[JDiculous]

> I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing

Then actually pay attention to the arguments they're making instead of talking about how offended you are because it goes against your self-interest as a degree holder. It's not as if the people bashing modern education are some kind of elusive minority.

I've got a master's degree and I've always though our education system is stupid, and at least in the U.S. not unlike a giant pyramid scheme given the cost of tuition these days. Absolutely nothing you learn in a college education you can't learn yourself for free on the internet.

[solveit]

> Absolutely nothing you learn in a college education you can't learn yourself for free on the internet.

This is categorically false. Face-to-face time with an expert is incredibly valuable and incredibly expensive outside of an academic setting. In fairness, you have to show some initiative in college to get quality face-to-face time with a professor, but it still takes a lot less motivation than self-studying a complex subject for a nontrivial amount of time.

Which brings me to my second point. There's an enormous amount of free stuff you could learn from. But actually doing it is a completely different matter and the overwhelming majority will fail. For instance, the bulk of a university-level education in pure mathematics is over a century old, and free resources are easy to find. With stackexchange, you can even get expert feedback on your work! Yet most people who try (who are already a very self-selected sample) do not in fact succeed in teaching themselves undergraduate level mathematics. Even Ph.D. students taking a few years off for whatever reason find it highly (but not impossibly) difficult to do any significant amount of self-study for a prolonged period of time. And these are precisely the people who are training to become independent researchers!

[JDiculous]

> This is categorically false. Face-to-face time...

Just because talking to an expert is valuable doesn't mean you can't learn it for free on the internet. Also most undergrad curriculums are teaching old stuff - not exactly cutting edge knowledge requiring face-to-face one-on-one time with an expert in your field.

It's not as if the alternative to 4 years of undergrad and $100-250k in tuition + living costs is just teaching yourself the same arbitrary curriculum alone in your room for 4 years getting a degree in some random field learning things you never actually use in the real world. One could instead intern or work, and not only potentially learn significantly more relevant and lucrative real-world skills for free, but actually get paid to do it. A business student could instead work directly for entrepreneurs and use that tuition money to start their own ventures.

Most people use very little of anything they learn in school after they graduate. For example I majored in math, and now as a software engineer I don't use any of that. I know some math majors will try to rationalize it by saying they learned "problem solving" skills or whatever but there are a million other more useful things I could've done instead of what I did in school. Everything I learn now as a software engineer I either teach myself or learn on the job. There is no curriculum that could prepare me for what I do now because by the time the curriculum is written, it would be outdated (well perhaps such a curriculum of "fundamentals" could be constructed, but the CS curriculum is not it).

The system is outdated, inefficient, and a downright pyramid scheme scamming the youth into indentured servitude in the U.S. If tuition was reasonable and having a college degree wasn't required for most jobs then I wouldn't be as critical of college.

[jshowa3]

I don't know what university you went to, but there are such things as bad universities. Just like there's such things as bad Internet courses.

However, the university I went to, could be classified as "No-Name" and I use what I learned in school almost everyday. In fact, I used K-maps to help a senior engineer struggling with a complex logic problem by simplifying it. The CS fundamentals I learn prevent me from writing ugly code and at least give me a sense for what's slow.

I also went to a university with a built in co-op education program where you got credit and paid for being an intern. And let me tell you, most companies treat interns like shit. They sometimes don't even bother having them do anything besides mediocre grunt work. My intern experience was not the greatest and arguably worse than my college experience. Most the time I was left on my own having no idea what to do and spent most of it reading programming books. Whatever "real-world" skills I picked up, like doing actual projects, was moot.

But again, it's mostly relative. So making categorical statements like "universities are useless" and "credentials are for cheaters" doesn't really help and certainly doesn't speak the truth.

[JDiculous]

CS fundamentals are great, thankfully you don't need to physically go to any university and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition to learn them.

The alternative isn't just being an intern taking on grunt work, there are many who forego college to work full-time jobs in industry.

[solveit]

I maintain that there still exist things that you can only learn via osmosis. Sometimes, books and MOOCs just will not do.

Also,

> It's not as if the alternative to 4 years of undergrad and $100-250k in tuition + living costs is just teaching yourself the same arbitrary curriculum alone in your room for 4 years getting a degree in some random field learning things you never actually use in the real world. One could instead intern or work, and not only potentially learn significantly more relevant and lucrative real-world skills for free, but actually get paid to do it.

I mean, sure you can not go to school and do different things, and it might even be a good idea, but that's a far cry from the original claim, which was

> Absolutely nothing you learn in a college education you can't learn yourself for free on the internet.

[JDiculous]

Please name me one piece of any STEM undergraduate curriculum that I can't learn for free on the internet, and then I'll take back my statement.

[jshowa3]

Not everyone is a genius like you. And if you want to sit in your room and do tutorials and MOOC courses all day without speaking to a single soul, and you can figure everything out on your own without guidance, be my guest. I applaud you, because that's something I struggle with and maybe that says more about me than you.

Not only that, please tell me how many people can afford things like a mass spectrometer, fume hood, VNA, and other pieces of equipment that cost upward of 6,000+ dollars when they're in high school. If you want a real STEM education, you need to learn how to use test equipment unless you stick with CS or math, there isn't a lot of options to learn for "free". Even online courses cost money.

