[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.

[cossatot]

They also introduce you to a lot of topics you may not have studied on your own, and give you the opportunity and resources to take them as far as you'd like. I spent a lot of years in universities and I never met a teacher who wasn't willing to spend at least some time with an interested student, or point them in the direction of materials for additional self-study.

Certain classes (particularly the calculus series and chemistry) were pretty exercise-laden but I don't remember anything else that wasn't somewhat obvious what the purpose was, or really many classes beyond science/math/foreign languages with much exercise-type homework. It's obvious with language classes why you're doing rote memorization. Calculus is pretty clearly an engineering weed-out gauntlet, and I have no idea why university chemistry is universally terrible. The context of humanities courses (kept separate from the occupational relevance) was usually obvious. Want to learn what different kinds of buildings are called? Take an architecture history course. Etc.

Mostly I remember undergrad classes as a bunch of 19 year olds who did about 2/3 of what they were assigned, and most of them took zero initiative. Sure, the first floor of the library was packed at night, but there aren't any books there. The stacks were basically ghost towns, and that is where the real learning goes down.

[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...

[freehunter]

Did you go to college? I ask because when I went, I had two semesters of accounting, one finance class, both macro and micro economics, and a personal finance class. All of which were required for my Computer Systems degree. You could also take more as electives if you wanted to go deeper.

Your definition of "real world" is extremely limited.

[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.