College: The biggest scam we'll ever buy

http://marcanthonyrosa.com/college-the-biggest-scam-well-ever-buy

37 31 15 years ago

You didn't explicitly go over how creativity is stunted other than saying it isn't rewarded. College teaches you new facts, it is extremely objective in it's teachings so that later on you can expand your ideas and creativity upon what you learned subjectively. It s a great place to expand upon things that have already been discovered in a structured manner allowing you to specialize in a timely manner (as compared to learning on your own).

Maybe I'm just biased, but if you find my ideas odd please inform me of why you believe so as I'd love to hear!

gee_totes• 15 years ago

This guy should have gone to Evergreen

http://www.evergreen.edu

kevinalexbrown• 15 years ago

Maybe, just maybe, the college system isn't as perfect as we'd like to believe. Maybe, just maybe, we've been learning the entirely wrong lessons.

Maybe, just maybe, this theme is a little tired. I keep hearing this, and I keep believing it. Cramming for tests does not a creative person make. But neither does sitting around talking about your creativity. Ultimately creativity comes from what we do and make, and college is nowhere near perfect for that, but then again college can't optimize for anything, because there are far too many things it might prepare a student for, however well.

Incidentally, I don't believe college should be placed on the pedestal it often is, to the point that wondering if it's "as perfect as we'd like to believe" is the wrong question entirely. e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html

dgreensp• 15 years ago

College, and school in general, is a strange game indeed. Probably the only way to get through it unscathed (or with minor scars) is with an intense amount of perspective, that is, not taking it too seriously. If you mold your very being around "winning" at school, you are probably hurting your ability to win at life -- to be successful or even fulfilled.

I wish I knew then what I know now, but I hope to teach my kids healthy priorities and time management skills.

jwingy• 15 years ago

The first two sentences of his last paragraph:

"Is college really a scam? Most likely, no."

Thanks for admitting your title was linkbait?

Also, it's fine if you're going to complain about the college experience, but please offer alternatives. It's much easier to bitch than to come up with solutions.

johncch• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I get what this guy is getting at. I've been through 2 colleges in 2 different countries (BA and MS) and am on my second job right now right after my MS. Not to list my credentials or anything, but in general no matter where I go, it's always a systematic thing that we as humans created and we have to tackle. The biggest challenge in a job is not the job but the organization.

Organizations aside, even in startup land or various just small companies as you know it, there are restrictions, in different forms. Customer satisfaction, for one. Investor pressure, as another, and they can be restrictions, or challenges depending on how you see it.

My problem with college is that for most of the folks, when they get into college, they don't really know what they want, with the new found freedom and gets distracted by the various frat like bonding activities that goes on in the campus.

///

I don't think creativity exists in some sort of pure unadulterated sort of vacuum where an individual is "free". Philosophically speaking, no one is ever "free". No one wants to be either.

Truly successful people are successful despite of the system. They are successful because they know how to break out of the system. They understand (metaphorically speaking) the system and how to cross the line so that the create something new. That, is creativity.

Unfortunately, my opinion is that most people try the best to construct some sort of structure to "teach the young", so to speak; I don't think there's any malice in there. The truth is, you can't teach people to be creative. You can teach people to be different, but if different becomes the norm, then different is no longer different. To be truly creative, one needs to have a good combination of observation, introspection, good working ethics (i.e. slog through the details) and willpower.

achompas3• 15 years ago

I'd argue that college is the perfect medium for learning about creativity: creative opportunities don't fall into your lap. Your first novel, album, or photography exhibit won't materialize from air--you have to work towards them. (That explains why I haven't made music yet!)

Students can be creative in writing or painting classes, robotics lab, go-kart engineering shops, or even on their political science papers or statistics projects. None of those are required (maybe the papers and projects), just like writing a novel isn't a pre-requisite for life, but students have the option to participate.

Again, to beat a dead horse a little further: college is what you make of it. If you memorize bold words, you're ready to file TPS reports; if you take that pottery class or join the robotics competition, you're ready to enjoy all of life's dimensions.

(Also, I flagged this because (a) it's another college-bashing piece and (b) it has possibly the worst argument against college I've seen so far.)

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

Education is what you make it.

