited number of inbound new hires to compete with for the first ~5 years. People would pay a premium for my "2 years experience" instead of hire new grads.
Tuition has risen about the same as the pay for the job I worked in college. I will admit it was a decent job as "un-degreed college job" goes. It was a job that several folks were making a career of (~$15-20/hour in mid-2000s). This job was in a 24/7 hospital environment so I was able to work whenever I wanted and usually worked 12 hour shifts on TTS and stacked my classes on MWF. I'd do homework afterwards and on Sundays I had no class or school. The biggest "regret" of doing it this way is the social experience I had is not as fun as most. Although, I was very self aware of that and the regimen actually helped me stay focused. I partied a lot in high school and nearly dropped out and in the end had to cram 4 years of classes in 1 semester + a summer. I did the self paced "alternative school" thing where you read the textbook and take proctored tests to pass the course. I loved that method as I always felt taking 1 or 2 semester to cover a single text book in 1 hour a day was a horrible approach to [my style of] learning. [I also taught myself to code around this time, built a lot of side projects, and realized my learning style is well suited for that, I can just read the docs - I don't need to take a class.]
If I was doing the same now, I think the biggest challenge would be affording housing. I paid about $400-500/month for a 1/1 in Austin back then. One year I had a roommate but even split the rent still worked out about the same, and we got a newer nicer 2/2 apartment. COL in Texas was much lower then, especially the major cities.
* Went to a local state school on a scholarship plus 50k loans. Paid off the loans over a few years. Was never really a terrible burden even when I was making <50k
* Worked over the summers
* Got to study abroad for 6 months, made a very strong group of friends, and met my wife
* Got to pursue anything I was interested before finally settling on CS
My default state is that my children will be attending college.
Fast-forward a few years into the economic downturn of the early 1990's and the company I worked at for my third job collapsed overnight. The market was flooded and I had a really difficult time finding another job because I didn't have a college degree.
I finally got another job and even better, they paid for me to go back to school. I went back to Ohio State year-round taking a couple courses per quarter (they were still on the quarter system back then). By that time I was married, into my mid-to-late twenties and able to avoid all the student life BS. I knew exactly the weaknesses in my knowledge, tested out of as many of the basic courses as they'd let me, and learned a lot.
One of the benefits I got from testing out of so many courses was I still needed hours - they cleared prerequisites but I maxed-out the hours. That means I was eligible to take a lot of graduate-level courses. I took all the core courses comprising their Masters program. Like, I said, I learned a lot.
And my employer paid for it all! The most shocking thing is after I graduated my employer gave me a 50% raise! I even said, hey!, my job hasn't changed I'm doing the same thing now as I was doing a month before I graduated. Their response? Your market rate is different, you're more valuable now. You're a Staff Engineer with a degree.
College paid off great for me!
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 for a 4-year degree.
That's about double what it was when I attended, IIRC, which isn't too bad given how long ago that was. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but ~$12K per year seems doable for just about anyone who can manage to work a part time job and / or get scholarships.
If you go through their business school, comp-sci program, marine-biology, or other practical degree programs, my guess is you'll probably come out ahead in the end.
I'll admit, I don't watch the college town apartment cost trends.
They put highest total at $27,091, or basically right within your 30k projection.
That said, 30k is basically full time at $15/hr, so that’s probably too high of an assumption if the hypothetical student is to graduate in 4 years. Though it is doable (I worked full time through college).
FWIW a lot of the nurses I know are desperate to get out. One person in particular I know makes ok money but the schedule absolutely destroys them.
Fucking Christ this is cheap?
> marine-biology
I don’t think this is a very useful degree. Don’t most biologists have to go through the PhD/PostDoc trying before they can find a job in the field paying more than $30k.
Marine biology was a bad choice of example, I’ll grant you.
Now film school might have a component of that, or maybe it is teaching you how to launch projects and bring people together. Or perhaps it is "worthless" as the author claims. I have never been to film school so I cannot guess.
However, it seems the author's issue may be a change in curriculum: "A degree in film is absolutely worthless for obtaining work in the film industry. What matters are connections, professional experience, and the ability to raise large sums of money. Those aren’t things film school can teach you."
Perhaps the film school should add some courses on networking, fund raising and an internship at film shoots?
> Perhaps the film school should add some courses on networking, fund raising and an internship at film shoots?
