Do we really need college?

[Iskaral Pust]

Holy shit, I didn't realize you could get into programming with out a degree. Wild.

You should check out the coding bootcamps that are springing up around the place.

[peterbound]

You should check out the coding bootcamps that are springing up around the place.

I had a brief stint in the IT world before I enlisted (mid to late 90's) with out a degree, but understood that I could only move up with a degree. Back then they had the MCSE 'bootcamps' for about 8 grand, but I was too busy getting drunk and high to really give that a go.

Though for sure you'd need a masters or more to get a programming job.

Good to know.

[peterbound]

I think we're doing alright , can be better of course :)

I just don't see the point of the question , maybe it's the American uni= dept thing . Which is different here in Europe .

But on general, even here , people do what they think is best for them , before deciding your future you sit down and do sone research and find out what you want and how to get it , it's hard work but life is hard work . If you're not willing to do the research to find out what best suits you , be it uni, IT , manual labour , the army ...etc. That's on you . I don't think anyone is chained and dragged to uni .

There was a huge push for my generation to get a degree, to not 'flip burgers', or 'dig ditches'. I'm pretty sure the powers that be capitalized on that idea, and started fucking price gouging the shit out of the cost of a degree.

I think that big push lent itself to the idea that blue collar jobs were somehow beneath them, and that people thought if they got a degree they would walk out of college making a shit ton of money.

Reality is proving different.

[AverageGuy]

My father works in the trades and has a pretty good income by most standards. I grew up working with him, worked for him for a couple years after college, and enjoyed the work. That said, he directed me away from his occupation.

There were a couple reasons. First, the possibility of injury. After college, I'd only intended to work with him for a couple months, saving up a little money while looking for another job. In those couple months, however, a driver plowed into him, broke his back. It was pretty bad, though he mostly recovered. He still has some pain when reaching overhead, which does affect his work, but not so much he can't do it. It could have been worse in ways that your standard office job doesn't need to worry about. Second, like most people in the trades, he's got an hourly rate. If he works his 2000 or so hours a year, his income is in the six figures. But there were a couple long periods in my childhood when he wasn't working. He planned for it, he always saved about half of what he made, but there are plenty of people in the same line of work who live day to day and don't have that luxury. So there are potential downsides like with anything else.

That said, he regrets not pushing my brother toward the trades. My brother was not exactly academically inclined, he went to college but dropped out and joined the army. After he left the army he still wasn't sure what he wanted to do and floundered for a while, where my dad could have got him apprenticed with one of his contacts, which may have made his life a little easier.

After I finished working with my father, I started a new job which still wasn't directly related to what I went to college for (Classics, mostly dealing with ancient Roman history and Latin poetry). It was a new company, I had to learn on the job, but when I left I had no debt and enough money for my house. During my time in that job I taught myself to program, now I work for a consulting company in IT. So most of my day-to-day skills are things I learned on my own rather than at college. Still, random things I learned at college have come into play since then - formal logic and public speaking have been the two most generally useful courses, but every now and then I find a piece of general knowledge that comes in handy.

So I don't really know if I needed college or not. I am glad I went, mostly because of the people I met there. I've had no debt since I was 25, so I don't have the problems some have had. Looking at my brother and my father, I don't believe in pushing everyone toward college, but I don't think those who go to college without being sure of what they want to do are really wasting the four years. I have seen what seems to be more awareness of this issue, which is definitely a good thing.

[Eponine]

You should check out the coding bootcamps that are springing up around the place.

I have coworkers who went to two year intensive for-profits for coding. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to an 18 year old. It's not cheap and I think you may pay upfront. You can't transfer courses if you drop out or decide you're in the wrong field. You need a lot of discipline - you're going to class as much as a full time job plus homework. And you're not likely to get a stable, well-paying job as a video game designer.

[deleted01]

I believe that university gives us experiences that nothing else can give us.

While I am not pursuing a career in the field in which I studied, I don't regret my decision to go to uni. I managed to move out (something that is extremely difficult at the moment, due to a lack of decent paying jobs and affordable housing), I managed to move away, and build a life for myself in a place I love. New friends, new connections, new experiences. A fresh start, for me. I'm not saying that this is unique to going to university, but it certainly makes it easier for young people, imho.

Many jobs want you to have a degree in something, whether it's in that field or not, because going to university does actually teach you a set of skills. I don't think that having a degree is the most important thing (for example, I have learned that having work experience and contacts is extremely important), but it's still a very good thing to have.

ETA: So while having a degree definitely does not equal getting work, it can give you some necessary skills and contacts. Good university programmes will be in contact with people within the industry. My partner, for example, has made some great contacts in the gaming industry, and has made a small mobile game while studying. My time at the university paper got me in contact with national papers, and enabled me to get some work experience. So it can definitely open doors, and put you in touch with the right people. I've personally found that you have to be prepared to do more than just study - I graduated this year, and have been working at several unpaid internships since April.

