A little while ago I would've agreed heartily with Peter. Now, as a "born" software engineer with a decent portfolio (now age 21) recently frustratated by a fruitless job search, turned down again and again (I believe rightfully so) because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.
A good college degree (especially in STEM fields) provide the basic foundation upon which to innovate. Our industries have gone so deep, and we are standing on such giant shoulders, that anyone who is going to take it further must first absorb the century or so of knowledge created so far on the subject. Even in Computer Science, the next innovation is not yet another WhatsApp, it's more along the lines of Counsyl (a dna-sequencing app), where a person without the knowledge-foundation equivalent of a degree simply would never get started with the idea of making such software, leave alone actually building it.
And I say that as a self-taught software engineer. Yes I can probably build the next Snapchat on my own. But even then I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, especially low-level stuff like kernels, bits and bytes, and fundemental details of cryptography and security. Not to say anything about the "unknown unknowns" which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now, after spending years in industry and freelancing.
You've got 2 different concepts about college mixed up in your post.
> because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.
This is an issue about "credentials" & "signaling in the marketplace"[1], and not possession of actual knowledge.
>I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, [...] which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now,
This is an issue about attaining knowledge. This is a separate issue from "credentials". All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available. Course syllabus, textbooks, and not to mention the vast resources of wikipedia, etc. If anyone wants to learn CS, he/she can study it. There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge. This is why hiring managers complain that many compsci graduates do not have actual programming skills.
I suspect the main thrust of your post is about the credential which is very defensible especially if you have aspirations for certain employers that absolutely require that piece of paper.
> All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available.
That's certainly true, and the same for mathematics or physics or philosophy or any other subject. But I've met very few people who have on their own actually done it, working through the material you'd cover in a 4-year degree (let alone going on to cover graduate-level work). Not zero people, just very few. I've met many more people who've worked through the equivalent of a few courses of material (e.g. have self-studied SICP), but that's a much lower bar.
Of those people I know who have done so, most are mathematicians. Could be random draw of who I know, but math does seem to draw autodidacts who go all-in and teach themselves the equivalent of a 4-to-6-year (or more) course of mathematics.
It's true that learning the contents of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming or Concrete Mathematics is easier in a class environment, but that's not the whole story. I'm a self taught software engineer. I actually find it fairly easy to compete against CS grads. A shocking number of them don't seem to pick up much CS during their 4 to 6 years in school. I've talked to countless grads who can't describe the differences between a process and a thread. They can't explain how they might implement even a naïve hashmap. I've had to spend an hour explaining to a colleague (a cs degree holder who was also the son of a cs professor) how amortized constant time append works in dynamic arrays.
For reasons I don't fully understand a cs degree does not imply cs knowledge. Grade inflation? Maybe they weren't given enough story problems?
When someone asks me about a concept I'm unfamiliar with, I don't have the excuse of that not being part of the curriculum.
First, there's a reason top-class students get better jobs. Not always, of course, but most of the times.
Second there are concepts that if you don't deal with them every day, you lose a your grip around them.
Third (and maybe most important), maybe CS was a good degree to have in terms of opportunities but wasn't their passion. You can't compete with passion. There are people who read this and that book only to acquire knowledge of a very specific domain out of pure passion about the topic at hand. You can't compete with those. These are the people who usually can make combine sources, spot errors, think outside the box for obvious reasons.
ps. I remember an instance when reading the Cryptonomicon, where Waterhouse - one of the main protagonists - was thinking that the fact he was at Princeton university in the 1930's was nothing special. He thought that in this place there was just a bunch of guys who knew one thing or two about maths and that was all there was to it. Later in the book while almost being drowned inside a German submarine, the only thing he could think of, was how to get his hands on a German strong box he came across. When he was healthy enough, he spent ~ 6 hours in a row trying to open the damn thing. When he did open the strong-box, he was almost depressed because he didn't really give a sht about what was inside. He wanted to know how thins German strong-box worked and if it can be reversed, somehow. Now that he knew that, there was nothing appealing about this strong-box. Not even the contents. To a pure mathematician like he really* was, there was nothing appealing in implementing something, once you understood how it works. Now, how on earth can you compete with a guy like that? :-)
> There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge.
There's a few things that make them good — most notably, the support available if you don't understand something well. While certainly there's a fair amount of support available (esp. online, and depending upon your corporate culture possibly at work as well), I'm yet to find a community that's as willing to help people understand material as many teaching staff are, especially when it comes to more obscure material.
It may just be the present college generation, but future generations will not hesitate or have issues getting into communal learning groups online to study similar topics without the need for a centralized instructor, especially when that instructor leaves them a hundred grand in debt.
Today, there is everything from IRC channels to mailing lists to forums to subreddits to facebook / g+ groups to linkedin groups to get involved with other students of the same topic, maybe even with a few veterans to provide guidance, to learn these subjects.
You won't find people that lecture you, but you will find people that will answer questions. I'm surprised there isn't an SO for that yet...
I propose both ideas are related. That requiring a degree as a signal in the marketplace is warranted because degree holders tend to actually possess knowledge.
You should realize that many people have no idea how to spot a good programmer, because they aren't good programmers, so they just go with degrees. Most people, degree or not, cannot do even the most basic tasks.
If you could build a Snapchat app on your own, you are already far ahead of most programmers, so it is only a matter of getting experience to show people other than a degree. When you get into a job you will see just how incompetent most programmers really are.
If you got a job now you could have a modest house payed off instead of being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt four years from now.
I believe that Thiel is saying that the current structure of higher education, in tiers of increasing eliteness, bundled with a living and partying arrangement over an essentially-fixed time period, is bad, not that the course material or content is bad. I'm a CS student at a very prestigious university in the UK, and I'm not going to claim that I would have learned all of the same things that I have learned if I had self-taught, but I totally didn't need the whole living arrangement thing, and I'm not really sure why I had to fight with thousands of other students for my place, when most of the teaching easily parallelises if you just record the lectures and open up the course notes.
I can't speak for others here, but college degrees don't really factor into hiring at my company. We have one lead engineer who doesn't have a college degree, and at least one other who also did not complete college. Some other fellow engineer co-workers did stuff like graphic design in college.
FWIW, I too don't have that low level knowledge - I did math & physics in undergrad and math in grad school. I never took a CS class, and am completely self-taught. I am happy & successful, and have no problems with getting a job if for some reason I am unhappy with my current one.
Good for you. While I see some wisdom in Thiel's campaign against the idea of universal higher education, I think college is still great for many individuals who can afford it. Focus on the "unknown unknowns" – you can go read about kernels and bits and bytes and cryptography, but college is the most efficient way I've experienced to become familiar with things you've never even heard of such that you can figure out how to learn more about them if the time ever comes to do so. This isn't just about the course of study either, it's about being around so many different people learning about so many different things. So don't get too heads down on computer stuff, it probably has the lowest density of "unknown unknowns" for you.
A hypothetical. You can choose one of the following:
a) A degree with no knowledge (perhaps you forgot everything after the final).
b) The knowledge with no degree (autodidact).
Which do you believe will help you more in your job search? If the answer is (a), you pretty much agree with Thiel. If the answer is (b), it's unclear why you are spending money on a degree.