If you go to film school not knowing the quoted hot take above, you've watched or read zero about the industry, history, etc. of film making.
i did a film project in high school, and i am involved in one now. if i were to go to college now i might think, hey this is fun. i would not even consider the idea that film-school would not help me get a job in the film industry. that's totally counter intuitive.
the only way to address that is to put picking a career onto the high school curriculum, and make the necessary research a class assignment. and once the students have made some potential choices bring in veterans from those industries to talk to the students about their choices.
Most people learn that by grade 10. College should be for highly specialized skill learning.
We wish! Most of the students I've known outside of stem will make sure they prove you wrong ;)
Sadly, it seems that 80% of college grads somehow never learn critical thinking. In my experience, non-STEM classes are not very good at teaching critical thinking, but perhaps that was just an artifact of the university I attended.
IMO even most college graduates can't read or write worth a damn. Possibly they can think, but it's hard to tell.
That's kinda true about everything though and it's called business. I still remember a speaker from my stem undergrad first year who came in and asked whether we were more interested in :
A. Learning stem theories. B. Making money.
Maybe 3 out of 100 raised their hands to go with option B. Most of us where like, this guy doesn't know we're not in a business school right...
It took me a long time to realize it's all about business :/
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 have to delegate tasks. There are all kinds of soft skills that are learned in the completion of any degree program, and people usually take them for granted because they never studied for that specific thing, their project management skills were never tested directly.
true in principle, and I don't totally disagree. but I have two counter-counter arguments.
first, at least in my experience, is that humanities focus a lot on the procedural elements of writing Scholarly Papers. you do learn about constructing good arguments and writing style to an extent. but a lot of time is spent on those highly specialized bits that don't really matter outside of academia.
second, writing is often required in stem majors too! the volume of writing was definitely less than in humanities courses, but I wrote lots of reports and documentation for my CS major. some of that was very contrived, but I don't feel it was less helpful than writing a million english or history papers.
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
True, but you can also teach yourself to do those things too. For me, the ROI of time/effort/money seems off for almost all degrees other than STEM if you have to borrow money to achieve them.
However, most people would not naturally put in the same effort and for those people, there is a lot of value in the structure.
How much has a lot to do with the particular school, career path, scholarship money and so forth.
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 going to parties and clubs, nobody seemed to be curious about anything in the world. It seemed more a goal to "be a writer" than to "write," for instance.
Most of the world is like this, for sure. But I spent some $30k a year to attend. What was that money for? What did I get out of it?
I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities. Kind of odd given the never-ending cries of "we need engineers to learn more ethics!" from journalists who themselves never bother to learn to code.
This reflects the world as a whole. Most people aren't curious about things that don't directly affect them, so I'm not surprised to see it reflected in the college population.
Many people in the US treat college as a vocational school, probably in large part because the US pushed hard to increase college attendance. So 75 years ago, someone would graduate high school and apprentice at a job and work their way up, today, they likely start at colloege then jump into the labor force, but they pick their major based on the job they want (just like apperenticing in a field.)
Personnaly, I treated college as an instructor led encyclopedia, and just took classes I wanted to learn about. I have never earned a penny with the degrees I received, but I never intended to. Most of my college carreer was spend in tandem with working a full time job. I've only stopped college for a while because my job is sucking up too much of my time. Once I retire, I'll go back to college to get a PhD in math (probabilities, specifically) as background for what I want to study in philosophy (bayesian epistomology)
I suspect this is a bias on your part. It's certainly been my experience that people into the humanities are curious about different things than STEM types; some people have no inclination towards building things, or learning about quantum mechanics, or solving problems in complex analysis. But they might be able to talk your ear off about Edith Wharton or Nazi themes to be found in Heidegger's Being and Time.
At least where I went to school people studying the humanities were not appreciably less curious or more "here because I have to be" than engineers.
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 comparable positions in the humanities (poetry, creative writing, that kinda thing), when we chat about the goings-on in our respective classes we all come to the same conclusion regardless of academic background: students are just incurious in general. Not all, but most. 80%-90% maybe. They spend a lot of effort optimizing exactly to the requirements of every assignment, treating the work as transactional – I check the boxes, you award the points. This forces teachers to adapt their teaching style to a different set of expectations.
