First, Elon Musk has an incredibly skewed version of the world.
Second, for people without educated parents (which most people who go to college can't comprehend because most people going to college had parents who also went to college), I believe a STEM education has way more value and you do in fact learn valuable things in programming, electronics, biology, chemistry, etc. from experienced people very very rapidly. It's hard finding good intro books on your own, and even harder finding people with expertise who can answer questions (if you look at a circuit and wonder what one particular capacitor is doing, it can be a rabbit hole).
Third, software, is (perhaps an unpopular opinion), not that hard to pick up. You can basically Google everything. Using Google you can even solve problems in languages you don't know. A ton of people do this. That's also part of why you see so many people programming who don't have a C.S. degree. I personally don't have a C.S. degree and feel like a lot of the projects I work on I would have been capable of learning back on middle school. You don't need years of scaffolding like you do in in physics, where each year they layer on more math and theory until they finally build up to the ability to grasp the concept you're interested in.
I think if you want to be a chemical engineer and you don't go to college, you're going to have a bad time. Same for physics. Same for electrical engineering.
For the humanities (and I'm lumping in software, because for Christ's sake, we even call them languages), I'm not really certain college provides much education. The real value is getting hired by a tech company that requires a degree (for the actual humanities... not even that I imagine).
At the expense of playing devil's advocate for most responses in this thread, I really disagree with this statement. I went to a reasonably good (top 25) state school. I studied a lot of hard science: physics, astronomy, CS, math. I can wholeheartedly say that without the structure and rigor of college I would not have learned as much as I did. Sure, I might not use all that knowledge in my personal day-to-day, but it is a lot more complete than if I had tried to teach it to myself.
On top of that, colleges really were the place to find information prior to the internet. Maybe Musk's statement is more relevant today, but in previous generations you needed something like a university to do research (try looking for physics journals that are up to date at your local library).
Last, Musk's actions speak louder than his words: most of his companies' jobs currently require degrees, they mostly recruit from tier 1 universities, and Musk himself _completed_ 2 degrees, and started a third. Obviously he values the signalling a degree grants.
All of this to say that despite that, some of the best developers I know have little or no formal education. So the caveat is true: you don't necessarily need a degree to learn and be successful in the modern day for at least some (or maybe many) things, I just personally find a lot of value in a formal education.
(Sorry for any poor grammar, just had LASIK done and its a little hard to see)
Warning: I'm a salty dropout from an incredibly bad Computer Science program at a private Iowa school.
> The main value of college, he said, is to be found in proving discipline by completing “annoying homework assignments” and in hanging around with people of the same age before entering the workforce.
In my anecdotal experience, I find this statement to be incredibly true. Effectively it was party and do the busywork it takes to get by in your classes from professors who have lived the majority of their professional life in academia. They berated me for learning web dev because, "web software just won't be a thing" - this is in 2005-6ish where it absolutely was already.
I worked in-industry at the time as a rookie sysadmin and web developer. It was a huge waste of my time to go to school vs. spending time learning on my own through my career and personal projects. I know this doesn't apply to all trades - I've always been focused on web development, automation, and ecommerce. Those were/are incredibly easy to self-learn if you enjoy it (even in 2005ish when I was in school)!
I resent my schooling because I had a FT job with real responsibilities, living at home helping to support my cancer patient mother (bio dad died years prior), and trying to keep my head above water socially/academically. As someone saddled with responsibility I felt I was in a playground for children riddled with booze, partying, and sex while professors demeaned my career telling me to "not to write software for the internet". It was bad.
I have to agree. Some of the full professors I know are real embarrassments. They refer to teaching web development as something a "trade school" would do. Then they fill up the classes with inane type theory that's obsessed with weirdo contrived cases that never occur in real life. Then to top it off, they trot out some nihilistic proof that "proves" the type systems can never be complete. What a bunch of maroons.
> They refer to teaching web development as something a "trade school" would do.
