How many jobs really require college?

I think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills of modern education system and what can be done to improve it. Like Peter Thiel and others, I don&#x27;t think they understand how and why students are failing in classrooms today.<p>Take for example the author&#x27;s suggestions on how school systems can be improved:<p><i>Create a set of free, online high school and college degree programs that any American could enroll in, and pursue at their own pace.</i><p>Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn&#x27;t work (in most cases)... and yet we&#x27;re going to do remote with our students? I took online classes when I went back to complete college at an older age... it was the worst mistake of my life. As a human, I needed the social imposition of a disappointed teacher telling me that I performed poorly on my test, I needed the camaraderie of students with whom I could study somewhere. Online classes, <i>especially</i> at high school stage are very bad (perhaps with the exception of &quot;gifted&quot; students who probably would benefit from being in a fast-tracked line).<p><i>At age 13, give everyone a $100k education voucher.</i><p>You&#x27;re giving too much credit to students, they don&#x27;t know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money.<p><i>Legalize and normalize apprenticeship contracts.</i><p>I agree with this.

This sort of article comes up on Hackerrank a lot. Zero research, a spreadsheet, and a prescription to change eduction from the ground up. The author advocates curiosity as a motivator for education, yet he doesn&#x27;t appear to know anything about professional architecture (certification is complicated and not always tied to education) and doesn&#x27;t seem to care enough to research it before bloviating.<p>I read his article dedicated to architecture on his blog, and it was equally ill-informed. Of course buildings built in the 1880s didn&#x27;t require architects with a college degree. They didn&#x27;t require that you know CAD, either.<p>What appeals to people about this type of article? The author doesn&#x27;t bring any experience with education policy or teaching. He doesn&#x27;t back his assertions with research, primary sources, or even secondary sources. He doesn&#x27;t bother interviewing anyone with experience with the problem or who has thought about it.<p>And, his reasoning is fairly shoddy. Much of what he&#x27;s arguing for already exists in parallel with formal education. Nothing stopped me in the past from supplementing my learning on Coursera or hiring a programmer without a degree in computer science. A good friend of mine dropped out of high school, got his GED, and went back to college. Nothing is stopping anyone, you just limit your opportunities.<p>Even if formal education was abolished or fully privatized, businesses would find a similar, expensive process for screening applicants. The government is rarely requiring this. It&#x27;s usually industry associations.<p>I read this article because I&#x27;m curious about this sort of thinking. Why do we not only have a desire for simple solutions but a need for radical ones from people with no experience in the field they&#x27;re discussing? Why is this appealing?<p>If you&#x27;re curious about radical approaches to education and the deschooling movement, read Ivan Illich or research the free schools movement. I read Illich before sending my daughters to public school. I didn&#x27;t think Illich had any answers, and much of what he advocated wasn&#x27;t precluded by formal education. School doesn&#x27;t take that much time. My kids thrived in public school, and one of them wants to be a teacher.

College degrees largely serve the social function titles of nobility once did. Having one shows that you have a shared set of experiences and a personal investment in a certain set of values and social norms. Requiring one for many jobs is much more about ensuring applicants belong to the class the employer prefers than any specific education the job requires.

Lots of interesting ideas here, but also some wacky or condescending assumptions about other people&#x27;s lines of work. Let&#x27;s take two:<p>TRUCK DRIVERS: They don&#x27;t just move big rigs around. They also need to keep detailed log books, plan out routes, pass inspections -- and know how to talk civilly and constructively to DOT inspectors. An eighth grade education will not get you there. Especially on the last part. The back-and-forth of a high-school classroom socializes teenagers to work with authority. Most high school dropouts give up because they can&#x27;t conform to those norms, not because they can&#x27;t do the work. Trucking companies rightfully insist on a high school degree for exactly this reason.<p>FINANCIAL ADVISERS: Met any lately? I work in a co-lo space with several within 50 feet. They&#x27;re all college educated, and they put non-obvious skills from their education to work, every day. They need to provide their clients with highly literate, personalized updates via quarterly letters. They need a sophisticated understanding of clients&#x27; expressed and unstated needs -- and you&#x27;re not going to be fully capable of doing that with just a high school education. Some college-level psychology classes, history classes or behavioral econ classes will get you in the game. And if you actually want to be a financial adviser with some understanding of how markets work, an econ&#x2F;finance major is your best path in.<p>Some of the other analysis is quite interesting. But the classification errors in this piece are more than just a matter of tweaking a spreadsheet. They come from a deeper misunderstanding of what many jobs are all about.

