For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

[Qenan]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1218...s_Most_Popular

I agree with the author that college is largely a waste, as a training ground for employment. I don't really agree that certification would be a good solution either, though, because an awful lot of important work skills are hard to test for. Or, to put it a different way, lots of skills can't be tested for economically, with little effort on the part of the examining.

[Supersport]

College has its benefits, I don't dispute that. You do learn new skills, get exposed to different viewpoints, and show that you can stick to something to the end.

However, I have always viewed it as a something like a rite of passage. If managers had to go through 4 years of shit then you know damn well they want you to go through 4 years of shit as well.

As for certifications, especially in the IT field, I do not understand why colleges don't except industry standard certifications as subsitutes for courses or credits that can be applied.

I earned an A+, Network+, Security+, I-Net+, MCSA 2000, CCNA, CCDA, CNA, ITIL-F, IPSR, and an NANS without any of them counting for anything when it came to college.

Currently studying for my PMP and the PMP makes a joke of the project management class I took in college.

[Papageno]

Perhaps purely from an employment-preparation perspective, that's true, but a good education broadens your perspectives and makes you think a little bit (well, unless you're a business major) JUST KIDDING. It makes you a more interesting and adaptable person.

[bigdruid]

However, I have always viewed it as a something like a rite of passage. If managers had to go through 4 years of shit then you know damn well they want you to go through 4 years of shit as well.

Well, this quote kind of proves the point - if your view of college is that it's "4 years of shit" that managers make you go through, then yeah, it's a waste of time for you.

[Abiding Dude]

What's all this talk about a waist of time??!!

[Sol Invictus]

A waist that stretches beyond the expanding diameter of the universe itself. The waist BEYOND time.

[Wallapuctus]

I agree in some respects, college is a big business now and high school kids are made to feel like they'll have no future if they don't attend. The fact is a lot of people don't need college to do what they do, and those people pile up huge debts for 4 (or more) years of education they'll never use.

I can think of 3 of my closest friends for whom college was a complete waste of time and money, and they all earn good livings in careers they could have started right out of high school. 2 of the 3 are still paying off their student loans, and will be for years to come.

[forgeforsaken]

Yeah, I've long held that college is a bit of a scam.

[Tortilla]

Currently studying for my PMP and the PMP makes a joke of the project management class I took in college.

Considering the low regard which I hold towards all the PMPs I've dealt with, that's a hell of a statement.

[Slainte Mhath]

College still provides a foundation for a successful professional career. With technology, science and industry changing so rapidly, it's true that many professionals will tell you that skills they learned years ago in college are all but useless now. However, college is still important in that it provides a transition where a person learns to be responsible for themselves, manage time effectively, meet deadlines and survive in a social structure not unlike those they'll find in the workplace in years to come.

In addition college provides people with a broader education than simply getting certified on particular career skills. It's fine to know everything there is to know about networking technology, accounting practices or the medical profession, but being exposed to all the other aspects of an education (writing, history, public speaking, literature, etc.) provide a skill set that is invaluable to producing a well-rounded individual. In my career for example, writing effective proposals, knowing how to properly plan a project and being able to present such things to a group of business people is every bit as important as knowing what to do when the email server loses a RAID drive or a new database server needs to be implemented. Certification can teach me the hard skill components of my job, but a well rounded education prepared me for the soft skill aspects of my career.

[Tortilla]

In addition college provides people with a broader education than simply getting certified on particular career skills. It's fine to know everything there is to know about networking technology, accounting practices or the medical profession, but being exposed to all the other aspects of an education (writing, history, public speaking, literature, etc.) provide a skill set that is invaluable to producing a well-rounded individual. In my career for example, writing effective proposals, knowing how to properly plan a project and being able to present such things to a group of business people is every bit as important as knowing what to do when the email server loses a RAID drive or a new database server needs to be implemented. Certification can teach me the hard skill components of my job, but a well rounded education prepared me for the soft skill aspects of my career.

I quite agree, but are the objectives you just listed the same as the objectives colleges have in mind when preparing curriculum? Or are those simply side effects of doing college? Actual classes trying to teach those skills were a small part of my required credits as I recall.

If one is pointing to the side effects as the real reason that college is good that implies at the very least that the educational components could be better designed.

[StGabe]

I quite agree, but are the objectives you just listed the same as the objectives colleges have in mind when preparing curriculum? Or are those simply side effects of doing college?

