Fuck college education, start minding your own business instead

http://damirhorvat.com/articles/22/2009/1/Fuck-college-education,-start-minding-your-own-businness-instead

by damir • 18 years ago

33 71 18 years ago

damirhorvat.com

Mystalic• 18 years ago

As I just posted on your blog:

I'm sorry to be harsh, but you're completely off-base with this rant.

"College Education is a Waste of Time"

Just like anything else, it's how you utilize that education. I built relationships with VCs, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, media, and many people who have been helpful and will continue to be helpful later in life. I built a company while in college. I lived my life while in college. People can't help but hear me out because of my specific college affiliation and my accomplishments there.

Everything's a waste of time if you don't know how to use it.

"College education is just a piece of paper"

No, it's not. It's a series of relationships, friendships, and knowledge that people can and do use. It's a door opener. VCs already know a lot about my qualifications when I walk into the room. The only person that can devalue that "piece of paper" is you.

"What is there after college?"

Whatever you want to do. I took the entrepreneurial path, not the "salary" path you generalize with.

I'll end it there, but the point is, you have it completely wrong. Nothing's a waste of time if you build meaningful relationships, knowledge, and happiness during that time.

lbrandy2• 18 years ago

College is more than just a networking opportunity. College exposes you to the vast world of ideas that you didn't know existed. It's a well established fact that the more incompetent someone is, the more confident they are in their own competence. This can be directly applied to knowledge. The more ignorant someone is, the more confident they are in their expertise.

College is the place you go to that educates you enough to realize how little you know. How little you will ever know. A college education is what turns people from ignorant and arrogant into basically ignorant but humble and ready to learn some domain well enough to be truly considered an expert. It gives you a lifetime of ideas to explore in detail, when time permits. This includes both the ideas of your professional domain and its neighbors, but also the domains of the general public good (like economics).

This post ignores the broader issue. It pretends the purpose of college is friggin vocational job training.. as in.. you decide when you are 18 what job you want, and then you train for that job, get that job, and work at it the rest of your life...

lbrandy2• 18 years ago

Wow. Just wow.

The purpose of college isn't vocational training. It never was. My college education is not, was not, and never will be "a piece of paper". That's just plain ignorance. The kind of ignorance that just might get cured by someone who cared enough to get a decent college education.

okeumeni• 18 years ago

I guess the surge of college dropout IT millionaire’s gets to the head of lot of people. Besides IT and arts in general I don’t know of any field where you can drop out of college and not end up cleaning dishes at local restaurant.

College kids beware, education is the foundation of whatever you want to become in your adult life.

strlen3• 18 years ago

They're also drop-outs: not people who never went in the first place. Most dropped (and the typical success stories talk about dropping out of graduate school) out because they had something else to run to, not something to run from.

ahoyhere3• 18 years ago

The word "educate" comes from "educe," to pull forth. That's not how universities work any more.

Anyway, you'd be surprised at how many successful people in all kinds of fields do not have a degree, or don't have a degree in the field they're in.

They just don't make the news as often (cough except for Richard Branson cough). You're right that there's a selection bias, but you missed the other selection bias.

vaksel4• 18 years ago

You don't go to college to expand your mind...you go to college to get a good job after you graduate.

Or at least you are supposed to. The problem is that in our society, the college degree has become a commodity. You are supposed to have one, even if you really don't need it.

Someone getting a CS degree, paying $80K is an investment. Someone getting a Communications degree, paying $80K is borderline retarded, why? because they'll wind up working at the Gap after they graduate making the same 25K/yr that they made before going to college, except they lose 4 years worth of promotions and raises.

Yes college is not vocational training...but if your degree won't help you get a better job...then you are just pissing a ton of money away. Someone working at the Gap should not be $80K in debt.

Actually, vocational training now a days is probably a better investment than a college degree. A plumber won't get outsourced, and will still make as much money as a programmer.

ssharp• 18 years ago

Pure ignorance. Not all communications majors work at the Gap. Many work in communications, marketing, etc. These high end jobs project higher salaries than a high end computer science degree.

