[brightball]

I always wonder if this is a symptom of a bigger problem that we created.

As soon as having a bachelors degree became almost an expectation, not having one became a problem to be avoided. We have people borrowing money to go to school because they think they have to...not because they necessarily even need to. Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.

At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job. That's borderline criminal IMHO.

I always wonder what the effect would be of transitioning public high schools to a structure closer to Cornell's one-course-at-a-time approach (http://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a-time/). It seems like giving kids the opportunity to deep dive into one thing (actually, learn it instead of memorize stuff) would be more effective. At the same time, scheduling of classes that taught real skills would a lot simpler.

Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:

1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)

In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.

Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.

[jinfiesto]

I've always thought that if I homeschooled I would take a "one course at a time" approach.

I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.

But yeah, there's an issue with the way we treat bachelor's degrees. I haven't found (in my admittedly limited experience) that it effectively signals anything these days, other than that you probably grew up at least "middle-class."

[EthanHeilman]

The education in the form of literacy is not incidental, it is most the entire point. Imagine how US Capitalism would function with a 10% literacy rate?

Without Public education or something similar to replace it is unlikely that we would have the high levels of literacy to which we are accustomed. Public Education successfully teaches most of the population to read and write English (including the children of immigrants whose parents may not speak English). This is a historically impressive feat.

1000 years ago the world literacy rate was less than 1%, 100 years ago the world literacy rate was less than 10%. Now it is roughly 80%!

It is clear Public Education could do much better, but lets not confuse failing to do better with failing to do anything or its most important job.

[emerod]

The literacy rate cannot function as a measure of the success of public education in the US. Rather, it is a measure of how useless the US public education system is, because it accomplishes little more than maintaining a basic level of literacy for the majority of the US population.

"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."[1] See the extensive citations at the link.

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2003/12/5/4379/-

[EthanHeilman]

>"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."

This is why I wrote "Public Education or something like it". We need education systems for literacy, however it does not to be compulsory or public if nearly everyone uses it and can afford it. It seems unlikely that these two conditions (affordable and widely used) would be met in our present society without public funding of education.

Note that in that article you link to they say that Southern Whites in the 1860s had a "56.4%" literacy rate.

[tracker1]

But even then we are falling... My great grandmother taught school back in the 1940's-1970's, and I recall reading through one of the 5th grade English subject books from around 1950, and it was significantly more advanced than what I was seeing in an English class for high school seniors (short of AP).

So, effectively even at the subject you mention, literacy (english language communications), we are teaching less with 5 more years than we taught just over half a century ago (assuming that it hasn't improved since I left HS about 24 years ago).

I love technology... I love history.. and a lot of things.. that said, I think we're letting the core that is pure communication (reading, writing, and effectively communicating) is falling behind at the expense of being able to follow [INSERT_CELEBRITY] on [NEW_SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM].

[stevenmays]

The textbook was more advanced, but how was well was the information retained? Perhaps most fifth graders are retaining information better now with books more suited to them?

Literacy rates have increased throughout the years: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

[tracker1]

If it was replicated/repeated for the next several years, I'd imagine the retention was relatively good. Likely as good or better for most people than today.

[EthanHeilman]

Far fewer people in the past graduated Highschool as well. For instance only 50% of students graduated Highschool in the 1950s. As of 2008 the Highschool graduation rate is 80%.

[koolba]

> I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.

And it doesn't even do a good job at that either! Most public school start (830am) after parents leave for work and finish (3pm) well before parent's get off work to pick them or be home. Sure there are after school programs to cover it a bit but overall it's a pretty crappy schedule for a publicly funded babysitter.

[emerod]

It would be more honest if this mission were made explicit--to serve as a holding place for children without daytime caretakers. Then, one of its primary objectives would be to pragmatically assess which children were capable of self-care, or even full independence, before the arbitrarily designated age of graduation.

[ianai]

add to that: Many studies show children need more sleep and would benefit from starting later in the day.

[thatfrenchguy]

Get your kids to bed earlier ?

[tracker1]

I'm consistently amazed by friends/family who put their kids to bed well before 9pm (even as early as 7:30-8pm). I don't think I've been able to get to sleep before 2am or so regularly since I was very young... Even if I force myself up at 7-8am, I'm still up until 2-3am most days.

On either saturday and/or sunday I'll let myself sleep until I wake up (usually 12noon-2pm). I'm fortunate enough that my first morning meeting is 9:30, and it takes about half an hour commute. My alarm starts at 7:15, and I usually snooze until around 8... it takes me nearly an hour to get going once up, and even then, I'm usually walking in the door just as standup is starting.

I'm amazed by the early-start types, as I've tried... It only made me really tired and funny for a few days, then increasingly grumpy. At 19, I worked two jobs, first at 4:30am, and second ending around midnight... I was a really grumpy young man by the end of that month (quit one of the jobs, just couldn't keep up with both).

