[spoondan]

I think your issue isn’t with universities and certainly isn’t with me. Reading between the lines, I think your complaint is with the systemic over-valuing of university degrees by parents and industry. That pushes people into universities that don’t want or need the education provided.

If that’s your issue, I completely agree with you. That’s why, in my comment, I actively encouraged people to do vocational training (boot camps) or teach themselves. If you want to learn to program, those are much better ways than to do a CS degree.

That doesn’t make CS worthless. It’s just different. The CS education provided by a university isn’t meant to train you to be a programmer. It’s broader than that. And it’s also, in some ways, deeper because it dives into CS topics that you won’t ever need for work.

I think that’s totally fine. The vocational and university systems have coexisted for a long time and serve different purposes. Pushing people into the university system that are better served by vocational training is an issue. But throwing away the university or pressing it to become purely vocational training is, I think, both unnecessary and deeply harmful to society.

[barry-cotter]

Parents and industry do not over value degrees. They value them for reasons that are mostly, but not entirely, orthogonal to any learning that may occur in university but they value them highly for the excellent reason that they’re a wonderful signal of ability and occasionally what they learned is of some relevance.

CS isn’t worthless. CS is awesome, just like Physics or Philosophy, for those who care about them. Those who have any interest whatsoever in intellectual pursuits are at an absolute maximum 10% of the population. Many more need to get a job and for many of them a university degree is an almost absolute prerequisite. To suggest they forgo it is to do harm to them because there’s the possibility they might listen.

As a society almost everywhere in the first over spends massively on education because while it may be socially wasteful it’s individually rational. It’s a signaling arms race.

Universities have never been primarily for those who had av burning interest in the topic matter. If they became that, forsaking their roots as upper class vocational schools and finishing schools they would be vastly smaller than they are now, in terms both of faculty and student body.

My thanks for such a cordial reply to an intemperate message.