It comes down to this: if you're wondering whether going to/staying in college is a good idea, you need to first examine the quality of your alternatives. Are you an 18 year old programmer with solid skills and a job offer in hand? College might not be worth the time or money, fair enough. Are you an 18 year old with no transferrable skills and a weak network? Do yourself a favor and go to college.<p>Bill Gates had a good alternative, so he dropped out and pursued it. Mark Zuckerberg had a good alternative, so he dropped out and pursued it. My friend from high school who dropped out his sophomore year and now works part-time at Best Buy did not have a good alternative, and now he's kicking himself.<p>People who say "college is good" or "college is bad" as blanket statements are oversimplifying the issue. Yes, college is still a decent way to get a good job and it can be intellectually enriching, but it takes years out of your life to finish and is (at least in the US) insanely expensive. Yes, college is insanely expensive and it takes years to finish, but it may end up being a good investment, and you may be personally better off for it in the long run. Individuals need to decide, based on their current position, which would be the wiser choice.
Do your time, get your degree it will open doors for you. It might not be the best system, but it's the one most employers recognise. I fear arguments like the one in this post could sabotage young careers needlessly.
A friend of mine decided he'd learn more about the real world getting a job than getting a degree, he now works a min wage retail job in his mid 30s.
I agree with the comments from fny and xupybd here. I'd also like to say that I think his categorical dismissal of a CS degree is pushing it:<p>> more over I don’t think these successes owe their brilliance to the institution which awarded them their document.<p>Yeah, their professional brilliance can be attributed a lot to things other than school--programming knowledge itself is more frequently learned on the job or a programming school, but this isn't the point of a CS degree. But anyone who's been to enough theoretic/scientific classes at a University to study something really interesting, or to meet a truly amazing professor will say that they owe a lot to the institution for adding to their mind new ways to think, see things, and learn things. If you really can't see the value in a scientific degree, I think you either didn't work hard enough, pay attention, or go to the right institution.<p>It's not all about your job. If all you're concerned about is a job and programming knowledge, by all means, self-teach yourself or go to dev bootcamp. University is about intellectual stimulation (for lack of less pretentious terminology). This is the reason we've been going to universities for hundreds of years now, and maybe they're not perfect, but if you go for the right reason you definitely won't regret it.
For "softer" subjects, I couldn't agree more, but good luck playing with rockets, brains, buildings, and quanta without school. For the "hard" subjects, a student gains a certain expertise and rigor in an academic environment needed before she can create her works of art.
I dropped out after two years of college and don't regret it even for a second. These days, I'm:<p>-Doing data analysis with pandas on parking tickets just because it's fun and it helps people.<p>-Freelancing for HFT firms and doing low level performance tuning.<p>-Playing the drums.<p>-Suing Chicago's mayor.<p>-In the running for an amazing security engineer job.<p>-In the works to start algorithmic trading.<p>-Helping setup a giant LAN party as one of four cofounders.<p>A huge part of me thinks that if I'd continued college, I wouldn't have had a chance to do even a single one of these. My mental model would have just been too hyper focused towards Getting Paid to allow the mental flexibility to say "I can do/learn that!" in most scenarios. I seriously don't consider myself particularly smart/intelligent - most of what I know these days is just learned through hard work and genuine curiosity, which college hugely inhibited.<p>One of the other comments mentioned that degrees open the door for you. Yes they do, but the places I've seen and worked at where that matters are incidentally the worst I've worked at. Self education goes a long way as long as you teach yourself how to learn before you start learning. Employers are often very impressed by that quality, so it's still definitely possible.<p>That said, many folk don't like the fact that I didn't to go college. There's often a lot of animosity with mentions of student loans and knowledge depth over width. "Jealousy" comes close, but it's more seething and exclusionary than that.<p>College is useful if you want to learn things, but often a quicker and more holistic way to learn is to skip college altogether and teach yourself and save your future self from asinine student loans. This goes for folks who're able to get their student loans paid, too. Maybe especially, since you have the money to get an apartment to learn your desired subjects, but also about life. :)<p>(edit: if this sounds arrogant, please let me know. I'm trying to better myself and humility's a strong one I need to work on.)
"Here English should be understood as a stand-in for any field which could be held in dialectical opposition to Computer Science: anthropology, criminal forensics, art history… Pursuing knowledge in this way, much like learning a new language, not only introduces you to, but installs you within, new diverse cycles of thought and promotes a creativity which I think is essential to excelling, dominating, or “winning” at Software Development."<p>I think I agree with him. In my university, most of the staff was kind of dilettants - I always reasoned that it's because a good teacher should master his subject and once you master it, you probably won't want to settle for 1/5th of the regular wage...