One of the things <i>I</i> learned in college is that when someone says &quot;I have thought about this social problem and understand both the cause and solution, please join me as I attempt to radically address it via state action&quot; you should get as far away from him as possible. The history of such programs is, to say the least, not a story of success and progress and rainbows.

Advocates of this general position, whether it&#x27;s Peter Thiel and &quot;hey don&#x27;t go to college I&#x27;ll just pay you&quot; or this author&#x27;s &quot;hey your job isn&#x27;t that complicated, you can figure it out in less time for less money&quot;, all miss the point of college.<p>The best purpose of college is to make you a reasonable citizen in a democracy. Most Americans voting in elections can&#x27;t even name the Vice President, let alone articulate what plenary powers are, what the 4th and 5th amendments say (or seriously any amendment), name more than 3 executive branch departments (Defense, State and... uh...), point out where Iraq is on a map, etc. It&#x27;s really no surprise we get the elected officials we get.<p>Sure, professional training is important and I think our education system is not particularly efficient about it. But education is more than just &quot;here&#x27;s how you work for the man&quot;. It&#x27;s supposed to make you a well-rounded, well-educated citizen so you can participate effectively in a democratic government.<p>Which is why things like public education, state colleges and universities, a separation of religion and education, and state subsidized college tuition are so important, and why religious schools, charter schools, and for-profit colleges&#x2F;universities are so antithetical to democracy: their agenda is entirely separate from &quot;be a well-educated democratic citizen&quot;.

The premise of this post is that the author has performed an analysis of the educational requirements for jobs and can extrapolate from it. But this author thinks that only a grade school education and not more than 6 months of training is required to be a cook --- a profession people go to post-secondary school for --- and that some college study is required to be a programmer. How seriously should I take their conclusions?

From my experience college is not so much about actual knowledge acquired but mostly about learning to learn and think. I could have studied civil engineering instead of CS and be exactly as good software developer as I am, maybe even better.<p>Is college absolutely necessary to perform some jobs? Probably not. But I think I&#x27;d benefit if my hairdresser or tailor (I don&#x27;t actually use services of any of those) attended some technical university during his&#x2F;her career. Real shame is that not everybody has time and money to do that.

The author makes a lot of great points here but I took issue with this sentence:<p><i>All jobs that currently require a degree, should instead require a knowledge test. The employer should not care how the knowledge was obtained, just that the applicant has the knowledge.</i><p>I would argue that the degree does provide some value beyond what can be easily tested in an interview setting. I&#x27;m not sure if it is the only way but the type of person who completes a degree is the type of person who is able to sit down and start a difficult task and complete it. Often these tasks are not directly related to what the student is passionate about, and sometimes not even necessary without taking into consideration the bigger picture of a multi-year program. In my experience dealing with the drudgery of the tedious day-to-day of most white-collar jobs, this college education degree provides a coarse litmus test for the type of person who will thrive in this environment. A person who will do things well and thorough for their own sake and deal with the bullshit.

With the quality of education as it is today, and no improvements in sight in the near or long-term future, I&#x27;d say a college education--or self-guided personal learning for the few who have the motivation and ability to do it--is required in the US if one is to not be considered stupid. There are exceptions at certain private--and usually incredibly expensive schools--but overall, even the best public schools are atrocious and don&#x27;t teach children the skills and knowledge they need to be decent citizens, let alone how to prosper. This is why attending college is not primarily about job preparation. Even when job preparation is not necessary, the rest of the education is. Yes, much of it should have been taught in grades K-12, but since that isn&#x27;t happening, college is the last defense against stupidity that&#x27;s likely to last a lifetime. Thus, the question the article asks is not very important, and the article&#x27;s dismissal of any use for college other than job preparation is short-sighted and ill-defended.

Any &quot;job&quot; does not require a college degree. A &quot;job&quot; is something that anyone can be trained to do. If you think that the purpose of college is to train you for a &quot;job&quot; then you&#x27;re doing it wrong. The point of college is teach you the underlying fundamentals of how things like language and science work, so that you can extend those rules and use them to create new things and new ideas. You go to college to learn how to create value, not get a job. There will always be a need for vocational training. But putting in the long, hard work of accumulating intuitive knowledge of the fundamental sciences, and having that knowledge verified by society to assure you haven&#x27;t deluded yourself, is the only way to operate at the highest level of intellectual ability for anyone short of a true genius.

