Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

> “There’s no reason not to…” is not a positive argument for anything.

It not be a positive argument, but it does set a floor for considering alternatives. Whatever you do end up choosing to do with your post-high school years, if it's not college, has to beat what college offers you.

There's a lot to consider. Are you good at motivating yourself to do stuff? Can you think usefully at a high level? Can you chart your own course, using only resources that you, yourself can acquire and integrate, and get somewhere in the four years you'd be giving up by going to college?

Then there's there's this: Are the questions you're asking yourself regarding the decision going to remain relevant after the new reality sets in? Can you trust your 17-19 year old self to make decisions?

I chose not to go to school, and that decision threw me into a purgatory that lasted until the end of my twenties. I lost my goals and ambitions and had to find them later. Now I've found personal traction and am working on personal product-market fit.

I don't know how my life would have been different if I'd have gone to school. I like my life now but I can't use that to say that the college decision I made was good or bad. Maybe it would have been better. Maybe I'd have found the traction I enjoy now earlier had I gone to school. Maybe I would have never found it.

Maybe it's a wash. In that case, it would have been better to go to school, because at least I would have had better jobs and situations while sorting through all my personal stuff to find traction.

School is a good default decision to make in a world where there are very few good default decisions available to make. Think long and hard before you decide to not take advantage of that.

Good, measured comment on a subtle issue.

The difficulty with not going into a formal program for an area you already have exposure to (say, physics, computer science, finance) is that for most people, at 17, you don't know what you don't know. The benefit of a curriculum is that the larger community you wish to enter has already figured out: this is the minimum knowledge people need to work with us.

Personally, I did not know what I did not know, and I sincerely doubt I would have learned on my own what I did learn, without the guidance of course curricula. Even though I work as a computer scientists, and most of my education is in computer science, I am enormously happy that I also minored in physics in college. I learned just enough to appreciate it (hopefully) better than the layman. On my own, I doubt that would have happened.

This is a good example of confusing macro vs micro. In the short term, solely individually, you are better off going to school. Society long term might be doomed by it because of work skills mismatch, financial issues, class issues, and waste of time / waste of human potential, but you're individually better off going to school... for now anyway, or more accurately, at least in the recent past, maybe not today.

Its like in a discussion about fuel efficient cars, pointing out the death rate is slightly lower in a land barge and its real nice for carrying my skis. Yes, but that'll also "destroy the planet" if all 6 billion of us acted that way. Nobody wants to live in the high crime city so we'll "ALL" move out, leading to guess what in the burbs?

Shouldn't the previous decade of schooling before college taught you how to make education decisions?

No. The problem domain is more complicated than can be understood and modeled by an 18-year old.

I agree with this. Granted this is anecdotal evidence, but I recently graduated from college with a degree in computer science. In high school, I had no classes on computer science. I wouldn't even know where to start nor would I be able to model myself an educational framework to understand computer science as well as college taught me. Now even though high school taught me the framework required to learn a new skill, I just feel that my total unfamiliarity and lack of peers or educators would have made the task especially daunting.

I had the ability to pick up new skills myself when I was that age. I taught myself how to program at 10. I was making websites at 15-16. I didn't need school to teach me how to learn. But that's not all school offers. Without a degree, you either have to figure out how to demonstrate your worth as an employee to someone by yourself bypassing all the usual social signalling, or you have to figure out how to be an entrepreneur, again without the benefit of the institutions we already have that evolved to fix this very problem.

Evolution doesn't create perfect solutions to problems, college is by no means perfect, but they do create effective ones, whereas designed solutions often aren't effective because they didn't take into advantage some important premise or edge case. Take this into account when you design the path you're going to take through your early twenties.

Most 'decisions' are made for you at that stage. College is the first time where real choices with lasting impact are made (imo, and for most people).

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