I kinda agree. I think that you could learn all you need to know to be able to work in a FAANG junior web role (i.e. programming, algorithms, distributed computing, UNIX, databases etc.) in a focused 2-year trade school program.
Absolutely... I've been wondering why the FAANGs don't just take education into their own hands and do this.
The problem is when people talk down about it, which trust me is real. Wanting to make software that works great for people and is incredibly accessible utilizing the internet as a distribution/communications platform makes me less of an engineer than other more "traditional" ones... but the truth is I can add a lot of value to a company just by
"getting things done" whereas I see a lot of the more academic-focused engineers pigeon-holing themselves into a one-dimensional career.
Even though I think you could teach the basics of what I do professionally in a 2-year program I don't think it should be devalued by 4-year institutions/people due to market value alone.
The large tech companies do basically take practical education into their own hands. When you are an engineering manager and you get new graduates in your team, you have tools like code review and mentorship from tech leads to teach your new hires practical skills. It’s wise to expect a new grad new hire to spend some time just getting up to speed on practical programming methods, and not necessarily be super productive day 1.
Startups are different, but Facebook or Google love to hire new grad engineers who don’t contribute much for six months as they learn from coworkers, then slowly develop into a top-tier contributor over the next year or two, then perform at a very high level consistently for the rest of their career. They prefer that to someone who can write medium-low quality code right now, let’s say enough to be a consistent 25th percentile performer at Oracle, and will continue to write that quality of code for the rest of their career.
I was a professor at ND. I left happily for all these reasons. Hopefully the idea that some people who were parts of the problem left gives you some solace.
By definition, that stuff is things that you don't use in your job, as otherwise you WOULD have learned it eventually.
And by extension, I assume he means things that he wouldn't have learned just going to a job in the first place. Many people learn how to do laundry in collage, but that they would have to learn for any form of independence.
So what we are left with are random intellectual pursuits that at best have a marginal effect on your job.
I love learning useless stuff. I'm happy to talk about intellectual history of economcis, or mongolian history. However wouldn't I think its a good idea to force 95% of society to learn about the difference between the New and the Old German Historical school just so they learn something new.
We are talking about a system that costs society a significant amount its resource IF the best argument you can come up with to defend that system is "I was forced to learn some random stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have explored and that was fun for me", then we need to seriously question the resource allocation of society. Sound to me more like a Kindergarten for young adults, and most parents wouldn't pay 50k a semester for it.
First of all, $50k a sememster would be the top 1% most expensive colleges out there. Probably more like 0.1%.
Secondly, learning things that are not specific to ones job is the definition of well rounded and while some companies may only want socially inept specialists that can do nothing else, society is much better when it is made up of well rounded individuals.
You sound a lot like high schoolers taking math classes. We are -never- going to use this in real life. No, you probably won't, but the point is learning how to learn, organize, study and become more intelligent in general.
> First of all, $50k a sememster would be the top 1% most expensive colleges out there. Probably more like 0.1%.
Fair enough its pretty expensive either way.
> Secondly, learning things that are not specific to ones job is the definition of well rounded and while some companies may only want socially inept specialists that can do nothing else, society is much better when it is made up of well rounded individuals.
First of all that is a total straw-men. Most social education happens in live, not in school. Going to extra classes of Plato will not make you better socially educated, more so then going to play basketball or volunteer at a soup kitchen.
Second of all, if you actually look at the evidence of how people hire you will notice that the idea of 'well rounded' isn't high on the list, no matter how much people like to talk about it.
> You sound a lot like high schoolers taking math classes. We are -never- going to use this in real life. No, you probably won't, but the point is learning how to learn, organize, study and become more intelligent in general.
Maybe the high schooolers in math class have a point. Because this 'learning how to learn theory' that you are making, has been the argument for 100+ years, yet in all that time, people who have studied these question simply can't find any truth to that claim. You actually learn what you learn.
There is a whole chapter in 'The Case against Education' on how every generation of social scientists working on education want to find that effect, but nobody ever does.
