That may be more true today with more math heavy focuses like computer vision or neural networks. But most everything else is better learned on the job or via YouTube. Unless you plan to specialize like that, it’s almost certainly better to just teach yourself.
I’ve hired dozens of engineers from both university and self-taught backgrounds, and the self-taught ones are by far superior. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I have to break the bad habits taught in university - those courses are painfully outdated and the professors often have self-serving motives that hurt their students.
The difference between computer science, computer engineering and software engineering is pretty nuanced in a lot of ways. Same core knowledge base. Sprinkle a little extra math and logic abstraction and you get a CS degree. More principles of development and team based work, and get a SE degree. More hardware and systems, and get a CE degree. And all three of them touch a bit on the other two.
More than a few of my team of software engineers and data engineers have degrees in things like chemistry or business. They just took a boot camp to learn to develop.
Did anyone ever actually get a Trump University degree? It only operated for like 5 years. Imagine being the poor schmuck with a framed Trump University degree on his pawn shop office wall.
That would absolutely go on my wall of shame along with several industry certifications I have where the software I’m certified for stopped existing (sometimes within a few months of my certification).
I’ve got plenty of those too, mostly Microsoft and Cisco plus PMP, all of which I let expire because I have no use for them anymore.
When I was younger the company I worked for got into installing and maintaining EMR/EHR software at a time when the government was giving out cash to switch over from paper records. So a million little EMR/EHR software companies spun up all with their own certifications and most of which only barely adhered to HL7 to be able to send info to other health systems.
The owner of the company decided to send someone to get certified in a bunch of them that he was betting would pay off. I got paid to sit in a room and get free certifications for a year on and off because I volunteered. He was grooming me to take over a whole healthcare support division he was spinning up. Those companies folded and I ended up supporting Allscripts and NextGen without a team.
The next big idea he had was for supporting Seismic and Geological software. So while my certs for Kingdom IHS are still good, I never used them because all the oil companies had in house people supporting that plus support from S&P.
Plus my certificate from bartending school (for fun, not for money).
Edit: I was kinda kidding guys, I took philosophy classes, my father is a sculptor, and I dabbled in the fine arts.
That said, I encourage all of you in the traditional disciplines to have a plan for employment after school- teaching or related fields are fine! But have a plan!
You’ll get a lot of people arguing arts degrees where there aren’t jobs are scams.
Frankly, I think there’s a divide between what we expect of education and what education should be.
There’s kind of a spectrum from required credentials like medical, law, or engineering degrees, to things like stem programs which are not required but open job doors, to arts degrees where there’s not really many direct careers being opened.
Charging an arm and a leg for arts programs is a scam because it’s not opening the same economic opportunities as career based degrees. Having or providing arts degrees is totally fine, they just need to be cheaper.
College should be about the pursuit of education, plain and simple. For a specific education to be required for licensure makes sense, not for it to be a resume filter for admin assistants.
I mean I’d love if my auto mechanic had a degree in ethics and philosophy. The world would be a much nicer place if everyone had a well rounded education imo.
I think the main benefit of an art degree (for the average person) is learning to research, communicate ideas, and think critically. I have a degree in political science and work in an IT/business role but I absolutely don’t regret my choice of degree.
Arts education (which I mean to encompass not just visual art but also literature, plays, music, etc) is important because without it you get idiots with no media literacy. An arts degree, specifically, may not be important or beneficial for the average person, but classes in which one must think critically about the creator, the creator’s intent, the context in which the art was created, and the reception of the art are how you teach people to be well-rounded individuals who don’t just vomit out the first half-baked thought their curdled brain cobbled together from propaganda.
It's only a scam if they're being misleading. I've never heard anyone say "get an art degree, you'll get rich!" It's not a scam to study art simply because you want to develop your knowledge and talents in a structured way. Should art degrees cost as much as they do? Probably not, but "expensive" and "scam" are two different things.
I don’t believe anyone managed to learn anything useful about history or economics or literature in high school. Or about anything else. I wish more people were able to seriously study these subjects as adults with the guidance and correspondence of a global community of fellow students and access to centuries of past discussion and debate.
People telling you there’s nothing more to learn (or that the “soft sciences” offer nothing better than your personal intuition) are the scammers.
It’s worse than that, most things you learn in high school end up being either false or so simplified it ends up misleading (think common misconceptions). Biggest offenders tend to be history and hard sciences, although that might be mostly since we don’t even offer things like psychology or sociology outside of a few elective APs (and imagine how prone to misinformation those classes could be if taught by someone following their personal intuition!)
Dunno how it is in other countries with a recent slave past, but Brazil did an excellent job in erasing both native and African ethnicities in my school years. You never learned about specific native tribes like the Aymore, Tupinamba or Goitacaz, it was always “the natives” and all African slaves were just that, “African slaves”, no difference between the ones from current day Mali, Angola or Somalia.
Whenever the books talked about the expeditions into the heartlands, the bandeiras, they rarely or never mentioned local tribes that might’ve helped them, whether in goodwill, in exchange of something like getting rid of old enemies, or by force.
Another thing that school glossed over was one of the many slave revolts, the Malês Revolt. I vaguely recall that the book said that slaves organized by leaving written notes, but it never mentioned that said notes were written in arabic, because those slaves were from Mali and most of them were muslim, thus they could read and write in arabic. It also never taught us that, after the revolt was quashed, nearly every slave from Mali was sent back to Africa and the city of Salvador, the focus point of the revolt, expelled every muslim and removed every mosque it had.