College has become little more than an aptitude test for many jobs. If you&#x27;re willing to grind through the years of studying and financial hardship to get a degree, then you&#x27;ll probably be able to handle the job.

I recently helped transform a customer service department from being an embarrassing shambles to something we could be proud of. The queue of tickets is now empty whereas before, when we didn&#x27;t have things automated, our many customer service agents were struggling to keep up with the back of a 4000 long queue. Things are now pro-active, we fix problems before customers know rather than wait for them to complain.<p>Essentially it is the same job but done properly, however, now everything is in order, we just need two people rather than hordes of people. Note that these two people are college educated, i.e. able to listen and learn, write good English and show up in the morning.<p>We get customer service ratings and these also come in for the things that the computer does rather than just what a human agent has done. The computer always writes impeccably, my human colleagues are nearer grunt and point level. The humans are lucky to get 76% satisfaction level, the automated stuff consistently gets 91% satisfaction level.<p>The net result is that our remaining customer service staff are the educated ones, their work is now pretty professional albeit not to rocket surgery levels and the job pays fairly rather than it being a temp type of arrangement. As a company we no longer need the hordes and the people to manage&#x2F;hire&#x2F;fire them.<p>My point being that college education is more helpful than one might think. It does not matter what the education is in particularly, it is the skills of being able to do basic things like work without disrupting others, being able to write and being able to learn that matter.

My father led the chemical safety laboratory of a ~10000 employee Hungarian drug company from 1990 to 2010 or so. He said this and this stuck with me, that when he started he was able to hire the lowest level assistants straight out of trade school but by the end everyone needed a univ degree because every instrument became so complicated.

Sure, very few jobs give you the direct day to day skills required to do a job. That&#x27;s neither the claim colleges are making, nor the primary reason that business require degrees. This feels like pure opinion with almost no evidence to back it up, divorced from reality. The table displaying apparent sub-percent accuracy for the completely subjective (made up) number of jobs requiring degrees is demonstrating this disconnect hilariously.<p>I&#x27;ve actually tried hiring people with less schooling than college -- has the author? It tends to not work out that well, especially in tech. Programmers with high school diplomas and two year degrees are usually missing all the theory and most of the practical experience you get during a 4 year degree. Not because someone who skips college can&#x27;t learn these things, and not because they can&#x27;t get experience or learn on the job, it just so happens that in the real world they usually don&#x27;t.<p>One of the biggest reasons that college is a good idea is that someone with a degree in a field related to the job is more often more capable than someone with only a high school diploma. Not always, of course, but statistically more frequently. So who will the employer choose? The college grad is an easy choice. This means getting a degree is simple market competition for employment, and probably won&#x27;t go away even if people make convincing sounding arguments. Why would employers choose the minimum necessary qualifications if some candidates will do more? Why would people who want good jobs expect to get hired with less experience than others who are applying for the same job? College is something many people are choosing.

In my view, something that has to be considered is the feedback of a worker&#x27;s education level on the nature of their job. If you stop requiring a college degree for a particular occupation, the nature of that occupation may change, and it may open up a space for new occupations to form.<p>Remember, anybody can stop requiring a degree for any job, today, so long as the degree isn&#x27;t required by law. We could stop requiring an engineering degree for Solid Works operators. (Just to choose an example)<p>In fact, about half of our mechanical CAD operators have degrees. I notice a big difference between those groups when getting CAD work done. If the operator has a degree, it&#x27;s much more likely that they can take a vague idea of mine, and come back with a nice design that even handles a bunch of issues that I overlooked.<p>If not, then I pretty much have to give them a complete specification (taking longer than just doing it in CAD myself) or sit next to them at the CAD terminal and direct them. If a design step requires math, I do the math. If a decision is needed, I make it. K-12 teaching would become a different profession if the college degree requirement were dropped, as was proposed in my state.

The author risks to make mistakes related to the Dunning-Kruger effect [1].<p>Quote:<p>&gt; The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect</a>

When writing Developer job descriptions I typically settle on <i>&quot;Bachelors degree or equivalent&quot;</i> for the education requirement.<p>The best Programmers I&#x27;ve worked with were self-taught autodidacts with insatiable curiosity.

