Kansas State Freshman Says College is a Scam

Parents Social Lounge
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I had a suitemate at Tulane Engineering who had straight As freshman year. He dropped out, too much pressure he said. I too was a A student along with him, and transferred out, was not satisfied with my overall situation at Tulane.

College and/or a particular college, is not for everyone.
Worked out for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Dean Kamen.

Even at the school I transferred into, still felt the requirements were too restrictive. I felt I was a high paying customer and forced to study things I truly knew were a waste of time in my life. Looking back years later, I still see it that way. College was designed by clergy for the idle rich, and we cling to our traditions even when they make no sense.

John Adams, before becoming our 2nd president, as French ambassador, was asked by French noblemen, about his knowledge of opera and arts. His answer was that he focused on law, politics and economics so his kids or grandkids will have the luxury of spending time to learn of such things. He was correct, it was then a luxury for the rich, yet somehow it became a necessity ?

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[Sigh]

“I agree with many of the points the student raised. At the prices the schools charge now and the debt people go into, one does begin to question the logic in being forced to take classes that are not applicable to your intended occupation.”

It is precisely this line of thought that will, should it proliferate, make this a second rate country.

We need both kinds of people folks. We need well-educated people and we need tradesmen. We no more need a country full of coders than we need a country full of philosophers.

There is an amalgam of qualities that is the well-educated person. Being really, really good at math, but having zero understanding of the world in which one lives, having no idea of history, having no sense of political systems or how the economy works or, more importantly, how policy makers think about it and why, having no sense of art and its role in our lives, having no ability to read and write the English (or other) language beyond where we leave off in high school … this is NOT an educated person. This is a one-skill pony show person.

The biggest challenge we face is justifying the need for such people in our society in a way that every-day folks who don’t have this kind of education can understand. We have failed in this respect.

People like Michael Roth at Wesleyan are making a valiant run at it, but I fear in the end that he comes across as yet another self-justifying academic egg head at an elite school. I should say, that’s how he comes across to people who don’t understand, and don’t want to understand, the issue.

Bringing it back to the more pragmatic, which is what so many want, there is ample evidence that what will be needed more and more in the future are people who are good at integrating various disciplines and thinking across multiple dimensions to solve problems. People who can ride more than one horse and can bring creativity to the table.

People who study the trades don’t tend to bring those qualities. Sorry. It’s true.

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@atomom , plenty of kids drop out for all kinds of reasons. I’m willing to bet 20 years later, most would make a different decision. I’ve personally never met one single person who cut their educations short who didn’t regret it. It I did, I would cite it here in the interests of intellectual honesty.

Bill Gates is the example people like to drop. It’s a terrible example. Bill Gates was one in a billion, and Bill Gates reads more literature, philosophy and other intellectual works in a year than most of us consume in our lives. That is a verifiable fact. The man never stops learning, and what he spends his time learning is not, I guess, how to better code.

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They are not only remarkable exception as they all had the rare spark of creativity/genius and the ability to execute on it, with the exception of Steve Jobs…they mostly dropped out when they were close to graduating and came from middle/upper-class families who could provide them with a safety net in case they failed. Knowledge of the latter tends to provide much security and peace of mind to aspiring entrepreneurs to drop out and attempt a business venture with the knowledge failure won’t be catastrophic financially.

The vast majority of people don’t have that spark or the safety nets most of them had.

Of all of them, only Steve Jobs comes the closest to a “rags to riches story” as he was an adoptee from a lower-middle class family and dropped out in the first semester at Reed.

However, he continued to sit in on classes…especially a seemingly impractical one on calligraphy which later heavily influenced him in the design of the computers and operating system graphics/user interface.

Bill Gates also had a comfortable safety net as his father was a prominent law partner at a Seattle biglaw firm and his mother sat on the board of some corporations. This was to be expected to an extent as his and Paul Allen’s early access to computers as kids/teens were costly enough that it was mainly a preserve for upper/upper-middle class kids in the '60s and '70s. Renting time on PDP-11s was exceedingly pricey…and having a personal computer when it first became available just as much so.

Keep in mind that the first IBM compatibles in 1981 with far less tech specs/speed than your lowest end smartphone today retailed for ~$5000 in 1981 dollars…and that was for the most stripped down option.

Also, I’d like to note that Bill Gates’ greatest claim to fame wasn’t in the technical/coding area*…especially considering the rights to the core of the Dos/Windows OSes which ushered in Microsoft’s rise was actually bought from another programmer for ~$100k.

Instead, it was more in the area of pioneering and implementing the concept of the software end-user license which separated software from being closely associated with PC hardware manufacturers and made it possible for him to make much more money by licensing software code using IP law to enable him to make money from multiple PC manufacturers other than IBM. While standard nowadays, this was a radical concept back in the early '80s in the computer/tech world.

