1) If you do go to college, live on campus! Commuters tend to fall into two categories. Those who miss out on lots of fun stuff and those who live at home and never grow out of their high school friends.
2) Schoolwork comes second. This does mean get failing grades or drink all day long (but one semester of that might not hurt). It means that you should take advantage of your ample spare time to do something fun or interesting. It's OK to miss a class here or there to get the most out of the overall experience. And if you don't have ample spare time, take fewer/easier classes.
3) Figure out a way to learn something real. Do research, take courses in areas you don't know much about, get a non-trivial part time job, do contract work, something, anything. Because if you're good at something, why coast through classes and do busy work? Why not get better at something you suck at? Got a bunch of assignments that are too easy, but time consuming? Tell your professor, then negotiate with them to do less, but more valuable work.
The dorms filled up before I got a room, so I spent my first year off-campus (but not at home); as a consequence, I missed out on getting to know people until, well, even now in my 4th year. Being an active participant of a club helped counteract this tremendously.
On the positive side, I spent less money, had more room, and had unfiltered internet.
As I get closer to completing my college education (its my last semester) I think what alot of posts like these miss is most institutions focus less on teaching you how to do something and more how to learn how to do something on your own.
- Its not about that ridiculous project you had to do that the professor didn't lecture on and is due Monday even through he only assigned it last Wednesday.
Its how you deal with that.
- Its not about the fact that you can drink yourself under a table and party every day and night
Its about how you deal with that. You could do it and fail out of many schools ,mine is one of those, or you could still do well. But either way you have to learn to balance it
College is the final playground. The last buffer between you and the real world. Its up to you to make it something that is worthwhile or figure out that it is not for you.
Also some of the best people I've met, the closet friends and strongest connections I most likely keep for life were made in college.
It wasn't perfect and there were things I would do differently given the chance but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything short of figuring out I had something of the caliber of what Bill Gate or Mark Zuckerburg found they had on their hands.
People always point out the social and networking benefits, which can certainly be great, but college can also be a very limiting social environment in a lot of ways. It often extends the cliques and general self-conscious stupidity of high school years and makes it easy to get completely stuck in that mind-and-soul numbing bourgeois bubble of social status and judgment, and if you aren't careful you can get pushed along on the conveyor belt into a job that's just a further extension, and you'll never get to have your own life.
You can actually learn a lot more about life and relationships by putting yourself in difficult, unfamiliar situations rather than cushy curated ones. Backpacking solo around the world or starting fresh in a big city doesn't get you into the Yale Entrepreneur's Club, but the things you learn and the contacts you get can be more unique and diverse, and I'd venture that a capable person will tend to end up with a better education and more adaptable people skills this way, but I don't want to downplay that it can be very very difficult to swim against the current, especially if you don't have great social confidence to begin with. It's still worth it though. The real world is tougher, but it's a lot easier to find meaning there versus being stuck on the good grades-good salary-right friends-high valuation-Achieve Success Treadmill Of Doom (tm).
>> You can actually learn a lot more about life and relationships by putting yourself in difficult, unfamiliar situations rather than cushy curated ones.
I could not agree more.
Last summer, at the age of 20, I picked a random country of Europe, in which I hadn't been before, booked a cheap flight and went there on my own just with a backpack. I didn't have any plans, I didn't know any people or places there, and I even didn't understand the local language.
I wanted to challenge myself, so I chose to have a flight back from the other airport, which was 600 km away from the place I had landed - that's to make sure that I will not spend all the time in one city - I must travel in order to get out of the country. Also, I decided, that in 2 weeks I must never pay for a bed - meet strangers, go to the places where noone goes, or sleep wherever and whenever I can - but prove to myself that it's possible.
Those 14 days, I spent traveling through the entire Portugal, was the most amazing time in my life so far. Every day I was meeting someone new and every day it was different experience. I was surprisingly lucky to be hosted by 10 strangers in 10 cities I visited, even though I often didn't know where I will be after a day - everywhere I went people were just saying to me: "You must see <that> place, it's really worth and it's so close!".
I still remember the conversions I had - every evening they were totally different, depending on the people I was drinking local beer on wine with: from a photographer of Porto sports magazine, and 40 years old famous Portuguese actor, who lived in the heart of Lisbon, was singing in French and preparing for the performance after a few days in Paris, to 60 years old Portuguese woman coffee shop owner, and exchange students from Turkey and Russia with their own culture and traditions.