Then I managed to find a job doing creatives/design, and fell into programming from that. All the same, in a lot of places "office hours" have been the biggest contention in the workplace for me. I get things done, I have high quality output, and significantly so.

[derekp7]

Have you ever gone camping for an extended time (week or two)? Real camping, where you don't have access to any screens, and filled with daytime activities (such as fishing or hiking)? If so do you still end up wanting to stay up till past midnight, and sleep till noon?

I've found that if there are no major artificial light sources, and if I've been outdoors active all day, I tend to want to fall asleep soon as its dark. And I wake up way earlier, soon as the daylight starts to hit the tent.

[Fordrus]

Importantly, the same research that indicates that kids would do better starting later also indicates that they (teenagers, at least, who were also the indicated population in the study about later start benefits) will generally have trouble getting to sleep much before midnight, regardless of when you 'send' them to sleep.

[mjevans]

I still am not one of the accursed 'morning people'.

Maybe it's natural for /you/ to get up that early, but it never was for me (the closest I came was waking up super early for reruns of Mr. Wizard, then falling back asleep).

[ianai]

With what? Pills?

[koolba]

Nah I think most people that drug their kids to sleep use liquids.

[thatfrenchguy]

"It's time to bed, now you go to bed, lights off" ?

[dsfyu404ed]

Give the stupid noise machines something to do. They'll have no problem going to sleep if their idea of fun is digging a hole in the back yard.

[prodikl]

woah woah woah let's be reasonable here

[emerod]

>>I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.

You are absolutely correct.

The point of public school in the US has always been to 'educate' in the broader cultural sense, not in the narrow sense of learning a subject (or range of subjects) or learning how to do a particular job. From its earliest forms in the US in the early 19th century until it was widely institutionalized by the late 19th century, it was always explicitly promoted as a method of integrating into 'productive' society all the religious outsiders, immigrants, lower classes, Indians, Blacks--everyone who was not a middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

This is still an explicit objective of public school, except that now it also has a normative function for the middle class--in other words, it has become the de facto normal condition of the middle class to have had a public school experience. That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally. This is the single most common public objection to homeschooling, even more than fears of child abuse, child neglect, or educational neglect.

[r00fus]

> That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally.

Strawman alert.

I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.

Nor are there any standards or tests in terms of socialization. Thus the stigma.

There's also the issue that if a homeschooler is trained with a large body of questionable content contradicting public understanding, these children could be reared to have their own set of "facts". Clearly this is disturbing to those who agree on other facts.

[dilemma]

>> That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally.

>Strawman alert. I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.

You make the exact criticism that you say isn't being made.

The public school system fails in socialization in many ways, and bullying, substance abuse and school shootings are symptoms of that failure.

[jnordwick]

> You make the exact criticism that you say isn't being made.

Yes he did. I was a little shocked by that. Apparently the public school system failed him in rhetoric and logic.

[emerod]

This is not a 'strawman', this is the actual content of every substantive criticism I received in 12 years of homeschooling my child. Because we followed a structured curriculum and she excelled in verbal ability, they had no other basis for criticism.

Also, at the time we were homeschooling, there was literally no relevant research in the ERIC database by anti-homeschoolers--it consisted entirely of polemics about socialization.

[linkregister]

Starting in the 18th century, public education in America was an aspect of New England communities. The stated purpose was to spread literacy for understanding of scripture and for commerce. By the 19th century, it was widely understood throughout the U.S. that literacy improved the regional economy and provided opportunity for one's children. Public education became an expected government service, and many localities' education spending dominated their budgets.

At the time, education was a drain on agricultural families, so the child care aspect wasn't a benefit. City dwellers may not have employed their children, but child care wasn't especially beneficial since household labor without running water was substantial.

The modern phenomenon of public education as childcare is only made possible by widespread employment of women with children. The issue is best discussed from this standpoint, not a false idea of what public education was originally intended to accomplish.

[emerod]

This highlights why compulsory public schooling was so long in being established. It follows the trajectory of the US transitioning from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, and children were actually expected to participate in both but even more so in the agricultural economy. Only in the 20th century were people expected to not work at a 'real' job until the age of 22.

[PJDK]

>I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.

No one you know is a teacher? I can't speak for the US, but many of my friends went into teaching here in the UK. There is plenty wrong with education but the people I know who went into it definitely want to teach and want to teach well. This kind of blanket statement is quite disrespectful to them.

[noobiemcfoob]

I don't see it as an indictment of the teachers, but the institution itself. I know many inspired teachers whose work ethic and selflessness can put us all to shame. There are also some pretty bad teachers. But neither point illustrates that the public education system (in the US at least) is engineered for many other concerns before considering how best to educate its students.

