College - A Waste of time?

[Demosthenes11]

The idea that you need a degree to succeed in life is kinda disproved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...t_billionaires

People with a drive to succeed are likely to attend college, so you can't just say that people who don't go to college are not likely to succeed. If college did not exist people would still succeed.

Why can't you prove your "quality" to an employer by working a few months and point to results rather then pointing to a diploma?

this doesn't make college a waste of time, even if you were correct. Education should not be prioritized for the work force in a first world country.

[Omnipotent]

As long as you have connections, you don't need a college degree. Getting a college degree helps you develop those connections, if you have none, and can lead to that high paying job. I could quit school right now, and work for my Uncles company making 60,000 starting, with the intent to take over his company making in the high 5xx,xxx. It's all about getting that paper with your name on it, because unless you are Mark Zucherberg or Warren Buffet-like, you won't get the respect you demand.

[ronin sparthos]

When a 14 yo boy cracks open encrypted DVDs, while a 28yo girl barely knows c++ after graduation, what measure is a diploma. Sure some companies only give interviews to graduates, but in many companies the floor guy can climb up pretty fast if the manager sees his/hers potential.

Because a 14yr old computer wunderkind is the average.

Diplomas are a way of setting an average for members of the workforce. You're going to always have people who are far and away above the standard and these individuals will most likely be recognized for their talents simply because they're that good but for anyone who isn't a prodigy or doesn't have high end connections you are most likely going to gain something from college either on the maturity, networking or skills front.

This isn't to say you can't graduate HS and start a successful business but is that the average HS grad in the US? No.

Of course on the opposite end you have people far below the standard or individuals with a degree that are clueless but much like wunderkind and those with high-end connections these are outliers that do not diminish the need for meeting the standard of a degree.

[Xno Kappa]

What is test even trying to argue? Dumb down the population or %100 government funded colleges? Force companies to hire people with absolutely 0 credientials?

Aren't you a huge Ron Paul supporter or some shit lol?

[ronin sparthos]

What is test even trying to argue? Dumb down the population or %100 government funded colleges? Force companies to hire people with absolutely 0 credientials?

Aren't you a huge Ron Paul supporter or some shit lol?

What I've gotten from his argument is that college is a cash sink that isn't worth the 2-5 years you spend there coming out of HS.

Instead:
-Individuals should either work directly out of HS pursuing their career (since you learn nothing of value in college)
-Employers should train these individuals on their own time from scratch (because employers are omnibenevolent)
-Everyone has the potential/resources/ideas to become billionaires without higher education simply because a handful of individuals have done it.
-Credentials mean nothing because some people have bought diplomas from a mill or come out of college clueless.

[Yugl]

The idea that you need a degree to succeed in life is kinda disproved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...t_billionaires

People with a drive to succeed are likely to attend college, so you can't just say that people who don't go to college are not likely to succeed. If college did not exist people would still succeed.

Why can't you prove your "quality" to an employer by working a few months and point to results rather then pointing to a diploma?

Post wiped earlier, so I'll be brief:

The link proves not everyone needs a degree to be successful. The link proves that those individuals did not need a degree to be successful. The link does not prove that everyone can be successful without a degree.

It is not contradictory to claim that people with a drive are likely to attend college and claim that people who do not go to college are less likely to succeed. All you've done is argued that the causal relation may stem solely from the drive or an interaction between college and drive (This latter proposition would support the effectiveness of college though). If you do make this argument, you may only claim that success is a matter of expertise. Otherwise, the fact that employers use degrees as a weeding mechanism immediately undermines the former proposition. However, if you limit success to expertise, your link contributes even less to the discussion because wealth is not necessarily an indication of expertise. For example, it's not clear how you judge the "expertise" of an individual's social-media creation. Social media, in particular, highly depends on your user base and it's not clear that google+ or other websites would be more successful if they, hypothetically, had Zuckerberg headed these sites. After all, timing and opportunity matter in this particular case.

This issue aside, it's not clear how you can assert that people would be successful without university training a priori. The only intuition that could support such a claim would involve reducing the standard of success for everyone . However, such a claim would fall under a US-centric view of the world because the US ceasing university education would not necessitate that all countries do the same. In short, you're misdirecting the facts in responding to the issue.

[test123]

As long as people are willing to take the bill for their own decisions I don't care what they do. People aren't dumb just because they don't have a college diploma. Knowledge and intelligence are two different things. You gain knowledge, not intelligence. You need intelligence to gain knowledge. But if you are intelligent you can teach yourself stuff without a college. There are countless online lectures and self-teaching methods.

[Zilong]

why stop at college though, I'd like to know if anyone uses much of K-12's shit beyond basic writing, science and math skill...if even that, maybe we should just abolish the entire education system and just give family with children a bunch of text and reference book to self study.

[miokomioko]

Or we should expect employers to put babies on payroll and teach them how to do their jobs for us.