  • Most hardcore engineering/CS folks IME tend to scoff at Bill Gates'/Paul Allen's tech chops and regard them much more as great marketers/businessmen than notable techies.
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@blevine Yet your posts here on CC show that you are very interested in college for your offspring.

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@TomSrOfBoston Interested in the context of knowing our society expects that piece of paper, and helping my kids do their best with that reality. My eldest independently came to the same conclusion, after a few semesters of college. In fact he changed his major to something of greater interest to him based on self study of the subject during summer break. But being forced to take other classes of no relevance to his interests, some of which took so much time and energy, that it made a huge negative impact on time available to study his actual interests. There are many things we must put up with and even make great efforts, even if we do not believe in them. I am not at all against learning and education, just not satisfied with the legacy form of education that we live with and accept that is terribly dated.

Regarding comments on Bill Gates and his lack of coding prowess, I studied Comp Sci and have worked in stem jobs my entire life. I happen to share the view, I was never impressed by him or Microsoft, in fact Microsoft broke anti-trust laws and should have been broken up. But any skills he had or could have had, did not require greek drama classes at Harvard. Total waste of time in his view, and good for him that he frees himself of societal norms.
I have no doubt he is doing meaningful things in his retired post Microsoft life. I would say I learned most of what I know outside the classroom as he did.

Dean Kamen was a middle class kid, not born rich.
And he was not a one hit wonder, has invented many wonderful things,
without the benefit of completing his degree.

Any of you watch Shark Tank ? Sometimes you see guys who graduated from schools like MIT,
eventually give up conventional jobs attained after such degree, only to go into a business that requires no advanced education. One MIT grad is making pet food. There is a wall street bond trader turned baker in NYC.
Did they really need greek classics, calculus, foreign lang requirements, etc ? Not saying there is anything wrong with learning those things, but paying up to 70k/yr for 4 years, and having half the classes on useless topics in relation to your own interests and goals, just seems like something that could be improved significantly.

Frankly if my kids wanted to study history or greek philosophy, they would not be at the expensive private schools they now attend. Even though they picked “practical” majors, I still feel haf the time and money is wasted based on the course requirements, quality of teaching, and style of education.
In fact in one case, they (with some coaching) chose a school that was more career oriented in terms of typical interests of undergrads (and this focus on career is often a criticism of the students at this school, because of centuries old snobbery of what college should be). My other chose a good tech school despite ranking criticism that it is less research oriented (good for undergrads), and weak in liberal arts (has no foreign language dept). What we often think of as the “best” education is the most lacking, and what we settle for is the best out there today, but still not what it could be.

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@blevine

It’s not that college/university is obsolete.

Instead, it’s that your personal philosophical outlook on the role of education as one which should mainly be a form of training for a future career is one that not too long ago in the US and still the case in many other parts of the world would have meant you/your kids would have preferred attending vocational high schools/higher vocational training institutes in lieu of attending university/college so you’d be focused mainly on training for a vocation rather than learning the non-career related subjects.

Not too long ago, parents and students with your educational outlook along with the student in the article would have opted to attend vocational high schools/higher vocational training institutes instead of college.

However, the US currently doesn’t have a strong vocational HS/higher vocational training institute system here which leads to well-paying middle-class jobs like we used to here in the states or which exists in many other parts of the world.

A part of this is also a remnant of how distribution requirements* in US colleges/universities started out as a form of “remedial education” due to the lack of schools/teachers which had the capabilities of providing the education comparable to the last few years of high school/the equivalent back then.

  • In many other countries in the world, distribution requirements many US colleges require in the first 2 years of undergrad are expected to be handled and finished in the high schools or even earlier stages of education for students who are placed/admitted to the college-track so by the time they reach college, the type/level of undergrad education there is somewhere between a US Bachelors and a Masters degree in terms of expectations and specialization.
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@cobrat I may be biased by the fact that my kids were lucky enough to go to to HS in a public school district where they did get a free and appropriate education by the classic definition. When kids are very young, that is the time to get them to try violin, french, soccer, painting…you name it. At that age they are open minded, and the cost of getting such exposure in a public school setting is reasonable (property taxes). Their personal preferences start to surface very quickly. By 4th grade, one kid joined Jazz Band and dropped out of sports, the other started playing one sport year round and dropped another. Not to say your life interests are set by 4th grade, but preferences start to form. By 12th grade, many kids have a good idea of likes and dislikes. They are old enough to vote, drive a car, but not to choose what they would like to study, even if paying for it ? Not saying colleges should stop offering non-vocational choices, but let’s be clear, one is paying a huge sum and due to a view of what college “should be”, yes there are few choices. There are a few colleges that do offer a bit more academic freedom of choice, and we searched for the colleges least objectionable to us in that regard, but accepting nothing will be perfectly flexible.