However, I spent three nights sleeping on wild Atlantic beaches alone, which I had never done before. I also had a few days without seeing any people at all.
When I was back, I felt like I had learned more about life than in my whole academic year at university. I learned how to deal with myself during the permanent moments of uncertainty. I realised how often the problems are really not such huge as we tend to imagine. When you throw yourself into the world, in which you don't know anyone and noone knows you, you become responsible for every decision you make, - you always have to think forward, you can't be nervous or scared. Now I am no longer afraid of being with myself for a few days in the nature without any communication devices (including a computer - not so easy for a programmer) and without other people. Also, I started to love meeting strangers and learning about things I never imagined existing before.
That's a kind of experience, which nobody will teach you at university. There are no classes on that. It's something, what you have to take from the life by yourself.
- Go to a college on the cheap, and don't break the bank. This often means an in-state, public school - frankly, where your diploma is from matters little from a recruitment standpoint after you've proven yourself in a job or two. You probably have a choice of a few of them - pick the one that has the best program in what you're interested in.
- Also, basic english and math will likely transfer from a community college, and you'll pay a small fraction of what you'd pay to take similar courses at the big name school. This frees you up to take stuff you're more interested in, and saves money.
- Avoid getting in debt if you can. If you must, try to take as little as possible, and rid yourself of it quickly.
- Explore. Take weird classes you might be interested in, you never know how it'll be useful - the example used most often is Steve Jobs taking a calligraphy course => modern fonts in classic Mac OS => desktop publishing revolution.
- Look for mentorship opportunities, and feel out your career path. Do internships, etc. You want to get a feel for how businesses work, and what being an employee entails, so you know what you like/what to avoid/how to be a better employee/boss in the future.
- Take advantage of "student only" opportunities. Many companies and organizations will give you hardware/software/conference/professional membership discounts. It makes sense to take advantage of these.
- Have social life. Meet interesting people. College is different that high school - you have more freedom, and consequences. If you're not living with the parents, then get used to managing the rest of your life.
After my high school, I spent two years on a startup idea and ultimately, left my partner behind and went to college in the United States. Contrary to common belief, I learned a lot in my college. I am already a veteran in C/Javascript/PHP/C# before my college day, but the valuable thing about college is not learning "programming". So, here is what I've learned:
1). I learned how to work with supercomputer, no, it is not Hadoop with thousands nodes (though I've worked on that too!). It is Ranger, one of the computer on TOP500. And I can spend thousands of computing hours freely to just explore MPI and how to efficiently program on this puppy (one lesson I learned, async communication does not always save you time);
2). I learned what Buddhism is and how it transformed during years, how to do anthropology study and what the war is like in chimpanzees world and human tribes, how that interact, and what it implies;
3). I learned what evolutionary theory really is, how it developed, and the influence to American pragmatism;
4). I learned computer graphics! It is an amazing experience to write your own ray tracer with all the knowledge you actually knew (not just glue some random code together);
5). I even learned how MRI works in one of my biomedical class!
I am appreciated so much to the college experience and despite what people say about it, I learned a lot.
I don't care if you go to Yale. When "getting in is the hardest part about attending an Ivy League school," I have to ask, if the problem the system, or the problem the school?
He later writes:
"Most of the foundation in communication, writing, and quantitative reasoning I developed in middle school and high school, and not in college."
That's plain screwed up. If you developed no communication, writing, or quantitative reasoning skills in college, then your college education was a waste of time. But it's because you made an (apparently) crappy decision to go to that college, not college in general.
Here in this thread, and many similar on Reddit, it is often advised to go to a state school or community college, get a technical degree, etc...But we're joking ourselves if we think a technical degree can lead to better reading, writing, or reasoning skills. Of course, if you can develop those on your own, sure, go for the technical degree. But, in this liberal arts student's opinion, the problem with college is that, instead of either studying a pure technical degree, or immersing yourself in the true liberal arts, people go to large state schools and attempt to do both, but end up doing neither.
From my knowledge no one really says that a technical degree leads to better reading/writing/reasoning skills. Then again not very many say what a technical degree really teaches you either. Funny system.
Pure liberal arts programs are interesting structures on their own. Can you name a high school student who thinks, "you know, I want to improve my reading, writing, and reasoning skills and for this reason I will spend 4 years in a Liberal Arts program taking a mostly random stream and number of unrelated courses."