Teaching any material past purely practical knowledge for the exam is usually met with blank stares. While this could certainly say more about my rhetorical abilities as lecturer than it does about "kids these days", it's pretty clear to see that college in the US has become nothing more than a glorified credentialing institution. I wonder if this doesn't have something to do with the way public schools are run, mostly teaching to the test and thus preparing students how to retain only the information necessary for success by that metric.
If our cultural expectation of college is that it provides job training and nothing else, then students' attitudes (consciously or not) are going to reflect that.
That's surprising. I found that the humanities students (sans Communications) were far more intellectually curious. My friends in Philosophy, Classics, Economics^1, and Art were particularly great. Communications not so much.
Out of curiosity, did you attend a public "Tech"/"Mines and Ags" style university? At least in my state, that university was famous for churning out stereotypical engineer types and everything I heard from high school friends who attended sounded a lot like your assessment -- the STEM folks were incurious at best and huamanities was worse (because who would go to a Tech for a huamanities degree?)
--
^1: At the college where I did my undergraduate, the Economics degree was kind of non-standard and really was more of a humanities degree.
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.
I would love the opportunity to engage my curiosities, sadly school is expensive as shit and the only way it seems possible is to be wealth now or take a vow of poverty.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
In my experience, this was not really the case. A lot of STEM people I met were very interested in some topics, but were either a) only superficially interested in things like ethics; b) only interested in a very specific view of ethics (some form of ultra techno-utilitarianism/utopianism for instance); or, c) immediately dismissive of whole conversations or areas of research without actually bothering to engage in any of the discussions. The more galling thing is they often thought that they could simply comment on those topics without any of the research. So just as there are journalists calling for people to learn ethics without learning to code, there are people who work on code who comment on art, or history, or philosophy, with little to no understanding of the long debates and research in those fields. It really goes both ways.
TBH, I don't think it's really about the whole STEM v. Humanities thing that people make it all about. It's really about the cost of higher education across the board.
For sure, in the US currently there aren't many alternatives, so this might be practical advice for the current situation. But that isn't how this argument is framed most of the time. Instead, it's often more akin to "poor suckers going to college, haha I beat the system!" as if skipping higher education altogether is something to be proud of.
In other countries in the world, university is cheap or free, has flexible time commitments, and isn't necessarily pushed as something you have to do at 18 or you will miss out. But there still IS widespread access to higher education.
I just find it depressing that we are turning to the idea of less education, not more, because the system sucks so bad that we can't envision change.
(I'm an American who moved to Quebec for college-- where university is $2700/year and there is a growing movement to make it free for all-- and then stayed here)
Seems obvious to me that the current college system is hugely antiquated and misaligned with student interests. The main thing perpetuating it is cultural attitudes, which does a huge disservice to the youth IMO
I regretted college while I was in college, but I was already on a debt treadmill. I am a vocal anti-college (in the US in its current form) advocate. Start a business instead. Fail. Learn.
But times and technology has changed. The antique system that is education needs to be completely upended. And, in the process, be made affordable again.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/free-college-is-now-a-realit...
https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/107044086-164943354866...
Do people who paid theirs off, get their money back?
>it will still benefit you. When your peers are less beholden to their jobs because of their debt shackles, they can ask more of their employers, which will also raise your working conditions. Sometimes life isn't 100% fair, and that sucks and I'm sorry. But looking at it objectively, it's still an improvement for you. (And, "I suffered, so others must suffer, too" isn't a great way to set policy regardless.)
The most recent serious proposal for canceling debt pays for it by adding a 0.5% tax on stock trades[1]. I'm not really convinced that people gambling on the stock market are "functional members of society," and it's certainly not all members of society that gamble on the stock market. If you have enough money to play around with on the stock market, yeah, you can absorb a tiny tax on your gambling for the good of society. Most people won't be affected by the tax[2].
[1] https://berniesanders.com/issues/free-college-cancel-debt/ which also sources https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02692171.2018.14...
[2] "56% of American adults own stock... American families hold an average of $40,000 worth of stocks". This would not be a significant tax on the vast majority of Americans. https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/
Literally every single person investing money in the stock market adds more to society than a student debt non-payee.
Just got my payslip this month and I'm paying $16K in tax why should that money go to paying off your mistakes and also when I hear that it will be paying off your mistakes I'm sorry but I'm quitting my job and going full leech mode, the government will never see a single tax dollar from my work as long as I live. Just gonna live off handouts and pump out 8+ kids.
