[ozim]

Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time?

Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signaling that he is reliable and comes to work every day vs someone who is inconsistent.

[dogma1138]

Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?

I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office work.

Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine and many other fields that require specific tools and environments in order to actually study not to mention make any progress in the field are all about signaling.

[Mbioguy]

Boy are you in for a surprise. Medical school lectures are mostly optional these days and are entirely skipped by a significant proportion of med students in favor of resources like Strong Medicine (literally a YouTube channel), gigantic Anki digital flashcard decks (see reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki), UWorld, First Aid, Sketchy, Pathoma, etc. 'High Yield' is the buzzword for resources that are a better use of time. So yes, you almost certainly will trust a doctor someday who was educated at least in part by YouTube or comparable online resources. You just won't know it, since the paper on the wall will say "University of X". And as long as they pass the boards and make it through residency, does it matter?

[snowwrestler]

> doctor someday who was educated at least in part by YouTube or comparable online resources

Emphasis mine.

No one cares if medical students avail themselves of digital resources to help them through medical school. Good for them.

Show me how many practicing doctors passed the boards and made it through residency after ONLY using Youtube channels and flash cards to self-educate.

[Balgair]

It's a continuum.

Some people rely on the 'free' resources more than others. The real question is where is the cutoff percentage at. Say someone got 95% of what they know only from free resources and passed boards swimmingly. That sure don't look good on the med-school.

Say 95% of the entire class got 95% of the learning through Youtube/Anki and 95% of them passed boards. At such a percentage, med-school is all but useless to the general public that they serve. May as well get rid of them.

Granted, I don't think it's anywhere near that kind of level of dereliction that the med-schools are at (Cadaver Lab is an obvious counterpoint). But, where is the cut-off point for the schools and society? It's not 5% of the material being learned outside of them, that's fine I think. But if 95% is 'learned' outside the lectures, then yeah, that's a real bad sign.

It's a complicated question and the answer will likely be more complex and will evolve from class to class and year to year.

[mcguire]

Say they sprouted wings and flew around. That would be pretty bad for the air travel industry.

Have you a real, physical example of someone who "got 95% of what they know only from free resources and passed boards swimmingly"?

[u801e]

As someone who went to medical school more than 20 years ago, it wasn't that much different other than people using "question banks" in order to help them pass the tests. There were plenty of prep books for preparing for the USMLE and board specific exams (for rotations in the third year).

[jdietrich]

The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a four-year college degree?". It would be a peculiar coincidence if the vast majority of jobs required exactly the same amount of academic education. Why do so many people go on to do work that has little or nothing to do with their major?

Here in the UK, a large proportion of healthcare is delivered by healthcare professionals other than doctors. If I go to my GP (family doctor) with a minor ailment, I'm likely to be treated by a Nurse Practitioner, who may have a Master's degree in nursing or may have never attended college at all. If I have a minor surgery, the surgery might be performed by a Surgical Care Practitioner working under the supervision of a consultant surgeon.

Lambda School have conclusively shown that it doesn't take four years to make someone into an employable software developer. How many other job skills could be taught through a short bootcamp programme, intensive vocational training or on-the-job training?

[barry-cotter]

> The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a four-year college degree?".

That’s not accurate. Law school requires any degree followed by three years of a law degree. Now that’s pure signalling. Every other Anglophone country bar Canada has undergraduate law degrees instead of requiring what amount to two undergraduate degrees.

[u801e]

Isn't a law degree in the US considered a doctorate rather than a bachelors?

Medical degrees in the US are similar in that you complete an undergraduate degree before you can get into medical school and get a MD or DO. Some countries have the MBBS degree which is a bachelor level degree that can be started right after the equivalent of high school.

[barry-cotter]

> Isn't a law degree in the US considered a doctorate rather than a bachelors?

A three year degree with plentiful coursework and no research component is not exactly a central example of a doctorate. M.D.s, D.D.S.s and J.D.s are called professional doctorates in the US and a second-entry bachelor’s degree in Canada.

