>In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now.
Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.
Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.
University has so much more value than the coursework and the name. The network you mention is a good starting point. You call it network and it evokes the idea of those connections that can help you later.
But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
Universities also do research you can be part of. I helped build a CubeSat during my uni time and was part of a sounding rocket mission. You can't do that in a YouTube video of a lecture and you can't to that as a side project.
University is a place to meet like minded people and learn about stuff you are interested in. You get teachers and facilities you wouldn't normally have access to. Use it!
And make sure that you go to uni with this mental model of it. Whenever you see uni doing things that don't fit in that model, try to change it. Unis aren't there to make sure you get a better job, get access to hidden networks in society, take loads of money from students, crank out degrees, ...
They are there to enable people growing personally and fuel that growth back into growing humanities knowledge.
... and yeah, some local hackerspaces are closer to that idea of an University that many Universities are. That's a problem.
> But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
Plenty of sites and forums to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
None of which come close to replicating the random occasions of running into a fellow student in the cafeteria and them asking you for a quick question. Or discussing the ideas you're studying over beer at the campus bar for hours. Asynchronous, anonymous, learning has its place but it is absolutely no substitute for the environment a campus provides.
Be sure to get the 4.0 GPA too - it's very nice to have for surprisingly long. Absolutely don't "challenge yourself". You can do that when you're not being graded on it.
Assuming that's remotely feasible. My alma mater only had 7 students graduate with a 4.0 ... In 60 years of existence.
I went to a top tier school and struggled with various parts of the curriculum (CHEM52, I'm looking at you). I convinced myself that I wasn't smart/good enough for various futures I'd previously envisioned, like academia or research. My confidence was shot and it affected where I applied for jobs out of college.
I ended up taking a contract position at Microsoft. I thrived, got my confidence back, and got hired full-time.
Two years after graduation an acquitance from my college reached out to me- he was coming to Microsoft Research for the summer, could I help him find a place to rent? We reconnected and got talking- It turned out his undergrad GPA was lower then mine! I never did find why he was more confident than me, but he had no problem thinking he was still qualified for a PhD program and was clearly doing well enough there to get picked up by prestigious research lab.
I'm pretty happy with the way my life has turned out, I have no reason to go back and change any decisions. In fact, many of the most valuable experience I had were unrelated to the classroom- student government, interactions with the board of trustees, putting together funding for various small projects. And I've had a great career since college. The only thing I wish I could change was how I felt about myself- I wish I'd been able to tell 20-year old me "you are doing fine! It'll be awesome in the end!" and have 20-year me believe me.
All of the above is a long way of saying- don't worry too much about your grades. Don't blow them off, but in the end they aren't as important as we often make them out to be.
I think this very much depends on where you're going. I did not have a stellar GPA in school, but I did take the most challenging courses available to me and it's paid dividends for years. I still work on projects where my college exposure allows me to have a deeper understanding. Working with customers operating at scale, my (in retrospect, amazing) exposure to HPC and distributed computing has been so valuable.
But these were the most challenging courses at a top 5 CS school, with some of the brightest researchers alive teaching course material. At another school that calculus is probably closer to what you're saying.
I haven't been asked what my GPA was since I got my first graduate job (which was a follow on from my internship), which is very convenient because I graduated with a shocking GPA.
ehh, I don't know about that. I haven't heard of GPA being useful for anything in tech apart from doing a PhD, which require you to have both a high GPA and to challenge yourself.
> Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.
> Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents.
Haven't we already seen that this mindset is exactly what plagues academia with the most recent Admissions scandal? I mean parents of Wealth use that to leverage their children getting into that system to further entrench it and admissions offices use that to base their admissions on more than anything else.
I'm beyond the University Model, I have gotten to do some of the coolest things in my career not even mentioning I went to University and only based on merit and networking--though most assumed and asked loaded questions that reveal that I had indeed gone. But none of them asked for a transcript, as I don't even know where they are at this point.
I went to a low-tier (but highly applied to) CSU/UC, that has/had strong Research History, but saw it was all mis-allocated to serve a series of career academics with clout and had no real purpose other than to keep up the with 'publish or die' model and fluff their CVs. We as undergrads often had to work with broken lab equipment, limited class availability that prolonged your graduation date, and other budget cuts and this is was in an impacted major! As a student from the 2008 financial crises I don't envy what your time will be like in a STEM in this environment, frankly.
I dislike University for the horrible unforgivable debt loads it places on young people, but I HATE it for the waste of Human Capital it ultimately creates. It does occasionally offer some amazing discoveries but that seems more consequential than it does like the intended purpose; you need only see how University takes it's inflated share of researcher's grants and are legally allowed to take any and all IP from the research done.
You're free to do as you please, and you seem like a bright person so I hope its a full scholarship, but please understand that its disheartening to see what was supposed to be your most intellectually formulative years be wasted on such a horrible and corrupt system. Especially because as even before going in you understand the substance of the degree can be learned elsewhere and it serves no real purpose besides a form of perverse virtue signalling to HR.
My dad was a grocery checker and my mom was a secretary. I didn’t go to college. I’m currently making more than six figures as a software engineer. The only meaningful networking connections I made outside of work was going to raves in the early 2000s.
My six siblings and I had farmer parents with a high school education. We all went to (and finished) college. Now we have 2 fortune-500 VPs, a research nursing administrator, an IT professional, and 2 self-employed business owners doing very well.
So it can help to go to college. Just saying.
Oh. And the next generation - 100% college educated. Several PhD's. All well employed. None working on the farm. So for some segment of America at some time, college was/is a huge factor in their social mobility.
There's nothing wrong with working on a farm, but it is objectively not a good job. Long hours, low pay, high stress. I understand being proud of working on a farm, but I understand being proud of not working on a farm too.