"That's plain screwed up. If you developed no communication, writing, or quantitative reasoning skills in college, then your college education was a waste of time. But it's because you made an (apparently) crappy decision to go to that college, not college in general."
You might be right -- I don't think I took advantage of all the opportunities going to Yale afforded. I don't think the decision was crappy though, considering I made amazing friends who I later founded my company with, and I had a great time in general. In fact, I think it was one of the best decisions of my life!
This article sits well with me, as I've hashed this out a lot in my own head in the past year. I would be a freshman this year had I decided to attend a college. However, I didn't want to get burdened down with any unnecessary loans, and as previously stated by others, the industry is quite navigable without a degree.
Instead I've moved myself from Boise Idaho to NYC, and I'm loving it, meeting other people in the industry I wouldn't otherwise be meeting, and learning new things constantly.
I think one main point that the article leaves out is that if you decide not to attend college, or decide to drop out, you'll really need some self discipline. I spent a ton of time in high school sitting in my room being an autodidact. Learning how things work, and then learning to apply techniques and such. Then trying to find any scraps of work I could so as to build a portfolio/resume. Had I been doing what the rest of my peers were doing I certainly wouldn't have been in a place to not attend college.
Hopefully that doesn't come off as pretentious. I just think the whole aspect of having a skill v.s. not having a skill, or a passion for that matter, are left out of many of these "is college worth it right now" articles. Assuming the goal is to acquire a skill in college, and not to make friends/go through that rite of passage.
Speaking of rites of passage, anyone else going to Burning Man this year? It's going to be my first, and I'm oh so excited.
Great post. Burning Man is a much more valuable life experience than college. Many of the engineering projects people bring there are completely amazing and trump even the wildest accomplishments of CalTech students. What people are learning in mechanical and electrical engineering in the whole Maker Community for example is way beyond what is going on at the university level.
I appreciate your skepticism. There really -isn't- any way to know for sure. For me, the best I can do is compare what would have been to what actually happened.
If I had stayed in college, I would have finished with a masters in CS and Mathematics.
I dropped out instead. By the time I would have graduated, I managed to:
- Co-found a startup
- Build a million-user product by myself
- Speak at half a dozen conferences, including GDC and RailsConf
- Help kickstart a multi-billion dollar new industry
- Get married
That seems like a damn good decision if you ask me.
Sometimes you can tell. I'm very glad I went to university for my undergraduate, and very glad I dropped out of my PhD. My career has been in fits and starts and I've been poor most of my life, but in my PhD I was doing a subject I wasn't interested in and I could see my career path ahead of me - disinterested, unmotivated post-doc, academic politicking with the sharks, no real-world experience with a doctorate in something that was rather tenuous and not useful, trying to hide this fact from future academic employment. Interestingly my first year in industry after dropping out gave me the experience that my topic would have ended in a null finding. The direction of the PhD was such that there weren't many doors opened by it, but once you have a doctorate you're overqualified for just about everything outside the doctorate's field - which sucks if you're not an entrepreneur (like me).
The important thing is to discern the people who say 'best thing I did' and actually mean it with the benefit of self-reflection versus the people who use it as a defence for copping out and not doing the hard yards.
The comparison in this case is not to the alternative. Rather, the comparison is to other decisions have been made. That's why the statement is "best decision ever made", not "best decision that was possible".
I'm always amazed by how many people claim to have learned so little in college. It's not that I don't believe them; I just had the complete opposite experience. Perhaps I'm just slower than most here, but I studied science and engineering in school and it was HARD. It took so much effort, but I learned a ton. I'm a programmer these days, but most of my analysis skills come from the education I got in college and grad school. I've learned a lot since then of course (especially about how to design code), but I attribute most of my (modest) successes to my education.
BS in CECS and MS in CS, with no regrets on either. On top of learning quite a lot (I had no prior programming experience, aside from a tiny bit of TI BASIC and C++) I met my co-founders and mentors in school, which is invaluable. But who knows, maybe I would have learned even more on my own or met even more awesome co-founders and mentors elsewhere.
I will say I've learned a hell of a lot more about programming in the 3 years doing a startup after college than in the 4.5 years doing the BS and MS. CS degrees aren't really about programming, but I do think they lay the foundation for being better programmers.