Yes and yes. Typically a college curriculum is set up to tackle interesting problems (that may not directly apply to work skills) and teach important skills as a side-effect. Most people focus too much on the course titles and too little on the skills taught along the way.

I'm most familiar with computer science (as a student, lecturer and more recently as an employer) and so I'll focus on that. A lot of students complain that CS curriculum's aren't teaching relevant job skills. There's certainly some credibility to that complaint. However, a CS curriculum really needs to be viewed as a broader course intended to teach one all of the core skills and context for programming/engineering, making subsequent learning of on-the-job skills easy. Take a programming language course. Many students will complain about learning Scheme and other esoteric languages during such a course because they're not relevant to future work. But that's not really the point. The point is to give a lot of exposure to different styles of computing, provide an in-depth understanding of core technologies like parers, compilers and interpreters, and have a lot of excuses to practice programming and problem-solving skills along the way. Many students find that such exercises will improve the programming in other, mainstream languages, which may not even by covered by the course itself.

It's about really learning the fundamentals of whatever field you're going into. It's also about proving an aptitude towards that field. And finally it's a really important time in kids lives where I think it's extremely valuable to take 4 years off and really focus on figuring out what it is you want to do. A lot of people don't really discover a love of a certain field until getting exposure to higher quality educational experiences with that field in college. My majors changed several times before I finally settled on something that really worked for me and I was hardly alone. Had I just gone straight into a trade school or something I never would have had a chance to explore other fields.

All other things being equal, when hiring I'll take someone with a good liberal arts background. They tend to have a more mature approach to their skillset and job and are more likely to succeed. I've certainly met qualified people without a college education, and I would never pass on someone just because they didn't have a college education, but based on past experiences, it's a big plus. I think that's one of the big things that the WSJ article is missing. College educations are valued a lot of the time because employers do see a correlation between degrees and job success and not because of some arbitrary decision to value colleges.

[Dave47]

I agree with the author that college is largely a waste, as a training ground for employment. I don't really agree that certification would be a good solution either, though, because an awful lot of important work skills are hard to test for. Or, to put it a different way, lots of skills can't be tested for economically, with little effort on the part of the examining.

Charles Murray's op-ed piece takes an incredibly narrow view of the goals and scope of a college education, and is supported by worn-out cliches about how "the schools and failing" and "liberal-arts majors don't know anything." Nevertheless, even if you accept his premises as true, Murray's proposal to create a system of certification exams is deeply and obviously flawed.

[zabuni]

Given how most people pass cert tests, at least in the computer science field, by week long boot camps, why would this be superior. If you think teaching to the test is bad in schools now, you haven't seen a CCNA boot camp.

I also think the validity of a cert starts to dramatically drop once you start moving beyond single target hard skills. A CCNA will teach you how to set up a router. A CISSP doesn't do much for security. CPAs works because they are based on a set of rules that have little leeway. As do computer certifications. The broader the requirement of a job, the more difficult it will be to come up with a certification that has any real resemblance to the job at hand.

[Case]

I never went to college to get a job.

I had a nebulous goal to someday get a Ph.D. in history, then teach at some small college.
Then I wandered through physical geography and anthropology (enough to pick up minors.) Avoiding the long story about what got me there, I ended up in freshman calculus and chemistry, ended up a few years later with a master's in physical chemistry.

Now, of course, I'm writing about PC and other technologies.

At the classroom level, college feeds you knowledge about the world, albeit from a particularly western point of view. The value of going to a university had nothing to do with all the chem classes I took to get my degree. Instead, it was all the other classes that shaped my thinking, exposed me to different ideas about the world and taught me that learning was something that should be an inherent part of life.

And it's not just learning about what I do daily for a living, but learning how to learn, and that learning obscure stuff sometimes pays off big time. College taught me that, and for all the years and dollars I put into it, I'm grateful.

[Jon Rowe]

I just got my 30 thousand dollar piece of paper in the mail.

And I am darn happy with it.

[Dean]

I like to think that college taught me how to think. So the skill it taught me was really in how to approach a problem, how to choose the tools I need to solve it, and then once I think it's solved, to ask, "Is that a reasonable solution?"

Then again, many people with college educations never learn that.

The thing we're told over and over again (and I'm an academic who was charged with designing a new academic program) is that college is NOT vocational. A 4-year degree does not guarantee that you will have all the qualifications of ANY job.

So does that make it a scam?