You can see it in this paraphrased anecdote from a middle school science teacher: The principal asks me to do a lot of things. Sometimes, he asks very sternly. However, as a teacher, there is only one thing I am legally required to do for these children every day: take attendance.

[deong]

I don't think that quote means much of anything other than it's very difficult to legislate efficacy.

Suppose you had the absolute dream of a public education system -- one that existed solely to provide a real education for the children. What would the actual laws around that system look like? Is it a misdemeanor to make a D on a math test?

It also ignores that there are a wide range of well-meaning (but probably counterproductive) things we require of teachers that are for all intents and purposes legal requirements. If your kids perform too poorly on a test, your school may lose funding, for example. Again, I think that crosses the line beyond which such mandates make sense, but it's pretty clearly intended to improve the legitimate education your kids get. If it were about babysitting, they wouldn't bother.

[noobiemcfoob]

In a vacuum, you're right, and it would be difficult to convey all the context that might sway you such that this anecdote is indicative of the structural problems in the education system. But this is just one of millions of anecdotes on how the system as a whole is largely concerned with anything but education.

The accounting machinery is needed to get money to all the schools sure, but when that accounting machinery becomes the focus of 40% of admins... You're not running an education system. You're moving money around that happens to educate...sometimes.

[emerod]

Whether teachers have noble motivations is completely irrelevant to whether the institutions perform their function well. All it means is that the teachers are working for institutions that take advantage of them.

[michaelmrose]

You can have inspired worthy people working in the midst of a crappy institution infested with bureaucrats and sports programs that suck up most of the money that could have been used to pay teachers.

[TheAdamAndChe]

I think the education system in the US is vastly different from the UK. In the US, the teachers are massively limited in their freedom to choose how and what to teach their kids. Mostly because the No Child Left Behind Act(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act), which requires teachers to teach for tests and nothing else. And this IS coming from someone who knows a teacher in the US. My uncle was an art teacher for several years, and ended up leaving because of the politics and lack of care given to students.

[PJDK]

I'm not saying that any particular system is good or bad (and for what it's worth there are similar complaints about teaching in the UK with regards to teaching to tests).

But looking at that summary it's pretty clearly intended to improve schools. It might (or might not) be the wrong way to do it - but it's certainly about trying to give children a good education.

[TheAdamAndChe]

I understand that's the intent, but what happens is that schools lose money if too many of its students do poorly, which leads to a lowering of standards and a teaching towards tests alone to shovel as many students through the system as possible. The students can make an educated guess at a multichoice question, but lack any real understanding of the topic being taught.

[sp332]

The act did not assert a national achievement standard – each state developed its own standards. I think I found the problem.

[tcfunk]

Not to mention the proles.

[dilemma]

The point of the public school system, where ever it exists, is well established: to produce a uniform workforce.

[freehunter]

>Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.

The problem with that is, college teaches a lot of things that are not directly related to core technical competencies. It's very easy to learn programming on your own these days, sure. But it's a lot harder to learn public speaking, finance, management principles, marketing, college-level reading and writing, technical writing, time-management, political science, biology, physics, and all of the other stuff that you're taught in college.

Going to a university or a college, I think, is still a very important thing. It's not worth the money right now, which I hope will change, but I know a lot of smart people who didn't got to college, people working in many different diverse fields, and it's almost always possible to tell who did and who did not go to a university. Do you want to be laser-focused on just being a programmer, or do you want to have marketable skills outside of a pure technology focus?

To put it simply: it's easy to learn how how a computer works and how to program it to work for you. It's much harder and takes much longer to learn how the world works and how to make it work for you. For 99% of the corporate/enterprise jobs people will end up working, being the best programmer is the world is far less important than every other skill you learn in college. If we do away with traditional universities, we need to find a way to replicate that other type of learning.

[monkmartinez]

> To put it simply: it's easy to learn how how a computer works and how to program it to work for you. It's much harder and takes much longer to learn how the world works and how to make it work for you.

I would argue strongly that university DOES NOT teach anyone how the world works. Wet behind the ear college grads are worthless in most "blue collar" professions, for example. If you get a degree in English Lit, what do you know about the "real world" that a peer who has worked construction for 5 years doesn't know???? How much more knowledge about the "real world" does a journalism major know than a military veteran?

The first two years of "learning" at American universities are generally filled with bullshit pre-requisites that serve almost no purpose in the "real world!" The last two years are more specialized but hardly teach shit about the "real world."

[freehunter]

Wet behind the ear grads are useless in white collar organizations too. College doesn't teach you about your job, it teaches you about the wider world. Being a military vet is an admirable use of your time, but the picture it paints of the world is very different than that of a university education. Likewise, I wouldn't want to debate a construction worker about the proper building code for a multi-occupancy building, but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.

You make good points about getting a broader picture, but the notion that the military or blue collar jobs are the "real world" is false, IMO. That's one aspect of the real world, it is far from a broader picture of it. University is supposed to present the other side, a far deeper picture of the other side.