Think people with your thinking are completely naive to how thin the line is that keeps society productive. Some of us are getting real tired of carrying the burden of your poor decisions.
I'm pretty good at earning money when I contribute to society, I'm happy to switch that energy to exploiting society, I'm close to the edge on this, all it's gonna take is a few more things I consider stupid and I'm switching. Think it's high time productives start holding non-productives ransom instead of us being threatened with stupid spending of our hard work.
Hahaha, okay buddy. Let me know how that goes.
IMO, college is one of many possible options to success. They all have trade offs, and there is no universal answer that fits all of the addressable market.
If you do not go to college, you have some benefits (no cost/debt, earlier involvement in an industry), but also some drawbacks (less of a social network, less insight into how some mechanisms of business and career work, etc.).
At my local top-50 CS school, the one useful course on things like React, Angular and Vue, was pretty much cancelled because the Chairman apparently didn't want to "turn the place into a trade school." They refused to even give the adjunct an office.
Kind of like complaining that a Material Science curriculum is dated because it teaches Material Science instead of Civil Engineering or the construction trade.
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.
It's not.
> CS can't be dated because you have a list of what is considered CS and your list is a single source of truth.
CS curriculum can be dated, if it doesn't keep up with progress in the domain. It doesn't become dated just because you want to do something other than CS.
(It may be the case that the percentage of working programmers in jobs where a CS degree is a particularly relevant on-ramp has declined; that's certainly true for both EE and Mathematics, but those degrees aren't outdated, either.)
> 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.
They are useful, they just aren't useful for the task you want to do, which isn't computer science, or something which requires particular depth in computer science.
Compilers remain useful, as does the skill to construct them, even if it's not the job you expect to be competing for. More broadly, theory is useful, it's just you don't expect to be seeking jobs that are either doing research moving the field forward or building systems that require more than rudimentary theory.
“Not what I want” isn't the same thing as “outdated”.
The same goes for theory. It's fun to learn but the reality is that none of the machines have infinite tape and the interesting Turing machine diagonalization proofs pretty much depend upon this feature. Many of the hierarchies collapse without assuming infinite RAM.
Again, you're waving your hands and saying they're useful. Maybe you can find the use for them. Good for you. But I don't see it that often. When I learned that Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, didn't create their own compiler for Swift, I knew that studying compilers was like studying buggy whips. There are a few folks at Colonial Williamsburg that want to understand buggy whip science. They can say with a straight face that it's useful. But it's not for 99% of the CS graduates.
For me, it's all connected in a big web, and it's very difficult to find a piece of knowledge that wasn't applicable at some point. I feel like I'd be lying if I said my career were not helped by taking compiler theory, even though I never was hired to write a compiler. It's all part of my knowledge base that I bring to bear to solve any problem.
For those of us without infinite tape/time to simulate our undergraduate years, we have to make tough calls. You can call it a trade to try to elevate the science. You can imagine hypothetical futures when something become useful. You can suggest that it informs some other decision. Those are all fair rhetorical positions. I'm just saying that there's plenty of information in the modern curriculum that's just not useful to most people pursuing most careers.
The idea that we should pay out of pocket for our own training before even knowing we'll break into a field is pretty absurd, if one takes a moment to think about it.
Sure, that's the traditional approach for a few highly specialized fields, but by and large it's obviously going to cause a huge misallocation of resources, along with enormous debt.
Obviously that’s not for everyone. You don’t need to go to college to do any of that either. It’s a signal that you may have learnt something and may have some smarts if you went to a good school. Beyond that if you’re sharp and GSD on the job, that ultimately outweighs everything else. How you get there - doesn’t have to be via college.
I have yet to find a job where these things are not true. In fact, I very much doubt there’s a job where it is your diploma that gets you that job. It’s almost always your connections. Your diploma from Stanford is more l likely to get you a job because of the name than your success in studying there.
I finished my degree 15 years into my career as a self-taught developer. I probably didn’t need to get it. I do think it made me a more well-rounded person. And I’m proud of myself for accomplishing something that was not easy, by any stretch.
Fields like fashion and journalism, on the other hand? Unless Mom or Dad has someone who owes them a favour you'll find there are far more graduates than jobs. Compounded with a nigh-endless supply of people willing to work unpaid internships in the hopes of one day getting paid.
I'm not saying higher education is perfect, but it's always been the case that some degrees do nothing to further your career or get you a job.
