> <i>That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in the real world. Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects and our own organizations. Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in improving the human condition.</i><p>Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.)<p>He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students <i>do</i> show an improvement.<p>I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.<p>Your thoughts are welcome.
He's missing the point.<p>College isn't entirely about learning things in the classroom, it's four years where young, hopefully creative people get to have almost nothing to do but think and create. The overwhelming majority of people in the world don't get to work in cool offices, on cool problems, with cool co-workers who want to solve difficult problems with them. The majority of us spend our days under fluorescent lights working on mundane business-intelligence type things. Not to say that creativity cannot be found in anything, but sitting in my dorm hacking until all hours of the morning because I didn't <i>really</i> have to go to class is certainly more conducive to creativity than working an 8:00-6:00 and going to bed at 10:00 because I have to be up in the morning.<p>While college might not really offer much in the way of knowledge acquisition (at least until grad school), it <i>would</i> does offer the time to work on things you're passionate about, and network with other people of similar inclinations.<p>I dropped out of college when I was 19, and it was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. For somebody who is already a member of the silicon valley set, this might be good advice, for everybody else this train of thought is parasitic.<p>(I'm not saying that networking and hacking and soforth isn't possible when you're working a "real" job [hell, I spend almost every waking second I'm not spending at my job hacking and writing and networking], I'm just saying that college is a better environment for it)
Blanket statements like this are foolish. My own college experience had a lot of regurgitation, but whether you make productive use out of your time there is completely within your hands. I was able to do challenging, hands-on research, make connections that lead to my last two jobs, and build a solid resume.<p>However, if you choose to party it up all the time, and/or only do the bare minimum to get through, you probably shouldn't bother.
I think he's got a lot of good points.<p>"conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content, rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software development and literature.<p>"competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have their own problems.)<p>"regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.<p>"theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job.<p>I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless.<p>Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of it.
This isn't the first anti-college discussion to come up recently... not even the first in the last 24 hours.<p>What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students. People are using this partial failure, and extrapolating it into these arguments that all higher education is worthless.<p>This isn't good logic, much less good advice.
At the end of the day, College is what you make of it. No one can force you to really get involved, participate in team projects etc. You have to have the internal drive to make the most of your opportunity.<p>It is also getting annoying to see another article by someone not going to school writing about why its a waste of time. How does he know? If he graduated and then noticed that nothing he learned applied or helped him in anyway, then he could say its a waste of time. In the authors case, he is getting paid not to go to school. Moreover, all schools are not created equal. Some are better at exposing you to team projects, cross discipline assignments, understanding "why" and not just the "how".
Hmm... a 19-year old dissing college. This sounds like that little kid in the movie commercial who argues Lebron > Jordan. You weren't <i>there</i>, man.
"Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim..."<p>Not once did I ever do this. Most of my very rewarding classes involved constant debating with my professors. Also, not one of my professors would even have accepted this as actual work.<p>College was extremely rewarding for me. Particularly the first two years which made me step out of my lonesome knowledge ghetto and into new areas I previously thought useless.<p>The real negative is cost. Right now college burdens graduates with sizable debt forcing them into what amounts to very comfortable (historically speaking) serfdom.
College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system)<p>Most people however are better off as employees, starting a company is not easy and many want to work 9-5, have a family and a balanced life, with a good salary. Going to college gets you on that track.
Just don't get too carried away in the whole "college is useless" craze.
People that don't need college probably don't need anyone to tell them that. They are already doing that. Probably the result of all those anti-college campaigns will mostly be providing an excuse to ones looking for a silly one.<p>Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly talking about the short term effect.
In the mid-long run I'm sure we're looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.
> He says college rewards conformity and competition, not collaboration, theory<p>Wow I never considered the collaboration vs competition argument, but it makes perfect sense. I have seen one too many students with perfect grades who don't know how to teamwork and learn from others.<p>I now strongly believe that colleges have to reconsider their entire approach to curricula -- the emphasis on students not sharing their work with others can be counterproductive, in my opinion.
I did plenty of group work at Georgia Tech. Built several working robots in teams, a video game, a bus monitoring device, and various other software projects.<p>I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.
While I agree strongly with most of the author's thesis, the zero sum aspect to this debate is tiresome. And I say this as a dropout myself.<p>Both sides go out of their way to justify their all-or nothing positions based on their particular experiences, as reassurance that their decision (dropping out or going into debt for their degree-du-jour) was the right one.<p>Everyone learns & processes information differently. Everyone has a different set of goals. All pieces like this do is bring out the traditional combatants on both sides of the divide, with the same tired arguments.<p>Hopefully at some point, we'll reach a point where both positions can be held in equal regard.
