Do You Really Have to Go to College?

http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/do-you-really-have-to-go-to-college/?src=recg

by danso • 13 years ago

26 50 13 years ago

thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com

radh• 13 years ago

I think this really only applies to coding and other skill-type jobs. This wouldn't work for finance, law, and other lucrative fields -- yet.

I'd like to see some case studies on someone who walks into Wall Street without a degree. That'd be interesting.

jurassic2• 13 years ago

In some states it is still possible to sit for the bar without attending law school. But who would hire you, when there's a glut of credentialed attorneys with no job?

icelancer• 13 years ago

Just because you passed the bar doesn't mean you need to practice law to make money. Having that feather in your cap could be worth a decent amount to any number of companies.

geebee• 13 years ago

You pose a reasonable question - and I would agree that the ordinary path of getting hired into a well paid first year associate job at a law firm would probably be off the table.

But I also suspect a lot of people would hire you. The US has a glut of lawyers, no doubt, but also a huge number of people who can't afford lawyers (and are pretty screwed without them). If you were willing to work for $50 an hour or less, I suspect you'd be booked up pretty quickly.

Another thing to keep in mind - I'm actually skeptical that law school is the only good path to become a lawyer. Keep in mind how talented people from non-CS fields can become at programming. A lot of people with degrees in math and physics, or no degree for that matter, who study intensely can become truly exceptional programmers.

Some people learn much faster than others, and some people are extremely good and disciplined at self-study. Abraham Lincoln is probably the most famous lawyer who never went to college or law school. Keep in mind, you still have to pass the bar, and there are often apprenticeship requirements or other educational requirements for the non-law school route. And (like the math or physics major who becomes a programmer), many of these non-law school lawyers might very well have impressive academic credentials in other fields.

simonsarris• 13 years ago

Medical equipment salesman to E.F. Hutton training program to jail. Then:

> With no experience, no college education, virtually no connections, and with the same casual outfit he had been wearing on the day he was taken into custody, Gardner gained a position in Dean Witter Reynolds’ stock brokerage training program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Gardner

~~~~

"Mr. Wall Street" Sideny Weinberg began as a janitor's assistant at Goldman Sachs and rose to CEO. He completed only Junior High school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Weinberg

~~~~

There are countless other case studies I'm sure, which are all pleasing to read, but the only common threads you'll find are luck and meeting the right people at the right time. In spite of the two people's good intellect/skills, if the parameters were different in either of the above stories, things may have turned out very differently.

At the very least, its hard to become CEO of Goldman Sachs from being a janitor if Goldman Sachs doesn't exist.

Most self-made men, in short, have a lot of fortunate scaffolding when they get to the construction site where they are made.

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

Well, and then there's this funny word, "anomaly." We all might as well cite Ramanujan as the quintessential reason why no one needs to go to college; why does anyone even bother with Gates and Zuckerberg? There just seems to be some basic statistics at work that people have difficulty grasping.

busterarm• 13 years ago

Also, if you have any interest in relocating to other countries, a degree is in most cases a requirement.

contingencies3• 13 years ago

Incorrect. This only applies to professionally acquired visas. To get what you want out of visa systems, as with any other system, it pays to consider some of the viable alternatives: subsidised skills areas (exceptions to professional work visa requirements), family and relationship based visas, investment visas, retirement visas, tourism visas where you are not working just receiving offshore income. Persistence is king.

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

You said several words here but nothing really contradicted the parent. The parent is correct. Are there some difficult exceptions, sure, but these are ... exceptions. If you don't believe, see the gigantically complicated chart for getting a green card in the U.S. I guess, game, set, match?

stormbrew• 13 years ago

This. Especially if you're a citizen of a country other than the US and hope to have the career mobility to work in one of the American hotbeds. It will severely limit your career for a very long time if you don't, especially if your work history is difficult to prove.

contingencies3• 13 years ago

Utter rubbish, in my experience: I've done it with no degree, and ~7 years out of the western workforce.