Throw enough darts at the board, and a bunch will turn out winners for the benefit of all. A bunch will turn out losers though (anecdote provided by OP).
It's probably a losing wager for individuals, but it benefits the economy as a whole.
For every 100 kids (insert your own preferred ratio) for whom film was just a phase, we generate a rockstar who changes the world for all of us.
The amazing thing is that there are always more individuals that have the audacity to keep trying.
For example, if your creative aspirations lie in youtube, or twitch, or instagram, or tiktok - mostly they just start doing it, self-educating about things like lighting and lenses.
Tech people have been repeating this bullshit since the days when Slashdot was the HN. Maybe earlier. It's always been 99% false and 0% true, with 1% "it depends" (please spare us that bullshit).
IQ and IQ-like employment proficiency testing is literally an entire cottage industry.
> There is no compelling reason why s/w engineering couldn't be taught on an apprenticeship model
Two reasons, without thinking particularly hard:
1. Why internalize a cost that can be externalized?
2. Who's doing the mentoring? Senior Engineers make $300K-$600K. Professors make $60K-$200K. Most CS educators make less than their students' first year offers. So, even if you internalized the cost, you'd run it as a stand-alone training program as opposed to embedded apprenticeships. Which, btw, is what companies with "learn to code career pathways"tend to do.
> Do you have a high G score? You may be good at software.
I know lots of geniuses -- in the sense of high Putnam scores even -- who are clever programmers but couldn't SWE their way out of a wet paper bag. I also know a lot of folks who are not particularly bright but who are really fantastic SWEs.
It's not clear to me that IQ is a good predictor of SWE performance for most SWE roles, any more than it's a good predictor for literally any job (including checkout clerk or fry cook, btw).
IME certain types of Software folks massively over-estimate their own intelligence and also the importance of IQ-like intelligence required to be excellent in 99% of software development roles.
My ability as a software engineer to effortlessly shift between industries is directly due to the broad college education I received. Software apprenticeships would only lead to a largely immobile workforce stuck in one or two particular technologies.
There seems to be this perception in some circles that software engineering is a handful of senior or principal software engineers tediously writing very detailed stories with specifications for hundreds of junior software engineers to crunch out without thinking. This is, without a doubt, one of the most expensive and least efficient means of software development. It's also what an apprenticeship system without college gets you.
They do, proper IQ tests have a language component. Properly reading, understanding and writing text is very much related to IQ.
One started as a wire guy in television and worked his way up to a producer now, the other one I got a job in corporate banking and he moonlit in a wedding video company. He has his own wedding video company now.
I wasted my college experience as an awkward introvert. I didn't take college to be a time to make connections with my professors, I didn't take the time to see it as a time of ecosystem of closeness you'd never have again.
I was way to shell-shocked inwards. The becoming an adult wasn't something I was ready for yet. I look back at all the opportunities I had to really learn interesting things and network and grow and frown because I was still in my high school 'just survive school' mentality. I did as little as I could to get through each class.
When asked, I now tell young people not to waste their time with college. Almost no one I know works in the field which they studied in college, they're just steeped in useless debt. It's a scam.
If you want to do science of computation, halting problem, P?=?NP, lambda calculus, good. Those are legitimate to study, and to write papers about. But studying them does not prepare you to engineer systems.
You'd think with the popularity of 'antiwork' attitudes, people would notice that few people are inherently motivated to snake out clogged toilets. It's not for everyone.
Look though the HR depts. of FAANGs and you'll find a lot of people with humanities degrees who are making good incomes. It's not the dead end field that's often suggested.
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 girl pregnant in high school, dropped out and started working and got married often had the best outcomes...anecdotal evidence...but there is some logic behind it...
I'm the lucky one. I went to college, graduated at the bottom of my class because I was working 40 hours a week trying to stay afloat. I was the first of my class to get a job, the only one with a job before graduation. After about 2 years, I was making six figures and have for the last 8 years.
I'm lucky. Today I'm closing on my second house. The first one I bought 6 years ago with only $9,000 down on a 3% conventional loan has ballooned in value to give us a home 2.5x the space with over $240,000 down. $9000 into $240,000 in 6 years. Magic.
