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Comment by unculturedswine | Hacker News Reader

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

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).

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.

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