If the grading structure is so rigid and foolish, then it ought to be trivial to game it, leaving almost all your time free to get laid/start a business/contemplate the human condition to your heart's content.

If you choose to spend your time trying to eke out as many marks as possible from each minute spent cramming, then I'd wager you probably aren't imaginative enough to be ultra-successful anyway. Aim to leave university having done something so cool that your eventual grade is rendered irrelevant, (ideally so irrelevant that you can drop out.)

"But these benefits cannot completely justify a system where creativity and genuine learning isn't properly rewarded."

If you're in your 20s and you still need to be "rewarded" by a teacher giving you a shiny gold star then again, something is wrong.

EDIT: upon consideration, I am putting across a somewhat elitist view here. Not everyone can be expected to "do something so cool that your eventual grade is rendered irrelevant," to transcend their peers in order to gain value from their degree; that's a contradiction. There are indeed many flaws in the system and it is unreasonable to say "just hack your way around them for your own benefit!" when we could just fix the system so one can take the normal, average route though it and still get value from one's money/time.

In lieu of that though, I still think what I said stands, although I didn't have to pay american tuition fees.

aidenn03• 15 years ago

>Not everyone can be expected to "do something so cool that your eventual grade is rendered irrelevant," to transcend their peers in order to gain value from their degree; that's a contradiction.

Not everyone, but those who plan to be mentioned along with "Steve Jobs, Alexander Flemming, and Adam Smith" certainly can.

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

You can't design an education system just around those people though.

fennecfoxen• 15 years ago

Private collage + faculty dependent tuition concession, jerks. :) Nice education, no debt. But we can't all be faculty dependents.

The computer-science parts were helpful but not super-helpful; Real Experience was more helpful. The art minor was fun. I learned to appreciate some other things like the mandatory English courses a while after I stopped taking them. I don't know how to make students like my past self better appreciate those things in advance so as to take advantage of them. I think it's a bit of a problem for most students.

brockf• 15 years ago

> Is college really a scam? Most likely, no.

Might want to re-title your article then.

kabdib• 15 years ago

I never crammed for a test. Aside from courses that I liked (like History and English) I never took anything outside of CS. I dropped out after ~ 3 years to write software for a living.

This worked okay in 1982. I don't know if it would work now. I /do/ know that when I interview someone I never really look at their degree or coursework except as a starting point to figure out if they're a good hire.

There are two other people within fifty feet of me who have a similar educational story. We work at a very large company and you've probably used our products.

As far as I'm concerned, college is what you make of it. If you're going there purely for a degree and you don't learn anything useful, that's going to be a problem. If you go and learn something and can demonstrate that, you're good. I don't care if you went to Podunk or MIT, I don't care if you have the piece of paper or not; if you have the chops, you've won.

crazygringo• 15 years ago

> We can learn all we want, but GPA is the end-all on how well we understand material and, subsequently, prepare around it.

Interestingly enough, in the ten years and probably fifty job interviews I've had since I graduated from college, not once was I ever asked for my GPA. (The only time in my life was once for a summer internship, during college.)

In college, I wasn't sure if my strategy of trying to genuinely learn, and not cram for tests or cater to teachers' whims, would serve me or burn me. Turned out it was very smart.

But that may only be because I went into software later on, where employers care mostly about the skills you demonstrate in interviews. Whereas for people in law and medicine, it appears your GPA matters a great deal.

achompas3• 15 years ago

I've been asked once. The person had just asked me how many ping-pong balls fit into the room we were sitting in, so that should tell you something about their interviewing abilities.

yzhengyu• 15 years ago

It is actually one of those famous interview questions. Kinda like the Microsoft one where they asked you why are manhole covers round. Totally useless, since performance in an interview is not indicative on whether an employee is a good fit or not.

aidenn03• 15 years ago

I had the opposite experience. It was nearly impossible for me to get an interview with a low GPA. Companies have so many applicants that they just throw out all resumes with a GPA below X, where X varies, but is usually 3.0 or higher.

When I left my GPA off my resume at one job-fair every single recruiter asked for it, from companies varying from a 10 person start up to Cisco.