But there is another option (c): a degree with the knowledge that's hard to get without a structured course of study. As an aside, if you're the kind of person who forgets everything after taking the exam, or takes irrelevant coursework, you might not have the discipline to be a good autodidact.
> knowledge that's hard to get without a structured course of study
You are omitting other resources no autodidact could replicate: Billions of dollars in capital resources (labs, systems, etc.), access to and personal instruction from leading experts and researchers in a wide variety of fields (professors), and large numbers of smart peers studying the same things.
> it's unclear why you are spending money on a degree.
Because universities help you accumulate knowledge.
Yes, autodidacts exist. But, for most people, the atmosphere of a university, the exposure to and attention from experts, and in addition the various sticks and carrots in place (e.g. if you don't study this weekend you'll fail the exam), help with learning.
>But, for most people, the atmosphere of a university, the exposure to and attention from experts, and in addition the various sticks and carrots in place (e.g. if you don't study this weekend you'll fail the exam), help with learning.
Sure, many folks need structure for learning. But why would such folks be desirable for hiring in programming jobs? Wouldn't we rather hire an autodidact that happened to suffer his way through college instead of the student that required the forced structure of college to learn?
There will be a lot of new and difficult material (additional compsci and/or business domain knowledge) to learn after the the 22-year old student graduates. If the student didn't have a "love of learning" to motivate and self-discipline his study, what value should we place on him as a job candidate?
I found that the material I encountered in college was significantly more difficult than anything I've seen in industry. My coworkers have expressed similar opinions.
I certainly agree with wanting candidates who have a love of learning though! On the other hand, I would think someone who loves learning would want to go to school. I can't see why someone who loved learning wouldn't want to work with people who are the experts in their fields and tackle challenging, still unsolved problems.
My professors are far from experts in their field. In fact, I'll go as far to say that this is a point for the other side of the argument: in teaching things to myself i find myself on mailing lists and IRC where i have far more interaction with actual experts.
I was taught data structures by a guy giving powerpoints and code examples on windows XP. In 2014.
Hm that's unfortunate, and I apologize for projecting my own experiences to that of students at other colleges.
I can only speak for my own experiences, and when I was in college I worked with several people who were clearly leaders in their fields. The reason it was obvious was that I would go to talks with guest speakers and they would usually either cite a paper written by one of the professors or informally say that if you have questions about X you should probably ask a certain person in the room.
I'm at the university of Wisconsin. We're nationally ranked for graduate computer science.
The issue here is that there's quite a disconnect between our research and our teaching. They take tenured profs that aren't capable of doing research and stick them teaching undergraduates. Everyone else that is worth a damn is inaccessible to us. (I'll make one exception: Jin-Yi Cai is amazing.)
I don't even know what to say, besides that our CS program for undergraduates is kind of shit. These people are academics. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's not like they're at the head of their field either. They're at the head of the field from a decade ago maybe.
The woman teaching the intro classes, the guy teaching data structures, and the woman teaching machine programming (low level) all have been doing so for over a decade. Their classes don't change either, you can find their powerpoints and handouts from 6 years ago and they're the same damn thing, give or take some small changes like the date.
Let's look at two 500 level classes, my compilers class and the OS course. There's two profs teaching OS. One is the chair of our cs department.
Searching google for "<their name> site:gmane.org" returns no results for the non-chair OS prof and no results for my compilers prof.
The chair has a few mailing list posts, such as one on the ALSA list with an amazing subject of "help with first ALSA program, please?" And this wasn't from 1999 or anything. He was the active chair at the time of asking. It was less than 2 years ago. It's embarrassing, honestly.
As for guest speakers, that's another subject. UW has a lot of smart people around it. It's just that they're entirely separate from the 18 year olds.
Ah that's very unfortunate to hear. I certainly did have many lecturers who were not professors, and also professors who were not as great as other ones. Nevertheless, at my school at least there was never anything stopping me from just going into the office hours of a professor who wasn't teaching to talk about something. They always seemed very eager to help me with anything.
It's really unfortunate that this isn't the situation at all schools. I guess I really lucked out!
Who said they "need" structure? Maybe it is just an ideal environment? Sure you can learn without professors, free time, and research facilities. But college was the ideal place to learn simply because there were no other demands on my time. I still learn a lot outside of college! But I wish to return to that environment again some day just for fun.
I was an autodidact as a kid. I taught myself to program, and wrote fairly substantial computer programs.
If you'd looked at the maze of spaghetti code I wrote when I was 11, you would have definitely concluded that someone should teach me how to do things right...
You're talking about vastly different fields. If you want to be a scientist and study DNA, college seems like a great option. For computer science? Not so much.
You probably feel like you've missed out on something really important but once you actually get to college, you'll realise that it isn't as great as it is portrayed to be. A lot of stuff can be self taught in a much more efficient and less time-wasting manner. As well, you can focus on recent technology whilst the curriculum of a uni may be outdated.
Despite that, I don't think your definition of "self-taught" is where a lot of industries will end up. You can still have a great education experience online (there will be many services offering this as technology evolves), so you can still cover the same content but not have to enter a traditional physical university relationship.
If you want to be a scientist and study computing, college is still a great option.
The OP's point was that increasingly, the low-hanging fruit is already picked and areas of high growth require a deep technical understanding of one or more fields.
The problem is even worse, because the low-hanging fruit isn't. The Paypals and Facebooks of today employ armies of Ph.D.s to work on their critical infrastructure. Google started as Ph.D. research.
On balance, tech startups that do not require a deep understanding of computer science to run are an anomaly. So where does Thiel's attitude come from?
I think the thing to keep in mind when listening to someone like Peter Thiel is that he's a businessman first, not an engineer first, and this colors what skills he sees as most important and necessary.
Thiel says "you don't need a degree to be successful". But almost all his warrants actually only defend the claim that "you don't need a college education or equivalent to build a successful business [because you can hire the college-educated experts you honest-to-god do need to build a business]".
Which is fine. But you're either under-estimating the difficulty of large swaths of Computer Science or over-estimating the intelligence and will of the average person if you think we can meet the demand for high-skill engineers with only people who spend large chunks of their childhoods learning about programming and computer science.
I believe Google would hire people on what they can do rather than focus on their paper qualifications. And I see this being a growing trend in the future.
The points by Thiel seem to be that uni can exist purely to be an exclusive option for a certain [richer] demographic of people, rather than an open playing field for anyone to study and improve academically. And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.
> I believe Google would hire people on what they can do rather than focus on their paper qualifications. And I see this being a growing trend in the future.
Sure. Any my point was that I don't believe we can sustainable pump out the number of high-quality software engineers that a place like Google needs without something like a college system.
I think your interpretation of Thiel is uncharitable, and I hope it's not true. That would be awful.
> And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.
> especially low-level stuff like kernels, bits and bytes, and fundemental details of cryptography and security. Not to say anything about the "unknown unknowns" which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
First of all, the unknown unknowns are much worse from the kid who went to school. Wanna know why? Because the autodidact is definitely better equipped to repair a gap. Its ridiculous to think a 4 year degree can teach a gapless understanding of computers-- do you really expect a 22 year old to have a gapless understanding of any field?
The most important thing a CS degree can teach someone is how to learn more, and at least in my experience it dramatically falls short. Never encouraged to read source. Never encouraged to implement an assignment in another language. The message to me and my peers is clear: learn java and go work for Epic or another dead-end enterprise place.