Sure there may be many people that get lucky and get into actual positions, but they're few and far between and are a direct result of success bias. The media shows you the thousands or so odd people that make it under extreme circumstances and never once mentions the people who never make it because that isn't "cool".

[JDiculous]

Ok yes my statement applies more to fields like CS and math and not to fields that require a lot of physical equipment (eg. chemistry).

I'm not claiming that the best way to learn is alone in your room, I don't even believe that to be the case. The best way to learn is by working with people who know more than you. That is generally what happens when you work a full-time job. Sure in school you can learn from professors, but (1) what you learn is often divorced from the reality of professional work (2) the format of listening to lectures, completing busywork, and taking multiple-choice exams on random information could be Googled isn't the most efficient way to learn.

Yes I know it's difficult to find work without a degree because companies unfortunately discriminate against applicants without degrees. I wouldn't be opposed to a law that banned employers from discriminating against non-degree holders unless the job clearly requires someone with the expertise gained from the degree (eg. medicine, not law or marketing).

[mehrdadn]

> Absolutely nothing you learn in a college education you can't learn yourself for free on the internet.

I don't know who "you" is (perhaps you in particular are very gifted) or what you personally learned in college, but on my end in college I specifically took particular classes to learn topics that I had previously tried and failed to learn on my own, so, if it's meant to be generic, I'm pretty confident your claim is false.

[throwawayjava]

> ...or what you personally learned in college

I went to a bad No-Name University for undergraduate and then Top Tier University for phd school, so I have an unusually representative view here.

I do agree that, for CS, the no-name university was... bad. Fortunately, I realized this early and did a lot of self-study. I probably learned more reading taocp and going through MIT open courseware courses in the library during the evenings than I learned in my actual undergraduate courses.

The mathematics courses, even at No Name, definitely provided me with a better education than I could have ever gotten on my own. I'm pretty bad at math, it was my worst subject in high school. So I double-majored in it during undergraduate. This dovetails with your advice to use university as a time to learn things you already tried and failed to learn on your own, or which you otherwise know will be difficult to learn on your own.

The CS education that undergraduates get at Top Tier University is far better than what I got, even though I worked through that Top Tier University's online courseware/lecture notes/exercises during undergraduate on my own.

My hot take: college is always worth it, but only if you intentionally invest in "leveling-up" past your previous potential.

That will happen almost by default at Top Tier unless you're a genius (...but you'll pay a lot for it). But not if you're going to university at No Name. So, in that case, students should definitely a) minor or even double-major in something they're not good at, and b) heavily supplement their CS courses during evenings/weekends.

Also, this is all highly specific to very self-motivated learners -- the sort for whom "self-taught" is a reasonable route. I'm one of those people. Over time, I've realized that we're a very small minority. Our perceptions of what others are capable of learning on their own, and prescriptions for how others should learn, are typically quite warped. Most people probably do need something like a 4 year college degree to become a competent programmer.

[JDiculous]

I only got my degree because everyone tells you to get one and most employers will throw your resume in the garbage without a college degree, though thankfully that's now changing.

[w4n9r3ntru3]

For some of the more 'difficult' domains, like computer hardware architechure, resources on the internet is sparce though.

[pmiller2]

Not only mention those fields that require lab work, practical field work, and/or specialized equipment or facilities to learn. This site is far too CS and math specific sometimes.

[w4n9r3ntru3]

Yeah, you're right.

[JDiculous]

Yea those would be the exception.

But then again, how many people majoring in biology or chemistry actually end up using anything they learn? I'd wager it's probably a small minority.

[jshowa3]

Ridiculous.

Do you have any idea where the majority of massive breakthroughs in technology come from? They come from university.

AI started in university before it was even a thing. Autonomous vehicles were a university funded DARPA project. Nearly everything, even this guys research, is an important derivative of this.

Why do you think this guy chose to publish his paper in a academic journal? It's because it's peer reviewed. The Internet is not peer reviewed, it's public reviewed, as in anyone with an opinion can say whatever they want and get a million other opinions accepting or rejecting that opinion with little evidence. That's essentially what the entirety of Hacker News is. Very rarely do I see a post, including my own, that's properly sourced.

Let me ask you, do you think it's stupid that I paid money, like most people, to build a solar power management system? Do you think it's stupid that I built a memory management system, and text message system from bare bones hardware? Do you think it's stupid that I built my own shell? I did all that in school with equipment that I could only dream of owning with people that spent more time helping me than writing blog posts trying to get famous.

It's funny, I was actually glad this guy got where he wanted. It must be nice to be a genius. And to be honest, I'm probably not as smart as this guy. It's great that he had a lot of drive and achieved greatness. But he doesn't need to imply that I'm some liar because I chose to go to university. I worked incredibly hard to get my degree, spending hours and hours in the lab doing assignments. Hours thinking I was dumb and that I'd never make it. Months trying to find a job.

And all I see is people that did it a non-standard way and then have these warped views of the traditional way despite the decades of people lifted out of poverty because of it. And despite having never even attending a university! I see all these smart people and how they're the only ones that matter. College did a lot for me. And I try and do my best every single day because of it.

Sure, I may not be able to write an ML paper in a year like this guy, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to defend myself when he essentially implies I cheated my way in because I got a degree.