[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.