Last semester I did a hackathon and some of the competitors were 4 kids that clearly did nothing outside of class. My group implemented a mobile app and responsive website. We learned NONE of that in any class. They implemented a GUI desktop application in java with eclipse. (It astounds me how many people can come out of my CS program and the only way they know how to compile their projects is via a green button.)
Second of all: your lack of knowledge about low level stuff is entirely on you. You can learn that anywhere. The problem is that 20 year olds, whether they're in uni or not, think that the high level world of rails and Python is more interesting than bits and bytes. I have never formally learned about the specifics of any of the *nix kernels, Unix tools, python arthimetic, C macros, and more. But I do know about them, because it interests me.
When you say you had a decent portfolio, was this at previous companies or stuff you did on your own?
The reason I ask is I don't have a degree either but I haven't had much trouble getting offers after I got my first job.
Nevertheless I think it's great that you're going back to school; I plan to do the same later.
But, I went to school for a few years didn't find that the undergraduate curriculum really went in detail for any particular subject, so I hope you won't be disappointed as I suspect you will still have gaps in knowledge even after you leave. On the other hand, you will have a good foundation and also have an idea of where to look or people to ask.
Sounds like a good plan. Just keep in mind, if you'd gone to school right away, there's a fair chance you still wouldn't know much about those things, and you'd still have to plug gaps through self study.
It sounds like you'll be in a better position to direct your academic experience, but you may end up feeling frustrated as well. There's a good chance you won't be able to study what you want to in college, and you discover that you have to get it through self-study anyway. On the bright side, some professors absolutely love students like this (because it's how they learned as well) and will help you out.
Then why don't you go learn those things? Set yourself up with a project where you'll need to learn them and go get it done. If that's not how you've learned everything you know to-date, then do whatever it was you did to learn those things with these new things.
College is only structured learning. If you can build that structure yourself, you're only missing a piece of paper.
Where do you live? The reason I'm asking is because location and experience are the two biggest factors that come into play when looking for employment. When I graduated from college, I spent 5 months trying to find an entry level development job and it was tough.
School is absolutely fine for learning what you need. Better than doing it by yourself.
The real problem is that it's
A) Necessary for certain jobs
B) Way too expensive. Making people decide to go autodidact
Is it really way to expensive though? I will graduate with just shy of 40k in debt, and a 100k+ job. That is imho a great investment. I think the biggest problems with college is that too many view it as just a piece of paper and simply a continuation of high school. I went back to school after a decade from graduating from high school, and while I wouldn't say that college is perfect, I appreciate that they exist what they are for.
I will graduate with just shy of 40k in debt, and a 100k+ job. That is imho a great investment.
That's not enough information to tell you if it's a good investment or not. What would the next best alternative be? Unemployment? A 70k job? And remember that you didn't just lose 40k - you also lost the potential income you could be earning during those years. Assuming that job would earn you 40k/year of disposable income, and you went to college for five years, you actually forwent $240k, not just $40k.
I gave up about 15k in salary per year(I continued to make money while in school). I also only took 4 years. So I gave up 100k and accounting for inflation my break even point is about 2.5 years.
Last summer I took CS184 Startup Engineering. It was a free Stanford Computer Science Course on Coursera, taught by Balaji Srinivasan.
It was about 10 weeks long. There were ~100,000 students enrolled. It was free. And it was, far and away, the most valuable thing I've ever done in my life. It was an order of magnitude more valuable than my 4 year undergraduate education at the University of Connecticut.
Since taking that course, I've pushed hundreds of code commits into the Airbnb codebase (I work on the online marketing team here). They're small pull requests , and I'm rarely ever writing anything from scratch, but the number of engineering hours I've saved by being able to write my own PRs is extremely valuable.
Out of curiosity, I asked a few of the recruiters at Airbnb what putting CS184 on my LinkedIn means. I explained to them what it was, how much value I got out of it, and how much value the company got out of it. I showed them the course, and the certificate you get when you finish. Everyone had the same answer: "It doesn't mean much".
My bias is, online education still has that "University of Phoenix" stigma. How valuable the course actually is still doesn't seem to mean anything yet. Maybe, in general, that's correct. Maybe most online courses still suck. But I can very much verify that life-altering, immensely valuable online courses exist.
This idea of online learning and more specifically, credentialing, looks more like it's a social engineering problem rather than "knowledge delivery" problem.
I've been geeking out on institution-agnostic credentialing and accreditation for a little while now. If you're interested in this space please get in touch with me - email is in my profile.
From the perspective of a recruiter, simply listing that course has zero predictive value for a candidate. It's too easy to fake/cheat. The value is demonstrated by what you do with - like what you say about creating your own PRs, etc. Hopefully that will be demonstrated by your professional references and career advancement.
Isn't this a Catch-22 though? In order to show that you can contribute PRs to the codebase, you must first get hired to AirBnB. And in order to get hired, you must first show your ability to contribute.
You mention that a way to show ability to contribute is through "professional references and career advancement", but doesn't that also first require that you get into the company first? For the former, you need work to find colleagues who can give meaningful references, and for the latter, you need to enter the job first in order to advance in it.
Am I missing something? Is there any way to get these jobs without first getting the (dubious) credential from universities?
It might not mean much to most recruiters, since most of them aren't technical themselves. But as someone who hires, and is technical, you would absolutely have an advantage if I were hiring for a marketing position (honestly, if I were, I'd reach out to you now). It's a no-brainer for me - especially for traditionally non-technical positions like marketing, where technical skills beyond MS Office are rare.
I think the bias against "University of Phoenix" type degrees doesn't really apply to online courses like Stanford's. Everybody knows that they're money-making schemes - so it frankly calls your judgment into question if you do it. I would wonder - why did this person choose to spend time and money on a University of Phoenix degree, rather than just take the free Stanford courses and learn on their own?
The issue with the Stanford online courses is that it's common knowledge that not many people stick it through to the end / pay attention. So having it on your resume would get my attention, but I would need to verify that you actually absorbed the knowledge. Once that concern is addressed though, you absolutely have an advantage in my book.
I guess my concern is that most recruiters aren't you, and probably aren't anyone commenting on this thread.
My bias is that mass-adoption (and ultimately, online learning as an alternative to a ~100k education) will only happen when an entry-level recruiter is able to filter through and use online courses as a hiring signal. So far, the only people I've seen get anywhere close to this, or care at all, are very technical founders hiring for a very small team, usually in the valley.
Even if they respect the course or what was learned, they don't actively seek these people out. I've seen startup founders aggressively seeking out and trying to hire Stanford / Harvard / Princeton alumni because they're alumni. Yet I've never heard anyone saying "Let's go recruit and hire CS184 grads".
Successful recruiters are efficient. By that, I mean they want the shortest route possible from getting a job to fill to filling the job. Filling as many jobs as possible with qualified candidates is how they pay their bills. They don't have all day to go over the life stories of candidates and why they didn't want to pursue a 4 year degree. The bottom line is that 4 year degrees show a consistent effort toward acquiring a domain-specific set of knowledge that is favorable to most hiring managers.
Is it possible that a non-degreed candidate with no work experience is the best of a pool? Sure. Is it worth a recruiter's time and energy sourcing candidates to put THAT guy in front of a hiring manager if he's only got a few spots available (because he probably isn't the only recruiter in communication with said hiring manager)?
