Stop telling me to go to college

http://www.teknically-speaking.com/2013/07/stop-telling-me-to-go-to-college.html

by jwarkentin • 13 years ago

5 10 13 years ago

aet2• 13 years ago

Another alternative would be to attempt a degree part-time, which might reduce the financial/time burden. I just realized this comment might be violating the title of the post. Oops

jwarkentin2• 13 years ago

As I mentioned in the beginning of my article, that's what I did. It took me about 30-40 minutes to get to school in the mornings. I had classes from 8am-1pm. Another 50 minutes or so to get to work. I would then work until about 10pm. I would go home and take care of the things I needed to for life, go to bed, get up at 6am and repeat. I didn't have much time for homework or study and I was sooner going to sacrifice my school work than my job. Luckily I realized the futility of the process.

aet2• 13 years ago

Sorry, I didn't catch the 'some' college part. It's too bad you couldn't find a way to reduce the commutes. Classes 8-1pm sounds like a full load. I was thinking about 1 class at a time.

hobs• 13 years ago

You could entitle the post "stop telling me to do something I don't see the value in."

I don't have a degree, and work exclusively with people with degrees, and they complain bitterly about the costs associated with education and frequently comment that I was the lucky one.

Do what works, don't worry about choices you could have made(you didn't make them!). If a degree looks like what you need to take it to the next level, do it, otherwise, who cares?

jwarkentin2• 13 years ago

You missed the point of the post. It wasn't about how I don't like people telling me to do something I don't see the value in. It was about people dogmatically asserting the necessity of a process which has been fed to us by society without reason. Yes, college is great for some people; but society today has almost turned it into a religious thing. We're told "you have to go to college to get a good job" or "you have to go to college to be successful", essentially "you can't be smart without college". That's what I don't like. Many people instantly look down on you or assume you are less-intelligent if you don't have a degree.

Maybe you haven't had the same experiences, but I've definitely had the debate with quite a number of people who religiously insist that I should go to college, but can't reason with me why.

userulluipeste• 13 years ago

The academic education has two purposes:

1. To instruct you in a systematic manner. You can do a good job by yourself but for someone else who might depend on your knowledge and experience, it is easier to trust an institution to do that than to trust one to do it by oneself. There is the inherent risk of erratic learning. There are reasons to prefer having a guide or a mentor. This is not to refute any of your arguments. You may find free mentorship, your autodidact ability might be of high quality and the academic institutions may as well violate the trust of the benefiting parties - both future employers and future employees.

2. To asses in the end the quality of your enlightenment. Because the academic system's interests depend on this, it might be a faulty process. For one, the competition game and the perceived self value/image involved in this is driving the education prices like crazy (which is not like the other competition-ruled areas, mind you), and for other - the "propaganda" that is meant to keep the high demand for education, sadly regardless of its quality. Yet, the value assessment is a hassle into which many employers do not want to get involved. This is what maintains artificially the value of a degree.

The academic system has its dirty game and you were smart enough to reap its promised benefits without being played. Congratulations! I am sure you'll find a way to deal with the after-effects of those who didn't.

kobot• 13 years ago

Going to college made me realize that I wanted to study computer science. If I had never gone to college I may have never known that. I agree that it's totally possible to educate yourself at home, but for some people (like me) who had no idea, college is a great place to access those resources and network with people in the field.

steverb• 13 years ago

I was in a similar situation, except that I saw the need to get a degree so I could get past the HR checklist. I was able to do it in four years while working full time and managed to leave college with a whopping $1500 in debt.

I think it was worth it for me, because it opened some career doors that would have remained shut, and I learned some things that my self-education had skipped.

On the flip side, I don't require a degree when hiring developers. It's nice to have, but to be quite frank most developers that didn't learn to code before they started college are generally (there are exceptions) not the type of people we hire.

I'm convinced that if you were to drop one of my people on a desert island, they'd build a computer from scratch and be programming again in 6 months. It's just what they love to do, and that's what we look for.

muffinator• 13 years ago

So brave

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

HN is not Reddit.

Stop telling me to go to college

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