At one company that I interviewed at because I didn't put my GPA on my resume, I had passed their technical evaluation, we had discussed salary ranges, when I could start, etc. put on the brakes when they were filling out a form for out-of-college hires that required GPA, and I told them.

In the three months from that interview living with my parents to when I got a job offer, I seriously considered whether I should have just lied to them about my GPA.

I ended up in a job I love though (at a company that didn't ask for my GPA), so it ended happily.

Synthetase• 15 years ago

I think I might have some perspective to comment on education. I dropped out of a large public institution in a technical program to work in industry for a while. Many of my motivations were similar to the authors complaints.

Is education a scam? I think it is what you make it out to be. If you major in Communications and spend all night fratting it up, then yes you could have a case that education was not useful to you. Even then you are deriving utility because you are practicing your people skills and creating a network useful in your future career.

I don't find his complaints about scut work particularly compelling. It happens in industry. Get used to it and stop whining.

I think that the biggest problem nowadays is that we immediately push students to college right after high school. For a subset of highly motivated students, this is the right move and they often thrive in college. I do think the majority could benefit from a year or two to find themselves. A semi-mandatory national service program might be a great idea since it would carve out a time for this express purpose. Students would no longer feel they were behind if they did not immediately enter college. The time spent in college would also be spent more productively.

Ultimately I plan on going back to school. I think there are something like six genealogical hops between Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mills. For better or worse, the most brillant minds who produce the ideas which civilization are based around or usually found in universities. One simply cannot get that kind of personal mental exposure to them in industry.

phamilton• 15 years ago

It's only a scam if you pay too much for it.

At $2200 a semester (before scholarship), I'm paying roughly $100 a week to use campus facilities and have access to my professors time. Considering I spend 10 hours in class and my professors all have 5 or so office hours each week, I think I'm getting a pretty good bargain.

Although, BYU is an exception. Most other schools aren't really the same bang for your buck.

polychrome• 15 years ago

Maybe you should consider transferring then? College is there to increase your breadth of knowledge. Ask yourself how many of your friends who never went to college critically analyze the world around them or have well thought out discussions about things bigger than themselves (cosmos, patterns in the world, science, etc). Remember, SA is the exception!

Creativity comes from limits (and knowledge). In art schools, students are told to only use certain materials for a reason. Why do you think we have coding competitions where the winner has the fewest lines of code or can do the most in 48 hours?

While I can understand your viewpoint, it just sounds like you need to either change your major or school or both. I went to a university where we had to co-op (read lots of internships that didn't involve getting coffee) and my core classes depended on mostly group projects solving problems. It is precisely because of this education and my breadth of knowledge that I have ideas connecting completely unrelated ideas.

gavreh• 15 years ago

This is clearly link bait.

Title: "College: The Biggest Scam We'll Ever Buy"

Conclusion thought: "Is college really a scam? Most likely, no."

arturnt• 15 years ago

I actually don't agree with this at all. Everyone loves to hate on college, but personally and professionally on average there is a world of difference between people that come from a good school and a bad school.

We are all lazy, I would rather have fun and party; that's a no brainer. However, rigor and competition and some metric(grades) to compare students is what pushes and motivates them to succeed. Creativity is possible in creative subjects, if you take drama, music, or art grading is going to be very different than in chemistry or physics. This has nothing to do with the system, and more to do with subjects.

Not everyone thrives in the system, but not everyone gets joy out of learning either. Problem is that there are a few good schools and a lot of bad schools, so on average you'll hear poor experiences, but this is suffering from the silent evidence effect.

rtperson• 15 years ago

This is such a shallow mush of generalities, that it's pretty much worthless as a critique of higher education.

"these benefits cannot completely justify a system where creativity and genuine learning isn't properly rewarded."

Anyone who has ever taught at the college level will quickly realize how wrong that sentence is. Any undergraduate who shows the slightest amount of spark, imagination, initiative, and hard work gets rewarded (as they should) with good grades. The ones who get punished are those who game the system by trying to get the highest mark for the least amount of work. These latter are usually the ones who complain that creativity (i.e., their own rank laziness) is not being "rewarded properly" (because, ummmm..., the school isn't making the next Steve Jobs... or DaVinci, or someone like that...).