I don't think so, but then again, I'm an academic. College is supposed to give you the mental tools you need to learn the skills for any job. And that's really all we can promise, because if we said, "After 4 years you will be qualified to do job X" then some employer for job X will find one of our students who isn't.

The truth is, no 4 year program can prepare everyone who takes it with all the skills that fall under any one job description. There will be poor students, and there will be skills that we just don't have time to teach.

[Wallapuctus]

I just got my 30 thousand dollar piece of paper in the mail.

I got mine too and none of my employers since have given a damn. They were more concerned with how I did on their programming tests and how well I interviewed.

Now, if I didn't have a BS on my resume would I have even gotten any interviews? I don't know.

[Gabe Lewis]

Is it too much to ask that college curriculum teach you this general "mental toolset for well-rounded individuals" and provide you with job skills in a chosen field?

I'm a college age individual, so I'll throw in my two cents. I've attended community college on and off and worked since I left High School. For me the major barrier has been that most of the skills I'd like to learn don't get taught there, and if they do get taught there you must take a predetermined amount of general education classes in order to qualify to take them.

I found that kind of absurd, as people who is paying for an education, why do students not have more say in the classes they take? Ultimately, it was this kind of a bureaucratic nonsense that put me off the idea that I should get a degree from a traditional university and directed my money into classes in directly applicable skills that I would like to have. I'm happy with that.

[extarbags]

Maybe because college and tech school aren't the same thing?

[StGabe]

Now, if I didn't have a BS on my resume would I have even gotten any interviews? I don't know.

From my perspective, I'm more likely to offer an interview if you have good college experience. I do so because I think this is likely to correlate to you doing better on the programming test, in the interviews, and with the job. That said, the only time I ask interviewees about college is if they are entry-level and that's their best source for examples of past work and problem-solving.

[StGabe]

IFor me the major barrier has been that most of the skills I'd like to learn don't get taught there, and if they do get taught there you must take a predetermined amount of general education classes in order to qualify to take them.

I'd say you are misunderstanding the process that is in place. Generally college is there to be an educational playground where you play around with a lot of ideas and learn a lot of general skills. A well-educated, smart college grad should be able to step into just about any job in their field and pick up the skills needed for it quickly. And so most job-specific skills are deferred to actual on-the-job training and experience. College is never going to be able to offer that sort of focused training and it isn't trying to. It's getting you ready to step into any role and pick it up quickly, give you general skills that will transcend any specific role, and help you find out which roles are going to be most interesting/successful for you.

[Gabe Lewis]

I understand that, and thats why I'd agree that most people don't need to attend university and shouldn't be consistently told that they do.

I also think that University's should loosen their internal requirements (their admissions can be as hard as the college demands) and prices so that they are more like the playground you describe and less like the degree machines that they are now. Most people don't have time to "play around" when they are paying 10,000 to 40,000 dollars a year.

I don't mean to overstep here. I think the system thats in place works for many people, and for certain fields, it's exactly how it should be. I just don't think it's for everyone.

[Dean]

I found that kind of absurd, as people who is paying for an education, why do students not have more say in the classes they take?

They did, it was called the 60's.

But the truth is, you don't know all the things you don't know, so how can you design a degree that will teach you stuff you don't even know exists?

Ultimately, it was this kind of a bureaucratic nonsense that put me off the idea that I should get a degree from a traditional university and directed my money into classes in directly applicable skills that I would like to have. I'm happy with that.

Every program I've ever seen has electives, and every program I've ever seen also has choices within its requirements, mostly because every department ever is in a constant discussion over what's important to their field so they offer more classes than a student can take in 4 years.

[Tortilla]

Yes and yes. Typically a college curriculum is set up to tackle interesting problems (that may not directly apply to work skills) and teach important skills as a side-effect. Most people focus too much on the course titles and too little on the skills taught along the way.

Maybe it was the fact that was in a business college 10+ years ago, or perhaps just a bad college, but I certainly didn't see much in terms of skills being taught along the way. There was the inevitable group project or two, a few presentations, and a ton of memorize-regurgitate-forget. The latter seemed to be the biggest skill that the courses required and the least useful to me nowadays.

Looking at my professional career to date, I wish every course had required intensive teamwork and lots of presentations. Those the skills I had to slowly and painful acquire as I went.

All other things being equal, when hiring I'll take someone with a good liberal arts background. They tend to have a more mature approach to their skillset and job and are more likely to succeed. I've certainly met qualified people without a college education, and I would never pass on someone just because they didn't have a college education, but based on past experiences, it's a big plus. I think that's one of the big things that the WSJ article is missing. College educations are valued a lot of the time because employers do see a correlation between degrees and job success and not because of some arbitrary decision to value colleges.