IMO, no. As someone who has worked both sides of that aisle (currently a developer), unless a recruit has serious experience, he's not in the final pool of qualified applicants. Let someone else take that risk. I've got to worry about my next paycheck. This is a sales job, after all.
My perspective is that this just takes time, because it's necessary for people making hiring decisions to have personal experience and knowledge with the material. Very similarly to how people who went to some college project their opinion (good or bad) about the program at that college onto other people who went there. I've done some hiring, and I've taken lots of online courses, and if I see a certification for one that I have taken and thought highly of, then it absolutely means something to me. But I'll definitely ask a bunch of questions to get a sense of how well you learned the material.
Edit to add: I think I left this too implicit: my main point is that as these courses become more prevalent, there will be more people with personal familiarity in higher positions, and that will make them more valuable.
Computers saved me from having to go to college. Graduated high school at the right time in 1990, became a computer consultant at 17. Started my own consulting company at 20. Started a small ISP at 24. Sold it at 26. Started working for corporate America and have worked as a software engineer in finance for the past 18 years. I wouldn't change a thing about my career or my self-taught path.
It all worked out well which is good because my parents couldn't afford to send me to college. But they did have the foresight to save up and buy me a Commodore 64 in 1982.
Computers are the only reason I have a job right now, despite being in a country with subsidized (effectively free) tertiary education.
Turns out basically nothing I did in university was remotely applicable to my current actual job. Though I suspect it's more a comment on my country's industrial priorities than anything else, but it does make me incredibly sad for US students.
After getting a job in the industry, I feel my university years were pretty much wasted. Very little, if not zero, knowledge I got in the university has been needed in my day to day job. I'm becoming more and more convinced that if you don't attend some of the top universities or don't wish to stay in academia, universities provide very little of value in the software world.
The poster below is correct, the credential is valued more than knowledge and this is what is holding people back.
Why do most elite schools refuse to bestow online degrees for anyone who can complete identical coursework with rigorous test proctoring?
It's not about cost. Forget about the lower marginal cost of online students, in most cases elite online degrees are not even allowed if students are willing to pay full price.
There is also the argument that the experience of being on campus and closely working with peers and instructors is an integral part of the credential. Yet that can't be the reason either or else a simple solution would be to offer "on campus" and "online" versions of a degree to clarify what has been achieved.
The biggest reason not to offer online elite degrees for all who can complete the work is to maintain prestige for the institution. Artificial scarcity is used against students the same way it is used by luxury brands such as Ferrari and Hermes hand bags.
Any why should this change? No one at these institutions would benefit including alumni who have already made it into the club.
It's prioritization of brand above the betterment of society through education.
It's interesting, but Capital One recently changed their requirements for the software developer role from:
B.S. required required
to
High School Diploma, GDE, or Military service required[1]
While I worked there, they decided to make the change because, "software development can be learned anywhere." It's interesting to see the change in corporations and makes me feel they are really trying to make a change.
Disclaimer: I'm happy Capital One changed their hiring policy. It's their reasoning -- not their policy -- that worries me. What worries me is that the attitude that "Software development can be learned anywhere" might coincide with not treating software development as a serious and mature field of engineering.
Investment banking, the practice of law, many parts of medicine, and bridge building can also be learned anywhere. None-the-less, we demand practitioners of these trades have a foundations in their respective fields.
To be clear, I am perfectly happy using software written by an expert at the craft who taught him/herself the foundations of computer science and software engineering.
I am far less happy using software written by a graduate of one of these "learn to code" 12 week workshops. Especially as anything more than pure implementation work ("implement this spec to the letter") on anything serious (such as the core infrastructure for a bank).
Security is hard. Reliability is hard.
It's incredibly ironic that the current administration invests hundreds of millions/billions into cyber-security while simultaneously calling for less -- not more -- training in software engineering.
>>I am far less happy using software written by a graduate of one of these "learn to code" 12 week workshops... Security is hard. Reliability is hard.
Sure. But the graduates of those workshops don't get jobs working on security and critical infrastructure. Rather, they get hired as junior programmers and are given small-scale projects where they can continue to learn and grow under the guidance of more experienced developers.
Besides, the code school graduates often have critical subject matter expertise in their former fields. For example, when I need a programmer to build an in-house system for a marketing team, I'd be much more willing to hire a former marketing specialist who completed a 3-month code school than a fresh computer science graduate.
My point was just that, on balance, colleges -- especially elite ones -- tend to produce the "highly skilled engineer working on critical infrastructure" type of CS practitioner, not the "in-house data munging app" type of CS practitioner.
And it's the former that there is a critical shortage of.
They still have to pass the hiring requirements, then have to go through 1 to 2 years of rotations before they are considered a non-development member. They actually do this regardless or rolls. They also will require applicants without a degree to show previous work.
The main idea is that many smart people start companies or consult and dont go to school. There's no reason to ostracize then.
This is nice and all, but Thiel does the exact same thing with his fellowships: winnows a crowded field and bestows highly-visible laurels on a few already-talented selectees.
After reading this article, I'm still not sure what his alternative plan is.
> Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.
Is there any need for a "plan"? Ultimately having a default option being college is obviously not working all that well for a lot of the people going down that route (dropout rates are high and finding a job in your field isn't a guarantee).
The "plan" would be to take an honest look at yourself and decide what sort of career makes sense for you. That might mean you go to a trade school, it might mean that you go to college, it might mean something I can't think of right now :)
The worst advice is saying just go to college and it will all work itself out.
Exactly. I'm sure really great online education stuff will exist in the future, but now? It's a poorly organized, incomplete mess, with a few great resources and a ton of holes.
Stop encouraging people to abandon the old system when the new one is nowhere near ready yet.
With the risk of coming across as a jerk or arrogant, and also admitting that I have assisted with interviews but have never worked in an HR department:
In my opinion HR departments are just lazy or understaffed. A real face-to-face interview with the candidate about the subject you're hiring on is almost always enough to see if a potential candidate has 'got the goods'. And without going to deeply into a discussion about what is and isn't a good interviewing strategy: Ask questions to see if the candidate knows what he/she's talking about. As how a person would react in situations you've come across. Examine the his/her responses with what you'd have done, ask your colleagues what they think after the interview. In short, just talk to your candidate, engage in a discussion.
Yes it's impossible to interview each and every single candidate. But, really, a college-degree-filter is not the way to go. A majority of the people will learn important lessons in college (and some won't), but sometimes it's the people that chose another way that prove the most valuable for your company.
A college education is like money: It has value because we all agree that it has value. And like money, it will retain its place in society until we all decide to use something else instead.
The system of higher education isn't going to change because people have too much invested in it, and that investment can never go bad like the housing market or tech stocks did. College graduates will talk about how much they learned, the networking and social experience or of being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking. It isn't possible to question the value of those intangible benefits, or to prove to someone that they could have gained the same things through other means. So the system perpetuates itself.
To be honest, it seems like an unbreakable cycle. Well off kids go to college, get jobs and move into management where they hire other well off kids who also went to college. MOOCs, community/online colleges and vocational schools are emerging as additional options, but most of the decision makers at major institutions attended traditional four year colleges and expect the people they work with to have done so as well.