You want your creativity crushed and your initiative smothered? Try working in a job. School is an absolute blast compared with what the rest of your life will feel like.

tryitnow• 15 years ago

I am pretty much as anti-college as it gets, but this piece really doesn't lay out the best arguments for why our higher education system is failing us.

This doesn't sound like an argument against college in general, it sounds like an argument against really bad colleges.

The problem I have with college is that it tries to do two very different things: 1) Prepare students for participating in the market economy 2) Provide learning for the sake of learning

It's best to separate these two things. First of all, doing (1) shouldn't take 4 years for most people. And it definitely shouldn't be four years of classroom learning interspersed with summer's of "real work."

And doing (2) is something that shouldn't be tied to how we sustain ourselves economically (i.e. getting jobs). Learning for the sake of learning really needs to be limited to those who: (a) have an aptitude for it (b) have the passion for it Otherwise, you're pretty much wasting everyone's time.

How would this look in practice? I don't know, but I bet will start seeing this pattern emerge.

The demand probably won't come from students. It will come from cashed up employers who desperately want to hire, but see long lines of unemployed grads who have no clue how to make themselves useful.

libraryatnight• 15 years ago

To add to the chorus: college is what you make it. I haven't finished my degree, financial reasons caused me to pause (27 now, going back will be weird). But I'll be back. Honestly, even when I graduate I'll probably still pop in for the occasional literature course or odd class I hear of that's interesting. College is a great place for discussion, flexing new ideas, and just general growth as a person. But, it's not for everyone.

I've seen a few articles like this pop up on HN and it always reminds me of this article I read a few years ago:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b...

I think it's worth mentioning that many of the reasons I enjoy college, and college classes, are the same reasons I love coming to HN. I am not a programmer, I do not work for a startup, I'm actually a literature student working in a support role that has little to do with technical skill. I come to HN because I enjoy a forum filled with intelligent discourse, where most visitors understand that intelligent people can disagree.

edit: I should also add to that list of reasons I like to keep up with computer and technical news, too :)

brikis98• 15 years ago

The purpose of school and college isn't training. It's education. People that confuse the two will be very disappointed with the results.

ImprovedSilence• 15 years ago

God, college was fantastic! Talk about the greatest 4.5 years of my life. Here's why:

I was in Engineering, where they drill math into your heads for the first 2 years, and you don't see a lick of a practical application for it, but looking back, that was incredibly useful.

I found more creative outlets then I could possibly imagine. I had friends in the fine arts who could teach me how to paint, and let me play around in the photography darkroom. I dabbled in getting a minor in philosophy (but found the meaning to life, and decided I didn't really need to go any further in it..) I planned practical jokes and embarked on poorly thought epic adventures with roommates. I wrote in my spare time (inspired to write out thoughts by my philosophy teacher) I met friends who played guitar as well, and we made wrote goofy songs that annoyed the neighbors, to blow of steam.

The social aspect was AMAZING. I participated on two club sports teams, joined philanthropic causes and met some of the most inspiring people from all walks of life, I threw the greatest parties and after-parties in the history of life, (I was somewhat shy in high school though, THAT changed) I now have more friends than I know what to do with, and an available couch to crash on in every major city in the Northeast (and several in the Midwest and CA)

I was free. It's not like most of real life, with serious financial responsibilities. No day was the same. If life sucked, in four months a new semester would be here, and it would be different.

Lastly, it opened doors. I have a career that pays well (thanks, valuable engineering degree) I have connections (be it social or business), and it was so damn tough (at least at times) it gave me the confidence that if I put enough effort into something, I can build it, and succeed. Priceless

edit: I didn't build anything awesome in college, or get a startup going, or discover the cure for cancer, but it gave me tools to do so, the rest is up to me.

edit #2: I spent a semester in Florence, Italy. I sat in museums and sketched, I took a history and culture of food class, I was exposed to so much diversity in thought/way of life/culture. I became exceedingly good at picking up non-verbal communication, which is VERY useful in real life (Took my first Italian class while there...). It was my first time living in a city, now I travel frequently, and move with comfort in a city. Sans travel expenses, it wasn't any more expensive than my public school tuition and room and board.

College: The biggest scam we'll ever buy

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