What's often not said in these discussions is that college/university time is a great time to work out what you want to do for a bit. I certainly had no idea what I wanted to do coming out of high school. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but didn't get the marks to get into that degree programme, so I ended up doing bioinformatics, and then eventually wound up doing a computer science degree double major with history and philosophy of science. And I love my job now, working as an academic in technology ethics. But if you'd asked the straight-outta-highschool me about what I'd be doing in 10 years time, she would have had no idea I'd be where I am now. Going to university helped me to work out which path I wanted to take. Granted, I didn't go to an American university, and it somewhat depresses me to hear about how university is pointless etc. because I had some amazingly good courses and learned a lot at my university. But that was back when it was still well funded by the Australian government and less of the corporate entity it's become. So who knows, really?
Anyway my point is that university is not just about coming out with a piece of paper, it's about exploring possibilities and different paths. And if you go to a good university that focuses on actually teaching interesting stuff rather than churning out pieces of paper, then you'll actually get something worthwhile.
Going pre-med, college is a massive waste of time. The organic chemistry and physics is something you will never use as a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, etc.
For business, it can be pretty good depending on where you land up. I was fortunate to go to a school that offered one hell of a BBA program and a majority of what I learned was applicable to investment banking, consulting, and other corporate jobs. But for entrepreneurship? Eh...I dunno yet.
Oh and it's a lot easier to become a pretty good programmer by taking classes than learning on your own. Feedback from good professors and peers about code optimization is priceless.
All in all, if I had to do everything over again, I would either apply to the best BBA or computer science program, or pick the cheapest university option available to me.
Of course I assume that one already knows what he or she wants do right out of college, which is rarely the case.
So, actually college is really a place for exploration. It sucked having to go through trial and error to find my niche, but when I finally did it was liberating. I stand by my earlier position, though, if high schools went through more effort to bring the exploratory experience to its students.
I go to a high-rated public undergrad business school because I was entrepreneurially-spirited when I was applying for schools and though college would cultivate that.
Instead, I found out that BBA programs are more focused on funneling you into a mid-level management position where you make dataflow diagrams and Gantt charts.
I agree with the author, college didn't teach me anything that I needed later on in life, I did meet some absolutely fantastic professors and peers who pushed me, who challenged me to do more and become better at what I was doing. That I think is an important part that is overlooked. Sure you can go straight to working out of high school, but generally the atmosphere is not the same.
In college you can screw up, big time, and all it will cost you is time, in the real world it can mean your job, and lively hood. Academia provides a comfort zone in which you can experiment.
Had it not been for a few select professors and my peers I would have never experimented with electronics and made it a hobby of mine, I would have never loved programming and network security as much as I do now. Those experiences cannot be overstated. Overall I think the time I spent in college was spent well, but I can honestly say that the time spent in classes was a waste.
I studied physics at a great university, got paid for it, and graduated as first author on a PRL. I've used everything I learnt, and things from courses I failed at the time.
If you're doing the right course for the right reasons, it's very worthwhile.
Good article. I agree with the points. After I dropped out of high school I ended up going to a well regarded west coast university. I was all set for it to be very challenging and some place where I would learn a lot but I was surprised to find the engineering classes were all things I already knew how to do. To challenge myself I shot for all A+s and considered each mere A to be a failure.
I also started to, as a further challenge, not even attend some of the easiest classes and managed to get A+ in those as well. I used the extra time to get involved in student government. I found it interesting observing the politics and learning how much back scratching and insider deals infect even college student council politics.
While in school, I joined a music group (unrelated to the school) and we did some touring during this time and earned money. One time we were even paid to play at my university. Touring in a music group is a great gig that I recommend. I met lots of famous and powerful people and made connections doing the music.
Still in school, I got a job working for a defense contractor. I wrote software for secret military satellite based space weapons. This was interesting since I didn't have any sort of clearance or anything and I was making close to minimum wage. At one point I had to write a paper on my research for my boss. He published it and took my name off the paper. He also went to some conference to present it that I had wanted to go to but he said I wasn't needed. There were also false promises about getting a $1 an hour raise. I was pretty resentful of this and stopped working on this project.
I do have a small list of things I learned in the program but they are somewhat trivial small things that I would have learned anyway. The interesting things had nothing to do with classes. I did make some friends of course but these "connections" have not really benefited me all that much, but I wasn't looking for that. It is strange that that is so often cited as a main reason to go into debt in order to attend university. Overall the main thing that happened is it delayed the starting of my first business by several years.
This makes me wonder about the value of school over all. I dropped out of high school and then found even college was pretty much useless as well. Very different from the way it is presented as the solution to all of society's ills. Did I learn anything even in elementary school I have to wonder?