I agree with Musk's point, but I think he should have been more clear: most people treat college as 'basically for fun and not learning.'
I personally got a hell of a lot out of my degree, but I was working my ass off, and studying with focused interest. I was working in the field I was studying full time as well.
For me, college was a way to be forced to study topics I would not have chosen to study on my own. I think most people are like that, and that's why forced curriculums can be beneficial in some way. Do I think college as it is today is the best way to achieve this? No I do not.
I think so much about university is just a waste, and the cost just keeps skyrocketing. Most people are not serious academics, and that's honestly what it takes to do well in university. Are you a person who is deeply, seriously, curious and will just read book after book after book? Good, go to college. If you are not, then you'll be better off learning some other way (catch, there is no other way right now, but there should be!)
> catch, there is no other way right now, but there should be!
Depends on your field... I've self-learned myself into a 6-figure career because programming, web, automation, Linux/UNIX, etc. resources have always been freely available for me to find on the internet.
Also it helps to be able to show your work vs. relying on the piece of paper. Killing it in the interview, being competent with basic algos/problem solving, and a solid portfolio will take you far.
> Are you a person who is deeply, seriously, curious and will just read book after book after book? Good, go to college.
Unfortunately I found myself more and more like this, after I opted not to go to college (well, not books per say, but I have started to consume more literature in general trying to get deep knowledgeof how things work).
Also, college becomes less useful as more people don't take it seriously. Peer pressure is a thing. I actually wish that my peers in college were more studious as I'm certain it would have made me work harder and focus more on becoming educated.
If you extend this to its logical conclusion, then he’s claiming that there is no value in teaching. Put another way: learning by yourself is equally effective and efficient as learning from an expert.
I think anyone with a trade (like plumbing) or an engineering degree would wholeheartedly disagree. At some point, you don’t know what you don’t know, and your own biases will blind you to the full breadth of any topic.
Perhaps with lots of wealth, we’d all have enough time to teach ourselves advanced skills, try them out, and learn from mistakes, but most people don’t have that luxury. College gives that framework to everyone who can attend.
This is a slippery slope logical fallacy that translates the value of college (an incumbent business) to the value of teachers (a person entity)... that's a poor translation and not a "logical conclusion".
In good faith, I believe if you asked Elon, "Are you claiming there is no value in teaching?", that he would say "that's not what I was claiming."
He's saying there's no value in college. College is not 100% good teaching, but it's not 0%. Musk is the one who chose an extreme position -- that college has no value -- not me.
He is prone to extreme, off-handed statements that are easy to refute, so perhaps I should stop taking him literally.
There is a big difference between, 'you don't need university' and 'you don't need teaching'.
> I think anyone with a trade (like plumbing) or an engineering degree would wholeheartedly disagree. At some point, you don’t know what you don’t know, and your own biases will blind you to the full breadth of any topic.
University professors that teach rocket science are not the same thing as working in a rocket factory with rocket engineers.
Seems to me that you are making an argument against universities, if you invoke that the primary way of learning is with a practitioner.
That would mean people should go directly into the work force and learn on the job.
> Perhaps with lots of wealth, we’d all have enough time to teach ourselves advanced skills, try them out, and learn from mistakes, but most people don’t have that luxury. College gives that framework to everyone who can attend.
Actually college is far, far more expensive, and if it was about learning, it would make no sense.
I'm not sure your "logical conclusion" is accurate, nor do I think that's what Elon Musk is saying at all. Also, I'm not sure your background, but I would definitely raise a red flag at the idea that all college professors are "experts" in the field they're teaching.
I would argue this post is more in favor of online schooling, MOOCs, etc. And against the traditional college experience.
The funny thing with this line of thinking is the hand-waving involved when claiming the superiority of non-traditional methods.
I'm not going to claim every professor is a good professor -- but University is a human institution. MOOCs, bootcamps, self-help books, jazzercise, etc are all as fallible and just as guilty as University at selling an idea but get a free pass for being 'alternative.'
