Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with you. Part of going to college is using their funding to get access to their equipment. Most people have no chance of getting to use a particle accelerator unless they go to uni or work with one.

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.)

Here's what I think people are missing: if you don't go to college then you don't know what you don't know. These people with no education think they know it all anyway, but that's because they're blind to what they could have learned.

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!

The anti-intellectualism in tech is quite surprising today. I find it shocking that we live in the age of CS yet great professors are quitting their faculty jobs to do startups and working at Google. I think the problem is lack of social status and compensation mismatch. Physicians still get some respect. Professors and researchers don't.

I'll save space, since you've covered my points nicely. I've taken apart a scanning electron microscope, built a transistor from scratch (with vacuum deposition and self-built masks), phase locked lasers, fully solved the hydrogen atom from first principles, and met tons of awesome people I'd never have had the nerve to meet otherwise.

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_.

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