Well, I knew how to read before I started kindergarten. My parents did not teach me. They tell me that I just started reading signs as we were driving along. Then I would read books. For a couple years in elementary I didn't even attend or study as we were doing some travel. When I returned to elementary school things seemed really slow and backwards. Before college, in primary school and high school I am not sure what I learned there either. Although I did have a psychology class in high school, and then a couple in college that were very interesting, so I learned some things there. But that was from reading the textbook and studies I'd look up on my own.
Whenever I want to know something I track down the information and just learn it on my own. It seems to me that school is pointless. I guess it is for dumb people? Or maybe its purpose is to brainwash people into being consumers.
Most of the founding fathers and enlightenment philosophe's were self taught. Some of the greatest minds in history are drop outs.
I think school is a rip off, just considering the wasted time and not even money. It does not benefit the "student", it benefits the system.
There is something to be said for a community of learners though. That is what a Start Up is. Others interested in the same niche thing you are come together, and you are now working together to make something new and figure out new things out every day. You depend on no one but yourselves. It is like a Salon of revolutionary France, only more practical.
If I had it all to do over again and was able to do so, I would not attend school at all, not even elementary school. I would simply unschool myself. This way I would have more time to work on my projects and inventions that I started working on before I was a teen. It would have given me a tremendous head start. I did not know it at the time, but what I was doing then was useful, unique and valuable and I was doing it right. Of course others are telling you you are wasting your time and should be doing worksheets or reading some nonsensical textbook instead, but that is because they are ignorant.
In addition to running my latest business, I read a lot. Now I am becoming educated. None of the history that was taught in school was accurate in the least. It was just propaganda to create patriots who will kill the "enemy" without question. The most ridiculous thing of all this is being forced to chant a pledge of allegiance to a flag, a piece of cloth. No allegiance to one's family or friends, the allegiance must be to a cloth. This ritual that lead each day is a symbol of the insanity of the whole system.
I thought basically the same thing all through grade school and college, and for a couple years afterwards, right through doing my startup. And I still do - as far as you go. But I think you're missing something very important.
School is not about learning facts. It really, really sucks at that - go grab a book or twelve out of your public library and devour them for that. And it's not even for learning skills - the best way to do that is to get a private tutor, mentor, or coach, and then practice your heart out.
School is for learning culture. And culture, by definition, can neither be learned nor taught. It functions on a subconscious level, in terms of the little behaviors that people can never quite articulate but certainly notice. You have to be immersed in it to pick it up, and it takes a significant amount of time, and an open mind.
It's an open question whether all school cultures are worth learning. For me, elementary school bus culture and middle school culture certainly were not, and probably set my development as a human being back by a decade. But the culture at my high school - a public charter school that was just starting up - was a good portion of the reason I decided to go into startups, and played a major role in me becoming the person I am today. I wouldn't trade it for anything. The culture at Amherst, my alma mater, taught me to look at everyone I meet as a peer and equal, no more and no less, and to feel that I have nothing to prove, whatever silly hierarchies people dream of. And the culture at Google, IMHO, is without equal in the software world. You pick up so many practices and ways of thinking simply by being there.
So yeah, I think you are basically right. It's interesting that you pick out the pledge of allegiance as the most ridiculous thing in all of schooling. That's exactly what I mean by culture. And in this case, that particular ritual was designed to create a culture of subserviency, a form of indoctrination so that the masses of public schoolchildren would mindlessly support their power-elite overlords. It's bullshit, as you say.
But by recognizing it as bullshit and then putting up with it long enough to "win", you open the door to many other communities which are far less fucked up than the public education system. Google is nothing like middle school, and it's only similarities to elementary school are the colorful beanbags, the ballpit, and the massive quantities of Lego. But it's much, much easier to get into Google if you did well at elementary and middle school.
I disagree - school is an excellent place to learn skills, especially if you do sciencey stuff. It teaches you how to question things fairly and appropriately, and how to do and dissect research.
When I left tertiary education we were all sitting around doing the trendy thing and bemoaning how university had been worthless; we couldn't remember any facts. Then it dawned on us that we got insights into industry, learned how to communicate professionally, learned how to find the truth or the most truthful path, how to research, how to critique work, learned how to better collaborate with others, gained a small measure of self-direction (tertiary is the first level of education where it's up to you to show up), tastes of politicking and how to survive it, professional ethics, so on and so forth. Occupational skills were learned in addition to all of those. Part of the above meshes with culture, but they're all tangible if non-obvious skills. If you want someone to do a root-cause analysis, you're not going to turn to the dropout unless he's talented and a passionate self-driven learner. Most folks are not this.