The US was OK but I much prefer Asia and Europe (for quality of life, languages, art, history and conversation).

klibertp2• 13 years ago

Except if you live in EU :)

jgh• 13 years ago

What is with all of the anti-college articles that the New York Times publishes? Almost every time I see one come up it's inevitably a NYT article.

jurassic2• 13 years ago

No doubt the scions of many middle and upper-middle class NYT readers are having a hard time seeing the ROI on their liberal arts educations. It's sad how many people I know who finished college, moved back home, and ended up with the same waitressing job they had in high school. And misery loves company.

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

It seems a bit ironic given their audience. So they are basically advocating for a reduction in their future subscriber base. Interesting tact. :)

ldrex• 13 years ago

That's especially true for Russia. The quality of russian university education is extremely low. Youngsters go to uni in order to avoid mandatory enlistment. Indeed, russian army is hell, composed of criminals. So, in some countries (like, Russia) you really HAVE TO go to uni.

10098• 13 years ago

> russian army is hell, composed of criminals

I wouldn't generalize like that. Russia is a big place. There are all sorts of things happening, and it heavily depends on where you serve. My friend is in Russian army right now, he has access to internet and posts on facebook occasionally. He's doing pretty good and the people surrounding him are all right.

oinksoft• 13 years ago

Kremlin Rising, slightly dated now (2005), has a very good chapter on this, and I expect there are other more detailed works on the topic. For many enlistees, it seems the Russian Army (I don't know how this is in other branches) is a terrible place with a culture of physical and sexual abuse, not unlike a good chunk of the US prison system.

gkarthik92• 13 years ago

I'm from India and I personally feel that India is not yet ready to accept non college graduates. No one acknowledges a non college graduate here. College in India is pretty much mandatory. In such an environment even though college education doesn't make a very big practical difference, it is important for one to go to college to achieve some kind of a footing for future ventures, either a job or a start up. Although this trend is slowly changing with students starting up at the college level and below. Wherever the students feel that the college material they are provided with is not sufficient enough they are looking out for online courses and other material from the internet.

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

Well, India has a real cultural issue with regard to education. There's just something odd about the idea that a child or young teenager that does not get the very top grades in sort of a "scary" educational system being basically a loser at life. There seems to be very little room for people to either reinvent themselves at, even, 16, let alone in their 20s.

chacham152• 13 years ago

I understand and possible agree with the general idea, but I feel that this article takes it way overboard. If you want to talk about coding use statistics relevant to coders, not general statistics.

> Furthermore, some recent college graduates are not faring too well in the job market.

This is not true in my experience for coders. Go to silicon valley and therell be many startups vying to get your attention.

> If you’d like to learn how to code, you don’t need a $150,000 piece of paper to tell you that you can.

That isnt what the paper signifies. It signifies that you have reached at least a certain level of education in the field. More importantly, it signifies this to other people who dont know you at all. Even pg wants to know what school you went to on the yc application. (you might argue that people who drop out still get in, yes, but if they had had that credential, their likelyhood would probably have increased, otherwise, why would yc ask?)

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

Well, and what happens to all these people that have basically just learned programming from a couple blogs or a RoR bootcamp/YouTube when the market is flooded? The article very, stupidly, if I may use that term, implies that programming is a panacea to solving the "job" problem. It loves to tout silicon valley is the savior of the workforce; but isn't this also the same valley that we know and love of articles discussing extreme Logan's Run style ageism? So combine a bubble awash of programmers with very simple skills combined with the fact that humans tend to start at a certain age and increment from there, and stir in ageism and you don't seem to have a great solution to the employment problem. Just being honest about it.

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

Also, is it really necessary for us to pretend the typical graduate is 150k in the red on tuition? I mean, if the argument is good, surely we can make it with realistic numbers.