I know that loans are different in every country, but in England, they're pretty good. Yes I have a lot of debt, but I don't feel overwhelmed by it. It's a good debt, if there is such a thing. I would caution students to be aware of our loan system, but not to be too daunted by it.

I'm trying to encourage my sister to go to university (applications close fairly soon I believe), but she's not very keen. I think it gives you so many opportunities that you may not have otherwise. She wants to work with children. While there are more jobs in that area here than in many others, it isn't very highly paid, and she would find it very difficult to move out in the near future. I want her to go to university so she learns to be more independent and self-sufficient, but without the worry that she can't handle paying the bills (her student loan would cover it all, as long as she learns to be financially responsible of course). University can be a good stepping stone between living at home and living independently, and with the state of the job market at the moment, I would encourage all young people to continue their education if possible.

[peterbound]

I believe that university gives us experiences that nothing else can give us.

Pretty much exactly how I feel about basic training, and military service.

[deleted01]

Pretty much exactly how I feel about basic training, and military service.

I agree, and both serve their purpose, but both are better suited to certain people. I would have no hope in any kind of military situation, due to a disability, but I can research and stick my head in a book. Someone I went to school with is in the RAF, and has done very well for himself, after leaving school at 16. I think the military route is a good one for certain people, who perhaps feel that academia is not for them.

[Eponine]

Something I learned when looking into military service when younger - the ability to do awesome things is largely limited by vision. Mine is around SPH -13.

[aceluby]

Despite what you'll hear... I think where you go to school has a big impact as to what your future holds. But not in the way most people think, which is usually how much 'prestige' your school has in getting you an interview. That shit is basically worthless.

What I've found is the vast majority of the people I went to college with have all gone on to be quite successful. Many started their own business, some went to law school, some (like me) went directly into the job market to work their way up, but after 10 years only one person I graduated with doesn't have a job right now; and that's because he is still being supported by his rich parents and has been since entering school.

What I take from this is not the prestige of the school, but the prestige of the students. When everyone around you is smart and good at what they do, you up your game to be competitive. Now, compare that with the local community college or state university where you're accepted if you pass a background check and mediocrity is common. You slide by because almost everyone else is, you don't have the personal skills to interview well or speak eloquently to superiors, and there's no push to be better. My opinion is that this translates in the job market more often than not, so you get what you have now, a slew of recent grads who are not equipped to be successful in their chosen major. Then you get questions about 'is going to college really useful', when the question should be 'is going to this college really useful'.

If the option for my kid is a mediocre school or some trade, I'd push them towards the trade. In fact, I'm pushing this exact thing to my 18 yr old brother who is now living w/ me.

[Eponine]

Despite what you'll hear... I think where you go to school has a big impact as to what your future holds. But not in the way most people think, which is usually how much 'prestige' your school has in getting you an interview. That shit is basically worthless.

Both schools I last went to are well known in my field (mining) and it's helped a lot with networking and interviews and perception of my skills. ETA: Both are state schools.

[peterbound]

Both schools I last went to are well known in my field (mining) and it's helped a lot with networking and interviews and perception of my skills.

ETA: wrong thread

[sperry]

Despite what you'll hear... I think where you go to school has a big impact as to what your future holds. But not in the way most people think, which is usually how much 'prestige' your school has in getting you an interview. That shit is basically worthless.

What I've found is the vast majority of the people I went to college with have all gone on to be quite successful. Many started their own business, some went to law school, some (like me) went directly into the job market to work their way up, but after 10 years only one person I graduated with doesn't have a job right now; and that's because he is still being supported by his rich parents and has been since entering school.

What I take from this is not the prestige of the school, but the prestige of the students. When everyone around you is smart and good at what they do, you up your game to be competitive. Now, compare that with the local community college or state university where you're accepted if you pass a background check and mediocrity is common. You slide by because almost everyone else is, you don't have the personal skills to interview well or speak eloquently to superiors, and there's no push to be better. My opinion is that this translates in the job market more often than not, so you get what you have now, a slew of recent grads who are not equipped to be successful in their chosen major. Then you get questions about 'is going to college really useful', when the question should be 'is going to this college really useful'.

If the option for my kid is a mediocre school or some trade, I'd push them towards the trade. In fact, I'm pushing this exact thing to my 18 yr old brother who is now living w/ me.

Having degrees from both a large mediocre state school, and an Ivy league school, I have to say that this is complete nonsense. The bottom of the barrel at the Ivy league school is better than the bottom of the barrel at the public school, but there's very little difference at the top. Plenty of students take full rides to state schools over paying $50 grand a year at an Ivy.