It seems like the best way to control the cost of education would be to make employers responsible for paying for it, instead of the students. Then market forces would come into play. If a business had to choose between paying $120k to send someone to Harvard or $20k to send them to a state school or community college, then they would have an incentive to evaluate the difference in quality of education and training from the respective institutions. Right now all of the financial risk is placed on students, and businesses get to pick and choose who to hire with relatively little consequence.
Obviously the system isn't going to change any time soon, if ever, no matter how many opeds the washington post publishes.
I would say that a more plausible solution (than somehow making businesses pay for the education of the people they want to hire) is to push actual accreditation off onto 3rd parties.
Imagine there's a trusted business who makes the tests and certifications, and anytime you wanted to hire someone, you'd check to see if they had the relevant certifications. Maybe this person self-taught themselves everything they needed to pass, maybe they went to a cheap institution to receive formal training for the certification, or maybe they went to an expensive one.
Colleges could no longer be more expensive just for the sake of being expensive, the colleges who could educate people to better scores would be worth more. Similarly the testing/accreditation companies who could better differentiate potential hires based on their actual ability would be more trusted by the hiring companies, and would be able to command higher prices.
> A college education is like money: It has value because we all agree that it has value.
Sticking with the same analogy: if you rapidly increase the amount of money in circulation, its value falls. The people whose wages and prices are rising in tandem experience little net change. But people whose wages don't rise suffer from the rising prices.
College is undergoing the same process. The fraction of people who go to college is up significantly. All those new degrees have pushed the absolute value of a degree down, which is why college is no longer an automatic path to high-paying, white-collar work. But at the same time, people without degrees are left ever further behind, and the relative gap between college and no-college is bigger than ever.
The article is not anti-college, it's against blindly going into college. Thiel is proposing that you decide what is the best for your future. If you want to build a company that provides ephemeral messaging and not much else, perhaps college isn't for you because there is little you can learn there that you can't learn on your own. If you want to build something that indexes large amounts of data in ways that were previously not doable, then college might be a good choice because you can do research and have your work reviewed by a community of people more interested in pushing the bounds of human knowledge than creating a business. My latter example would apply to a very small subset of existing companies.
The reality is that when you are at the stage of deciding whether you should do college, you have little idea of what it is that you want to do so it's difficult to reverse engineer your education against your potential career path. For this reason college seems like a good default. It's insurance (as was mentioned in the article, but in a different light) against realizing that your career path would benefit from a degree but you did not get one. It seems like a useful strategy may be to help young students discover their careers at an earlier age, or at least to enter the workforce before deciding whether college is for them.
My problem with Thiel's logic is that he doesn't go far enough. If you've spent the past 12 years in the traditional education system you're ill equipped to forge your own path. If instead you've been figuring things out on your own for pretty much you're entire life, then by the time you reach college age you'll have the tools necessary to make the right decision for yourself.
I believe (and would love to see research around) that learning is a pull model. Traditional education works on a push model. This fundamental incongruence wastes decades of a person's most prime learning years. That's not counting all the other ills that come with the artificial environment of restricting immature people to interact primarily with other immature people (bullying, ostracization, self-confidence issues, depression, etc etc).
The model I plan to use with my own children is incredibly simple: do something productive 8 hours a day, every day. The set of productive activities is defined solely by their ability to justify why it's productive. That combined with good nutrition, emotionally supportive household, physical security give the building blocks and raw ingredients that will allow a person to achieve their full potential.
This is a biased if not myopic view of higher education. To Peter Thiel, the best route for a high school graduate is to go to Silicon Valley and do a start-up. While that might be the best option for a very few, it just doesn't work for a general public.
Beside, this article started with "higher education", but never even touched upon what that word meant. It's higher education, it's education. By and large, college provides the best environment for young people to meet and learn from professors and from their peers. The college experience is a very special experience for learning. College is not just an investment of how much money you put in and how much your salary will be after you get out.
Even if Bill Gates and Zuck Markerburg dropped out of Harvard, I am sure they learned a lot while being there, and perhaps beyond what they probably were aware of at the time. Bill Gates for example coauthored a paper with Cristo Papadimitriou (a giant in Computer Science) while at Harvard. I bet Bill had great opportunities to meet and learn from many great people while being there.
> it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place
Not at all. It implies a future where people are more productive, produce more, and earn more. It's not just an implication, but fundemental economics.
> a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists
College is not a zero sum competition; everyone can be winners and get degrees. Also, most people complain that college encourages too much non-conformity. I've never heard, and it certainly wasn't my experience, that college creates conformists.
> Is higher education an investment? Everyone knows that college graduates earn more than those without degrees.
The focus on earnings is very narrow. Increasing your knowledge, your understanding of the world, your exposure to ideas, and especially your critical thinking and other cognitive and intellectual skills, helps you in every place in life where those things in apply. Not only as an employee, but as a citizen, a member of your community, a member of a family, as someone managing your own affairs, as an autodidact in your learning after college, and as someone seeking a fulfulling life.
> It implies a future where people are more productive, produce more, and earn more. It's not just an implication, but fundemental economics.
College degrees do not correlate with productivity. The earning power of degrees is almost entirely driven by proximity and access to higher-paying jobs. Productivity simply has nothing to do with it.
> College is not a zero sum competition; everyone can be winners and get degrees.
I believe Thiel is arguing that college experiences are becoming a cultural binary -- either you have a degree or you do not.
I read Thiel's commentary as: if you're a zero in that system, you lose out on future opportunity; and to become a one in that system, you need to conform (in the manner of social norms.)
> College degrees do not correlate with productivity. The earning power of degrees is almost entirely driven by proximity and access to higher-paying jobs. Productivity simply has nothing to do with it.
I was all ready to come back here and strenuously object to this since I really can't stand Peter Thiel, but after reading it, I agree with him (about this one thing). College, or any particular career field, isn't for everyone. I especially agree with the idea, and I've seen this in a couple places now, that college is just the final round of a long zero-sum tournament. You mess up early and you'll probably never win, regardless of actual talent or "merit". This seems like a broken system.
On the other hand, how do we do better? Massive companies still need hundreds of thousands of workers? How do they find them without college admissions offices providing signals? Hiring is a massive problem, as we can probably all agree, that isn't going to disappear just because people start skipping college or attending alternative institutions. How does a "nobody" 18 or 22 year old prove his or her value without a letter of admission or a diploma?
> College, or any particular career field, isn't for everyone. I especially agree with the idea, and I've seen this in a couple places now, that college is just the final round of a long zero-sum tournament. You mess up early and you'll probably never win, regardless of actual talent or "merit". This seems like a broken system.
This is a really important idea for the public to understand. It's not simply a class thing either, which is how it's typically portrayed (e.g. "you just want college to be for rich kids and poor kids can learn to be plumbers at community college"). It's more of a "how is a person's brain wired up" thing.
I was an amazingly mediocre student, but I've been very successful in industry. I think it's because in school, the curriculum is set in stone - you're just consuming it. There's no opportunity for self actualization. In "the field", you will have opportunities to drive real solutions and even innovate.
> How does a "nobody" 18 or 22 year old prove his or her value without a letter of admission or a diploma?
Usually side projects and a kind of radiant passion. If you can point to some solid code you're written and you sound passionate when you're talking about the technology and the job opportunity, many interviewers will sense that.