As always GIGO, but you learn a hell of a lot of skills in tertiary education, they're just not all in 14-point font on your syllabus.
University is a whole lot different from K-12 schooling, and which university makes a difference as well. I felt I learned a lot about respect for data, the scientific method, how to formulate and test hypotheses, etc. in my physics classes at Amherst. I learned mostly facts at UMass. I'm not sure I learned anything about what science really was through my K-12 studies.
One of my main beefs with K-12 science education is that it mistakes the results of science for science itself. So kids are taught evolution, they're taught plate tectonics, they're taught Newton's Laws, but they're rarely taught how these were discovered, or the rigorous data-driven experimentation process that's refined them. The scientific method is covered as 6 bullet points that get glossed over in a week, and never returned to.
In many cases, if a student actually does science - they question the recieved wisdom of their teacher, and go off and do the experiments themselves, and report back objectively on the results - they'll be labeled a disruptive student and sent to the principal's. Hell, if the science involves chemistry, they'll probably be reported to the FBI and arrested for making bombs.
I dunno, man, that'd sure be nice if school taught you how to think, how to question. Maybe your friends do that. But schooling in general seems to be "them's the facts, get used to it". Industrial-strength indoctrination.
Some colleges teach you to think, some don't. A 'classic' liberal arts education starts with debate, discussion, and rigor. An engineering school starts with terminology, overviews (survey classes), and specialization options. Learning to think takes both an institution willing to teach it and a student willing to learn it.
However, it seems that a number of people, possibly more than half, under-estimate the value of learning how to motivate yourself to finish things in the presence of losing interest in doing so. Lots of people "get" the joke that the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the effort but they don't get the fact that folks who never learned how to motivate themselves through the finish (of which having a college degree is a reasonable signal) will 'drop out' at the 90% point at best, and become dead weight at worst.
Combine that with the unemployment statistics of folks with versus those without college degrees and statistically it seems you want to be in the 'with' group.
The bottom line is that college is the first place you get to show the world your work ethic and your 'mettle.' That's because for many its the first place where not-going is considered a legitimate option.
You can be very successful without finishing college, see Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as examples, just like you can get into the National Football League or Major League Baseball by going to open tryouts. If your personality is suited to that, its going to be a great option for you. But success on those roads isn't the "more common" outcome.
With your claimed grades and intellect you could obtain scholarships to almost anywhere of your choosing, fully paid fees + stipend, to work with the greatest minds in your field. Oxford, Cambridge... the world is your oyster. So it's a completely one-sided proposal; work with the best in your fields, and they will pay your way. How is this a bad deal, and why didn't you take it?
> All of the above is highly dependent on where you go.
That's one of the few claims I agree with. I can only speak for engineering majors, but my college experience was radically different from the author's. Whether the piece of paper my classmates and I walked out with mattered is another story, but at least the first three years of education were invaluable.
> This really applies to tech, where honestly people don't really give two shits about your degree if you are a good programmer or have experience on hot projects.
Half-true. Even though I had been programming since middle school, my college experience with EECS taught me a lot technically and socially. It granted a far broader network faster than any job has. On top of that, it gave vast access to internship programs, which taught everyone involved a lot about industry. And that came in handy after graduating; having the knowledge that I could get a high-paying job almost anywhere at anytime allowed me to take far greater personal financial risks with my startup than I would have been comfortable otherwise.
> If you expect to learn skills that will train you for a job, prepare to be disappointed going to a four year college. You aren't going to learn anything that is directly applicable to any job.
I completely disagree. Granted it all comes down to your major, but if you take engineering at a top school (which does not include Yale), this is highly untrue. The knowledge I learned in college was critical to developing my startup from a technological standpoint; operating systems, programming languages, artificial intelligence, probability, algorithms, and databases are just a few of the subjects which have flowed into it. And yes, you can just "read a book", but that is no substitute for being in the thick of it through collaborative group-work. Technically, being exposed to vast numbers of patterns is essential, and college is a prime place for that to happen. I know virtually no one who possesses the same technical breadth of those that went through my program (or equivalent).
