Is College Obsolete? | Hacker News Reader

Is College Obsolete?

sixmonthmba.com

Is it just me, or does a "college is obsolete/failing/just plain sucks" article hit HN about once every week or two? And most tend to assume the target industry will be IT or web-based, ignoring fields like engineering or non-computer science where it's much more difficult to do online-only learning.

This instance of the college rant does make one interesting point about online interconnectedness as a useful way to bypass credentials. References and personal connections are certainly becoming more important as connectedness is easier to achieve online, and small professional communities become more tight-knit. I'm not sure how much effect this will have on credentials, but I do think it will dilute the networking advantage of highly ranked schools.

I've noticed this too. Along with the everlasting nature/nurture debates. I think there are two reasons why people on HN (myself included) like pulling higher education into question.

1. People in CS realize that the field is changing rapidly and that their 50 year old professors are somewhat losing touch. This contributes to the feeling that one could just as well work and autodidact.

2. People in CS are notoriously bullshit averse and realize that higher education is riddled with social prestige and research projects that are of little value but sound sophisticated.

I would be interested in what others think of these two points. Thanks.

I can see some merit in those points, but mostly only because computer science as an academic field and the jobs real-world CS majors do are fairly disconnected at the moment. Most of the "50 year old professors" I've met are nowhere near losing touch with the bedrocks of "computer science": information theory, computation and algorithms, etc. But they probably don't know much about the rapidly-changing landscape of Internet technology, and there are good arguments in either direction whether they should.

I know people who've gone the autodidact route in CS and they do just fine, but I do notice it leads to a particular kind of snobbery against higher education because they learned everything online, so why can't everyone? Trouble is, a fairly high fraction of human activities don't lend themselves to that kind of learning. And some of them, like green energy technologies, are even the kinds of things some startups want to get involved in. Higher ed becomes pretty damn necessary in these cases.

"71% of college graduates are unable to read proficiently"

huh? according to the link they cite: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/kf_dem_edu.asp looks like college graduates are amongst the best.

He also changed the link (while I was writing a comment). It now points to the general NAAL site, instead of that graph, so that you'd have to dig through a wad of information before discovering the link doesn't back up his claim. Bunk.

Their definition of proficiency has more to do with logic and reasoning "comparing two editorials" etc. than reading. Ridiculous. http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/perf_levels.asp

This, coming from a blog titled Six Month MBA...

The fact that people use colleges as a source of credentialism doesn't actually change the structure of classes themselves. So, to claim that colleges are obsolete because of the futility of using the knowledge of which one a person graduated from as a shortcut for actually assessing their value to your enterprise isn't effective...well, that just doesn't make follow. Maybe credentialism is practiced too much, but surely there is more to college than that. A well structured school will ensure that you learn something in the process of achieving that credential.

Not sure, but this meme has certainly entered senescence.

Is a college degree an absolute indicator for expertise? Of course not. But a college degree is hardly going to be made obsolete by the internet. Networking has always been an important part of getting a job, perhaps more important than any other one factor. The internet can certainly help networking. But I don't believe you can equate networking on the internet with having a degree. The degree points out particular things about you to the potential employer (that you can stick with and complete a degree program, for instance) and I don't think that necessarily equates to "someone vouching for you"

Summarizing quote: "And they haven't just failed abstractly or in general. They've failed me personally."

Interesting logic.

I can't believe a user with over five thousand karma submitted this. What the hell. Flag this garbage.

so now we've had the end of college, twitter, google, the free world, MBAs, etc. etc. etc.

the blogosphere seems to be on an existential kick of late.

must be the bad economy.

College is amust! Dixi.

yes

[edit: just to win the inevitable continuation of this argument, yes infinity + 1!!!]

I voted this up because it's no more useless than the comment it's responding to which isn't getting voted down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com