Hacker News Reader

Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

No, the value of a college degree is that, at least when the graduate has taken college seriously, it provides education. You can be smart, successful, ambitious and curious and not go to college - but you probably won't be educated.

The absolute best and easiest way to become educated - if you care about that at all - is through college. This isn't some eternal mathematical truth. It's just that as of today, there are very few ways of getting education without going to college and learning from teachers who know the best way to approach a subject, and who can direct you to things that you in particular might find enlightening.

I think that's the real value of college, and unless you'd otherwise be poverty stricken, this value far exceeds that of the material gains.

View on HN

"It's just that as of today, there are very few ways of getting education without going to college"

Easily the most outlandishly wrong statement I've heard in years. Except for a very narrow set of STEM courses (such as analytical chemistry) the vast majority of a college education comes about through nothing more than reading books and writing papers. This is something that many folks are entirely capable of doing on their own.

Edit: The strongest proof I have for this sort of thing being the case is the prevalence of people with the "wrong" degrees. For example, one of the most talented developers I worked with was a physicist by education. One of the reasons why this sort of phenomenon is so hard to study in the developed world is because pretty much any individual with the dedication to study any subject is going to be able to get a 4-year degree in that subject in some way (the cheapest way being 2-years of community college for a transfer degree then another 2-years or less at a state school). Given the value of a college degree as a credential there are very few people who wouldn't make that choice.

>the vast majority of a college education comes about through nothing more than reading books and writing papers

You went to a shitty college, I guess. Or maybe didn't realise what was going on around you?

(I'm not normally that mean to folk on the internet, but you totally earned it with that ridiculous opener.)

I did make an exception for certain subjects. And no, I went to a good college and I enjoyed the experience. Some of which, such as working with 600 MHz NMR spectrometers and the whole plethora of chemistry laboratory equipment, is very much not the sort of thing one can learn at home. However, such degrees are not the norm. I also studied mathematics, and though many of my professors were quite excellent I have little doubt that motivated self-study with the appropriate books would have produced an equally valuable education in the subject. And that's probably the case for the average course of study. Computer Science? English? Foreign languages? Linguistics? Astronomy? Art? History? Economics? Environmental science? Psychology? These are things that are well within the grasp of self-study, especially today.

"I have little doubt that motivated self-study with the appropriate books would have produced an equally valuable education in the subject"

Much easier said than done. The course plan, deadlines, and grade that are parts of a university course force motivation that often does not exist in self-study. In my case, I've only engaged in "motivated self-study", when I have been very motivated to solve a narrow problem and my studying was similarly narrow.

As I said, pretty much anyone with the motivation to see their own education through is probably just going to go to a cheap college and get a degree as well, since the cost floor on a degree is pretty low for most people in, say, the US. However, I suspect that the advent of ebooks and educational software is going to radically change the landscape. To the degree where people 40 years from now will look at the higher education system we have today and think it is utterly preposterous and primitive.

Engineering degrees require access to expensive equipment and software. Autodidacticism won't magically make a gamma-ray spectrometer appear in your basement.

How many undergraduate college students ever interact with a gamma-ray spectrometer? Indeed, how many ever come into contact with any equipment that is outside the realm of access to an individual studying on their own? Many perhaps, but as a percentage of all college graduates, not that much. Not even all STEM majors require such specialty equipment, and STEM students are a relative minority in college enrollments.

It's just that as of today, there are very few ways of getting education without going to college

I'd say this was mostly true 20 years ago, sort of true 10 years ago, and utterly false today.

  > I'd say this was mostly true 20 years ago, sort of true 10
  > years ago, and utterly false today.

Remarkably, I've yet to meet one of these effortlessly self-educated men of the Internet age. Checking out a couple of Calculus videos on KA doesn't make you an engineer. In fact, despite current advances (Udacity, Coursera, what have you), I'd argue that the kind of person who manages to self-educate to a sufficient degree today would have managed just as well 20 years ago.

Libraries and textbooks did exist back then, you know. Your comment comes significantly too early.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. What has changed in the last 20 years is Internet. My son surprize me with the thing he learned from the internet.

Though it is also true that the things he learned are limited to what catched his curiosity. With classical education you get a more wider and uniform education, but also more shallow than if you dig the knowledge by yourself.

Note also that education plays only a significant role in hiring the next few years after it. After that it's what you have achieved and your expertize domain that become the most relevant.

> Remarkably, I've yet to meet one of these effortlessly self-educated men of the Internet age.

In my experience, pretty much anyone who can program well is self-educated. They might have also done a CS degree, but most of them were programming on their own beforehand.

The mechanics of programming are usually self-taught, but able to write code that compiles != educated. In my experience those with degrees in mathematics or physics tend to be much better at producing value through programming than those without.

> "No, the value of a college degree is that, at least when the graduate has taken college seriously, it provides education"

My post never said anything to the contrary. In fact, I am just starting graduate school so I certainly believe in the education it provides -- at least to me.

* To elaborate on my original post, what I was getting at is that not everyone who goes through college will make a good employee, and not going to college doesn't automatically make someone a bad employee.

For instance, my degree is in chemical engineering but I have been programming since I was twelve. I could probably do a good job in a programming career despite the fact that I don't have a CS degree just because of the sheer amount of free time I've spent learning about programming.

At least in the US, you're more likely to get someone better suited for a technical job if they have a degree in that field. It's not at all guaranteed, but there's a decent chance.

The textbooks written by those teachers you speak of are often available for download on the internet.

On a percentage basis, especially outsid of STEM, most of curriculum is irrelevant to employment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com