I have a wife and a kid. Lucky. Waited until I was 30 to have a kid. He's almost 3 now. The best outcomes? If I had a kid at 18, he'd be 12 and I'd be poor, never had gone to college. I would have either worked a full time job, retail or restaurants only in my small colorado town and never had the opportunity to go to college, to get internships and work part time. After community college, I went to state school and started working 40-50 hours a week. Multiple internships to reduce the debt.
If you were self-taught in IT or development, then you essentially won. Even the junior worker does well. You could self teach way faster than a degree program. If you were stuck to retail just trying to make ends meet, then you were fucked, comparatively.
If you were former enlisted military and did IT/dev/security and have a clearance, you can easily beat out civilian IT or development with salary and probably work twice as less. I bet it's even more ludicrous for former officers. So does that mean military is better than college?
Even though there were studies on lifetime incomes for degree-holders vs. not, there are a wide number of options so that you can avoid being a statistic.
College would have been great if internet education had never been a thing.
I don't have statistics handy, so that's just my feel...
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"
I would say it's true for academia and some other fields that a college degree is required. It has not been true in my experience with technology. Experience and demonstrable skills trump education. Certification also helps. This does vary from company to company, so I am sure there are some people on here that disagree with me based on their own experience.
With that said, I work in InfoSec (as a dev/manager) so I suspect my experience might not be the typical one.
Also I am curious what HN's thoughts are on general education requirements in the US. It was something put in place in the 60's[1] in an attempt to prevent specialization[2] in education. I am wondering if it's time to reduce that requirement and go with more focused degrees similar to the UK.
Also Gen Ed courses seem like a real money makers for US Universities since there is not scaled tuition. A human lit class costs the same as a STEM course that could require very expressive lab equipment. I am not trying to down play the importance of human literature in this scenario. It just seems odd that it would cost the same as a organic chemistry class that requires a multi million dollar lab, a wide assortment of chemicals, and a staff equipped to maintain it throughout the day.
[1]. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1090127 [2]. https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/encyclopedias-almanac...
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.
The article talks about film degrees being not very useful long-term. This should not be something that requires taking 100k of debt out of and we should not push teenagers to take on these loans.
For civic professions like teachers, librarians, medicine (nursing): These are jobs that are required for a functioning society. We should not push 100k of debt for a 40k/yr job. Wipe out the debt after a number of years of service.
I am not at all disappointed with my decision to attend university, I make plenty of money to pay loans due to being in an affluent career (software engineering). The article calls out that STEM, Doctors, etc should have university-level education and I agree. Let's get away from having students rack up 100's of thousands of dollars on debt for degrees that don't provide that value over 10-20 years to the receiver.
Not many 18 year olds would have the ability to jump right into an industry, film in your example. So for them, I can imagine the benefits to going to college being learning/refining their skills, creating a portfolio, and building a network. That’s not mentioning extra things like making friends, learning about other subjects, and other social aspects.
Of course if you think you already have all that, then maybe college isn’t for you.
My family was lower middle class. My parents made ends meet and worked their asses off to do that. There was no way they could have saved for my college. I filled out FASFA and they had nothing to offer me because my parents made too much money (~40k at the time) and also probably because I only had a B+ GPA and I biffed the ACT and received a mediocre score.
I had a choice to take out loans and if I was lucky end up in an entry-level position making a quarter of my loan totals a year. I chose to make my computer hobby a career and my music/audio career a hobby. I taught myself web development and eventually back end development. I never went to college and I didn't spend my twenties paying off debts. I am eternally grateful for the choice 17 year old me made.
Since then, when something is purported to be a silver bullet or something _everyone_ must do I tend to look for a different direction.
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.
A guy I went to school with did econ and acting. He was working as a producer for a while, and I heard he's going to be in a Netflix show
Well you're very unlikely to get a job with any degree without writing a resume, attending job fairs, networking etc., the degree is helpful but not sufficient.
Film school is a place where you've got the equipment, you've got people there who want to work on projects with similar profiles to yourself, and you've got experienced faculty who have been paid to teach you stuff and who are on the lookout themselves for really good students to refer to their industry friends. It's a place you go to to create a fucking awesome portfolio, so that you can be taken seriously when you network. Of course schools don't put that in the brochure, because they are businesses in a competitive field, so they try to talk up what you can get if you go to their place in particular. You have to figure this out for yourself.
Obviously this is just a single anecdote but I think it does show that it is possible to succeed if you really take advantage of the resources that are available to you in school.