Did I claim superiority or equality? And is there not a problem if an insanely expensive institution is not orders of magnitude better than its free/cheap alternatives?
> I would definitely raise a red flag at the idea that all college professors are "experts" in the field they're teaching
Real-world: they're often not... or at least in my anecdotal experience.
I had professors who were shoving Pascal my throat in 2005-6 saying "it will come back because it's such a good language"... they told me that "writing software for the internet is a waste of time" when it was obvious that was the direction of the industry... they told me "MS Access is just as good if not better than other SQL solutions because it's accessible to the office worker".
Real-world anecdote: They almost never are, unless you're at one of the best universities in the country/world. Most often their experience is dated, they've been tenured for a long time and the quality of their work is pretty poor.
I broadly agree with what you're saying, but it wasn't obvious to most people in 2005 that web apps were the direction of the industry. Visionaries were predicting it, and I think they did know what they were talking about and weren't just making lucky guesses, but the vast majority of software users still had the attitude that a serious program was something you bought at the store and installed.
I sorta disagree here - it's neigh impossible to argue but I definitely feel like it didn't take a visionary in 2005 to predict that the web would be the next transport/distribution layer for software.
My argument: I was in HS from 2001-2005 and when I started it was the end of the Win98/IE era with highspeed internet being one of those things few people had (middle class Iowa). When I got out of HS nearly everyone lower-middle-class and above had a broadband internet connection, online gaming was booming, we were seeing offerings like Gmail, Google Docs happened, online courses were starting to be a thing, blah blah...
If you were an educator of the era trying to prepare people for a real-world career in CS you ABSOLUTELY shoulda had your fingers on that pulse noticing that the internet use was growing exponentially for everything from business, to socialization, to entertainment.
If anything, they shouldn't have been discriminatory against a student's choice to specialize in it saying "software on the internet isn't a thing" when it clearly already $#@%ing was with an obvious growth trajectory.
TLDR: "Software users" - totally agree don't expect them to have seen the wave coming in 2005. Collegiate computer science educator claiming to prepare students for real-world careers should have seen it coming from a mile away if they weren't tone-deaf to the industry (they were).
Well, yes for the most part you can self learn anything they teach you in college and even universities and yoir information would be even much more to date. But the problem is not just with the material you have to learn. But the discipline. Not many people posses the discipline needed to self study and college provide the framework for people to at least have a schedule. Albeit an expensive disciplinary measure.
For me the most valuable part of college was discovering how much I liked computer science. If I had picked a career when I was 17 it would not have been software engineer. Once I was in college, it was pretty simple to take a computer science class to see if I liked it, and I really did like it, even more than I had enjoyed teaching myself to program during my k-12 years. When I got bored with my original choice of major, it then seemed like a good idea to switch into computer science, and I’ve been happy with that choice ever since.
It is a shame that college is so expensive, but to me the real problem is people taking out loans to go through degree programs that don’t give you a high expected income. If you take on a lot of loans to get a CS degree from MIT, it’s probably going to be a worthwhile investment. If you take on those same loans to get a philosophy degree from Tulane, it’s a bad idea.
This seems to be far more true now. Thirty or forty years ago, there was no other easy way to get access to a professional-level computer and software that one could write programs with. These days, of course, one can pretty much have it for free, along with a wealth of educational material.
In addition, for people that had motivation problems, a University is a nice framework for forcing yourself into working through a lot of not-always-interesting material.
That said, if I was graduating high school today, I'd probably already have five or ten years of solid learning and programming experience, and just join a startup directly rather than trudging through a BS.
In India it is to fulfill the ego of professors nothing more. Unlike America professors are paid lower than the industry and those who can't get jobs in Industry become professors and treat students like slaves. I did not understood while in college but now i get it, it is a coping mechanism for incompetence. One good thing about Corono is that it forces online education like the recent MIT online classes, hope this will set a chain reaction and take the monopoly on education from traditional colleges.