The article&#x27;s classifications aren&#x27;t even observed in other OECD countries: for example law and medicine are undergraduate degrees is most of Europe and Australia and people do fine (obviously doctors still need residency etc in order to become skilled). And those countries are doing fine -- better than the US in many ways.

Very few. I think it&#x27;s much more a matter of job culture and a bit of red queen (useless arms race) competition that has brought on this situation. Probably with a sprinkling of politicians wanting to be able to say that &quot;in my country 50% of high school students go on to university&quot; when they hob nob at international conferences.<p>In almost all white collar jobs the apprenticeship model would work just fine, but that doesn&#x27;t work well when people want to change jobs every few years. It&#x27;s not that most desk jobs are actually harder to learn that most skilled manual labor jobs.

If your job doesn&#x27;t require college, then pretty soon it won&#x27;t require a human either. The more brain required the longer you have until a robot or computer can do it better.

I knew a lot of people in college that didn&#x27;t work all that hard except for last minute rushes to get things turned in at finals. Those people had a hard time finding jobs that justified the cost of their education. I also saw people that consistently worked hard. They are doing quite well. I think going to college is something you shouldn&#x27;t do if you&#x27;re not taking it seriously. If you&#x27;re using college to put off real life, you might be better off waiting tables.

I am 100% convinced that colleges were created for good reasons but were quickly exploited for profit. Today&#x27;s version of college is designed to empty savings in the maximum way possible. I can&#x27;t think of too many professions that require the general education requirements that colleges claim you need. I&#x27;d say most if not all professions can be learned through training and on the job practice. Take nursing for example. Today&#x27;s nurses have to write countless nonsense papers that have nothing to do with improving their knowledge. Dental Technician can do their job without prior education yet many are swindled into a technical program. They say designers need formal education to be taught human computer interaction, color theory etc yet here providing for myself and family with less than 8 months of self-taught reading. One time I wanted to check out a Standford online course to see what designers learn there and was blown away by the uselessness of that information. Pardon the typos, I&#x27;m on mobile with whacky autocorrect.

How many jobs require college is a fair question when you are young. But at the other end of life, I ask how many jobs would have taught you the same things as college. Lifelong education and self improvement is important. Whether it come from college, work, or somewhere else is not as important as just making sure it happens.

In my experience as a hiring manager, a degree <i>can</i> be useful as an indicator, but I wouldn&#x27;t actually require it for most positions. A degree requirement can also be a crutch for HR departments that are overwhelmed by applicant volume and lesser hiring managers that put more stock in a culturally defined checklist than their own judgement about any given candidate&#x27;s suitability.<p>The biggest problem with the degree-as-a-substitute-for-judgement approach is that not all degree programs are equal to start with. There are degree programs which absolutely speak well of a candidate (on a resume) and there are programs you can graduate from which would be less of an indicator of suitability than relevant work experience. Certainly not all degrees are equal. There are some real bullshit things you can major in insofar as being an indicator for employ-ability is concerned. So for me to care about a degree on a resume, it has to be an appropriate degree and it has to be from a program that <i>I know</i> indicates some skill and perseverance on the part of the candidate... otherwise I dismiss it as an evaluation factor: at that point it&#x27;s simply an uninformative data point.... it&#x27;s just noise.<p>To be fair, I say this as someone that has had a good career in technology without a degree. I have do have a fair amount of college (in one of those bullshit majors I was mentioning), but no sheepskin. (Actually, one of the schools I attended seemingly attached so little to the degree in terms of success of the candidate, that they had a policy of indefinite re-admittance since many wanted to finish solely for self-enrichment after they had gone off and had their career success pre-graduation :-) ).

The question implies &quot;how many jobs require college <i>to do</i>&quot;. A better question is &quot;how many jobs require college <i>to get</i>&quot;.

It&#x27;s cute how software engineers are attributed as the likely inventors of HVAC robots. Whatever happened to mechanical &amp; electrical engineers?

The mistake of the education system is its focus on jobs. Education should be motivated by virtue, to raise a generation that can think, reason, innovate, in all aspects of life, emotionally, culturally, artificially, physically, scientifically, spiritually, etc.<p>If we educated more people that way, we&#x27;d probably have a society that could solve the job problem.

I can&#x27;t help but feeling this has something to do with women. Namely that women are &quot;winning&quot; the education game. Each year, the fraction of women to men in (almost) all programs are steadily increasing.<p>Since men aren&#x27;t winning anymore, the game clearly wasn&#x27;t that important. Let&#x27;s create a new game and play that instead!