There are universities - and I mean well-renowned universities - all across the globe where people can get a degree without necessarily having to go into an obscene amount of debt.
A degree may not be for everyone indeed, but we don't have to assume these issues have to necessarily be part of the process.
People say college (esp. liberal arts) teaches critical thinking, but in my experience, succeeding in liberal arts classes is about going to office hours and figuring out what the professor wants to hear in your essay.
Related: My friend - smartest I've ever known - wasn't a great writer, but got a perfect score on the SAT writing section by memorizing the SAT word list and making an absolutely incomprehensible essay where almost every word was a bastardized thesaurus word for what word should have been used (and many just didn't make sense at all). Undoubtedly, it was a bad essay. But simply because they couldn't read it and it sounded smart, they awarded him the perfect score.
I mean, it's a virtual requirement for more than that. If you want to work a white collar job of almost any type it's much harder if you don't have some kind of college degree. It may only barely be possible unless you're particularly skilled at something or good at finding and chasing opportunities. Accountants, social workers, therapists, teachers, middle managers, HR people, supply chain specialists, city planners ... low and high paid positions of all types ostensibly require a college degree in many cases. I'm sure there are people without degrees doing some of these things, but it's more of an uphill battle.
At least when I graduated in 1998, I only had loans of around $8K, since the course back then was free to take, in the US, I can't believe the sums involved but when you see the gravy train and insecurity in some institutions, it is no wonder they rinse their students for as much as possible.
I think we are seeing more routes now into work that look more like traineeships especially in comp-sci and other technical roles.
But this sounds like the exact opposite of what the OP did; there was no long-term planning involved in their decision, they just did what was expected of them. We can argue the huge impact of the established norm "Thou shall attend College" but that's not what happened here. It sounds like they could have studied anything but choose film, then were suprised that immediately out of school were not handed the keys to a multi-million dollar enterprise. Hey, me too, and everyone else regardless of industry or domain.
If you don't think you need to go to university, you are precisely the person who should go to university, as unlike the long tail of people who actually go, your consideration and self-reflection alone means it's almost uniquely the right bet.
I initially went to tradeschool, before college. This was a reflection of self-confidence. I hated it. I often didn't have important tools or had them stolen, I didn't connect with anyone, and there was frankly a lot of standing around and waiting for your turn, there was a substantial lack of written reference material if you so happened to miss what a prof says (and their attention was always monopolized by 1-2 guys). I also didn't want to work graveyard shifts and 12 hour days.
Trades median pay (salary.com):
* Plumber $59,698
* Carpenter $58,542
* Journeyman Welder $51,413
* Electrician $61,350
I've wondered at times whether it was worth it or not. I'd been programming since I was 8 and for the most part I only felt like I learned something in a handful of the upper division CS classes (computer architecture set up my love of FPGAs, operating systems was another favorite). The math classes are something I'm happy I was exposed to.
I do know that I matured significantly though. I also obtained a large group of friends that I stay in contact with to this day.
Prestigious schools are worth the connections/friends you will make. Always take it if you are offered to go to Harvard, Princeton, MIT etc;
If you get into your regular state college etc then just do 2 years community first and save money. You won't make friends with wealthy/connected people in the same way you would at a prestigious university.
Are they?
One of my good friends went to Harvard. He was of a rural blue collar background (he got his admissions file and it had some real gems in it). The only lasting connections he made there were the handful of other people of blue collar backgrounds he crossed paths with in his degree and he has stated he doesn't really think the network was worth the suffering of living in the Boston area for 4yr. It's not like he met a bunch of people who were going to go on to have rocket ship careers in high finance. He met a bunch of people who were going to parlay that Harvard piece of paper into a stable white collar existence.
>Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-th...
College doesn’t make success, it just gives you a set of tools. Ultimately you have to do the work. I am not convinced this author has really put in the work.
That said, financially it was too expensive. I hope certificate courses on campus gain more traction as a cheaper alternative to a Bachelor's and people can still form networks in person vs Zoom in the future.
I also hope campuses stop forcing people to live on campus in their overpriced, shitty apartments...
I stopped right there.
Making the debt non-defaultable isn't the solution. It's eliminating the credit.
In art industry diploma doesn't mean much. Portfolio and contacts are everything you need.