And for the record... what I'm talking about is the pre-reqs. I'm specifically saying those pre-reqs are not bullshit and are the most important part of a university education. I just want to be clear on that. Job training is better left to an internship/apprenticeship.

Finance and marketing and math and science and English classes are the real benefits of college that you can't replicate on a construction site.

[monkmartinez]

> College doesn't teach you about your job, it teaches you about the wider world.

Playing devils advocate for a second...

How does college teach you about the wider world? By taking a bunch of tests on subjects being taught by TA's (if you are lucky) or professors that sometimes struggle with English?

Or

Cramming for tests and writing papers you don't want to write is learning about the wider world?

Find me the Engineering major that would rather take 2 semesters of humanities|Literature|etc or graduate sooner!

Find me the doctor students that wish undergrad was a like 2 years shorter! Fuck it, make it 4 years shorter and call it a day! Strait to med school if you have the aptitude.

> but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.

One semester of finance is craptacular, you wouldn't learn much. Better if you had said Accounting... but most students don't pick accounting. You would do far better listening to Dave Ramsey for a month, IMO. Seriously, where in the bulk of College majors outside of Finance can I find the requirement to take a finance/accounting/econ classes? I'll answer, NO WHERE!

The fact that you bring up finance is interesting because fully half of the Colleges today would go bankrupt if their students knew ANYTHING about money! Why would they go into such crazy debt for what they get in return? The subset of college majors that actually have promising career futures ahead of them are miniscule in comparison the "majors" offered at universities.

[michaelmrose]

Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.

This isn't to say you are yourself less intelligent but perhaps you lack perspective?

[wtetzner]

> Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.

I've gone to college I agree with the GP that most gen. ed. college courses are mostly useless. Just the way they're structured usually means you never get a good picture of what you're learning and why. Instead, you usually learn to do a bunch of exercises, with little context about what the point of the exercises are.

[monkmartinez]

One finance class? Unless we are talking about someone majoring in finance, I don't think one class will get you very far. Look at the classes required for the finance major at USC, for example[1].

Uhh... ok, if you want to do finance for a corporation or similar, great! I don't see much there about managing personal finances... do you? Perhaps if we had more personal finance and less about leverage, in the USA at least, we wouldn't have the crazy debt problems we have. Perspective.

Real world is managing both personal and professional. College isn't great at either.

[1]http://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/fbe/curriculum/undergrad...

[dsfyu404ed]

Depending on the construction worker's experience he may or may not know a heck of a lot more about what works and what doesn't on the job site.

Any engineering intern can run some numbers and write a spec. Whether that spec will be easily implementable or whether it will encourage corner cutting in certain cases is a different story. Specs (building requirements, part design, etc) written up by people with little or outdated experience with building the finished product is probably the single biggest time waster in blue collar industries.

Think about that next time you encounter something designed with enough clearance to swing a wrench but not enough clearance to swing a wrench with a hand on it.

[watwut]

"Depending on the construction worker's experience he may or may not know a heck of a lot more about what works and what doesn't on the job site."

Absolutely. And military veteran knows a heck of a lot more about how army works. Neither of them knows enough about building statics nor how to evaluate whether ground is good enough to hold tall building. Neither of them knows about history of country the war was in, something you would expect from journalist.

People that do x know more about x then people who dont, but that does not make construction job reasonable choice if you wants to be architect.

Neither of them was forced to learn hundreds of pages of stuff every semester, something that makes college graduate more likely to be able to learn similar amount of similar difficult stuff again. Part of it is selection bias, but part of it is that good college makes you used to having to learn a lot.

[extra88]

I don't know why you're singling out Humanities degrees, as if STEM degrees are chock full of "real world" knowledge. Many STEM degrees have very clear job positions to enter but "job preparedness" and "real world knowledge" are not synonymous.

I would expect a journalism major to be very good at media literacy which I consider important real world knowledge a construction worker or someone in the military would not develop over the same period of time.

[literallycancer]

I don't think what he means by real world corresponds to what you think it means.

It's likely that he meant things like policy making, some basic economics, knowing how democracy works, being able to recognize fake news, being able to figure out (faster) who you need to talk to about a problem (be it a person, or an institution), being able to state a hypothesis, gather evidence and update your beliefs, better understanding of systems and what makes them function and a plethora of other things. The pattern here being that these things are very general, allowing the person to do do anything they want, and be able to get better faster.

[monkmartinez]

I am dumbfounded by your answer. As if, college grads have a lock on being smart and figuring things out... You see, other people can do that too. The fact is, most Americans have a really good chance to work for someone who is not a College grad.

How many small business owners do not go to College? I'll answer for you [1].

[1]https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Issue%20Brief%202,%2...

