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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

As a child of the multimedia revolution, it was strongly ingrained in us that going to college was the only route to getting a job that wasn't flipping burgers. To even consider learning in non-traditional ways would make you the laughing stock of not only your peers, but the older generations too. I'm not sure learning through multi-media ever stood a chance.

I do feel that those times have changed dramatically. Now all we hear about is the college dropouts who went on make billion dollar companies. It has almost become cool to not go to school. I think the time is finally right for these non-traditional educational services and it just helps that the internet is now widely available to act as the conduit for it.

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I sort of want to just say Poppycock to this. How many billionaire dropouts do you know? I don't know any myself. OK, fine if you happen to be connected in SV and know MZ or whatever then you're an outlier.

These billionaire dropouts like Zuckerberg and Gates, ... where did they drop out from? Although I don't think it makes a lot of sense to equivocate those two, it will suffice for now.

I don't think times have changed that much. Learning purely from these things is also going to be likely only for autodidacts. There happen to be many of autodidacts in our little world (or at least autodidactic enough to put together a website in Rails or something) but this is not true of that many people.

In fact, how far do you get with this online stuff? Not far, if you look at most places like Khan and so forth, you're talking about sophomore, maybe junior year stuff for the most part. OK, sure there's the occassional machine learning course that gets popular online that a lot of people that don't have any sort of mathematical background take and can say they are a part of the "cool kids" group, but let's be honest. Even then, we're still talking about this small segment of autodidactic or semi-autodidactic types.

A lot gets said of "big bad college" and how the "fresh new hip information revolution trumps traditional learning" but I don't see it. Sure, you could put up a few tutorials about learning to make Hello World in Javascript but I'm just not seeing this education revolution here.

I feel you've perhaps read too far into what I wrote. The fact is that the vast majority of the population couldn't care less about education. The only reason they go to college at all is because they've been told that they won't be able to find a job without it.

With people like Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Gates frequently in the news as of late, people are starting to question those long-held beliefs. They see that people are successful without the education, despite what they've learned to not be true. The stigma of not going to college is starting to lift as a result. Knowing those famed people personally is completely irrelevant here.

If spending a couple of months reading up on Rails will get you a decent job, that's exactly what people will do. They really do not care about deep CS topics. They care about providing a decent home and comfortable living conditions. That is it.

I respect the academics, but you are as rare as the autodidacts.

I didn't really read too much. Again where did Gates and Zuckerberg drop out from? We're not talking about East Savanah Technical College here. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg are the worst examples you could pick to show that people are shedding long held beliefs about education. They are outliers in several different senses.

Who cares where they dropped out from? All people hear is "you must have a degree to be successful" and then they hear "oh, these people didn't have degrees and are still successful." You give too much credit to believe the vast majority of people actually consider the backgrounds of these so-called outliers. These are the same people who previously bought into the "you must have a degree" line in the first place.

There has to be something regional/cultural about this that I'm missing since I hear this complaint a lot, but don't know anyone personally that experienced it until very recently.

When I went to high school in Pennsylvania the 90s people were still encouraged to into the trades. I have some friends from high school that have gone on to be very successful electricians and welders. Even when my brother went to the same school and graduated in 2007 he was never pushed to go to college. He ended up getting his AA at a local university and is now a paramedic/fire fighter for the same city.

Is that not the same principal? Person X chooses career Y and must obtain a certification through path Z.

The complaint is that teenagers are being told the only way you'll be a member of the middle class is that you must go to a four year university. People were saying that going into a trade or getting "just" an Associates degree would leave you in the dust of everyone else.

HN isn't remotely representative of the population at large. You're primarily getting bay area and a bit of Pacific Northwest culture here. A touch of NYC businessfolk sentiment that HN entrepreneurs envy but can't actually pull off.

If you think the folks commenting here have any idea what life outside the bubble is like, think again.

Interesting. I too have heard it so many times I had assumed it was fairly widespread across North America, but I guess that is not true. I'm from Canada, for what it is worth. Maybe it limited to Canadian culture? Though another reply to you seems to indicate that it is also true across the western US.

>When I went to high school in Pennsylvania the 90s people were still encouraged to into the trades.

I graduated in 2002, at the time any Georgia high school graduate with a B average got full tuition and fees paid for with the HOPE scholarship (still exists, but it only pays about 80% now).

Possibly as a result, almost everyone who wasn't a terrible student was encouraged to go to college.

The only people pushed into the trade direction were people with less than a B average, and with grade inflation you really had to be pretty lazy not to get by with a B.

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