I don't even think it is a "how is a person's brain wired up" thing. I think it is a college instruction caters to a subset of the set of available students. Which is kind of the same thing you said, just couched from a different perspective. I guess some people think it is the student's fault because they failed to conform, and others blame the college for failing to adapt to a multitude of different students.
Moreover, it's very difficult to be admitted into an Ivy League school. It is also very difficult to recruit graduates from Ivy League Schools. They are rare: In 2014-15, 1.8 million bachelors degrees were awarded in the US [1]. Roughly 20,000 of those are from Ivy League schools. That's about 1%.
Hence, even sought after employers like Apple employ more students from mid-tier schools like San Jose State than top-ranked schools [2]. So if you are an Apple recruiter, the bulk of your recruits come from a University that is ranked 38 out of about 130 -regional- schools. It is not even ranked nationally.
The notion that if an applicant is not admitted to a top-ranked school, they are going to wind up a janitor, is simply false.
What has become skewed is the perception of the value of elite schools. Since perception drives price, the price of attending them has skyrocketed. The 4-year cost of Harvard is now $234,000 [3] vs. San Jose State at about $100,000 [4].
And schools like Missouri University of Science and Technology present the better ROI.
It's interesting how many people seem to read this as an argument that college is no good for anyone as opposed to the more reasonable college is not good for everyone. Many people end up in college not because it is a good fit but because it's the default thing to do, because people assume you're a complete failure if you don't and because it's artificially required to have most good jobs. The number of openings that require a college degree—but don't care which one—makes this abundantly clear: businesses are using it as a signal that's entirely independent of what you learned.
I've always been curious, and a little disturbed, at how inflexible a college education is for something supposedly universal. People are different and need different things from their education, but everyone gets the same sort of classes at the same sorts of medium-to-large institutions. If you want something less oriented around classes or smaller and more personal or more specialized or more hands on or not forced into digestible quarter- or semester-sized chunks, you're completely out of luck.
But if this doesn't work, it's apparently a problem with you, not with the system.
And then, of course, we turn around and feign surprise when college prices go up as we artificially drive demand through the roof.
I personally valued the college experience I've had so far... with the exception of most of my classes. What really worked for me was doing research, taking graduate courses, learning on my own, interacting with other students and a bunch of external things like working part-time at a startup. But there's simply no other way to get into research, even though many seem to agree that the overlap between strong study skills and research potential is, at best, limited.
I'd like to be doing research now and, false modesty aside, would be entirely capable, but it's very difficult outside the inflexible system. It really doesn't need to be.
In hindsight, I would have loved an alternative. But, as far as I know, that alternative does not exist and, if it did, I would not have known about it in high school. The only other choice would have been going to a small liberal arts college, which has more classes and less of everything I actually liked.
The pressure to go to college is too high. The worst part is that the pressure itself is not irrational because of the irrational way the rest of the system is set up.
I'm fairly depressed by this continuous attack on getting higher education by Peter Thiel. Previously he famously offered students money to drop out of college. This is especially scary considering his sphere of influence and amount of money-power he can throw in. Why someone as smart as him would do this?
To me it looks like he has got it all wrong here: Higher education is not an investment. It's not a preparation to get a job. People should not be considering higher education as a way of getting lots of money in future. Higher education is an opportunity to delve in to subject that you dreamed about all your teenage life. Did you wanted to become astronomer? Physicists? Mathematician? Painter? Were you interested in learning why biggest wars in history happened? How our ancestors lived 10,000 years ago? Do you want to build airplanes? If you asked these questions and were intensely interested in some subject, higher education is a tremendous gateway to do what you love for rest of your life as opposed to possibility of becoming millionaire first and then do all these things. No one should be persuaded to be turned away from it. Not everyone needs to be in rush for making million and retire before 30. Some people wants to do what they love to their last dying day. Not everyone needs to be startup founder either. As Guy Kawasaki said, jobs are for rest of your life (even if you are "boss" - it's still a job), education is just those few early years when your brain is hungry and eager to absorb everything. Your best years should be spent in studying something cool and worthwhile rather than selling underwears and rental apartments to people. You should take advantage of it. I consider advising youth to drop out from their selected area of study with a lure of making millions in startups a sin.
Going for my bachelors, most professors said we would have to spend at least three hours of study time for every hour we spent in lecture.
Splitting it up another way, that is three years of studying on my own, and one year of lectures.
If I had decided to forgo a bachelors, if I wanted the same level of knowledge as someone with a bachelors, I'd have to spend the same three years studying calculus, discrete math, theory of computation, graph theory, algorithms, data structures, databases, assembly, C++, Java, paradigms of programming languages, AI, graphics etc.
So really a bachelors is just one more year on top of that. Plus the extras you learn from the professor in class, or after class, or during office hours, or hanging around with other students.
While theoretically an autodidact can study the same as a college student, they generally skip over pushdown automata and Gödel numbers and L'Hôpital's rule and go right to learning things such as Ruby and its methods, without any theory. Some progress can be made initially, but the lack of a base of theory usually causes problems at some point.
You can get into a good local public school like Berkeley or UIUC or Georgia Tech for a decent price. You can apply for Pell grants, work/study and so forth.
During go-go times, you can often get work without a degree. During downturns like 2001 or 2008, suddenly everyone is laying people off, and the market is flooded with job applicants, many with college degrees. This is when you really need a college degree, especially if you have a family. You don't want then to be the time to realize you need a bachelors. Even if you get work again, you'll be juggling a full-time job, wife, kids, in-laws, plus your night/weekend classes and studying, in addition to whatever else you're doing.
There is a danger in taking Thiel's plausible general observation and applying it to specific vocations. The obvious example involve surgeons installing heart valves, lawyers preparing trusts, and engineers designing pacemakers.
In software, the term "engineer" is roughly meaningless without anchoring to a specific context of company culture and/or an individual's experience. That someone can be called a "software engineer" with no formal training and six month's industry experience doesn't change the fact that designing a procedure keeping a process out of NP is not a natural talent.
In the same way that plans for a homeowner's kitchen remodel don't require an architect's seal has no bearing on the requirements for a hospital emergency room remodel, amateurs are fine for bridal consultant landing pages but not for self driving car control systems. There are problems that require professional judgement not just a technical opinion.
It's worth pointing out that almost none of the work in the examples in your first paragraph is done by someone straight out of school with only a college degree. Surgeons, lawyers and engineers typically go through years of on the job training before they are allowed to install heart values, prepare complex trusts or design pacemakers. Which says little about the value of the college education, other than that it serves as a filter before someone can receive the hands on training and mentorship that is critical to performing those tasks.
If surgeons/lawyers/engineers say "I'm only go to offer an apprenticeship to someone who went to school for eight years like I did", then that's fine, it's their choice of who to invest their time with. But it doesn't prove that a traditional four year education is a necessary prerequisite to being able to do any of those jobs.
Proof and necessity are logical constructs. In the messy real world we deal with judgement and experience. The burden is on those who want contrary judgements to be given weight to point to experience and rationales that justify its acceptence, e.g. to reason from sound statistical evidence.
It's not enough to say, "Hume proved we can't really know anything about the world of things." The claim is not that the current system is perfect. My claim is that the system is better than the alternative for certain vocations and that engineering is one if them.