In additional, what is very difficult to find is quality teaching. Given colleges are ranked in part by research production, and professors are paid in part by getting research grants, very little emphasis is placed on teaching. My elder child goes to a major internationally known top ranked research institution, where the students are often career oriented yet the professors are clearly not. They barely teach, and what little is taught is very theoretical. With my younger child, we selected a school that has instructors with field experience for many of the professionally oriented (engineering) courses. This is looked down on by some, but IMO a useful blend of real world input into education, and a hiring practice that actually hires people who value teaching over research. If I had to do it again, would advise anyone to go to local junior/community college to get the first two years of BS out of the way at low cost, get your As and then transfer to a better school where at least you wont be subjected to almost $70k/year to sit in a lecture hall with a grad student or PhD who doesn’t want to teach, but must do so. Upper level classes are indeed better, as they approach graduate level, but the cost and time one must put up with to get there is ridiculous.

College when Harvard and Yale started were for the idle rich, and today colleges model themselves after this classic idea of what college should be. Vocational has become a dirty word, but yes we need more practical education for MOST people. And we need to encourage people to pursue their passions, not distribution requirements.

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A complication to that is what we may consider a classical education in the sense of a broad-based liberal-arts education as we know it today had only been in existence for around a century or so.

Before ~1917 or so, a classical education for aspiring university students for most European or many elite Ivy/elite private colleges would have been adequate preparation so one could tackle the Ancient Greek, Roman, and Hebrew classics by studying/reading them in the original languages.

Contrary to popular belief by some posters on a recent thread, English lit by such luminaries like Shakespeare WASN’T part of the standard undergrad classical education or officially those of university aspirants.

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yea!

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“Colleges are REQUIRING people to spend money taking general education courses to learn about the quadratic formula (and other XXX they will never use)”

“It probably first began when I started questioning how old I would be when my engineering firm would actually become profitable. I estimated I would be at least 35 before then. That was one of the large factors in my decision, the amount of time it would take me to achieve my goals.”

So all these posts are about someone who spent a year going through college application process, could not figure out there are general education course requirement, still “waste” time and money on the first semester of college, then suddenly became so brilliant that he figured all out about the profitability of an enterprise that has yet to be created? You must be kidding me!

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Incidentally, I had a few relatives with similar attitudes to yours…except they weren’t against college/distribution requirements altogether and regarded business as more impractical/waste of time as they regarded it as worse than starting someone in a business/apprenticeship and have them sink/swim or learning on the job.

I am also a bit biased as most HS classmates and I had no issues picking up career oriented skills in the technical/non-technical areas with little/no schooling/training in those areas.

In my case, almost all the computer tech skills I used in my 2+ decade long career were picked up from hanging out with HS friends and learning on the job from HS onward. And I’m not the exception as some of the most technically adept people in the computer technology field I know were Arts/Humanities/Social Science majors in undergrad.

A former supervisor of mine in one of my earlier jobs was an Lit major from an elite LAC and yet, had no problems supervising or working alongside engineering graduates from MIT or CMU on the most technical aspects of their jobs.

He later picked up a STEM Masters from a respectable/elite university paid for by his employer despite not having majored in it for undergrad.

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In software development and QA (as opposed to IT) some of those with high levels of motivation to self-educate enter the field after a bachelor’s degree in an unrelated subject, or no college degree at all. However, most people doing technical work in the field do have a related degree, since most people do benefit from a structured curriculum and may not have the motivation to self-educate, or may have difficulty figuring out what they really need to learn.

Of those who have an unrelated bachelor’s degree, physics seems to be relatively common. Others are mostly other liberal arts. Biology and business do seem to be underrepresented.

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@cobrat Does not matter much whether one learn about Shakespeare or Greek tragedy, neither will help one support oneself today, unless you become a university professor to perpetuate this idea of classic education. By classic I mean well rounded in the arts, literature etc. Of course when Shakespeare was comparatively modern literature, his death being not much before the founding of Harvard, it would not be regarded as a classic at that point in time. Not my point at all. Harvard’s earliest graduates went on to become clergy, not accountants, lawyers, etc. Nothing wrong with that career choice, but the same education for that aspiration is not appropriate for someone who wants to be an engineer, lawyer etc. Many careers today didn’t yet exist back then (most Americans were farmers in the 1600s).