Success in America isn't "becomes a farm laborer". I think that's well-understood.
I actually live on my farm, have for 25 years. With Silicon Valley money from successful startup buyouts.
Btw "You …" kind of posts are sort of unnecessary. I know what I am; no need to tell me. Maybe just add your own thoughts, its less argumentative and we learn something.
1. Nobody was attacking you in first place. Re-read the comments. 2. You complained about my writing style and got a reply in a same way. Ironically you seem to have problem with that. 3. I don't care much about karma and posts turning grey. If you don't like my opinion just move on.
Learn that there are more views than your own. I won't be writing in a way you want to get upvotes from you. So again, keep your lectures for yourself and stick on point.
Good for you if your kids know how. I am not really interested in that, so keep it to yourself.
I didn't downvote you :) Its not possible to downvote responses to your own posts.
Reading motivation into my words is certainly rude, and unnecessary. As I've mentioned its always better to just add one's own thoughts, instead of warping other's words to fit your narrative. Just a thought.
If you're in India (and I'd imagine most other developing countries), getting a degree is one of the most surefire methods of ensuring that you live a good life.
It's much less the case in Western countries, especially here in Australia, where tradespeople tend to earn on-par or more than white collar professionals.
Yes! Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the price of a plumber or other trade, I say "Yeah! Where do they get off, wanting to earn a living? Why can't they just live in a van down by the river like their parents?!"
I'm perfectly happy to pay a competent trade for good work, at whatever rate gets me out of painting/plumbing/pumping sewage.
I hate the attitude that tradespeople should get paid less than white collar professionals, it takes the same to finish an apprenticeship as a bachelors degree, it's skilled work just as much as computer programming or accounting or law (incidentally the only time I needed a lawyer I would've been better off representing myself, he was literally worse than useless). I pay my barber $35 for a 20 minute haircut, he certainly cuts my hair better than I ever could, and I write code better than he can. We all have our role in society.
A large proportion of professionals are completely incapable of doing the work that tradespeople do, most people can't even replace a tap washer on their own, let alone replace the transmission in their car. It's conceited and elitist to think you're more valuable than somebody else just because you have the luxury of sitting in front of a computer screen all day. It's not even an intelligence thing (which I think shouldn't matter at all), plenty tradespeople are just as clever as programmers or accountants, they just don't want a job that keeps them cooped up in an office all day. Especially when it comes to trades like electricians or plumbers, where you're still diagnosing problems and creating solutions, a good tradie is worth their weight in gold.
Pay is defined by political and economic leverage, not by intelligence or by actual ability.
Tradespeople aren't paid seven figures a year because they have very little political and economic leverage. Top-rank CEOs, and people working in corporate law and finance are, because they tend to accumulate both - although often from a place where they start with plenty.
You can argue that this is neither fair nor justified, and I will agree with you. In fact I will argue that this is a fundamental failure which makes any political and economic system that lacks feedback loops to limit excesses of privilege inherently unstable.
But it helps to be clear about how the system really works before criticising it. Cleverness is not the primary decider. Nor is skill. Earnings are set by leverage and perceived power, all the way down.
The market determines price at that level, not some conspiracy. Agreed, nothing to do with fair. But something to do with, the decline in trade schools in America which limits supply.
You are correct about the numbers in absolute, but this is one of those cases where the stats are lying.
Once you go to university, it is relatively easy to get a job making around 2.5-4 lakh a year. The total cost of university stays under 4 lakhs for most people, which is an acceptable percentage of projected annual wage.
It is also a lot easier to live under your means in India, where a single person can easily live under 1.5 lakhs/year.
On the other hand, a university degree in the wrong major in the US can mean a $30k gig at Starbucks, with saving being nearly impossible and student debt worth $200k.
College would have alleviated it for four years during college. I’m not convinced that the job market transforms quickly to absorb twice as many people in jobs we think of today as “college required”.
I’m not sure what the correlation between income (or other life outcomes) is between “attended college” vs “would typically have chosen college but took another route” but I suspect it’s a lot smaller than between that latter group and the “was never even considering college” group.
It’s not clear for an individual who “should” attend college how important the decision to actually attend is. I seem to recall studies that suggested there was a much stronger correlation between applying to Harvard than there was between that and attending Harvard.
As summarized by the Atlantic: "For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
This finding suggests that the talents and ambitions of individual students are worth more than the resources and renown of elite schools. Or, less academically, the person you’re becoming at 18 is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22. The takeaway here: Stress out about your habits and chill out about college."
To be fair, the Atlantic continues on to say that the effect is different for women (which they ascribe primarily to increased workforce participation rates).
Unless I completely misremember that article, the article says nothing about not going to college at all. I don't think I'd use that paper to conclude that highly talented individuals will have similiar income outcomes regardless if they go to university or not. The credentialing effect is likely very important
That being said- strongly consider going to a place that is willing to throw scholarship money or special programs at you. The financial aspect of that advice should be obvious, but buy in from the school into your education can mean better access and sponsorship from professors as well
For most of my career, nobody 'created' a job for me. I went out and figured out something useful to do, did it, and made a living.
And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Why would we wish that on ourselves? How does that improve the world?
Even worse, the implied understanding that our society cannot function without an uneducated subject class is worrisome. Are the socialists right, and Capitalism/the free market demands a slave class?
Anyway, with automation any such demand diminishes yearly and is already small.
>And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people?
Have you been involved much in hiring? I suspect if you had it would disabuse you of the notion that university is effective at producing "capable, educated, useful people".
For people who make it through the initial technical screening to the on-site round, I think there's probably a positive correlation to outcome for those who are self-taught. (I equally suspect there's a higher percentage filtered out before on-site, of course.)
Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.