> More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations
The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.
Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.
I studied mechanical engineering and a bit of CS, though I didn't complete the degree. I work as a SWE now.
Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university.
University felt extremely intellectually restrictive to me. You were given a ton of material that you needed to learn at a surface level to pass tests. There was little room for exploration and deep understanding within courses.
Most of the material did not seem like it was going to be useful for me. I don't like learning for the sake of it, I prefer to try and focus on usefulness.
Why do I need to learn about how to draw structures in isometric and oblique or understand CPU registers when I have absolutely zero interest in those things and never want to do that kind of work?
Because "foundational knowledge" or something, even though the vast majority of people will never use the vast majority of the knowledge they learn. I've asked my friends who completed degrees how much of the information from their degree they use at work and it's practically nothing.
This is precisely why I'm glad I was able to choose (Management) Information Systems instead of Computer Science for my major. There are key courses in CS that I missed, but I feel like I also avoided a good number of courses (deeper math, specifically) that I ultimately never needed to establish my career in Web development. I've picked up the rest learning as I go.
Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.
I wonder if that's a difference between STEM and the humanities - and I wonder how much of the perception of college on HN is based on that experience.
In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!
I get where you're coming from, but at this point I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add.
From my perspective most faculty add very little value, so in terms of learning and exploration there's not much point in paying boatloads of money to attend when I could go through the material (Or similar) myself if I'm interested.
Just a suggestion: Try one class with a good professor and see what the difference is. Expert mentoring is a thing, outside academia too. How do you even know what books to read?
> I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add
This new social trend - which suits the reactionary movement very well (which doesn't mean you are a reactionary - is really tragic. We are just destroying so much in instututions and potential, so many years and resources lost, and mostly just to destroy things. It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts.
I know how valuable mentoring is, but a large part of the problem is that finding a "good" professor or mentor is difficult.
With people online you can at least vet them well and have access to their knowledge and advice. Even though it's not the same as a mentor I think learning from an expert online is better than having a mediocre mentor.
> It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts
I agree knowledge and learning are important, but I no longer feel like university is the primary place for that unless you want to go into academia. Internet communities feel like better environments than university at this point.
This doesn't feel like a purposeful destruction of university through a social trend though. The institutions are destroying themselves.
I think that 95% social is pretty important. I know it was for me. If I knew everything I know now about software after high school I could have gotten a good job, but coming out of high school I was socially completely inept. College accelerated me so much in that regard that I honestly can’t imagine my life without it today.
The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.
Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.