AutoCorrect• 13 years ago

yeah, that piece of paper is kinda like the HS Diploma that those 80% of graduates who can't read received (NY article earlier in the week). The college degree is just as useless. How many people remember everything, or even a large portion of what they read in college? Or still remember all of the lectures? Even going to college and getting a degree is no guarantee that the person will be capable of doing the job.

chacham152• 13 years ago

What is the probability that a person without a diploma can read? You see, its a credential that means something to people who do not know the person. Even if the difference between the probability a person can read given a diploma and one without is shrinking, it still has value. Furthermore, I remember a lot of what I learned in college. What I dont fully remember, I still remember the basic concept. This aids me in a general understanding of what is possible, knowledge of possible solutions, and furthermore, if I actually need to know more detail about it it would be very fast to learn what I had forgotten (like a cache miss).

M4v3R• 13 years ago

I was disappointed with the article, because the title led be to believe, that there is some college that will teach Go in their classes.

zanny2• 13 years ago

Many colleges in the upper level electives will let you use whatever language you want, but if the prof doesn't know it don't expect help. I was using Scala in my game programming class instead of Java like everyone else (since the projects were targeting the JVM, I couldn't assume any other environment be present, and I had done plenty of C/C++ elsewhere and wanted to try something new). I got an A, and the prof only once read my code and said "I really need to read some documentation on Scala!"

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

Students, and others in this industry in general, tend to make such a big deal about using the latest hyped languages. I think too much so. It's "impressive," I guess. Having a foundation in computer science means you understand that most of the concepts in these "new" languages have been well worn since the 60s, just packaged in new ways, incremental improvements. There's also something to be said, in my view, for Turing completeness. This is not anything about your story, just a related tangent.

xarien• 13 years ago

I met the love of my life and the mother of my child in college.

The problem with these articles and the types of comments on sites such as HN is that people neglect the fact that college is an experience, and a highly subjective one at that. Too often do technocrats forget that college isn't simply an investment, but for many, it is also a consumption good, and THAT IS OK.

Sure, college isn't necessarily going to make you the best programmer in the world. But, if one looks past the facade of a pure investment brought upon by our economy and media, there lies a rich experience in diversity and the exposure to the liberty of choice (at least in America).

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

You can easily be exposed to diversity and choice without going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt.

billeh• 13 years ago

The best I've heard is "At least you will be able to think critically." Was that really left out of the previous 12 years' curriculum?

precisioncoder• 13 years ago

I think what the poster and other people say is basically there are cheaper consumption goods which would bring a better ROI. For the cost of one year of college you could travel the world, volunteer overseas, start a company, learn anything you want through self directed study, go to Europe learn a European language and take advantage of their education system. With a working visa I am eligible to attend university in Austria at a price of around 200€/year. It took me less than 6 months to learn enough German to land a job here at a total cost of under 1000€. These are just a few possibilities off the top of my head. However the big problem seems to be that it requires thinking and motivation, it's easier to take the college path since it's the current default.

Arelius4• 13 years ago

> I met the love of my life and the mother of my child in college.

And a friend of mine met the love of his life many years ago on a Bart Train. One of many who never met her in College. I guess my point is that sometimes you get lucky, and that place is in College. But the cost of college is high, and you don't know the value of the things you would do if you didn't go to college. Clearly you in particular would have lost the chance to meet the love of your life, but there is no way for somebody to know that looking forward to the choice, rather than back on the experience.

klibertp2• 13 years ago

A quote from "Coders at Work" - one that I read every time I feel scared or not "good enough".

Seibel: And you very briefly went to CMU after you finished high school.

Zawinski: Yeah. What happened was, I hated high school. It was the worst time of my life. And when I was about to graduate I asked Fahlman if he’d hire me full-time and he said, “No, but I’ve got these friends who’ve got a startup; go talk to them.” Which was Expert Technologies—ETI. I guess he was on their board. They were making this expert system to automatically paginate the yellow pages. They were using Lisp and I knew a couple of the people already who had been in Fahlman’s group. They hired me and that was all going fine, and then about a year later I panicked: Oh my god, I completely lucked into both of these jobs; this is never going to happen again. Once I no longer work here I’m going to be flipping burgers if I don’t have a college degree, so what I ought to do is go get one of those.