You can find lots of people with non-vocational degrees that have had extremely successful careers, don't work at the gap, and have more fulfilling works lives than code slaves who "invested" in a CS degree.

revelude2• 18 years ago

With all this talk of vocational training versus a real degree, I assert that a college degree without some form of Liberal Arts grounding is no degree at all.

Nobody plans on having a worthless degree after school, and no educator wishes to leave their student ill-equipped. No one wants to work at the Gap in the first place, and whether they have a degree in Communications or not is irrelevant.

Education, like a trip to the hospital, is a practice in fighting for yourself and getting what you came for.

swombat2• 18 years ago

You don't go to college to expand your mind

Speak for yourself. I went to college to expand my mind, meet interesting people, and learn things I would never have learned by myself. I am very happy that I did so, even though I barely use any of the actual Physics that I learned, in my daily job.

I will add that I learned far more than just Physics at university. I learned that there were a lot of extremely smart people out there. I learned about my limitations (cramming only gets you so far). I learned about my abilities (few things seem that incredibly hard after a physics degree). I learned how to learn new things (there are many ways to learn). I learned how to behave in a wider variety of environments than I had been exposed to previously. I learned that even amongst very smart people, there were things I could do that no one else could. I learned that if you make the right connections, you can benefit immensely. I learned many more things, far too many to list here.

What went in was a naive, uncouth, slightly ill-mannered boy, what came out was confident, friendly, approachable go-getter.

Perhaps your university didn't expand your mind. If that is so, it is deplorable, but might be the fault of either the university, or yourself. But certainly you should not generalise your unfortunate case and assume that everyone had your poor experience of university.

jfarmer4• 18 years ago

"you go to college to get a good job after you graduate."

I didn't.

strlen3• 18 years ago

> You don't go to college to expand your mind...you go to college to get a good job after you graduate. Or at least you are supposed to.

To get a "good job" you get training. That's usually a job you get after college. You go to college (for a Bachelors) to learn how to think rigorously logically and to learn the fundamentals of your field. That's of intrinsic value, irrespective of whether it gets you a job. If you enjoy and have a passion about the field you study, all the better (on the other hand if you chose to study CS to "make a lot of money", you get to miss out on the biggest advantage of a programming career - doing what you enjoy for a living).

When an employer gives you a "college hire" position (which is often the only way into some mature companies, unless you're already wildly known and successful), that means they're making an investment in you. Education (or lack thereof) is one way for them to gauge the risk of said investment.

As I've also said in earlier posts, if you're worried about outsourcing and/or your job going to entry-level candidates - then you need to pick up domain specific knowledge.

Domain specific knowledge builds on these fundamentals (of computer science and mathematics) and can't be looked up on google.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

The purpose of college isn't vocational training.

I agree. But our society has completely bought into the idea that it is. Even the so-called educators have. And as we know from Gatto and others, this is not a recent distortion, but one that goes back to the origin of public education.

andreyf4• 18 years ago

our society has completely bought into the idea that it is

What this hell is "our society"? Is it the most common occurring opinion of a set of people magnitudes larger than the set of people you will meet in your lifetime? Our society is made up of a lot of people. If some, even most, have bought into a particular idea, it still leaves many, many people who haven't.

So even if 99% of our society has bought into the idea that education must be vocational doesn't mean that one can't go through life spending most of her time with people in the other 1%.

As I advanced through my schooling, I had more and more Renaissance-personalties as teachers. At Rutgers University, I had enough choice that I was able to pick classes almost exclusively taught by people who didn't think of my education as vocational. Sure, it took a bit of work at the beginning of each semester - adding and dropping classes based on the first couple of lectures and conversations with the professors, but it certainly wasn't some insurmountable feat. Independent studies helped a lot, also.

IMO, there's a greater pattern here - a large part of life is about avoiding the vast majority of people who focus their lives around petty nonsense.

