The Case Against College Education

[Sparx]

Do you live at home? I am talking tuition plus room and board.

no, i have an apartment. but even still, room/board at my school is roughly 2/3k a semester, so it is only 5/6k for a semester and room and board. no where near 30k a year.

 

[Sparx]

I can't agree with EVERYONE because I did know a number of people who literally never did the party thing. If you say the MAJORITY, I'll agree with that. I agree completely. You can find plenty of examples of people FROM PAST GENERATIONS who had little in the way of formal education and made up for it with hard work and talent -- but you won't find many of these exceptional people amongst our children's generation. Those doors are largely closed. Then you're being unfair by deciding ahead of time that a degreed individual isn't going to have a chance. Because of your personal bias, you're discounting anyone without a degree without even looking at his or her qualifications. Are you aware that more and more college students -- particularly those in technical fields like engineering, architecture, and computer fields -- are doing internships that give them extensive hands-on experience? Our universities are moving towards four days in the classroom, one day a week in the work world.

my thoughts exactly. and actually, i have to have more than 500 hours of an internship in my field to graduate. thats one semester of three days in the classroom and two days in field, and one semester of two days in the classroom and three days in the field.

contrary to popular belief (well i won't say popular, because i've only heard this from college prejudiced dis posters) it is possible to get a degree and have work experience.

i'm a social work major. when i graduate with my degree i will be hired into the department of children services over anyone with any other degree. state legislation is placing more MSWs into social work fields than ever before. and you can't get that job without a degree, no matter how much experience you have.

 

[golfgal]

no, i have an apartment. but even still, room/board at my school is roughly 2/3k a semester, so it is only 5/6k for a semester and room and board. no where near 30k a year.

So with room/board/tuition/fees your school really isn't any less expensive then most smaller state schools around the country. I just checked DS17 school for next year and tuition is $3145 each semester, overall cost for the year $17,500.

 

[crewmatt]

Yea I'm 50/50 on the argument. Yes there are quite a lot of jobs that I encounter everyday that people don't need a college degree to do. There's management staff on my team who literally run spreadsheets all day to track money spent vs budget. Really far from rocket science. Sometimes they organize team outings. All things that could comfortably be done with a HS diploma.

We also have a lot of software testers, for some tasks yes the college degree and knowledge of advanced finance topics comes in handy, or the ability to write automated test programs. But there is quite a bit of the testing that could be done by anyone even without a highschool degree, just a basic knowledge of what a computer interface should feel like (the fit and feel type of testing that always is the most time consuming and hardest to nail down exactly).

In our programmers I do see a difference between the ones that have degrees in CS or Engineering or etc and the ones that don't. While on the day to day screen and interface work it's fairly transparent, on the more complex programs requiring complex algorithms or more elaborate data and program structures to do it well, there is a noticeable difference in the people that have a CS degree and experience vs the people either straight out of school (often write programs that are hard to maintain) and the people with experience but no CS degree (often write programs that have lots of brute force solutions in it).

College is no substitute for experience, and in some cases experience is no substitute for education (note not college education necessary but the only way to learn some things is to take an academic interest in them) and honestly I think maybe 3-4 classes I took the whole time have really become the most useful to me (and I HATED Numerical Computing). The rest while very interesting I dont use in my day to day work. I did several internships and Co-Ops (summer+semester internship) which helped me quite a bit in learning both how to work in a professional environment as well as how to solve real problems as opposed to the ones presented in a vaccuum in a text book (I mean really how many poker playing programs can you write).

Oh I'm also an education addict, and am currently working on my MS. I just like learning things. Expensive hobby.

 

[crewmatt]

Oh and as a millenial I will say that I lucked out that I got a job where I get to do something I really enjoy, have an awful lot of sway in what I do and how I do it, and get to work with fun people. But some of the people I work with are drastically overqualified for their jobs (as I said in the post above) and yes they are extremely bored. I think a lot of that comes from potentially either A - choosing a field that is not currently in demand - no offense to my comparative literature and journalism friends who are now editting and writing proposals or B - not being challenged at work - a few of my friends tell me all the time that they've forgotten more skills since they've graduated college than their boss currently knows (now yes I know this isnt always true but it also isnt always not true). They're stuck doing the same thing day in and day out simply due to seniority (which is something millenials don't hold in very high esteem). My boss is awesome about letting me take on whatever I want to take on, and providing me tons of support, and I'd like to say I deliver about 90% of the time. And I try to do the same thing with the guys that work under me.