I really liked learning in school. Many of my intellectual interests today would not be so if I didn't learn, for example, a bunch of stuff about linguistics. I don't know if a college education is worth its cost these days, but I think there is a lot of value in it.<p>There will always be time to work, and to be good at your job. School can be more than that. Pretty much everyone shits on college these days, and I certainly understand why, but this shouldn't be looked at as anything other than conventional wisdom at this point. It's not a cutting-edge take or anything of the sort.
If you drop out you'll probably learn more but life will get harder.<p>School is a wonderful soap bubble and the trouble is not so much "drop out or don't" as much as it is "do we have a place for aspies in our English programs?"<p>Computer Science departments are <i>not</i> a safe compromise. The conflict @fat is trying to articulate is between those with a place in the school system and those without.
As a (former) non-U.S. CS student (although I still haven't officially dropped out) from a European country (but <i>not</i> a part of the EU), college was a huge waste of time in my case.<p>There were a couple of hints all over my two years in college, but the biggest one was when I managed to convince my professor that our college FTP server is not secure by showing her a Wireshark packet in which I have submitted the password to the FTP server and convincing her that the server replied to my connection with a password (which, of course, doesn't make any sense what so ever).<p>Plus I was not able to convince the college staff that a self-signed certificate in our online learning platform is not a good solution. And I found one security exploit in the custom CMS they were using (privilege escalation just by tweaking the URL).<p>When I got to the point where I had a server administration course taught with the Windows server explicitly, I've decided to freeze my education.<p>I got into a good tech internship and now I finally have the chance of actually learning something useful (Python / Linux administration / a bit of front end programming / whatever is necessary since it's not a tech organization, but a journalistic organization with a highly skilled tech team) by actually doing some interesting things.
Before I went to university I did a lot of UI and web design with very light programming here and there.<p>In school I studied computer science because I knew I liked computers and I didn't know what else to do.<p>Being around a bunch of intellectually serious people (not in my program so much, more the musicians and literature and biology students), I pushed myself to develop a perspective as a scholar and an intellectual. I ended up studying opera for a year and doing a minor in psychology. Both of those experiences, plus the experience of being pushed hard in some key computer science contexts (particularly programming language theory) were immensely formative for me. I can't imagine doing what I'm doing now (designing platforms for software development) without all of those experiences.<p>I could've easily skipped school and just gone straight into industry. I was already earning $15/hr doing web design in high school (~1998).<p>I'm not sure where that would've led. If I have to guess, I would've probably ended up a web dev in Boston and I would be a very wealthy WASPy family man in the suburbs now at 34.<p>As it is I am an artist and an intellectual in California. I am actually "in the world" in a way I don't think I would've been if I hadn't been pushed through the intellectual ringer for so long. But it turns out the world is a bleak place compared to the relative safety of where I started. I think I've gone much further towards making something of myself but I am much less happy than I would've been. The Tree of Knowledge allegory is much weightier and more frightening to me now that I'm older. As a child knowledge seemed like a silly thing to villify.<p>It's so hard to say what would've been though.
Frankly, school is going to be such a small drop in the bucket of what your career will look like, that it shouldn't much matter whether you go or not. Your success will be determined by a continued habit of learning forever thereafter. This overemphasis on the importance of choices made in school devalues that.
I am a junior at a target CS school in the US. I'm currently studying in Europe at Sweden's KTH, reputed as one of the top engineering schools in Europe/Scand. I loathe all the "EUROPE IS SO MUCH BETTER!111!!!!!" posts everyone makes because I always feel like it's out of touch and hip to say to. The culture here in Sweden is way more relaxed. This is definitely NOT a catchall, but a catch-some, sort of statement, even if I do interact with mostly Masters students from across Europe, probably >50% of my classmates. It's not as rigorous here, and it's not as if the students are still "killin' it!" because I have been in exclusively project classes, and the projects presented have been pretty mediocre. Most students aim to pass. Few students in my MASTERS LEVEL classes (bear in mind it's 4/5 year students unlike in the US) have NEARLY the chops of any kid in my undergrad CSE program, and I've been in 4 groups now with around 30 students and obviously talk to many more. I'm frustrated because everyone hates on this system, but it's allowed me to perform so much better technically than any of my classmates here that I've interacted with.
Also, His comment that "you may need to reinvent the wheel sometimes" applies to so few. I am going to be designing REST APIs or similar for years, I bet. I am going to need to know reasonable HCI for years, I bet. So many people don't learn the right idioms. The right design patterns. Every internship I've had has "man, sucks that we taught ourselves this technology instead of learned formally" or "man, this stack was built by non-engineers and is an un-maintainable monolith." I can't take these statements seriously. You can learn programming by yourself. You can be way better than I'll ever be through self teaching, but I feel like this is similar (but to a much less extent) logic to, "Bill Gates dropped out of college!!!11!!!!", and it's just NOT true for MOST people. The comments before me are SO right that it's career jeopardizing.
I find that relevant: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0</a>