PS - Unless you're talking about maximizing social productivity of some kind, in which case, yes, it is a shame that most people see themselves as slaves being trained to do a job. The average person would be a lot happier and productive if we were to pursue our interests for their own sake, but that's their mistake to make.

tallanvor• 18 years ago

Eh? None of the teachers or professors I had ever called college vocational training or ever insinuated that it was. None of my employers ever expected me to know everything I needed to know just because I went to college. My parents, and other adults from their generation that I know would never call it vocational training either.

College helps us learn new ways of thinking and teaches us a lot of the theory and some of the practice behind the profession we think we want to go into. A college education is no guarantee for success, but it does tend to say something about the person.

jaytee_clone• 18 years ago

I agree.

And, there's merit in an under-graduate degree. There is merit in going to prison too. But that doesn't mean we don't have better alternatives.

1. Most of the professors I had cannot teach as well as a well-written textbook. You can choose your textbooks on Amazon. You cannot (usually) choose your lecture professor. With MIT open course, Berkeley webcast, nowadays you can even choose your professor for without going to college.

2. The good professors and grad student that you met in college, why can't you meet them when you are not in college? What stop you from send them emails or just stop by their offices anyway? In fact, I've talked to far more professors who are not in my college than ones that are.

3. People who want more than a vocational education will actively go out and get their knowledge. The internet + a good library + Amazon is a far larger reservoir of knowledge than any college. Why do you need an excuse like college to learn more?

4. People who just care about a vocational education, and really don't give a damn about liberal arts or general education, why should they let a college force them to learn things useless to them, trick them into thinking that a degree is equal to vocational training, and rob them of their money so they had to spend the rest of their life paying back loans?

5. People who network in college, what stops you from networking in the real world? What stop you from talking to people on a bus, in a park, in the subway, in a conference, in a bar, in a farmers market, in your jobs? Most people don't learn networking in college. They are given their network by dorm assignment. Of course, there are exceptions, and those are the people who eventually learn how to network in the real world anyway, so why not start in the real world?

I can go on for a while. My point is under-graduate college has it's place, but it certainly shouldn't be the only way.

Yes the post author is generalizing. But the fact remains true that most people are not getting what they want out of their college degrees. If that's the way we educate the mass, then there's something wrong with that.

silentbicycle• 18 years ago

The biggest single contributor to this occurred after WW2, when the majority of white* veterans were able to attend college under the GI bill. The amount of college-educated people in the middle classes spiked, employers' expectations raised, and it set up a loop that tightened the association between going to college and finding employment (in certain fields).

I'm glossing over a lot of history here (the GI bill had several tremendous effects on postwar America; suburbanization is another huge one), but this was one of the main times when what it meant to go to college shifted.

* Though veterans of any race theoretically had tuition paid at any college, they were still mostly segregated.

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

Is that why I see admin assistant jobs requiring a bachelor's degree?

astrec• 18 years ago

This was more the case before our venerable institutions were turned into modern day businesses. Used to be that a university was a scholarly, research oriented institution, and vocational education was the domain of technical and further education colleges (to sub degree level).

Government funds, research grants and philanthropic bequests are either drying up, or come with onerous conditions (e.g. ban on stem cell research institution wide). What we've seen in the last 25 years are universities entering the vocational education market and acquiring technical and further education colleges in the hunt for revenue and growth. Add to this full fee paying places with lower required entrance scores (you can actually "buy" an engineering degree now), and industry's incessant demand for vocational training and you'll find most universities simply ain't what they used to be, more's the pity.

Now, your education might not be just a piece of paper - mine sure isn't (most guys laugh at my major) - but the sad fact of the matter is that an undergraduate degree is simply a meal-ticket for a great many people.

TweedHeads• 18 years ago

I agree. Don't waste time and money in college. Start your own business. But keep yourself learning all your life. Online, business and management skills. Offline, social skills, the power of word.