[literallycancer]

I don't claim only college grads are smart/good at figuring things out, just that they are more likely to be.

[watwut]

College is as real place as factory. The construction worker does not know all that much about parts of real world that are not his immediate surrounding.

[rjbwork]

Honestly, just data structures and algorithm skills seem starkly lacking among the autodidactic programmers I've known. An in-order traversal of a tree data structure is not hard, you just have to know how to do it, in concept if not able to immediately write the code out on your screen.

[runT1ME]

> just data structures and algorithm skills seem starkly lacking among the autodidactic programmers

remove autodidactic from the sentence and it is still true.

[dsfyu404ed]

Even with formal schooling you forget all the stuff you don't use weekly within a semester of last using it.

I think one condensed class on algorithms and data structures could have replaced the three I took if the low level CS classes had emphasized thinking about time complexity and planning before you code. If you're used to thinking about "I only have X resources, what's a not crap way to get Y done" then learning specific data structures and algorithms as you need them is second nature.

[richardwhiuk]

I don't think that's true if you learnt it properly the first time. I can still solve a quadratic equation, and I learnt that more than ten years ago and definitely haven't used it since.

I think there's a general rejection of knowledge, and software development has a continue cycle of reinventing the wheel because a large number of developers have no formal training. This something we are now celebrating instead of looking down on.

On the front page today there's separately a 'America needs to reject degree qualifications' and 'How do we get a certified certificate for developers'.....

[nikdaheratik]

At least you remember that they exist, and have a rough idea about how they work, which is more than someone who never took the courses. They probably could have condensed the courses and stuck with a few basic proofs instead of the more rigorous proofs I had to do.

The main reason they didn't is because those topics are mostly settled and unchanging, which means they don't have to rewrite a new course every few years. There are easily 5-6 courses I'd rather have taken but some of the most useful topics were too cutting edge to make it down to a Bachelors program in most Universities. The curse of a cutting edge field I guess.

[rjbwork]

Fairly true, but uni grads seem to do better at both and just general programming. There are definitely lots of people from both camps that are interviewing for programming jobs that can't actually write code.

[ianai]

College definitely forces you to learn a breadth of topics in whatever field. There's also a lot to be said for being out of "the rat race" and devoted to learning. It's hard to study 40 hours a week if you're working 40 hours a week. It's even harder to study when rent is due and you're about to be fired from your job (as a 'for instance')

[heynowletsgo]

The only thing people need to learn, whether with a formal instructor or on their own, is opportunity and reason. That's where society fails, the system is designed to hoard and dole it out from the top. If you want people to learn you have to enable them to stay on the edge of what they know. Programming isn't "easy" to learn on you own, its easy with a computer and an internet connection to keep your self on that edge. Any time you are forced to interact with people there are political barriers in place. That's where the failure of the system is, it prevents people from staying on the edge and getting to the next step by denying them opportunity and reason.

[fillskills]

And they learn that too. Maybe they just havent needed these yet and still manage to be called some of the best engineers.

[svnsets]

To be honest, I didn't find the extra "things" that my university taught outside of my Computer Science program to be of value. I took two public speaking classes, multiple business courses, and plenty of other general education courses. You can sit in a classroom for years and learn theoretical ways to be better at public speaking or how to grow a business, but that won't make you a good public speaker or successful entrepreneur. The experience of running a business or speaking in front of a large crowd is what will force you to improve those skills. If you never have to run a business or speak in front of a large crowd, then those theories are quite useless.

The issue I have with the requirement of a college degree that so many companies impose is that the degree proves nothing other than that the applicant can go through a long drawn-out process of getting a degree. It says nothing of their competency. I've interviewed multiple candidates for software engineering roles that had a bachelors or masters degrees in Computer Science, and more often than not, they can talk for hours about theories behind programming concepts or data structures, but when given a fairly trivial coding challenge, they fall flat on their face. When I graduated college, I was one of those people, but luckily I recognized that quickly and spent countless hours learning new languages and frameworks until I felt I could build a fully functional piece of software by myself.

In my experience, I often prefer candidates straight out of a short vocational computer science program or self-taught programmers to work on my team. Going 4+ years before actually putting concepts into practice is way too long. There are plenty of unaccredited programs that only take a few months and often churn out much more competent candidates than a four year uni program.

tl;dr: People spend way to much time talking about doing things rather than doing things.

[erroneousfunk]

On the flip side, I've met a lot of programmers who decide to install Mongo or Redis to solve some data storage problem, and that works okay for a while, but they never stop and think what kind of data they actually have, how they're going to commonly access it, or what kind of trade-offs they're willing to make. This causes problems down the line (currently dealing with some right now) that could have been avoided entirely with a little theory.

I would argue that a bachelors or masters in computer science was not designed to produce programmers, in the same way that a degree in physics doesn't let you start building bridges. On the other, it's also hard to build bridges without physics.