The author&#x27;s cherry picked examples from the 19th century are pretty misleading. The state of the art, as well as society&#x27;s expectations for most professions have changed significantly since the 19th century.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t want to live in a building made to 19th century safety and efficiency standards, and while I&#x27;m sure some people can teach themselves how to design and build modern buildings, I&#x27;m also sure that a good way to get up to speed is to go to school for architecture or civil engineering. Ditto with law and mechanical engineering.<p>I&#x27;m also wary of anybody claiming software engineers and computer programmers don&#x27;t need a degree or other training. Software quality in general is really crappy, and I&#x27;m skeptical the solution is less education.

One of the best things you can support, whether you agree with Bill Gates, or with OP, is investment in making primary education as good as is absolutely possible. The result is:<p>1) people are smarter and more mature even if they don&#x27;t go to college 2) people who do go to college are already ready to do great work<p>If, like OP, you seriously want people to effectively graduate at age 13 you need to put a lot of work into primary education first. I admit, if like Gates, you just want more competent graduates, then it is probably going to be more nuanced.

College may improve the bargaining position of laborers vis-a-vis employers. Compare eight apprenticeships which provide the ability to work one job each vs a college which provides the ability to work all eight jobs. If students filter into one of the apprenticeships they&#x27;re locked in; if they go to college then employers must compete for labor across sectors.

Most do.<p>Most high school graduates can barely string a sentence together in writing, and are more likely to have similar limitations in reading.

How many jobs <i>will be</i> really required?

I think that the really fundamental problem is the proposition that college has the goal of getting you prepared for a job.<p>That should not be (and IMO is not) the primary goal of education.<p>The primary goal of education should be to make you a better, more informed member of society. That&#x27;s the only way democracy can work.

I agree with the author&#x27;s conclusions that college is mostly an expensive waste of time and money. Job training can and should be done in a more cost-effective way with paid apprenticeships. Universities should focus on pushing the boundaries of knowledge (research) not job training.

Almost none of them, outside of STEM fields. Even then, not even some of those.<p>One of the biggest scams of modern times.

Nobody has really commented yet on how highly suspect the methodology here is, nor the tradeoff between education and experience, nor the tradeoffs inherent in the world &quot;acceptable&quot; when you&#x27;re trying to figure out what the minimum acceptable education is to land a certain job.<p>Just for the easiest example, the given education stat for top executives (chief executives, general and operations managers, and legislators) is listed as &quot;high school.&quot; It&#x27;s not even &quot;some college&quot;. Now if I come to you and say, &quot;hey, my niece actually just graduated high school and she&#x27;s pretty smart, has a lot of ambition and drive, really great extracurricular involvement -- can we set up a job interview where she might take over your company as CEO?&quot; you would laugh at me! You would say, &quot;let her get her MBA and manage real people for a few years, and then let&#x27;s talk. Or I mean if she really can&#x27;t wait, let&#x27;s give her an entry-level position and if she&#x27;s really as good as you say, she&#x27;ll be managing in 5 years and might be able to get to the top in 5 more.&quot;<p>But if we say &quot;minimum&quot; as in &quot;could you start a company with only a high-school education and find yourself as its CEO?&quot; then of course the answer is yes. Heck, let&#x27;s knock this one down a peg, that could happen even if you don&#x27;t graduate high school, it&#x27;s just less likely. Legislator? Sure. I mean, most legislators today are presumably former lawyers who have 7 years of post-high-school schooling in them, but all you really need to legislate is to be elected.<p>Or for another example, Devin has said, &quot;Any job specific training takes less than six months. Examples: ...cook.&quot; I mean, that&#x27;s partly true, some 1&#x2F;4 of cooks in this country work at fast food joints, some other 1&#x2F;4 of cooks work in cafeterias etc., but placing it at &quot;high school&quot; as if culinary school isn&#x27;t a thing is just deluding yourself for the other half or so of cooks. And if you have the choice between going to culinary school for a year or going to work in a kitchen that will take you for a year, probably if you&#x27;re fresh out of high school you&#x27;re going to get a lot more out of the culinary school. And that&#x27;s because education has a different <i>sort</i> of value from work experience, which makes them very hard to compare evenly. The cook who went to culinary school for a year probably knows how to cook a much broader diversity of things, but the one-year-anniversary line cook will probably have greater appreciations for, say, prepping quickly and efficiently, taking multiple orders at once, estimating the time that dishes take to cook and communicating that to others, and so forth. They&#x27;re not easily comparable.