Everyone has known for a good few years that spending $100,000 on a film degree is not a high-ROI decision
Go study film in college if you want to know about film. Same with many, many other fields. It will transform your understanding of yourself and the world, and that is amazing. But just don't do it with the belief that you can study some obscure corner of history and then go make a living with that knowledge. If you want to get a job and support your life financially, then go into college with a different mindset. Be mercenary, figure out what you are good at that you can stand doing, and then compare that to the needs in the world, then develop the knowledge and skills in college that help you do that. And don't forget, it might be that college doesn't have what you need! Or only specific colleges.
Notice I don't say "follow your passion" - I think that's generally cruddy advice. Most people will be far happier finding what they are good at that society values. Passion for it will come later. Being good at something feels really good, when that something is rewarded by our culture.
If you are truly a "follow your passion" kind of person - you'll figure that out, because those kind of people can't not follow their passion. Their passion drives them, but they are exceedingly rare. Don't worry about it if you aren't that kind of person - many that I know that are like that often feel trapped by their passion. Especially if it is a passion that doesn't align with society's values.
College is a tool, find out if it is a tool that matches your life, and find that out by talking to people that have been through it, not by consuming media and university propaganda!
To be clear: I think going to college is awesome, and if you can afford it, study something you love, but with the understanding that you are doing it to make yourself a better human, not because of a financial benefit. I'd much rather work with someone that went to film school, and then learned coding online and is now a software developer and finds enjoyment in software where possible, and then uses the money to enjoy film in their own personal, idiosyncratic way. Then someone that went to school for CS, but really has no interest in the field, and is just another dull, unhappy drone.
Why do people keep doing this to themselves and why don‘t peers, parents and teachers advise them better.
Many of them then start screaming for the government (=tax payers) to bail them out, which is absurd to me.
The college wage premium is still wider than ever even after accounting for inflation and student loan debt and despite Covid and online learning.
Most grads major in 'actionable' subjects, like business or nursing, econ, or STEM subjects, not the humanities or film.
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the fathomless insanity of expecting teenagers to hatch decade-spanning plans intended to shape the course of their lives, while their brain’s prefrontal cortex, responsible for long-term planning, is seven years away from being fully developed.
I don't buy the underdeveloped brain theory either. I don't think it's well understood what it means for a brain to be fully developed, and if so, what age or how this is related to impulse control or decision making. Plenty of older people, such as boomers, go into debt and are bad with money.
Who you were in college/university, what courses you took and how much it cost is missing the point is completely subjective. If you took STEM path but you felt like you could've leveraged your open source contributions to a job, yeah you might be inclined to view it as a transactional loss (which to me is quite predictable and telling of their outlook). IF you did not take traditional STEM path and do not translate into an acceptable level of intellectual challenge/livable wage you will also view it as transactional loss (also quite telling what sort of preferences and outlook this group has).
Who you were in college/university, who you met, what sort of social experiences and relations you had will directly translate into how much you view it as worth it.
What you get out of something is largely what you perceive as valuable and your current situation will play a large role in that. So it is perfectly acceptable to feel at different points, college/uni was worth it/not worth it.
Just for me on a personal level, the friends I have gained through clubs, memories of working late in groups, socializing (pushed myself here), relationships more than made it worth it. My only regret was not pushing myself further to seek potential partner relationships because outside in the real world, there is a loss of innocence and naivete that you could only find in such environments. Everything feels transactional between adults with careers and strings attached although that isn't to say you won't find similar bonding-over-camraderie and aligned interests, you might find even more worth while relationships. It's just that intimate ones seem much harder to come by (at least for me) and that would be my biggest mistake, not exploring/pursuing those because of more problems I deemed more urgent: academia (impacts job), a job upon graduation ( a huge source of anxiety). In reality, I created these urgencies to avoid and limit myself when I should've been all out exploring. It actually might have made me more efficient at studies too. It's the inaction that kills me and I tried to justify it through PTSD, wounds, external things when the correct action would've been to aim to become wiser.
I'm thankful for whatever relationships remain, and I feel lucky to say that I've gained friends for life due to college/university but was only possible because I pushed myself to the extremes of comfort zone. Something that I'm saddened to say, I increasingly avoid as I get older. I'm screwed but having friends lessen that dread more, although that isn't to say you can't find ways to do it yourself without external things.
Rambled on here but seems tough to really limit this discussion without involving some personal anecdotes because the axiom highlighted in the article is completely irrelevant to anybody reading if they realize its wholly subjective.