> Medical degrees in the US are similar in that you complete an undergraduate degree before you can get into medical school and get a MD or DO. Some countries have the MBBS degree which is a bachelor level degree that can be started right after the equivalent of high school.

Some countries are everywhere apart from the US, Canada and former US colonies like the Philippines. Undergraduate medical education is the norm everywhere though postgraduate programmes are extending across the globe.

[ozim]

I don't live in UK by what I heard from people that are there was "GP was googling stuff, when I visited".

There is also other side of coin, doctors who are really experienced in some area are going to be expensive. There is also a lot of people who you can treat by googling stuff. Of course they should not take pills without second hand opinion, but not everyone needs brain surgery. If you get viral infection or bacterial infection you have to send stuff to lab, and lab returns results in readable way, so even GP (general practitioner) is not needed. Once I even got my blood tests and "GP" (my first contact doctor since I am not in UK) was like: "yeah I dunno, I usually get older folks with those specific problems so I cannot really help you". Boy that was nice, because you can go to some ass who thinks he has to know everything and that would be annoying.

Be humble, even as developer you don't get to know everything. Don't think doctors, mechanical engineers know all.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Because most high school graduates don't have the soft skills (or the hard skills) to work in a corporate environment.

I've worked with people with previous job experience that have gone through 10-week coding programs. And it shows. They might've been taught a framework or a language, but their computer science skills aren't nearly as developed. Some things take years to click, and growth occurs from years of writing bad code.

[jdietrich]

>I've worked with people with previous job experience that have gone through 10-week coding programs. And it shows.

Were they useless? Were they worse than useless? Or were they just not as good as a more experienced developer?

I'm not arguing that college has no value, but that it's bad value for money. If someone can become a useful-but-flawed developer after a short bootcamp, surely it's better for them to learn on the job while earning a living rather than mortgage their future on four years of education.

If college were free to the student and cheap for society, sure, send everyone and don't worry about it. That's not the case though - an entire generation have been saddled with vast, unmanageable levels of student debt. We need to be asking serious questions about how much and what kind of education is really necessary to produce skilled workers.

[hopler]

College doesn't teach those soft skills. Jobs and skill training teach those skills

You don't need college to write years of bad code. Internships or hobby projects do fine.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

The credential signifies that you indeed spent years writing bad code, and got better. Maybe it does have value there. Many companies are weary of hiring someone who has a few years of self-taught experience.

[daveFNbuck]

Hobby projects don't do fine because there's no one to tell you what you're doing wrong. You need that to avoid reinforcing bad habits.

[bko]

> Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?

Depends on my ailment. Most of the time people go to the doctor they are told to get some rest and maybe prescribed something. I don't think that needs 8 years of medical school. And doctor's don't even necessarily do a good job at prescriptions either, since they tend to over-prescribe in the US

[chongli]

they are told to get some rest and maybe prescribed something. I don't think that needs 8 years of medical school.

What takes 8 years of medical school is knowing when not to tell the patient that. When telling the patient to go home and rest could result in severe illness or death.

[jjoonathan]

Except that it doesn't, because other countries see similar performance metrics with less overall training.

Nobody in charge is doing the "extra training increases costs by X which decreases availability by X which causes X damage vs lack of training causes X' damage" calculation -- everybody just argues for more training every time there's a problem, with the inevitable result of our stupendously expensive outlier of a medical system with middling measured performance and poor, ever-worsening accessibility.

[treis]

>Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?

That's not a fair comparison. A better question would be: "Would you go to a Doctor that spent 9 years learning on the job or 9 years in school?"

[moorhosj]

I certainly wouldn’t want a doctor in their first 5 years of on-the-job training.

[mythrwy]

If they were overseen by another doctor with more experience it might be OK.

Besides I'd assume with this setup the future doctor wouldn't start with brain surgery. Maybe stitch up cuts and set broken bones, working up into more complicated scenarios.