His statements are absolutely true... about a handful of fields people go to school for:<p>Computer Sciences, absolutely.
Mechanical & Architectural Engineering, sure.
Mathematics & Physics, possibly, if you're gifted at it.
Biology & Chemistry... maybe, but it'd take a LOT of study<p>None of this applies for fields that you can't be self-taught or learned on the job. Medical, Law, Business... these are all things that need to be taught in a formal setting.<p>Given the author's mention of StackOverflow and LinkedIn, I'm inclined to think his perspective is skewed towards education involving the programming and web development.
It just occurred to me that the anti-college backlash follows inevitably from the decline of the classical liberal arts education. Since "education" is now, in our society's view, nothing more than job training, why bother with it at all? Just skip it and go straight to the job, or start your own business. No "education" required.<p>Education as civilizing self-development is something other than schooling and training, but our institutions have abandoned that, if they ever provided it in the first place. I think they did use to, but only for a tiny elite.
It is useful to distinguish between two issues -- the usefulness of a college education and the cost of said education. The costs of a college education in the US today are completely unjustifiable IMHO and I agree with those who say that there surely must be better use for your money. On the other hand, it seems that dismissing college education itself qua education is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's leave aside the question of whether a college education improves your critical thinking -- I claim that a good college education <i>properly</i> trains you in the fundamentals that you need to master before going on to doing greater things. The obvious caveat is that there are a whole bunch of vocations for which such training has little or no value -- I get that. But do we really want to create a society where a whole generation has little or no training to invent, for example, the next breakthrough transistor technology?
I think that the college system is terribly broken.<p>In my view, college is broken in 3 ways:<p>1. It is too expensive -- this severely limits talented people from going to college<p>Hopefully, online, free college lectures will go a long way to remedy this situation.<p>2. Brilliant PhDs are not able to find jobs in their area<p>This is not about money but about the ability to do research and about the ability for these people to contribute in their chosen fields.<p>3. The Wrong People are going to college<p>People are going to college because they don't know what else to do and because everyone tells them it's what you should do.<p>College should be optional for jobs. Some of the most brilliant engineers that I have worked with are self-taught without a college degree.<p>You don't need college to be educated and you don't need a college degree to make lots of money.<p>College is the entry point to the academic community which should be regularly enriched by the world's best talent.<p>For many people, it is the ritual, the sports, the experience, and the opportunity to explore ideas for the first time that makes college so worthwhile.
Although he makes some valid points, it seems a bit foolish to me that a 19 year old, who has barely been in college to just flat out deny it's usefulness. I recently graduated, and though there are a lot of things I would change about college, I don't regret going there.<p>I made great connections, made life long friends, and (most importantly) learned a lot. Most of what I learned was because of my own efforts, however, that seed of curiosity that pushed me to learn was usually thanks to something mentioned in a class, or because of a conversation with a professor, or because of me going the extra mile in my projects, or because of the research I had looked to work on.<p>Overall, I'm not saying that you need college to succeed, and I'm not saying that there isn't alot to criticize about college. However, before you knock it down, try it out. You may not regret it.
This article merely proves the point that Thiel's coverage on HN has pounded into the ground: smart, driven kids interested in entrepreneurship don't need college.<p>What seems to be missing from these kinds of discussions is a focus on what kinds of college programs we should be emulating.
<i>I left college two months ago because it rewards [...] competition rather than collaboration</i><p>Let me get this straight -- the whole premise of the Thiel Fellowship seems to be to get bright kids out of the doldrums of higher education and into the real world where they can start competitive businesses, and yet this kid says he doesn't like college because it rewards competition?!<p>And, I don't really agree with that premise in the first place. If anything, college rewards the appearance of collaboration -- when I was college, I ended up in numerous group projects where at least one person was completely worthless and contributed nothing besides their name on the written report's cover page.
Where I grew up, entreprenuership without a college degree meant being on the other side of the law. Without my Ivy League degree I'm afraid, most of the people I know now would be clamoring about ending my food stamp benefits. College was often boring, and I sucked at Technical Writing, but I'd never have the opportunities if I "unColleged" myself. Maybe if I grew up in the same neighborhood as I live in now, I'd think like him too. For many kids growing up in the inner cities, places where "local VCs" will litterally take your knee caps, college is a much wiser choice.
The article—appropriately, perhaps—reads like a high school essay from a smart student. Grammatically correct, logical, structured but stiff.<p>I guess the biggest thing that college gave me wasn't knowledge, it was a firing range where I could practice shooting without actually harming anyone. If I think of myself when I was 18-20, if I was actually put into a position of responsibility my net contribution would be negative.<p>There are certainly exceptions, but the net value of an unexperienced 18 year old is negative. He costs more to the company (in mentoring and mistakes) than the value he provides.
