I just want to know when college became some holy grail of uncovering your true potential. I've been to college. It absolutely and utterly pales in comparison to the knowledge base I'll never have time to consume for free on the internet. As for networking and thinking. I find an IRC channel and a few conferences in a single year introduced me to more like minded people than I met in the whole of my college experience. I'm sure we could all make the argument you get into college what you put into it. The same goes for my preference of meeting people and networking. The difference is I wouldn't be tens of thousands of dollars in the hole if I had known that earlier.
I think the point is that college exposes you to unlike-minded people. You can find plenty of people who share your interests on IRC or Hacker News. You can also find people who don't share your interests on the Internet, but realistically, you won't. The true learning experience of college is that it throws you together with people that you would never hang out with by choice, and so forces you to broaden your perspective.
In practical terms, you will probably never hang out with these people after graduation. Most likely, they will be useless for your career (although you never can be sure - I co-founded my first startup with my floormate from sophomore year). But there's something that changes in your brain when you're forced to re-examine your most basic beliefs from the perspective of someone who doesn't share them, and it's a transferrable skill. You may very well decide that you were right the first time (my goals, strengths, and skills are not hugely different from what I believed in high school), but you see a whole new level of nuance that's missing when everyone around you self-selects into the same groups.
It's certainly possible to get this experience outside of college. But it's much, much harder, because you are looking for something outside of your own conscious awareness. I think one of PG's essays once said "Do whatever seems harder", which is pretty good advice. To that, I'd add "become the people you resent most" - not permanently, but long enough to understand their POV and empathize with them.
> I think the point is that college exposes you to unlike-minded people. You can find plenty of people who share your interests on IRC or Hacker News. You can also find people who don't share your interests on the Internet, but realistically, you won't.
This ‘like-unlike-minded’ categorization seems dubious to me. It can be said as well that college throws together the like-minded (they all felt the need to go to college); and Hacker News throws together the unlike-minded (because vaguely IT-related interests is all we have in common).
> [College] throws you together with people that you would never hang out with by choice, and so forces you to broaden your perspective.
Plausible, though it remains your speculation (you went to college). I don’t see how college is radically different from working in various workplaces with respect to perspective-broadening.
> But there's something that changes in your brain when you're forced to re-examine your most basic beliefs from the perspective of someone who doesn't share them, and it's a transferrable skill.
The true learning experience of college is that it throws you together with people that you would never hang out with by choice, and so forces you to broaden your perspective.
Huh, my take on college is the exact opposite. Public secondary school is where you are together with people who you would never hang out with choice, but are thrown together by accident of birth location. College is where I finally got to live with fellow nerds, have late night bull sessions, join clubs that matched my interests, have crazy dining hall conversations, etc. It was great, I could finally be a normal, fun, social person without having to dumb myself down or hide my intellectual interests. The true value of college, is that you can find groups of similarly ambitious people, and you can feed off of each other and push each other further. Also, you can build lasting bonds that will be helpful over the course of your life.
Quoting two of my best teachers in college on the worth of college:
"What is college for? To make friends."
"College is a way of opening you to see the world in more than black and white."
That's why college only worth when you make it with the right age. Otherwise you'll not have time to make any friends neither openness to change your mindset. College will be a waste of time and resources.
I would say also that college teaches you the why not the how.
As an example, you don't need 5 years to draw an house. Few weeks of learning will make you a CAD drafter. But you still need 5 years to explain why did you draw that particular house and be able of making rational choices and not just random ones.
I really resonate with this comment. Like many my college career was mostly 'stuff I already knew' in the sense that I had been playing around with electronics and computers throughout high school. But college gave me an opportunity to hang out with folks who I would not have hung out with were I self selecting the crowd. And that experience allowed me to step outside of my own thinking and see a more nuanced world of alternate views. It also improved my critical thinking skills.
Without going to University (in the UK) I could have continued to learn technical things and be a great geek. I studied Electronic Eng, but I spent most of my time reading literature/classics as well as books about all sorts of things and speaking to lots of types of people. I think this has given me an advantage over a lot of programmers I meet who seem to struggle to relate to "normal" people - you know the people in management, accounting, HR etc...
For me, the most important thing about college was 1) setting aside such a massive block of time to learn, and 2) being in a place with a bunch of other people who were also there mostly to learn. That's not to say it's necessarily worth it for everyone, and depending what you're bringing to it it's certainly possible to fail to get much out of it. I think different groups of people over- and undervalue it, in weird ways.
>>I just want to know when college became some holy grail of uncovering your true potential.
When I did studies here in India, the internet penetration was close to 0. You could visit a library with books, practice paper, pen, and a water bottle and clock record 12 hours straight minus rest room breaks. You could break for tuition classes after wards. And then again work a few hours in the midnight.
This will prep you up for productive work later in life.
The competition is pretty fierce for getting through entrance examinations, and I would say working on hard math and physics problems helps develop your problem solving skills as much as programming does.
>>I've been to college. It absolutely and utterly pales in comparison to the knowledge base I'll never have time to consume for free on the internet.
This depends on how your spent your time in college.
Teach yourself real analysis over the internet. There are people who can, but not nearly as many as can learn it in a decent undergraduate math class. I imagine the same is true for other difficult subjects.
I really recommend MIT's Open Courseware for this. Modern MOOC platforms such as Coursera and edX tend towards the lower level courses and prerequisites are a major problem for anyone looking to do an entire degree. OCW is great though. Motivated learners can go at a minimum of 2x the speed of university classes.
The bigger problem is that not many people want to work through these kinds of courses. Universities motivate students through credentials, but open courseware is really just the people who love the education itself as opposed to the schooling and credentials.
MIT's OCW is fantastic. It's not what I think most people have in mind when they talk about teaching themselves a subject over the internet (especially since many of the classes I'm familiar with have assigned textbooks and homework), but you make a good point.
I disagree with the last two statements, though:
> Universities motivate students through credentials, but open courseware is really just the people who love the education itself as opposed to the schooling and credentials.
Universities also try to motivate students by putting a lot of people who want to learn the same material together at the same time, and by coordinating the pace, readings, etc. It's easier to get motivated to study if all of your friends are studying, whether or not there's a grade involved. It's easier to learn something difficult if you can ask specific questions from other people learning the material (ie classmates) or if you can ask them from an expert (the professor and TAs, ideally).
Believe it or not, students, TAs and professors of physical classes can all be found on the OCW forums. The sheer wealth of discussion is amazing, but the one big drawback is that the higher the level of the course, the less likely a quick response is. In some cases it's better to go to http://math.stackexchange.com/
I totally agree about the textbook part of the equation, too. While I love the automated graders for CS courses on Coursera, I think it's a major, major flaw to de-emphasize textbooks in favor of lectures. It's different for language courses of course, but I've never encountered an engineering course in which lectures were a good use of time compared to working through the book and going to office hours as needed.