[jimmies]

>To be honest, I didn't find the extra "things" that my university taught outside of my Computer Science program to be of value. I took two public speaking classes, multiple business courses, and plenty of other general education courses.

I don't think you would get great values in those public speaking and business classes. I personally agree that people who want to do those things better just start doing it (although, the article tells a different story about the cook). Introductory science courses (which I would otherwise not being able to learn on my own) were certainly worth the price I paid for. I was in a public university and those 3-credit hours courses used to cost me about 800 USD per. There are not many other things that I could better spend my money - I think those are of great value (Although the MOOCs have shown that the price point for really good basic education could be set much lower, but with some trade-offs.)

[svnsets]

>Introductory science courses (which I would otherwise not being able to learn on my own) were certainly worth the price I paid for.

Out of curiosity, why do you think you would not be able to learn introductory science without spending $800 on a uni course?

[jimmies]

The other day a person asked on HN - he stated he taught himself to program, but feel insecure because he feel he can never be a legitimate programmer, he even doesn't know how to deal with pointers. I find myself the same way before I went to college -- I tried to program in Pascal with a college level textbook and couldn't gasp the idea of pointers. Not until college do I understand what pointers are -- after only 5 minutes of lecture from my professor.

I had a lot of a-ha moments in college like that. That is to say, the example above is for something I knew that I didn't know, there were many a-ha of something I didn't know I didn't know. Science courses are often dense and not everyone can easily gasp ideas in the textbooks or online resources without help. I wouldn't know to look up and study chaos theory, game theory, and many other interesting ideas without a primer in college. Plus, being able to interact and ask and see as things progress when the professor explains the problem is quite worth the money to me. Again, MOOC can provide some of those, but with trade-offs (I can't interrupt the professor to ask something everyone understands, but I don't). MOOC was not an option when I went to college though.

[runT1ME]

>t's very easy to learn programming on your own these days, sure. But it's a lot harder to learn public speaking, finance, management principles, marketing, college-level reading and writing, technical writing, time-management, political science, biology, physics, and all of the other stuff that you're taught in college.

Am I insane, or really bad at programming? Because with the exception of biology and physics, the other things you mentioned are significantly easier and more intuitive to learn on your own compared to say, computer science concepts and math.

[freehunter]

Computer science is hard and I don't know any good place online to learn it for free. Picking up a Rails tutorial, on the other hand, is free and very very easy.

I would say that real, fundamental computer science is one of those things that universities are better suited to teaching. Other comments seem to agree with that.

The point I was trying to make is that college forces you to learn a lot of things that you may choose not to study if you're learning on your own. And those things you're forced to learn end up being more worthwhile than the skills you wanted to learn, whether you realize it or not.

[watwut]

If I waited with learning English till I needed it, it would be too late. I was forced to learn it and benefited from it. If I waited with learning how to write coherent text till I needed it, it would be too late. I was forced to learn it and benefited from it.

I did actually used linear algebra and mathematical analysis on couple of projects and if I did not had math background before, I would not be able to understand what I needed.

I discovered programming at high school. If the teachers did not showed it to me back then, I would not even think about programming as a possible career.

The value of high school and college was in having me to learn things I would not learned otherwise. The things I would learn by myself, I learned by myself.

[usrusr]

So true! On the job, almost all of your new knowledge is specialisation on an absurd level of being specific to your job and only to your job. Framework X isn't your specialisation, framework X is the most general knowledge you acquire while on the job. The specialisation is knowing the implementation Y built on top of X and remembering the misconceptions and politics that led to business decision Z which caused module Y to be implemented like it is.

All the education that came before that was to complement that on the job specialization. You start out very general (walking, talking, basic social behavior) and then dive into an increasingly narrow funnel of stuff that is somehow related to your future X,Y and Z that you will learn on the job, but is not not identical with them. Education is for learning the things practice won't teach you (an extreme example: knowing a bit about Plato or Cesar would likely be more relevant to making sense of Z than understanding the halting problem or being good at regex).

[watwut]

It depends a lot on what they mean by programming. Building nice looking small crud app? Technical challenge is rather easy, the hardest is to make it good looking. Making physics simulator or writing eventually connected database first time when they did not existed anywhere else yet is harder.

[dsfyu404ed]

You're probably holding yourself to too high a standard. If you think about performance before you commit then you're probably doing better than average.

[greggman]

I'd love to see some kind of study that could prove that college grads are on average more rounded people. It's certainly not my experience.

[aanm1988]

> But it's a lot harder to learn public speaking, finance, management principles, marketing, college-level reading and writing, technical writing, time-management, political science, biology, physics

I took 2 of those courses. first year physics and english course. The english course wasn't even a requirement for CS, it was for math.

[magic_beans]

I learned more in high school than I ever learned in any of my courses in college (and I was a Literature major at NYU, which is apparently a good school).