I'm officially calling the nocollege movement a bubble and a direct byproduct of the tech bubble. Tech is hot and for some sound reasons, no doubt, but there aren't enough fundamentals to justify the same folks who used to think higher education was the ticket to prosperity now thinking it's starting a software business straight out of school.<p>If I were graduating high school this year, I'd go counter cyclical and get the PhD, hoping to land the comfortable government job and ride out the depression there.
The author is 19 years old, so I'm guessing he dropped out pretty early. I don't think he was actually in college long enough to even know that it was a waste of time for him.<p>I loved college, especially a lot of the stuff that happened well after I turned 19. I feel really lucky that college forced me to learn so much stuff. Otherwise my mind would have gotten stuck in a narrower path.
I've never heard of anyone learning thermodynamics/static/mechanical design/fluid dynamics/heat transfer/etc from a group of people gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other (other than in a school).<p>Technological advancement has a lot to do with "improving the human condition" and the majority of significant advances come from those who have been through higher education.
College is more than learning the material, it's also about learning about yourself. Most of the time, it's your first taste of freedom and it's one of the only times where you aren't really a kid anymore and you aren't stuck working in a 9-5.<p>You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not that easy.
Does the education system in the US need to be changed? Absolutely 100% agree that it does. Do 18-19 year old people have the world figured out? Not by a long shot, but they sure think they do.
I'm curious to see the success rate of entrepreneurs without college degrees vs. those with degrees, however you might define success and over whatever time horizon. What do you think?
in 30 years, we'll be "remember the UnCollege movement? yeah, we really wanted to change the world at that time".<p>definitely a good movement to demand for change in education, will it revolutionize the system? probably not.
I'm not going to make any comments regarding the article, but this is a topic I've been annoyed with for some time now. From 2000 to 2004 I spent a lot of my time getting better at building websites, starting with learning HTML on my own before taking a class on it at school in 2004. I excelled in the only programming class available at my high school, easily keeping up with the second year students. When I graduated I had several websites using PHP/MySQL and was still building my skills every day. For my senior project I was asked to show everyone my passion and demoed a website I had created with a content management system and showed the code.<p>I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I got stuff done and everyone around me thought I was really good at what I did. This was never something I bragged about, I have always been completely aware of how little I understand about everything.<p>Then I went to apply for college. I had wild dreams of just picking classes that interested me and taking them, learning all sorts of complicated tools and programming languages. Imagine my surprise when I instead was asked to take basic math, english and other uninteresting refresher courses. I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't know what the program I wanted was called so I ended up in a CIS program. I lost most of my passion for programming and making websites at that time. I switched schools, got an internship that turned into a job, but it's just a completely worthless experience for me.<p>I'm visiting in an advanced HTML class right now and they are going over techniques I used EIGHT YEARS AGO. I used these skills in my high school HTML class where no one else could. Worse, these skills they are teaching are now outdated and trivial. The LAMP stack isn't hot and new anymore, and now I just get annoyed when people get excited about being able to use it because it is so basic and trivial to use.<p>It deeply saddens me that I've wasted my time at college; I could have instead worked on personal projects for the past 6 years since starting and I would have not wasted money on tuition, student loans and my time on worthless classes like I'm still taking. When I bring up how little I've gotten out of my education that I've paid tens of thousands of dollars for the response I get is "You'll have a degree that you can show to future employers!" Sorry, I'd rather have a portfolio of work than something that just shows I have had minimal experience at trivial applications of a variety of subjects.<p>I used to be passionate on doing personal projects and all of the skills necessary towards my goals in life, then I went to college and had all of that ambition sucked out of me, replaced with worthless boring classes that wasted my time. You're probably thinking "why not just work on these projects while going to school/work for the past six years?" I could have, but those around me made it seem like college and working were more important. The mindset became "I'm going to college and working, what more do you want?" My parents didn't realize that I will probably make every dollar for the rest of my life using a computer. Instead, they just saw someone wasting their time on a computer and berated me at every opportunity. I'm just now realizing that I need to quit listening to those people and need to just work on whatever seems valuable to me.
I attend Baruch College in NYC, which is a city-funded school. My tuition is <$6000 yearly, and I am extremely happy with my classes. Required courses for the business school include business law, micro and macro economics, calculus, statistics, accounting, and other highly useful courses. The school is in the city, so I've found it very easy to get a marketing position at a start-up while in school. I've gotten to meet and speak to the CFO of JP Morgan and Tommy Hilfiger, and got his daughters input on an idea. Connections with professors have been very useful, and often fascinating. The emphasis on communication intensive courses has noticeably improved my skill.<p>I am extremely happy with my college experience, and would certainly recommend it for the opportunity cost.