> It didn't prepare me mentally for startups. College was really an exercise in credentialing within a rigidly defined system, and didn't prepare me to think outside-the-box, live the consequences of my own actions, or really exist on my own in the real world at all.
It's amazing what a difference a major can make. Working on ill-defined team projects that would last well over 200 hours in a single semester was a great precursor to the startup world. And college is an excellent training ground to build essential social skills.
> In my final year I was taking classes two days a week for only two hours a day (most of them intros, perversely). Keep in mind that I was a full time student without a job at one of the best universities in the country.
If your goal is to just get a degree, sure, you can slack by. If you want to take the maximum advantage of courses, this will not be true. Especially in engineering (architecture is another example I've seen), you will work your ass off and learn a lot.
> For a lot of students, college is a vacation, and it is a bunch of bullshit if we pretend otherwise.
The only sustained vacation during my college years was Winter Break. Hell, the summer internships I had offered way more of a vacation than college did. Again, if you are going to college, you need to take full advantage of it.
Best point made in the article: "College is an oversubscribed resource". This rings factual, and I think it would be useful to discuss the ramifications of oversubscription. And the extremely high cost despite oversubscription. And MIT doesn't count because... it's not oversubscribed as you generally learn industrially-applicable information there. Contrast with Yale, Columbia, or Vassar. This also goes for art schools- you can use those learned skills in industry.
Good or not, I think one thing everyone can agree on is to go to college first. There are two sides to this debate. To go to college at all, and to drop out after you're in college. I think at the very least going, is worthwhile for everyone even IF college isn't made for everyone and in many cases may not help out at all in things you learn in the classroom. Afterall, there are other aspects of college you can gain from, both on and off campus.
Seems like the main message of this post is "If you're majoring in Philosophy and Physics, don't expect college to teach you about business or computers."
> This really applies to tech, where honestly people don't really give two shits about your degree if you are a good programmer or have experience on hot projects.
In my experience, this is true up until a point. However, I've been coding since elementary school, and topics like algorithm analysis and graph theory are not things that one typically encounters making games in Java or web apps with RoR.
"If you want to be a world-class programmer, you can program every day for ten years, or you can program every day for two years and take an algorithms class." - Prof. Erik Demaine (MIT)
It's not terribly hard to teach yourself algorithm analysis or graph theory if you have the motivation. Hop on Amazon, buy CLR, and then go through the algorithms, work through the proofs, and implement each one.
BTW, you can't become a world-class programmer by programming every day for ten years or by programming every day for two years and taking an algorithms class. Try programming every day for ten years and taking an algorithms class. Every world-class programmer I know has done that - they have both the experience and the formal knowledge.
I think you can only get those if you go to MIT or CMU. The vast majority of CS programs and lecturers aren't that good, and certainly worse than what you could teach yourself on your own.
I'm attending a public school, with a CS department consisting of 6-or-so people. They taught me well :-) Definitely not what I could have taught myself.
In school (UC system) I met people who are now doctors, CPAs, attorneys, investment bankers, top engineers, scientists, and various PhD candidates. I also learned that their parents are a variety of very accomplished and impressive people. To say that knowing these people is valuable would be an understatement since I am now a small business person and having professionals you can truly trust (as good as it's going to get anyway) is incredibly important. It factors into confidence and decision making in business.
For me, personally, I would not have met these people if I had not gone to school. I would have been sitting in a cubicle programming computers for the next 4 years, severely handicapping my social and professional life. I also probably would not have learned the basics of Econonomics, something that fascinates me almost as much as technology. I also didn't spend much time doing schoolwork, but I certainly didn't get A's like some others here. I actually was on academic probation twice and spend most of my time socializing.
Some other random tips:
1) If you do go to college, live on campus! Commuters tend to fall into two categories. Those who miss out on lots of fun stuff and those who live at home and never grow out of their high school friends.
2) Schoolwork comes second. This does mean get failing grades or drink all day long (but one semester of that might not hurt). It means that you should take advantage of your ample spare time to do something fun or interesting. It's OK to miss a class here or there to get the most out of the overall experience. And if you don't have ample spare time, take fewer/easier classes.
3) Figure out a way to learn something real. Do research, take courses in areas you don't know much about, get a non-trivial part time job, do contract work, something, anything. Because if you're good at something, why coast through classes and do busy work? Why not get better at something you suck at? Got a bunch of assignments that are too easy, but time consuming? Tell your professor, then negotiate with them to do less, but more valuable work.