Most of my learning in college came from following paths my courses "didn't have enough time to teach."

(I'm a front-end engineer now -- I learned programming on my own on the side!)

[metaphorm]

> It's not worth the money right now

money is just fictional status points. if we really decide the thing is important there will be money for it.

it's not worth the time right now and that's the larger problem. there's no way to make more time and we spent waaaaaay too much time in school.

[freehunter]

>money is just fictional status points

Disagree. For many, money is the literal difference between life and death. Every dollar spent on college is a dollar not spent on food or medicine or safe housing. Time and money, for a poor person, are exchangeable at nearly a 1:1 rate. Most poor people spend all their time trying to get just enough money to scrape by. If they had more money, they would have more time. Since they don't have any money, they don't have any time.

I don't know you or your history, but saying money is just status points indicates to me that you don't know what it's like to not have any money. It's far from fictional, and it's far from status.

[metaphorm]

My family is middle class, I'm college educated, and have a middle class wage as a software engineer. I'm not wealthy. I spent 4 years in my early 20s in rock-bottom poverty and I know exactly how much of a struggle it is for some people. I've been there before.

Money is still fictional status points. That doesn't change anything about the nature of the thing. It's value is based entirely on social constructs. I call it "status" points because it represents how much "buying power" you are granted by your society. That's a form of social status. It is only very indirectly correlated to how much material benefit you produce. For example, a nurse who saves lives at a hospital ER is paid much much much less than a bank executive who takes phone calls all day. Do you understand my point now?

[vocatus_gate]

> money is just fictional status points.

For fictional "status points" it sure has the ability to drastically change your life.

[Impossible]

There is a point where money becomes fictional status points, but everyone I've heard say this is a relatively wealthy person, often multi-million dollar net worth. For the majority, money is often more of a limiting factor than time.

[anigbrowl]

Credentialism is often a side-effect of rent-seeking, where existing participants in an industry agree to create barriers to entry (eg requiring a bachelor's degree) while often 'grandfathering in' existing market participants who may lack the qualifications in question. It's one approach to self-regulation, and can interact with governmental regulation in various ways.

[literallycancer]

Isn't it more just a reflection of assessing people being very hard, so you either prefer people with some work behind them, or use a widely available metric (a degree), even if it only improves the chances of finding good people a tiny bit, because it doesn't cost you anything?

[anigbrowl]

That's a factor too, and likewise you can point to things like legal liability driving pressure for employers to pick people who look good on paper.

I don't mean to suggest all credentialing is bad, obviously I would prefer doctors to have been to medical school and so on. but rent-seeking is a powerful economic force that often goes overlooked and is worth taking time to understand because it's so widespread.

Also lol at that username ;)

[mdpopescu]

> obviously I would prefer doctors to have been to medical school

I have twice had the experience of doctors (generalists) looking up symptoms on Google and picking a site - with me there. They didn't even go to a school for learning how to search on Google.

People tend to overestimate the value of credentials.

[tapatio]

This is something they don't teach in college but you realize once you're in your 30's and start interacting directly with upper management.

[irrational]

>Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:

1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)

One of my kids attends just such a class in high school half of each day. What you have described is pretty much exactly what they do. They have a carpentry shop, a huge garden, a kitchen, a science lab, etc. It sounds great, but the teachers suck. All the students hate it and are encouraging other students not to sign up for it next year.

[20years]

"It sounds great, but the teachers suck."

That really is too bad. Sounds like a great program but if they can't get good teachers, it is a waste.

What are some of the reasons why the kids think the teachers are bad?

I believe that is an entirely different issue. Our education system is not employing the best teachers especially in the STEM fields because we do not pay them enough. I know plenty of professionals who would absolutely love to teach but they don't because they can make 2x to 3x as much elsewhere and would barely make ends meet teaching.

[ddebernardy]

> What are some of the reasons why the kids think the teachers are bad?

I'm not the parent, but my guess if any is that it has to do with the teachers' educative background. They're basically trained to teach biology as biology only, mathematics as mathematics only, etc. without putting 2 plus 2 together and spelling out the day to day usefulness.

A corollary question with a similar answer might be why the education system in just about every country (all?) is stuck with "traditional" course separations, as in maths, physics, biology, literature, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[irrational]

From what I can tell the teachers are wanna-be hippies who aren't really interested in teaching but enjoy collecting a paycheck while hanging out miles from supervision by administrators. Most of their teaching doesn't seem to be STEM related per-se, but more political ranting.

[watwut]

We had similar classes and I always found them waste of time. It sounds fun, but a lot of time is basically wasted in (needed but still) busywork. Conventional class allows you to learn exactly same amount of things, but much faster and then you can do whatever you actually find fun. Specifically, planting in different environments and tracking growth takes a lot of time and boring work.

