[dexterchief]

I have been seeing quite a few posts in this vein on HN and they really disturb me. While I think its clear to everyone that there are problems with the education system, I have a real problem with encouraging people to drop out of, or not attend higher education. Questioning the value of your education is one of the many privileges an education affords you.

The experience we have as IT people is really deeply skewed. The IT industry really barely existed ~25 years ago. Saying that education doesn't matter because a handful of high-school/college/university dropouts made it big riding the coattails of an enormous technological change is really misguided. We get away without credentials here and there simply because so much of this stuff is so new. This is a quirk of this particular moment in time. It won't last. Once that change settles down, degrees will be required for just about every IT job. Hell, that's getting to be the case already.

This statistic about 17 million Americans having degrees in jobs that don't require them has appeared a few times in various articles. It's said as though the people went to school _intending_ to be an overqualified waiter. If that were the case, I would agree that is a terrible waste. With years of aggressive outsourcing, the effective destruction of the manufacturing sector behind us, and a recession all around us, can we really accept that statistic just as it is offered to us?

If student loans have just surpassed credit card debt I agree that is a problem. But if education is to expensive then do something about the cost of education. Don't go telling people to drop out and have their world view shaped by something as meagre as a job or a bit of travel. The only way to develop your brain is to have someone push you to think. Hard. Yes there are examples of this happening outside school but not as many as you think.

Really I think uneducated people are social equivalent of infected PC's on a network; they make things bad for everyone. More education, not less is crucial if we are going to make any progress as a society.

Just my two cents.

[sebkomianos]

> Really I think uneducated people are social equivalent of infected PC's on a network; they make things bad for everyone. More education, not less is crucial if we are going to make any progress as a society.

But the question is, do we get an education from colleges that we wouldn't be able to get without them?