The plan was that I’d be working part-time at ETI and then I’d be going to school part time. That turned into working full-time and going to school full-time and that lasted, I think, six weeks. Maybe it was nine weeks. I know it lasted long enough that I’d missed the add/drop period, so I didn’t get any of my money back. But not long enough that I actually got any grades. So it’s questionable whether I actually went. It was just awful. When you’re in high school, everyone tells you, “There’s a lot of repetitive bullshit and standardized tests; it’ll all be better once you’re in college.” And then you get to your first year of college and they’re like, “Oh, no—it gets better when you’re in grad school.” So it’s just same shit, different day—I couldn’t take it. Getting up at eight in the morning, memorizing things. They wouldn’t let me opt out of this class called Introduction to Facilities where they teach you how to use a mouse. I was like, “I’ve been working at this university for a year and a half—I know how to use a mouse.” No way out of it—“It’s policy.” All kinds of stuff like that. I couldn’t take it. So I dropped out. And I’m glad I did.

Then I worked at ETI for four years or so until the company started evaporating. We were using TI Explorer Lisp machines at ETI so I spent a lot of my time, besides actually working on the expert system, just sort of messing around with user-interface stuff and learning how those machines worked from the bottom up. I loved them—I loved digging around in the operating system and just figuring out how it all fit together. I’d written a bunch of code and there was some newsgroup where I posted that I was looking for a job and, oh, by the way, here’s a bunch of code. Peter Norvig saw it and scheduled an interview. My girlfriend at the time had moved out here to go to UC Berkeley, so I followed her out.

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

We sure never see this topic on HN. :) Of course you don't have to go. And of course, getting stuck working in the restaurant business until you're 40 because you started working their because it was quick money out of high school and easier than going to college is always an option too.

Now, lest anyone get the wrong idea I do not mean to imply that one path leads to the other. But also, please let's not pretend that Gates and Zuckerberg are "typical" college dropouts either. Maybe, the restaurant kids are more common than Gates type people, eh?

-- Anyway, seriously, if you are a recent HS grad and choose not to go to college and instead decide to give Devbootcamp $12,200 for an RoR course ... I'm sure they have a nice product ... But I will also like to contact you regarding the small matter of a bridge I would like to sell.

revuniversal• 13 years ago

You can learn quite a bit from just the Internet, a bit of ambition, and a willingness to say "I don't know, but I will figure it out." Sure, there are foundational concepts that you will miss, but I haven't noticed their absence yet. Besides, if I'm missing some kind of CS knowledge I will buy the book, ask the web, and take the heat. I'm sure college is great, but is it necessary in this field, at this time? My personal experience says no. I'm not the best dev, and I have some things to learn, but so do the guys with papers.

Arelius4• 13 years ago

Agreed. As an interviewer, I'm constantly disappointed with the skills of CS grads. Many years in industry show me that if there is anything to be learned about programming in college, it in a field other than CS.

Now, that's not strictly true, but the fact that we've accepted more non-CS grads, or non-grads than CS grads I think says something about the state of our CS education.

dinkumthinkum9• 13 years ago

Well again, there are individuals but on the whole this is an issue. I suspect there are many more people without degrees that have no idea about this field than anyone really likes to admit. Is it true that there are very successful autodidacts in this field? Yes. Is it true that autodidacts represent a much smaller percentage of the population than is implied by articles like this? Yes.

It is a broad field, no one can be expected to know everything; this is true of any field. However, what is found in a few YouTubes and a devbootcamp is not, in my view, something that will carry large percentage a of people through a bubble or saturation.