I don&#x27;t understand all the agurments for apprenticeship, what we&#x27;re dealing with now are the problems of workers being unable to move over&#x2F;up after being displaced by technology.<p>Apprenticeship systems would only exacerbate that problem.

Number of births in US per year: 4.24 million<p>Proposed stipend: $100,000<p>Budget for proposal: $424B&#x2F;yr, assuming no overhead (lol)<p>That&#x27;s 2.5% of GDP, minimum, which is almost as much as the total non-defense discretionary budget is today.

The question to ask is what jobs require you to get educated through either close social interaction with others or needs access to resources you can&#x27;t just get at home.

I go a step further, how many jobs can be done by most people, and things like college or personal connections decide who fills those jobs.

christ - reading through this person&#x27;s website he seems like a parody of the &#x27;arrogant engineer&#x27; stereotype.

How many jobs really require people?

Far fewer than most will admit.

Most, according to economic signaling theory.

This person has a bunch of essays but he comes across as an sad person who doesn&#x27;t believe in civil rights for women.<p>In an eassy on his website [1], he says &quot;Men have natural abilities and disposition towards leadership. To deny this, to mandate equality of results, to push women into masculine roles, to domesticate and feminize men, only results in misery for both men and women.<p>Universal suffrage elections are virtually always a bad idea.&quot;<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devinhelton.com&#x2F;principles-of-formalism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devinhelton.com&#x2F;principles-of-formalism</a>

The article has some interesting ideas. But it tries to solve a problem that is already solved in other countries. Why do not, instead, start looking at how those countries do it?<p>The problem needs thinking out-of-the-box. Education is not &quot;too expensive&quot;, remove that from your equation. Education is a great investment.<p>Why is your country not paying for it? Try to solve that instead.

1) People don&#x27;t know what they want to be when they are 11 years old, so how you do determine who gets what kind of education?<p>2) People don&#x27;t want to be truck drivers for their whole lives. Hell, truck driver might not even be a job.<p>3) The goal of education isn&#x27;t to get a job, it&#x27;s to get an education. The job comes after and can be unrelated to the education.<p>Those are the three things I can think of that make me think this guy hasn&#x27;t thought his argument through very well.

tl;dr I should have been able to get a 4 year degree after taking 3-4 classes. Why do people who have equivalent education need to _waste_ 4 years of their life?<p>I think that the largest problem is that there is no way for people who have achieved the equivalent or more of a college education to gain the same recognition. But possibly that is just because it affects me directly.<p>While working a technician type job for years with lots of downtime, I studied CS at home and with my work downtime. I took lots of the free courses from the elite universities and finished them. I read lots of good book, most of the No Starch Press books, and did all the exercises. Then I had the money to fund a four year degree, with high expectations for the higher level classes I persisted through the absolutely painfully trivial, tedious work. I got anxious about wasting so much time not learning, after I was not just out of high school.<p>I&#x27;ve burnt out on busywork, started neglecting schoolwork for stuff that actually improved my skill, or to drill way deeper into some interesting bit of a class than needed to get to something challenging. I ignored school for side projects that stretched my legs. It really hit when I took 300-400 level courses and realized that i really wouldn&#x27;t learn anything CS at all. I&#x27;ve even helped nearly 10 other students learn Python which the school doesn&#x27;t even teach pair programming with them on a very non-trivial project.<p>But now here I am, way more advanced and capable than a standard graduate, terrible GPA, not going to graduate, and no job opportunities. I don&#x27;t even care how much I make, I like programming, I like making things, I like solving problems. Probably going to have to go back to what I was doing.<p>That said I did pick up a couple math tricks, but _wasting_ 4 years of my life for 3-4 good classes which could have been taken in 3 months, not even remotely worth it.<p>Been here for a while but using a throwaway for obvious reasons.

The solution is to be long in anti-fragile assets such as bitcoins and gold. If approximately everybody else is getting it wrong about degrees, the economy and the value of its fragile assets, especially paper money, will shrink systematically, while my assets will keep gaining value. In that sense, it is better to encourage most other people to get it wrong. Hence, they should get MORE useless degrees and saddle themselves with MORE stupid and MORE enormous student loans. That is what will eventually sink the boat completely and make me more money.