And that's laughable that the access to interviews doesn't matter. My law school had great placement at large firms, because every large firm in the country came to our campus and interviewed our studnets. Not the case at my state school's law school, where the firms weren't coming to visit.

As for personal skills, the personal skills were much, much better at the large state school.

[Aemon Stark]

It's been touched on in this thread, but this often comes to an issue of class. Professional parents want professional kids, so they send them to university, sometimes the same school they went to, and the kids generally speaking expect a similar or better lifestyle to their parents. So I'm not sure why it should be at all surprising that the kinds of careers young people might consider reflect that kind of bias. On the other hand, parents often want a "better life" for their children, and university often seems like the best path. That is the experience broadly in North America, I think, where skilled trades seem to occupy an unclear (or lesser) "prestige" position, even while elsewhere they are most certainly professions via apprenticeship.

Of course, what I'm really doing in residency is an apprenticeship, even if we don't call that - and medicine could not so unreasonably be called a trade, even if it was one of the three mediaeval professions. Until the 19th century we didn't have much more than rudimentary microscopy and Vesalius' anatomy, and it was only after insights from the laboratory and the science-ization of medicine that medical education moved to the university. But a lot of our training still revolves around the learning of technique and practice, and of course surgical and procedural training is explicitly about this.

Again, while in North America medical school generally requires the completion of an undergraduate degree first, this isn't generally the case elsewhere. I don't really mind this, though, as I enjoyed the freedom of undergrad and the ability to explore things (not that I'd decided to go into medicine then anyway).

Pretty sure i stated that in the OP. Although from my experience with the medical world, i'm not sure the Universities you guys are going to are doing all that great.

The US has a lot of bad and/or questionable residency programs. There are some variations in med school quality, but residency is the real "apprenticeship" period, and some people struggle or end up in "malignant" programs. Others scrape through residency but never are able to fail their exams. Anecdotally, Royal College exams in Canada are more difficult, but some people are able to work without RCPSC certification in certain areas.

[karaddin]

We should do just that, but so much mythmaking and propaganda makes college out to be the only path to a happy life. This propaganda is driven, in no small part, by colleges who are being run like corporations and treating students as customers while jacking up tuition at several times the pace of inflation, and by the vast legions of financial services companies that profit off the college loans racket.

The answer to almost every "Why are we doing [stupid illogical thing X] as a society?" is "Because some fuckers are making a lot of money off it."

It's not just the Colleges seeking profit, it's that it all snow balled from degrees being seen as an advantage in getting a job, or getting a better paying job. I think University is one of the clearest examples of the positional advantage - when almost no one has a degree then obviously it's great to have one, but then everyone you are in competition with starts getting one and instead of it being a boost it becomes part of the baseline minimum that everyone has to have to even have their resume looked at. Then it goes round another round of escalations with postgrad stuff etc.

I'm in IT at a University, I don't have a degree and I think for a lot of IT the degree doesn't really add that much. What I feel more strongly on though is that the impetus to make people go to Uni just so that they have *a degree* even if it's not relevant to the work is both really stupid, and damaging to society and the University system. It turns Universities from institutions focused on research and education to glorified degree factories.

A field that requires all the education like Medicine, or Sciences etc is a completely different story to this, those are teaching prerequisite skills that you have to learn. Just requiring a generic degree that has no relevance to the job, just so you can show you are the "right sort of person" who can "stick at something" is just bad. I view my decision to not complete the degrees I have started in the past as demonstrations of good judgement, not sinking good money/time into a bad investment. All this said, I'm back at University now doing something I actually want to do, and have a reasonable chance that I'll end up pursuing going into academia - so it's not the Universities and academia I have an issue with, its the perversion of them.

[Altherion]

Seriously. With all the discussions about college debt, no work, and anxiety over our kids being able to pay for their education, have you ever asked yourself if you really need to put the emphasis on getting a degree that is currently pushed in our society?

Probably not, but as Iskaral Pust said, it can have substantial benefits.

So why the huge drive to go to, or push our kids to attend university, other than some prestige? If anything the current system has taught us is that the idea of Degree=Job is a fucking joke. And if the a job is the end goal, why not pursue a training program that will actually allow you to obtain one that pays decently, and not leave you in decades worth of debt?

I agree that people who are in debt for decades after college have most likely made a mistake. It's not just that they've paid too much, but there are pretty good odds that the college they selected was either intended for the elite or an outright fraud. However, keep in mind that there are plenty of colleges (including both the best of the best and the more accessible variety) that more or less structure their financial aid to prevent this from happening. Alternatively, one can deliberately aim at a high paying career and people who are willing to plan for years in advance generally get what they want at which point the debt is small relative to the income.

Would you be upset with your child if he/she decided not to go to college, and instead became an electrician, welder, fire fighter, cop, carpenter, plumber, mechanic, framer, or lineman?