New times we're living, adapt and evolve.

cianw2000• 18 years ago

Really? The things I learnt at university were priceless - even though it was economics it just gets your brain trained. And it's a signally device - you have a good degree from a good uni; people flock to you.

likpok• 18 years ago

Another thing: It's easier to get a good job/find good people at a good uni, because that's where the good people are. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

In addition to that whole "education" thing they have going there.

wheels• 18 years ago

Ooh, this meme again! Now, everyone line up and form teams and repeat your arguments from last time!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=275258

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115158

I think this one does win a prize for being the least articulate version of the three. ;-)

mdasen• 18 years ago

Part of the issue is that many places use a bachelor's degree as a screen for employees. As a token that gets you past one turnstile in the job hunt, it is worth a ton!

It also takes a certain type of person to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone has that instinct or motivation.

I'm a big fan of ideas to change the way post-secondary education is done. Right now, it's expensive, time-consuming, and undertaken when you don't know what you want or need. However, right now HR people just love that BA and that BA puts you in a certain class (beyond work or money, but in terms of associates/friends). And people are willing to pay up for that. How do you get the HR industry to start valuing alternative modes of education and experience? Our universities have a reputation built over hundreds of years - if not for educating people, then for screening intelligence.

It's a wonderful essay, I guess I'm just cautious and would want more social change around the issue before I felt comfortable following this path.

ideamonk2• 18 years ago

College is a big lesson in time-management for me, these days i'm trying to figure out ways to maximize the time I spend on side projects and work besides managing good grades at college which eats 12 hrs a day.

Its gradually leading me to a routined life where I plan each day and loads of sticky notes find their way on my wall :)

hmm... what about learning to collaborate and organize events, we can't do that so easily, schools and colleges provide excellent opportunity for that! :)

mojuba• 18 years ago

Fuck business, go get some education and become a decent Homo Sapiens.

alecco2• 18 years ago

A non-exclusive cheaper alternative:

  * Travel.
  * Read a *lot* (borrow books, use libraries, read online.)
  * Write some.
  * Make something happen be it for money or just to help someone else.

DarkShikari• 18 years ago

This seems like a classic troll blog--write an extremely inflammatory headline that vastly overgeneralizes the subject, knowing it will annoy a whole lot of people.

It's a great way to get your blog posted on tons of social media sites and jack up your ad revenue (or, in this case, get more people to see your portfolio).

Hacker News should be above falling for this sort of thing.

cosmo7• 18 years ago

Bad spelling and foul language. Is this a parody?

Reminds me of "two years ago I couldn't even spell engineer, now I are one."

jwesley• 18 years ago

Yes, I can't resist saying that maybe with a college education you could spell rudimentary words like "business".

dan_sim• 18 years ago

I'm totally opposed to that. You just can't burn steps like that. What do I learn in high school? Almost nothing. So, I should never go to high school and "start my own business" and make money. That's complete nonsense.

There are plenty of things you can learn in college. If you know nothing about nothing, you'll have to start your business AND pay someone else to do the job because you can do nothing. This is starting with a handicap.

And... college is fun! You don't have to be an adult as early in your life.

CalmQuiet• 18 years ago

Well college can expose you to good communication practices... For example: remembering to spellcheck or even to proofread -- the latter helping with the impression you make by adopting conventional presentations (like "business") rather than idiosyncratic ones (like "businness") -- with possible benefits for coding as well? ;)

lhorie• 18 years ago

I think the flaw in the argument is the author's generalization of anedoctal evidence as if everyone was the same. Medical schools is not pointless. Getting a degree because many employers require it (as opposed to being stuck in customer service roles) is not pointless.

There are many ways that people can make the most out of their degree, and many ways to waste it as well.

It's very easy to dismiss something as being useless, but ironically, entrepreneurship is about doing the exact opposite: finding and exploring value where others see it.

ideamonk2• 18 years ago

Well... as far as my college is concerned, yeah it does eat up a big chunk (8am to 4:30 pm, on 3 days a week) of my 24 hrs, plus till 3 years of 4 year course I need to study chemistry and physics along with core subjects, and surprisingly environmental science too is pushed into CS here, 4 credits (highest) for env. science... and chemistry shares same 3 credits with other topics like OS and Algorithms. I wonder why my education system fails to see the importance of less load on students and giving us free time to experiment, self-learn and spend more time in understanding what is important for us.