These discussions are a little awkward as well because anyone that is in the pool of autodidacts is quick to defend themselves. The issue is not "Can one be in the top of the field of programming/CS without a CS degree?" This is very different question; actually I think a good foundation in computer science or mathematics would help people, greatly, in realizing that these are separate issues!

csomar• 13 years ago

The connection economy we live in today has had drastic effects on the incentives and economics of education — yet it seems that colleges haven’t really taken notice.

Obviously, Colleges didn't take notice because enrollment is still high and people still bet on their degrees.

What I think colleges should do, is not reduce their tuition, but improve their brand. It's not the degree that matters, it's the college that you graduated from. If the quality of graduates of a certain college drops significantly, this will affect the whole college graduates credibility.

If you are looking for a JOB (at a company), go and get a DEGREE. That's it. The typical path. There is no creativity in this path. If you are looking to become an ENTREPRENEUR and start businesses and stuff, I'd say give college a shot (maybe a year or two) and then drop (if you don't like it).

There are many other ways to network beside college. But I'd say, give it a shot.

NateDad• 13 years ago

Stop with this no college crap.

Here's the facts: if you have no work experience and no college education, you're not even going to get a phone interview with any software company. You're just not. None of the companies I've worked for (from tiny startups to 1000+ person software companies) would look twice at your resume. They wouldn't even get so far as printing it out so they could throw it away.

You are not Mark Zuckerberg. You are not Bill Gates. Don't try to pretend you are. If you're incredibly lucky, you'll get a job as an unpaid intern at a medical device company writing Delphi for their internal systems. You may be able to work your way up from there... but it'll suck.

College was FUN. I learned a lot there. I wouldn't skip it for the world. Hell, for much of my 20's I wished I could go back to college to do it some more.

I went to a private, expensive technical school, and graduated with, yes, $30,000 in debt. If you're as smart as you think you are, you can get grants and scholarships to reduce the cost of college. And then you can pay it off a few hundred dollars a month like everyone else does... and you'll laugh, because a few hundred dollars a month isn't that bad when you're getting paid $70k+

I promise you, you'll learn a lot in college. You'll have fun. Don't listen to all the statistics about not being able to get a job or pay off loans... those are general statistics for all graduates that include all the philosophy and English and history of music majors.

You'll be graduating with SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE that can be directly applied to the JOB that you get because you are QUALIFIED, and because software companies troll job fairs at technical colleges looking for bright stars like you that will work their butts off for half the price of the old neckbeards with kids that want to go home at 5pm.

GO TO COLLEGE. IT'S AWESOME.

quesera• 13 years ago

Working within the system is always the easiest approach, but it produces very predictable results. Some people don't get the same affirmation from following the expected path.

There are very strong arguments for and against college. The right choice depends on the temperament of the person. Unfortunately that person is rarely equipped with all of the information/maturity to make a good choice for themselves. This is a failing of parents and schools, who themselves generally don't know any better.

But the crux of the argument is that the default choice is very very often the (or a) bad one. It's an important conversation to have.

Edit: your "here's the facts" line is overemphasized, and demonstrably incorrect.

Arelius4• 13 years ago

Frankly, at most of the places I've worked at, you wouldn't get a phone interview with no experience, regardless of education.

avenger123• 13 years ago

I agree for the average person this is good advice.

I just don't think anyone needs to go to a college where they are going to have $60K-$120K tuition over the span of their degree. If you can't pay for most of the tuition in cash, then, I'm sorry, you can't afford it. And, no, being able to take out a student loan for the amount, does not mean that you can afford it. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Go to college, find a local one that is reasonable in price. You should be able to go to a college and only have total tuition in the $20k-40k range. That's much more manageable than the $100k student loan.

RobotCaleb• 13 years ago

I'm definitely an outlier, but, aside from a scuba class, I have zero college and zero debt and make more than 3x the debt you incurred by attending your technical school and I love my job.

I don't doubt college was fun, nor would I say it's not useful. I wouldn't even discourage someone from going. I also definitely wouldn't clamor on about "you're not even going to get a phone interview with any software company." It does happen.

In other words, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes".

Do You Really Have to Go to College?

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