Not necessarily. I come from a rather "academic" family (everyone has at least a Masters, some have PhDs or MDs or even both). However, even in such families there are people who are probably better suited to other work. It depends on the child.

When you went, did you go with the understanding that it was to get an education with the end goal of a career, or did you just go to 'find yourself'?

I did not know what I wanted to do until my senior year.

Did you pick your education based on an eventual career?

No, but my education led directly to my current career. I might switch to something else though.

Were you told at a young age that you /had/ to go to college?

No. But there was a very strong emphasis on doing well in school.

Do you feel like going to college actually helped you in the workforce, or are there some days where you think that just about anyone could do the job with some basic training and some OJT?

My work is in experimental particle physics. While a lot of it comes down to programming and thus can be done by many people, when we try to outsource stuff, it generally requires extremely close supervision because people don't understand why we want the things that we ask for. So no, I think people who could do what I do without years of education are very rare.

I think a lot of the confusion on this topic comes from generalizing the idea of "college". Somebody who graduated from MIT and somebody with a degree from the University of Phoenix will both say that they went to college, but practically every significant aspect of their educational experience is radically different -- their peers and teachers almost certainly varied in intelligence and skill by a significant margin, the curricula were different and a degree from MIT will obviously get one a lot further. As a society, it's pretty safe to say that we really need MIT (and the Ivies and their West Coast counterparts and the like) and I would also argue that we need most (though perhaps not all) of the not quite as exclusive state schools. However, we can probably do without the University of Phoenix and its ilk.

[Civility Reigns]

Coming from a computer science background, the conventional wisdom amongst the current generation is that college as it exists now is unnecessary. Yes, there are some benefits to going to college, but in terms of actual experience and long term employability it offers very little to the average software engineer. When I first started college, Ruby on Rails was the premier web development framework. Now, it's node.js in Javascript. When I was a kid, long before I was introduced to programming, it was PHP, and before that...well, there wasn't really a "web" before that. You'll find situations like this occurring frequently in the technology world: the skills and paradigms you were taught in school or learned on the job are radically altered or replaced entirely within 5 to 10 years as technology changes and the professional community evolves.

Computer scientists and software engineers don't get their information from textbooks, or by consulting ancient professors. In some cases this can even be detrimental to your education. Most of my college professors cut their teeth with FORTRAN and freaking punch cards. If you wanted to run a piece of software, you had to write it down on paper, punch the code into a card and schedule it to be executed by the university mainframe. It was a completely different world. No, these days we get our information from Google searches and forums. Personally, about 70% of what I know as a software engineer/computer scientist came from the internet. The rest is very high level stuff, things like artificial intelligence, algorithm design and analysis, or the architectural concerns of designing computer hardware. If that's your sort of thing, college is great. Otherwise, the online community is more than capable of educating you.

Unfortunately this philosophy clashes with the beliefs of the old guard, especially amongst those without a technology background. Employers often hire based on college education or years of experience, rather than skill or an ability to learn and adapt. This means many of the most talented programmers have to trudge through years of college before they're allowed to work on the projects they've been dreaming of, even when they already knew what they were doing to begin with, and the most incompetent programmers get high paying jobs pushing their archaic design philosophies onto company software. Sometimes this isn't the case; some companies hire hackers straight out of highschool for their cybersecurity divisions (though I get the feeling this is because cybersecurity in America is a mess and they're desperate for help, rather than an actual belief in talent). So, many people go in thinking "whatever, I don't need a degree" only to find that the guy paying you thinks you absolutely need one.

Of course, if you're interested in becoming a computer scientist, don't go in thinking "I don't need college" or "I absolutely have to go to college". Do whatever it takes to get ahead, and whatever is comfortable for you. The last thing you want to do is get locked into one path that isn't working for your unique needs and expectations.

[Prue]

I'm glad that we have apprenticeships/trainings for white collar jobs here, too. So there is not as much of a stigma if you don't go to college. In fact, many trainings are very hard to get into, and provide an excellent education. Better than some college/university courses, as you get RL experience and access to the newest machines etc. Plus, you earn some money instead of being in debt. And the company you work for can see if you are the right person to be offered a permanent job afterwards. Win-win.

Of course you still need a university degree for some professions, but that's not the right path for many young people.

[Gneisenau]

Would we still ask this question if university wasn't as expensive as it is ?

[peterbound]

Would we still ask this question if university wasn't as expensive as it is ?

Probably not. That might be why there is some confusion between cultures.

Dylan's (my son) college is paid for. His mom passed on his GI Bill to him, so he's got a full ride, and his housing paid for. Pretty sweet gig. Saying that though, I'd be just as proud of him if he went into a blue collar job, or the military.