Plus a semester in my college has 5 tests, so every month we are really busy... its really hard managing time like this !

Imagine a student whose parents can't provide funds due to some reasons, how can he ever self finance or add some independence/comfort to his life!

While my friends in foreign universities do find great part time opportunities and free time to work some side-projects, this kind of scenario is majorly lacking in India :( most of my classmates just concentrate on getting 9+ gpa,don't even care to look at whats going on in the world outside... since grading is competitive, this creates a pressure on one and all to be at a nice position compared to those who give 24x7 to mugging based syllabus and never ever dream to achieve any self earned practical experience which I believe to be the best form of learning.

The case is not the same in premier institutes in India such as IITs, NITs and BITS. Getting to those colleges is achievable only after beating a huge crowd of super high IQ people. This can't be possible for everyone, anyways my point is the private institutes are really messing up with our lives as in case of my college due to outdated ideas and thoughts of people who run it. Major issues for my college are discipline which translates to -

1. no use of laptops in the hostel for first 2 years of college....

2. Uniforms on 2 days a week.

3. ban on jeans and tshirt

4. no cellphones

5. no girls and guys hanging out

6. not getting treated like adults even when we are 20 years old...

7. many more like hostlers standing till 3am as punishment for making some noise on the last day of 2008

Now that really makes me think, my college is stopping me from getting rich and advancing in my own views! I could've learnt so much more if I was in a college that is run by people who are more broadminded and understand how education and knowledge are different and respect what Einstein said in "On Education" and aim for a better advanced society for future rather than creating huge crowd of people with zero creativity, experience and almost ditto common skills.

The best some screwd up colleges can do for people like me is relax the timings and test, syllabus load and let me have some college/life/fun ratio.

BUT COLLEGE EDUCATION IS NO WASTE OF TIME EVEN IF THESE STUPID ADD-ONS ARE ATTACHED TO THE ONE WHICH I GET :)

jfarmer4• 18 years ago

Is there a word for when you improperly generalize your personal experience to the whole human race?

My time at college was excellent for a number of reasons, and where I am today is a direct result of decisions I made while studying there.

ivanzhao• 18 years ago

apparently he doesn't know how to REALLY learn in college yet (but it's fairly tricky nowadays you have to admit)

tom_rath• 18 years ago

As a undergraduate bonus, one might learn an additional verb/adjective/noun to use when expressing one's dissatisfaction.

strlen3• 18 years ago

Life isn't about getting vocational training for money. At the least, an education (university or not) could teach you that there are ways to state your point beyond using "fuck" in the title of a blog post: if you're talking about "selling" yourself, you may start off by not being insulting.

Second, if you're just talking about vocational training and job preparation, a college degree in some field and from some schools can show that you have the capacity for approaching a topic with mathematical rigour and know the fundamentals of Computer Science (as opposed to fashionable frameworks and APIs). There are many other ways to do that - but a college education also buys you a great deal of free time (something that hackers in college probably won't realize until they're done), exposure to smart people and new ideas; finally it's a chance to fulfill other intellectual curiosities (take courses in other sciences, history, philosophy, so forth).

Third, starting your business does not conflict with going to college. More often than often than not, I've seen people who have never attended a university (as opposed to attended and dropped out when they had something more compelling) simply take full time jobs right away, usually in systems administration or web front-end development.

Both of these are essential and great skills to have (especially in a start-up), but you can't build a product on that expertise alone: you can build a web design or systems administration consulting shop, but consulting won't (usually) bring you an exit.

jscn• 18 years ago

For a guy who is apparently so pro-business, it's instructive to see another post on his blog about how to pirate books (the post doesn't even involve an interesting technical aspect, it's just "google for a pdf"). Apparently he is of the opinion that people should pay him for the product of his business, but he doen't need to pay other business owners for their products.

Perhaps a little education might have given him the critical thinking skills to see the problem with this position.

trapper• 18 years ago

Fuck all education. Start your own business instead of going to preschool

kuvkir• 18 years ago

the link doesn't work, redirects to kleko.si :((

Fuck college education, start minding your own business instead

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