Frankly I was forced to learn about Shakespeare and Greek tragedy in HS, which while painful to me and my kids, was probably good medicine that tastes bad (to some). But when one is 18, planning to go out and support oneself, and hopefully a family at some point, and by then either has an interest in drama or not, I don’t think the tuition paying public should be forced to learn about drama, art history or anything else not of interest/relevance. Sure if you want to take 1 of your 4-5 courses in a semester on something you find interesting, and not just take courses in accounting, computers etc, I have no issue with this being OFFERED. But compulsory distribution requirements are just too inflexible at many colleges. Fortunately there are some that have strayed a bit from the traditional, but they seem to be the exception.

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Looks like he is short-term orientated and earrings driven.

Nothing wrong with that approach, but you shouldn’t blame the college system as a whole because it is not structured to make you rich fast enough.

You have out smarted us all, good luck in life.

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Keep in mind that up until very recently professions like engineering and law were still regarded as professions to either be learned in higher vocational training institutes or through apprenticeships.

In fact, the US is noteworthy for being one of the earliest countries to institute engineering as part of the university curriculum…albeit through West Point which for the first half of the 19th century was one of the few places in the US one can learn engineering beyond attending vocational school or apprenticeship.

And while law was offered as a major in medieval/European universities, many lawyers up until the end of the 19th century were trained as apprenticeships on the job. Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson are two examples of lawyers who were trained through apprenticeships. And neither had the benefit of a college education…or in Lincoln’s case…much K-12 schooling.

Lincoln was practically completely self-taught which makes him much more impressive…but also makes him a great exception which can’t be applied to the vast majority of more average folks much like folks who trot out examples of successful college dropouts like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

@ucbalumnus

One of the early movers and shakers of a local Unix/Linux group in my area who did much to develop parts of the OS and to propagate the latter from the 90s onward majored in Music at Columbia. Yet, he can hold and impress upon many engineering/CS graduates that his CS/techie cred towers over their own already impressive cred.

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“Did they really need greek classics, calculus, foreign lang requirements, etc ? Not saying there is anything wrong with learning those things, but paying up to 70k/yr for 4 years, and having half the classes on useless topics in relation to your own interests and goals, just seems like something that could be improved significantly.”

Your thinking is too linear for me to make any kind of dent here. So I’ll waive the white flag and concede the debate, and leave only a comment that I think your estimation of “1/2” (referencing the required classes that are not directly relevant to the degree or career sought) is probably a bit or more high. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

I’d rather hire a well-educated plumber than a poorly educated plumber, all else being equal. The economics of the thing has proven to be a confounding issue in our time. I don’t disagree with you there.

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“So all these posts are about someone who spent a year going through college application process, could not figure out there are general education course requirement, still “waste” time and money on the first semester of college, then suddenly became so brilliant that he figured all out about the profitability of an enterprise that has yet to be created? You must be kidding me!”

Great point. You almost have to wonder if this is a real story.

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Education surrounds all of us every day. Memorizing facts and last year’s solutions do not, by themselves, build a solid enough foundation to manage the technological tsunami we are experiencing. Fifty years ago, the half-life of the electrical engineers’ tool kit was about three years. This same tsunami is pushing the world social and economic order.

Twisting Chubby Checker’s “twist” (look it up) does not, by itself, make you a dancer. A dancer needs to observe the dance floor action and imagine. Be careful you don’t look too curiously at the wrong couple. You need to manage the situation and create something new while not loosing sight of your partner. Yes, good engineers and good managers need to work in groups to solve complex problems.

Non-engineering managers need to stop stereotyping engineers and understand the currents of the tsunami or they will miss the boat. Engineering graduates from my small university alone have headed GM, United Technologies, Xerox and whole divisions of DuPont, General Dynamics, and Exxon Mobil among many others. To work on the complex design solutions required of today’s design TEAMS, social skills and interdisciplinary respect as well as the technical concepts and imagination are necessary to keep Apple successful.

The world is interdisciplinary and we all could profit by practicing interdisciplinary learning. It is time we stopped segregating learning into artificial groupings. Some colleges are working hard to remodel the college learning process and would love to talk with Billy. Billy should know that a 4.0 in a prescribed college course is not the ultimate vehicle to weather the continually changing technology.

How do you build the boat?

Many good students want to have some understanding of WHY they are taking a course before they sign up. Without active participation with a mentor in the design of their education, they may look out that window and still complete what seems like a vacant exercise… complete with a 4.0 grade.

Many, but not all, engineering and scientific accomplishments have been achieved by famous dropouts. There will always be cases of remarkable individual achievement, but I fail to see scientific evidence here that colleges and universities are a universal waste of everyone’s time.

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Glad dude not trying to be a doctor. IMO, I think dude is just about making money which is fine but don[t discredit getting an education. I think this article was a SCAM to get people to support his business. Probably a technique he learned in one of those YouTube tutorials.