> Unlike America professors are paid lower than the industry and those who can't get jobs in Industry become professors and treat students like slaves
Just sharing experiences, I was in-industry at the time of my education which caused a huge issue in backlash from the professors. These old salty men were dinosaurs and although I wasn't at some prestigious company I was still learning what it meant to run large-scale and highly-available web services - ie: they were stuck in the 8/16-bit era and I was HUNGRY to learn web.
Although I never felt like a slave, I felt like I was always a "lesser" to them no matter what. Coming to school with a fair amount of programming ability subverted them as I had a ton of people calling me up/IMing me for homework help vs. going to their restrictive office hours.
I wasn't the best student, aced the tests even with horrid attendance, organized collaboration on Google Docs so everyone had a consistent study-guide, and I tutored half of the class because I had better "office hours" that lined up with when college kids are working on homework/assignments... they haaated me.
I'm pretty sure that in the U.S. professors are paid way lower than what they could get in industry. They probably get at least six figures but so does anyone in the industry, especially with as much experience as a professor would.
Depends on the field and on the individual. In many fields, the professors would be all but unemployable. And even in hot fields like CS, some professors would not be very useful. It's hard to remember now, but back in the 80s, a PhD in CS was almost a strike on your resume rather than a plus.
I feel that. I've had no trouble learning the skills I've needed to succeed in the workplace, but I wish I'd gone to college for the social environment and the girls and the connections. The stuff I'm NOT good at on my own, basically.
Of course it is. But you go for the checkbox item for interviews. That's why you save as much and penny pinch. Also don't fall into the trap that schools have your best individual interests in mind. They just want your money and nickle and dime you at EVERY corner.
> Also don't fall into the trap that schools have your best individual interests in mind.
But can ya blame 18yr old kids/their families who are idealist believing that they do? I mean I say this having FELL for the trap!
I mean - I worked with the school I dropped out of doing their .edu as a web developer. When I went from being a "student" at the school to being part of the marketing effort it was a night-and-day difference on what the narrative was.
All I'm saying is that the marketing, the admissions counselors, the academic advisers, etc. all are devoid from telling you "HEY! We're a business FIRST and an educational institution SECOND." Perhaps projection, but I feel like lots of people learn this the hard way just like I did.
I sort of learned it after running the gauntlet the first time, however I went to a technical college and my family was low enough income that grants basically paid for it all through financial aid.
Going back, I had a plan in place, prepped for over a year, asked like ten million questions to them making sure I knew exactly how everything was gonna play out. The saddest part wasn't even coming back to college, but that I realized my college is so lacking it sort of makes me wish I could've somehow knew that for this program beforehand.
Second, for people without educated parents (which most people who go to college can't comprehend because most people going to college had parents who also went to college), I believe a STEM education has way more value and you do in fact learn valuable things in programming, electronics, biology, chemistry, etc. from experienced people very very rapidly. It's hard finding good intro books on your own, and even harder finding people with expertise who can answer questions (if you look at a circuit and wonder what one particular capacitor is doing, it can be a rabbit hole).
Third, software, is (perhaps an unpopular opinion), not that hard to pick up. You can basically Google everything. Using Google you can even solve problems in languages you don't know. A ton of people do this. That's also part of why you see so many people programming who don't have a C.S. degree. I personally don't have a C.S. degree and feel like a lot of the projects I work on I would have been capable of learning back on middle school. You don't need years of scaffolding like you do in in physics, where each year they layer on more math and theory until they finally build up to the ability to grasp the concept you're interested in.
I think if you want to be a chemical engineer and you don't go to college, you're going to have a bad time. Same for physics. Same for electrical engineering.
For the humanities (and I'm lumping in software, because for Christ's sake, we even call them languages), I'm not really certain college provides much education. The real value is getting hired by a tech company that requires a degree (for the actual humanities... not even that I imagine).