I mean, I've always done my own minor doctoring anyway. And people did for a long time, it's only recently a long stint in college was required.

Granted this approach had variable levels of success, but the idea you have to have formal schooling to fix up any health problems I'm not sure I buy.

[moorhosj]

What was the infection rate in this “pre-schooling” period? We used to use leeches, blood-letting and cocaine medicinally, that doesn’t make them good ideas for today’s society.

[Mirioron]

We still use amphetamine to treat ADHD and leeches to help heal skin grafts. I believe that even cocaine is used in medicine today, but I'm not quite sure.

[wolco]

Yes. Why would learning through video scare you?

[chaosbutters]

yes and no. I would go to a doctor that learned medicine from medical school but when faced with an unforeseen would turn to youtube if there was a way to help a patient. And this has been shown to happen on rare occasions when patients do something incredibly stupid and rare and the doctor has no idea what to do. But if they learned all their medicine from youtube, then no. Youtube should only cover 0.00001% learning materials

[pgt]

I would.

[tokyodude]

Note: I am not agreeing nor disagreeing with the article. I'm only clarifying what it's trying to say

The article is about the fact that school does not show that "developer ... is signaling that he is reliable and comes to work every day"

The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

It sounds counter intuitive. There's like 3 situations

1. College trains you more than non-college

2. College doesn't train you but shows you're willing to stick things out more than people who didn't go

3. College does nothing what-so-ever (no difference in job performance from hiring people who did or didn't go to college)

The author of the article is claiming 100 years of research has shown it's #3. People will let you in the door because you have the paper (diploma) but they are fooling themselves that that paper has any meaning relative to hiring people without that paper

Here's another interview with the same author

http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-edu...

again, I am not agreeing nor disagreeing with the article. I'm only clarifying what it's trying to say

Let me add though, the author is claiming this is true in aggregate. Not for your personal anecdote.

[barry-cotter]

> The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

... among the population who have been hired to do the job. This is conditioning on the collider. The people without a degree who got in are a highly selected sample compared to all people without degrees. Anyone who used this to argue that a degree wasn’t a strong useful signal Wouk be making the same mistake as those trying to get rid of the GRE in graduate admissions because in the population admitted the GRE doesn’t predict anything. If it did that would show under or overweighting ofbthe signal it sends. Zero correlation shows it has been given appropriate weight.

[hopler]

> Anyone who used this to argue that a degree wasn’t a strong useful signal

Reread the title of the article.

The question is whether an individual would benefit from college even if everyone's college was enrollment/graduation status was kept secret from everyone, even classmates.

[mcguire]

The same question would apply to pre-college education.

[abecedarius]

> The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

This is not what the article says. It's saying employers hire graduates because they're better employees, but college mostly didn't make them better. This is closer to your option 2. (We are talking about the OP, the Caplan editorial, right?)

Caplan is saying college is mostly an expensive arms race. It has to be expensive (in students' time and attrition through boringness/difficulty, if nothing else) to be an effective signal. Subsidies in recent decades have made it even more expensive.

[throwaway287391]

> Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes

Not sure about others but I tried my damnedest not to take morning classes unless I absolutely had to -- most semesters I had nothing before 11am or noon. The flexible scheduling was one of my favorite things about college. I did take one 8AM class and thinking back I have no idea how I didn't completely bomb it -- I showed up pretty sparsely after the first week or two.

[slfnflctd]

Honestly I think this line is total bunk. I'm quite sure hiring managers believe it to be true - many jobs that don't actually need you to have completed any degree to do the work still require one to get hired - but in my experience, people who haven't completed college are more likely to be willing to put in long hours, while those who have tend to expect/demand more time off. [Not that wanting time off is a bad thing, I just don't think it should be doled out based on whether your parents could afford to put you through school.]

[AstralStorm]

More importantly, taking internships means you have some practice, not just theory. Not quite as green. It also signals you actually take some things seriously.