It is cool to do experiment once in a while or short experiments you are curious to know what happens. But, if you are able to read experiment based class means waiting till the thing you expect to happen (based on what you already read) finally happen.

[LyndsySimon]

> Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:

> 1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)

> In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.

> Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.

Add in "the student is interested in learning about biology/genetics", and you have unschooling.

[bonesmoses]

As someone who went to that Cornell, I somewhat regret my decision. Sure you can cram in as much information as possible in that month, but long-term memory generally requires periodic refreshes. I've forgotten pretty much everything I learned there. :(

[vecter]

> Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.

You must not know that many great programmers. I work in Silicon Valley and most of the great programmers I know absolutely crushed college. That doesn't necessarily mean they went to top schools (which it turns out, is not a great predictor of programming skills), but they at least went to college, and most of them majored in a STEM field and performed well academically also.

I have met one or two who didn't go to college and were great programmers also, but they're by far the exception and not the norm.

[adrianratnapala]

Ok, I went to Uni, indeed I did postgrad. But I never studied CS, I think I did two programming subjects in total. Plus some others that simply expected me to know how to program.

The point is that non-CS STEM education doesn't teach programming, it just collects people who learn it on the side. Given the poor abilities of most CS students, I would say the good ones are also people who "learned it on the side".

For a company recruiter, looking for (any) STEM degree is a cheap way of finding such people. But for society, this is inefficient. And unfair on people from poor communities who never get that degree.

[brightball]

To clarify, I know more great programmers that went to college. In my hiring experience, it's more the person than then degree though. In my opinion, most of the guys who I know who went to college would have been just as successful if aimed at the books at given time to study.

Level of interest is what drives learning and in this field that is a huge key.

[vecter]

> To clarify, I know more great programmers that went to college.

That makes much more sense, even from a purely prior probability point of view. Thanks for clarifying that.

I also agree with your point that personal interest and initiative ultimately determines success in this (or any) field.

[lithos]

If I were to blame one group, it would be the loan industry. Though I wouldn't fault them for it or say it was intentional (at least at the on set).

First you become forced to make loans easier (it only take a quick glance to see them taking sure and comfortable bets, combined with a little social Justice a statistics the govt. Mandates unsure bets). This open the flood gates of who can get loans, people apply in great numbers (combined with culture, and people not realizing what they're getting into). Which leads to a huge glut of college grads no one knows what to do with... With market pressure the students go for lower and lower positions. Which becomes the new baseline qualification.

[adrianratnapala]

But in many other countries, University places are either taxpayer funded or funded by a government loan scheme with with fiarly easy terms. As you can imagine, that leads to the same result as in the US.

So I would say these countries had a pre-existing moral ideal that everyone should have an undegraduate educaton, and then solutions (such as the US student loan industry) came about to implement that ideal.

[JamilD]

I'm so glad that something like "one course at a time" exists. I've been thinking about this a lot recently -- I start a semester excited and eager to learn, but end it off just knowing the basics at a mediocre level, just enough to do well on the exams for all five courses. It's impossible to get any sort of depth of understanding on five topics during three months. It's optimizing for a 4.0 GPA rather than maximum understanding.

[sdflkd]

You're not supposed to learn ideas in depth in your undergraduate. It provides a foundation and exposes you to many different topics. That is it. If you want to learn in depth you should go to graduate school or start learning on your own.

[JamilD]

That's true, it's really helped with the fundamentals - but most of my domain-specific knowledge comes from self-study.

[sdflkd]

The most important lesson I learned in my first year is that if you want something, you're going to have to get it yourself. The world won't babysit you like it did before. Would be nice if I didn't have to pay $20k/yr for the opportunity to learn, though.

[dikdik]

>At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job.

Maybe I just went to a great public school, but I could have easily done by first professional job at the age of 18 with no college. However, having a BS was a requirement, so I wouldn't have been able to get hired without that piece of paper.

[tlow]

Could you kindly email me (address in profile), this is a very interesting comment and I wish to discuss some of it with you offline. One thing I've noticed among "hacker spaces" and the machine shop company is that they have very few ties to higher edu, but they're doing VERY similar things. Even considering the machine shop company has a deal with Arizona State University, their crossover is limited. At that location, the spaces are actually physically delineated.

[sigstoat]

> I've noticed among "hacker spaces" and the machine shop company is that they have very few ties to higher edu, but they're doing VERY similar things.

hacker spaces and universities strike me as nearly polar opposites. what do you think it is they're doing that's similar?

[tres_bien]

You can't just say Cornell when you're referring to "the other Cornell".

[mason240]

>Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:

>1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)

That's already pretty close what happens in elementary schools.

[magic_beans]

Not any elementary school I or any of my friends went to...

[cossatot]

There are a lot of educators that would love to do this. The problem is paying for it.

[id122015]

You are right. But do you know what politics is really about?