While the article suggests a few roles for college, including "investment", "consumption", "insurance", or a "competitive tournament", it makes no mention of personal growth. Most kids have no idea what they want out of life at age 18, and college is a place to be safely independent and start figuring that out.
College degrees are similar to a car. The more it costs, the better you look. But you cannot buy a "used" college degree...
Europe is even worse, they are getting master degrees to have an edge over other bachelor engineers and they compete for low paying jobs as well.
A very easy solution to the college degree arm race is to have employers not discriminate using the name of the school. Perhaps it could be a law to hide the name of the school from the résumé. The only thing that matters is the person applying for the job and his skills, not the school he went to. The name of the school could be a forbidden thing to ask, until after he is hired.
You could theoretically switch to a system where there is a standardised national exam at degree level in subjects such at computer science. Then instead of paying lots to go to a fancy college you could learn inexpensively and still get as impressive a qualification. Dunno if it's a good idea. In the UK there are standardised exams at 18 so if you get 3 As at A-level people know your bright regardless of where you went, in fact it's probably harder to do that at a rubbish school. At university level though you don't have that so a degree from Oxford is probably going to be valued more than one from Bedfordshire, say even if the grades are similar.
I like the exam idea but it's not really the best way to test the skill of a person. You wouldn't hold an exam for the best painter or the best sculptor. I feel like computer programming (and related jobs) in general is similar.
If you watch the TV show Better Call Saul (strongly recommend), you see him in the last episode learning that his own lawyer brother doesn't want him working at the same firm because he did an online law school, instead of going to a prestigious law school.
there is no good reason why there can't be meaningful standardised exams for post secondary education. professional bodies set exams at this level in accounting, engineering etc. it would be a much more efficient model.
I buy into Thiel's ideas on higher education. I created a startup out of high school. It failed and I went to college the next year. However, the startup taught me more than I have learned in my first two years of school. Many of my CS classes are simply a rehashing of what I already know. In my experience, Thiel is mostly right. It is possible, easy, and cheap to educate yourself and turn it into startup. The problem is it requires a great deal of luck and savvy to turn the college-less path into a sustainable model.
the obvious unasked question that article doesn't quite get around to either asking or answering is, if not college, than what? the article waves off this question by saying that there is no single solution for everybody. it's as good example of a non answer as I've ever seen.
my guess is Peter Thiel 's real answer, the one that he doesn't want to say too loudly, is that he wants more and more people to go be entrepreneurs. to be the next gates, jobs, or Zuckerbergs. this is great! let's all start our own companies! let's have every college student drop out, start a new business, and we can all ride the rising tide of technological advancement together!
except you can't have everyone be a ceo. not everybody should be! the founder isnt a lone hero, holding the weoght of the world entirely on his shoulders! they still need the engineers, the marketers, the insurance salesmen, and all the other trades and skilled workers that make our economy work. we cannot forget that it is the middle class that does the vast majority of the day to day work that keeps everything humming along smoothly.
college is certainly an excellent path to get to these sorts of careers. it's a great place to learn the skills necessary to be an hr rep, or an fda regulation expert, or a general manager of a restaurant, or a journalist, or a lawyer, or any of the other of thousands of middle class jobs that everyone forgets about because they are boring and unglamorous.
the honest truth is that, for a majority of the population, college is a great decision.
except you don't learn how to any of those jobs at college. a college education is not even a necessary precondition for success in those roles. i think you've largely missed his point.
thiel is surely smart enough to recognise that the economy will always contain a diverse range of companies and roles within those companies. but there are better ways to train the population if we can only get beyond our fixation on certain credentials
i would say that university is more than just a place to learn. It prepares you for actual adult life.
Most 18 year olds are not ready to go straight into work and I'd say they are definitely not ready to start a startup (remember, general case).
At uni you learn a great deal but you also benefit from being eased into adult life with internships, mentorships, you have tons of opportunity to network too.
The problem is that employers are incredibly insistent on a college degree (sometimes ANY college degree) as certification of basic cluefulness.
We sometimes have applications to our entry-level software developer jobs from people with two-year software development diplomas from community colleges. My manager won't even look at them. He absolutely insists on a true college degree.
This is 100% not true. My employer would have preferred that I dropped out of school after my internship to join full time rather than complete my degree. I have a handful of friends that chose to not complete school and then found jobs later. Also, there are a lot of companies (particularly startups) where recruitment does not involve dropping a stack of resumes on a managers desk. You can directly contact existing employees and propose how you'd be a good new employee or intern, and if the match is there they'll likely give you a chance.
>“Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists.”
So the Bahaus was conformist. Strikes me as a myopic opinion of someone that hasn't studied the history of art movements and schools.
>“The same kids would probably enjoy a wage premium even if they spent four years in the Peace Corps instead.”
“Would probably” is telling of privilege here. Perhaps Mr. Thiel would probably do well to study some post secondary sociology or anthropology?
>“But what if higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive tournament?”
Curious how many HN people have degrees outside of their career. Was it relevant to your worldview? Is it possible that higher education isn't mired in capitalist competition?
>“Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t famous because of the similar ways in which they left school. We know their names because of what each of them did differently from everybody else.”
Seems to me that at least part of the formula here, if he is choosing to cite these people, is to be white and male. Many would do well to skip higher education and perhaps chase that.
>“You need to figure it out for yourself.”
“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”
I see his point about the Ivy privileges (really knowledge is so available nowadays, that nothing justifies the blind respect that people award them). But if college is the default religion what is the alternative, no education at all? I would like to see an alternative to having to spend early twenties learning stuff.
The term "higher education" is completely wrong. Education is not a strict total order, so one cannot speak of "higher" forms of education.
For instance, if I learn to speak French in school A, and if I learn to solve differential equations in school B, then which form of education is "higher"?
"higher education" is a term of art that refers to the same thing also referred to as postsecondary education, e.g., in US terms college/university education. Insofar as the relation to the common use of "higher" alone is inspired by a presumed total order, it is the chronological order in which various types of schools are attended in the normal course (in modern practice, this is less than perfectly strict.)
I think a good start to solving this problem would be to come up a basket of statistics of alumni while comparing that to the cost of the school and the cost of living while going there. It would be far from perfect, but you can't improve what you can't measure.
>Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.
Discouraging high school graduates from going to college is just bad for society. Entrepreneurs are essential, but I would argue that the most profound advancements in STEM fields come out of universities. Those advancements tend to be in highly abstract fields (e.g. physics, math), where there is no immediate applicable benefit, but there may well be one in the future.
Students should go to universities to gain a theoretical foundation in STEM fields -- that's how we find young researchers. And those who decide that research isn't for them will nevertheless gain a strong intellectual foundation that is hard (but not impossible) to acquire otherwise.
I work at the intersection of many STEM fields at a prestigious university. I think very little important research is coming from universities anymore. The paper publishing factory, again credentialing, has taken over. I think we need a renaissance in STEM but strongly believe this will happen outside of academia.
How do we get around the issue of funding though? A lot of innovative projects come out of universities because governments give them money without expecting an immediate return on investment. How can we create a non-academia system that has the resources to take on big, risky ventures without that system becoming isomorphic to academia?
Thiel makes some interesting points, and I don't necessarily disagree with the substance of what he's saying. However, I'd like to offer a reframing of the college debate that goes beyond the views put forward by Thiel et al. with regards to higher education. I'd like to break offer two points regarding higher education.
