"You just spent four years of your life here, and are now six figures in debt as a result. You didn't have to do that. Hopefully in that 4 years and with that six figures, you learned how to educate yourself without this institution."
Who needs to spend time learning from best academic minds in CS? I can just tweet to some jackass Javascript 'rockstar'!
I'll just teach myself philosophy by reading these library books! I don't need some stuffy Oxford tutor who has been doing it for their whole life passing on their knowledge one-to-one!
Civil engineering? Making mistakes is how you learn!
I don't need a network and credentials! I'll just apply to this government policy institute with my GitHub profile and some retarded PHP library.
You people are fucking deluded. I can't believe tech has become so anti-intellectual.
Having the best academic minds teaching Bachelors, or even Masters level comp sci is a waste of resources. They might be an excellent researcher but most of what you're covering is not particularly new or controversial and can be better taught by someone whose main skillset lies in the realm of teaching rather than research.
The idea that you need someone who might otherwise be doing important work to turn up and read their power-point presentation to a bunch of undergrads in order for them to learn is retarded. Almost anyone with a decent familiarity with comp sci could be reading that stuff, or the students could be reading it from one of the many books on the subject.
Lectures were originally there, as I recall, so that people could copy down from the extremely rare book that was being read, and with very few exceptions little has changed in that regard with respect to education.
And what the hell's your distribution for best anyway? I went to university, didn't meet anyone smarter than myself. I'm probably not a genius but since none of the professors were trying to do anything hard in our presence....
The best argument for university has nothing to do with professors, it has to do with other students you'll meet and having the chance to argue over subjects with them and work on projects with them. But that you need to be in a lecture hall with the best minds to learn? That's just cargo-cult bullshit.
You also get to hang out with a bunch of people doing similar things. You compete with them; you learn from them; you learn by teaching them.
You get to talk to people who have done important things in the field you're working in.
Of course, this is all in the ideal situation. Unfortunately modern education seems, for many people, to be "cram 'em in to get the funding". The education is secondary. Certainly some universities in the UK appear to be just extensions of 6th form education, and not the launchpad into proper academic rigorousness that they should be. (Not all, obviously. There's a lot of great work coming out of uni's.)
It makes me angry because it's so fucking arrogant! There are people working at colleges who have a lifetime of experience, hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and grants, and people just think they can teach themselves all of that without any of their help!
College opens doors. It's as simple as that; no guarantees other than it surely helps. Some can be self taught and build their own doors, but the rest of us mortals don't want to wait two decades to be allowed to do engineering work. I'd rather play with toys _today_.
There are other parts of the tech community with a much different tone. There's academia itself, of course: I'd consider folks like the machine-learning and robotics communities to be part of the "tech community". And in industry, there are places like Microsoft Research and some parts of Google, doing things like designing F# and advancing NLP. Even at less explicitly "researchy" places, a lot of companies value people with solid science/engineering fundamentals.