[Inactive]

why stop at college though, I'd like to know if anyone uses much of K-12's shit beyond basic writing, science and math skill...if even that, maybe we should just abolish the entire education system and just give family with children a bunch of text and reference book to self study.

im game

[Woozie]

Several subjets that depend on eachother that you need in order to do your job are useful. But what about everything else, which is my point.

For the economy as a whole, why should a good chunk of the population "waste" so much time studying something they will hardly ever use. It is like building roads noone will use.

What do you mean by "everything else"? Do you mean gen ed requirements that aren't at all related to math and physics? I do think those are absolutely useless and wish we didn't have them (but that's a whole 'nother discussion right there) but since you only do those for less than half of your college career (as a physics/math student who will need 6~10 years of college before entering the workforce) I didn't count those.

As for any non gen ed class, pretty much every class a physics or math major takes is going to make them better at math and physics even if the class isn't about the specific area of physics or math the person ends up in. Being good at math and physics isn't just about the acquired knowledge. It's also about the "mathematical maturity" (and the equivalent concept in physics) that you develop from doing lots and lots of different types of math and physics. For example, it's (usually, but not always) a lot easier to handle quantum mechanics after doing E&M even though you may not use any the same math or science from E&M in a one semester QM class. In general, the more classes you've taken in math and physics, the better you'll do at later classes regardless of whether or not they use the same material.

So the only way for classes to be unused in your career is if someone majors in math or physics and then gets a job doing something that is neither math nor physics.

[test123]

There is a clear distinction between High School and College. At some point you are starting to learn a skill to land you a job. But do you want to be 20 or 28+debt when you have the job. And yes, I think you can do many jobs with just a few years practice after high school.

[KCem]

So promotion of a child labour force, because it's logical ! Who'd have thought those illegal Asian sweatshops were a step ahead of us the whole time !

[Zilong]

i know a group of people who don't bother with high school or higher education and just taught their kids what is necessary to do for their future profession in life.

they're called the Amish.

[Xno Kappa]

This thread is fucking stupid lol.

[Zilong]

This thread is fucking stupid lol.

Probably because the thread went in debt and went to college to learn shit that is unrelated to the topic that is being currently discussed...or so the OP would argue.

[Yugl]

This thread is fucking stupid lol.

Nope, this made the thread worthwhile:

i know a group of people who don't bother with high school or higher education and just taught their kids what is necessary to do for their future profession in life.

they're called the Amish.

[archibaldcrane]

College is overrated. I mean, if you run a successful company like Ebay, noone will even care if you completed your degree in computer science or not when you try to run an even bigger company.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,4602467.story

wait

[kuronosan]

As long as people are willing to take the bill for their own decisions I don't care what they do. People aren't dumb just because they don't have a college diploma. Knowledge and intelligence are two different things. You gain knowledge, not intelligence. You need intelligence to gain knowledge. But if you are intelligent you can teach yourself stuff without a college. There are countless online lectures and self-teaching methods.

wat

[Woozie]

I can't speak for all careers, but I'm sure you'll agree that in math and physics, requiring a college degree is the best way to train someone for a career.

To give an example, I spent this summer studying photoluminescence in photovoltaic cells. After teaching us how to not break equipment, the professors basically threw us in a huge building with chemicals and lasers and shit and told us to come up with something useful in 10 weeks if we want to get paid. The actual button pressing and lever pulling to set up and use my laser and record data is something a brain damaged retarded inbred monkey could do in his sleep with one hand tied behind his back. But that's pretty much the only thing that could be done without having years of background knowledge in physics and math, and no one hires us just to sit and press buttons all day. My job was to design an experiment, carry out the experiment, and then interpret the results (and then repeat the experiment and make changes when my original experiment inevitably isn't enough). The experiment had to be something useful and something that had never been done before. Just figuring out what's useful and what hasn't been done requires years and years of education since it requires reading tons of peer reviewed journal articles and other literature on the subject. Of course, designing an experiment and especially interpreting the results of an experiment also requires years worth of knowledge. You're not going to get a job doing physics if you can't already do all of these things. No employer is going to spend a few years educating you so that a few years down the line you'll be able to start being useful to them.

Even the button pressing caveman-could-do-it work would sometimes get complicated if the machine wasn't working as intended. My laser intensity steadily dropped throughout the course of the summer but I was able to adjust for that using my knowledge of quantum theory and using my knowledge of math to learn some stuff about optics and about solid state physics. Another incident occurred when I accidentally broke a diffusion pump and needed to repair it on the fly to prevent ruining my samples and breaking more equipment. There just happen to be other students around with enough engineering background to fix it. If it wasn't for that, my mistake would have cost tens of thousands of dollars, something most employers probably look down upon.

In non experimental physics, I'd say the situation is even worse. In non experimental physics, the "carry out the experiment" part is no longer caveman-can-do-it button pressing. It's designing a model or simulation of whatever you're studying it, which requires more background knowledge than any other step in the process. The only part of the job that's easy is playing pranks on your coworkers or playing soccer or "the fast and the physicists" in the computer lab while waiting for your program to finish running (pranks and soccer and making up games are very important parts of any mathematicians or scientists duty).