Firstly, Thiel argues that society suffers when high-caliber people go through elite colleges and take positions at conservative organizations in old industries. He implies that society would be better served if more of these people went off to do startups or other cutting-edge organizations.
My rebuttal to this is: lots of elite college-trained people are going to startups. There is no system barrier between highly-trained (if somewhat conservatively thinking) people and cutting edge stuff. In fact, some of the most elite MBA programs are taking note of the interest among their students and creating programming specifically to help them enter that realm [1].
Also, what's wrong with highly trained people going into management consulting and investment banking? If talent gravitates toward these industries, it's not because peoples' training made them useless for any other purpose, but rather because of standard economics: people have a right to want to get paid.
Furthermore, I'd argue that Thiel is mistakenly conflating lack of sexiness with social damage. General Motors and JP Morgan are not startups, and few starry-eyed undergrads would dream of a mid-tier leadership role in such an organization over founding their own billion dollar company. But what's wrong with having competent and well-trained leaders in charge of these companies? They might not show up on the covers of popular entrepreneurship magazines, and they might not be the first do something sexy and innovative, but these sorts of companies do deliver a tremendous amount of growth and innovation to the economy. GM's size and distribution clout makes it as viable and worthy a source of innovation as, say, Tesla, and there's nothing wrong with training people to lead those productive if boring machines.
Secondly, on the topic of Obama's push for more higher education, I believe Thiel brings to the argument a Silicon Valley/disruptive innovation-centered view on what is actually a different problem. Thiel argues that talent is best allocated to new industries because they are the ones that produce "black-swan" type economic innovations. This may be true, but I think it fails to discuss a more systemic issue.
As few as fifteen years ago, American manufacturing represented a significantly larger portion of the economy, with a hiring demand to match [1]. As recently as two or three decades ago, a high school-educated person could live comfortably and securely on a manufacturing salary. Our economy is currently dealing with a decline of well-paying work for relatively low-skilled labor. We're transitioning from a work-based economy to a service economy where intellectual skills are most valuable.
The economic study establishment sees this. Obama sees this. Cast in this light, the spike in college tuitions is not the irrational bubble that Thiel attempts to portray, but rather a natural and unavoidable consequence of millions of people suddenly realizing that their futures depend on skills that until now only private colleges have been able to give them. Economically, subsidizing higher education is a natural response. Culturally, placing higher value on higher-tier educations is a natural consequence given the fact that simply having a degree is no longer by itself a marker of intellectual exceptionality. Hence the spike in demand for prestige.
The only way this country is going to transmute the legacy of its fantastic economic power from the twentieth century into correspondingly fantastic economic power in the twenty-first century is by successfully making a transition to a knowledge economy. People know this, and they're reacting en mass. Money is being poured by the bucketload into higher education. Radical experiments are taking place in education technology. Traditional institutions are rethinking themselves. This change is already in progress, and it's clear the solution is more focus on education rather than less.
Great post jfasi. One thing I'd like to add is that most HN contributors are not the type for whom college is as valuable. We are passionate about a remunerative subject. Most of the people I went to high school with are not, there passions lie in their children, music, sports, volunteerism, or other worthy endeavors that aren't going to pay the bills. They went the "default path" of college and got jobs in law enforcement, business administration, real estate, and such.
For the vast majority of college graduates, the degree credential is a great signal that they can be trusted to work independently, retain knowledge, and deal with a large institution. While I certainly think we need a solution to the spiraling cost of university and would like the 18-22 year olds who are not actually interested in a liberal education to be productive with that period of their lives, we have to acknowledge the signals that completing college send are much larger more than an understanding of a body of knowledge.
College has a specific and peculiar consumption pattern: almost everyone is under 25. This doesn't seem weird because it's pervasive and we're used to it, but it is. How many other things are only for a narrow age range of person? And how often is that an endorsement? Usually, it's the opposite. When it comes to culture, if the only people who like something are under 20, or over 60, that usually means that it sucks because things of quality are enjoyed by people of all age ranges. (Not necessarily uniformly. Most people born before 1955 didn't like Nirvana when their music came out circa 1990, but at least some could recognize the talent and creativity.) College, for as overhyped as the experience is, isn't really appealing to people over 23. Some will go, later in life, for the education (which is quite valuable, if you pay attention) but the overall product (which is what people pay $160,000, usually of their parents' money, for) isn't of interest by that age.
Advanced economies seem destined to breed immaturity and extended adolescence. You see it in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. It has to be that way, because the dirty secret of them is that there's low demand for workers and the only way to look like there is full employment is to delay adulthood (and hasten retirement, which is welcome if it's elective and wealthy retirement but horrible if it's age discrimination and despair).
We put people into college because most of them have no hope of getting jobs (at least, jobs appropriate to their social class) otherwise. Widespread college is the most socially acceptable way for (a) young people to stay out of a working world that doesn't want them and that they'd be too immature to handle, (b) middle- to upper-class parents to transmit connections and status under the guise of "merit"-- in reality, it's more complex than that, since academic success is a combination of factors including merit, and it's this illegibility that allows the ruse to work-- and (c) people to be fully enculturated into either their native social class, or (in fortunate but rare cases) the social class that society "corrects" them to inhabit when a lower-class child has proven extreme merit.
This is not an easy problem to fix. College has become a private safety net for middle- to upper-class children while they get to an age and level of intellectual maturity that will make them acceptable to the modern economy. It's a socially acceptable way for these kids to sit out of that game for 4 years, under the supposition (which I think is right) that the experiences that they'd have without college would be so negative as to be detrimental.
Peter Thiel's advice, in general, is bad. It applies to statistical outliers, perhaps. Even then, I'm not sure that I agree. But given that the social purpose of college (at this point) is to handle this problem of labor oversupply, the "fix" of asking young people to go directly into the workforce isn't going to work. It's just going to flood the labor market even more.
I agree with everything you've said except for the conclusion. I think Thiel's point is that it doesn't have to only apply to statistical outliers. It only applies to them right now, as the culture surrounding higher education is very ingrained in the developed world.
Also, I agree widespread adoption of going straight into the workforce could affect unemployment numbers tremendously. But for most people, the current "fix" is to have an institution babysit young adults for 4-5 years while allowing them to accumulate a mortgage's worth of debt. At least with the unemployment numbers the weakness would be more visible.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating the abolition of college as an institution, but I've seen too many people graduate with no marketable skills (and no job prospects). I would argue that for most people, it's not worth the price of admission.
most people do not have the aptitude to benefit from a traditional college education. this is not a controversial statement if you've attended an average, fairly representative high school
A good college degree (especially in STEM fields) provide the basic foundation upon which to innovate. Our industries have gone so deep, and we are standing on such giant shoulders, that anyone who is going to take it further must first absorb the century or so of knowledge created so far on the subject. Even in Computer Science, the next innovation is not yet another WhatsApp, it's more along the lines of Counsyl (a dna-sequencing app), where a person without the knowledge-foundation equivalent of a degree simply would never get started with the idea of making such software, leave alone actually building it.
And I say that as a self-taught software engineer. Yes I can probably build the next Snapchat on my own. But even then I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, especially low-level stuff like kernels, bits and bytes, and fundemental details of cryptography and security. Not to say anything about the "unknown unknowns" which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now, after spending years in industry and freelancing.