You'll never get the chance to interview that person without the college degree because the HR department will circular file their resume before it ever lands on your desk.

As to why employers value college degree, I think you are giving them WAAAAY too much credit for thinking out their hiring criteria in detail. It's a firmly entrenched tradition at this point, a self perpetuating rite of passage. If managerlady and vpman had to have a degree to get into this company then of course all new employees must have this as well!

Full Disclosure: I'm slightly bitter on this topic because I never finished college and while it hasn't impaired me yet I live with a nagging dread that it someday will hamper me.

[TheWombat]

As one who returned to school after working in business for a bit, and did in fact get that Ph.D. in History and end up teaching at a small college, I have somewhat mixed feelings about this topic too. I do a lot of work in curriculum design, in the general education arena, and at our school at least it's all about building general mental abilities, toolsets, critical and creative thinking, that sort of stuff. Content, in the GenEd sense, is important but somewhat secondary. All of our new core courses are interdisciplinary and we don't have any traditional liberal arts majors, so we're less interested in students who can recite the Magna Carta and more interested in those who know what it is and know when more detailed knowledge might help them in whatever their doing in their lives.

Our GenEd program is pretty prescribed, too, with cohorts and common experiences built in. We found, like most schools, that yeah, we do know more about what our students need than they do, mostly, both developmentally and academically.

That being said, I agree wholeheartedly that a lot of people paying a lot of money for college have no intellectual reason to be there, and for many of them the experience is likely to be akin to teaching birds to swim, or fish to fly. Some people simply want technical skills, and are in college because their prospective employers want the diploma. Others, let's face it, manage to pass the entrance requirements but have no real aptitude for college-level study. Because our school is professionally focused, and I teach a lot of GenEd stuff, I'm usually faced with students who enter the classroom completely baffled by why they're taking a class that's not networking, or graphic design, or accounting, or whatever. By the time they graduate, many do understand that ultimately what they got here wasn't the tech stuff, which will be obsolete in all probability before they get their first promotion, but the other "soft" stuff, the thinking, communications, creativity, and social skills (and yes our general education and co-curricular education design actively takes these into account) will last them a lifetime.

I don't think that college per se is a waste of time, but going to college simply to get the technical skills you need for a job is perhaps inefficient at best.

[StGabe]

Maybe it was the fact that was in a business college 10+ years ago, or perhaps just a bad college, but I certainly didn't see much in terms of skills being taught along the way.

Well ... to be honest I'm very critical of business schools. Whenever I meet someone with an MBA I tend to joke with them about how worthless it was and how the only point of an MBA is networking. The thing is, most MBA grads agree with me. So I do tend to think that business programs (or at least MBA's) are a bit of a racket. As I said, I'm talking with a bias towards computer science education.

You'll never get the chance to interview that person without the college degree because the HR department will circular file their resume before it ever lands on your desk.

Not in my experience.

As to why employers value college degree, I think you are giving them WAAAAY too much credit for thinking out their hiring criteria in detail.

Again, not my experience. I've worked with qualified people who didn't have degrees. And I'd certainly consider hiring them. I think it's a lot harder to "master" a skill (and in my field, I expect some semblance of mastery from most candidates) without taking time for college, but it's possible. Most non-college grads who make it in my field (game programming) are people who were really passionate about programming in the first place and spent years doing it on their own without a lot of incentive other than their own enjoyment. Not a lot of people can pull that off.

[Qenan]

College still provides a foundation for a successful professional career. With technology, science and industry changing so rapidly, it's true that many professionals will tell you that skills they learned years ago in college are all but useless now. However, college is still important in that it provides a transition where a person learns to be responsible for themselves, manage time effectively, meet deadlines and survive in a social structure not unlike those they'll find in the workplace in years to come.

I think this is bogus. These are skills you could certainly learn in entry-level jobs, and you would likely learn them more quickly.

I have a doctorate. For folks with academic inclinations, universities can be very rewarding. But making them the basis of the employment system is dumb.

[AaronSofaer]

You can't get a decent job without a college degree.

[Glenn]

Well, you can, depending on your definition of decent, it's just much harder (and of course you're completely denied entry to certain fields). I know a half-dozen people without any college making salaries over $100k a year, but that's out of a pretty big pool.