Man, I could go on for a while, just comparing what I remember being taught in school and all the stuff left out that’d make me really damn interested in paying attention to classes.
I mean, all it takes is a look at the cost of shit like tuition and text books to conclude college is a scam, but that doesn’t equal a disrespect for the knowledge of people who’ve gone through it.
The difference lies in whether the speaker thinks the problem is the clearly evident financial exploitation or thinks that the education isn’t valuable.
(I almost walked away from commenting on this like three times. Hopefully I made sense) I don’t believe that modern college equals education, necessarily. How many corporate VPs have impressive college credentials but took nothing away more than future networking? Education is extremely valuable as is an educated society. And I get that we’re talking about people who do not value the societal benefit of a well-rounded education. Schools don’t seem to value it anymore either. We’ve commodified “knowledge”. It’s merely a stepping stone to better earnings. Engineering and medicine, though, are two positions I think anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together should value the quality of their educations.
I’d argue that commodification of knowledge doesn’t equate to the college experience not being educational. A lot of it boils down to the individual getting out of it what they put in: I’ve had my share of bullshit online classes that I only took to check the prereq box, didn’t give a single flying fuck about the material, gave it the absolute minimum, and finished it having gained only debt and a slightly shinier transcript. I don’t remember shit from those classes other than the feeling that they were a waste of time and money.
They were fascinating to some of my classmates. And vice versa: microbiology for example was one I didn’t think I’d take much out of when I was doing pre-nursing (there are way better study-of-tiny-bastard topics for pre-nursing, like clinical pathology; microbio is WAY more broad, and hit or miss in relevancy to the kind of work nurses do). Some of the topics microbio blew my fucking mind though… like did you know some bacteria have a literal fucking motor inside of them that spins their flagella around like a microscopic propeller?! Or a protein that along the lengths of nanotubuoles. We are stuffed with tiny, home-grown robots… and it makes my brain explode. Other pre-nursing peeps though? Couldn’t give the tiniest bit of a shit about it, cuz knowing about walking proteins n’ whatnot isn’t useful AT ALL for nursing.
And people like to bitch about English classes, but having been on the workforce for a good couple of decades now: writing is how you advance your career. SO useful, but SO underrated and undervalued by students.
I took a criminal justice course cuz I needed an elective and the classes I wanted were all full, so… fuck it. Wrong field, didn’t care, just there to check the box… walked away with a fresh appreciation for how fucked up our legal system is, and a kind of legal mindset for some non-criminal topics but turn out to be applicable.
Point is: the knowledge and education are there; whether the individual student engages with it in a meaningful way is up to the individual student. I’ve been on both sides of the coin, and have been surprised a few times.
Yeah say what you will I may not have gotten much out of all my classes, but as an engineer I was changed by intro to Greek and Roman culture and by intro to stand up comedy. Blow off classes to some but I loved them. I paid more attention to them than to chem which really bit me in the ass come thermo.
There are mainly 2 types of “college is a scam” people. Type 1 is anti-education and places more value on what they typically refer to as “common sense” and think that you don’t need an education to know about something. They’re the type most likely to think they know more than experts and argue with engineers about bridges. Type 2 is more anti-capitalist and doesn’t view education as a scam itself but rather how costly that education is and the opportunities provided to educated people who paid the price is what they see as a scam. They’re usually capable of recognizing and acknowledging their lack of understanding about a topic and listen to experts because they do value education, they just think access to it should be easier and cheaper and provide more tangible results for the effort put into obtaining it. This post is probably talking about type 1.
Same thing with Big Pharma. People hear that pharmaceutical companies are greedy and untrustworthy and think it means that their medicine doesn’t work. It does, they just charge excessive amounts of money for it. We don’t hate big pharma because vaccines don’t work, we hate Big Pharma because they sell insulin at a 10,000% markup
There’s this thing called “law”, you know, and every country has a number of scams defined as crimes, though some may not fall in those terms. “Feeling happy about it” is what kids these days call copium. Deluding yourself won’t make the decisions good, they’ll still be objectively bad and trying to reframe like that will make you look stupid.
All I know about bridges is how to sell them, and I have one right now I can guarantee was built by an entirely white construction team. I examined their skull shapes myself. I’ll just need about $80 million, and it’s all yours, Elon.
it floats way better than i do, so it can’t be that much heavier than i am. and let me tell you, there’s no way i could topple a bridge by running into it
There’s a fairly crude equation in the American bridge engineering standard that relates impact load to the mass of a ship, which is:
P =√(DWT) ±50%
Where DWT is the deadweight tonnage, and P is the impact load in meganewtons.
So in this case P=315MN ±50% which is 315000kN or 31500 tonnes of force…
For comparison, I’m working on a project where we’re going to build a new concrete bridge on the ground next to where it needs to go (under a railway) then wait until we have a planned week with no trains running and push it into position using jacks. That bridge is a 60m long 20m wide 8m high concrete box with 1m thick walls and top and bottom slabs, and we think we will need about 30MN to install it (one tenth of the impact load from that ship).
I mean, colleges are fucking expensive and their biggest appeal is a promise of a high paying job. Even public ones still eat up your soul and you may not necessarily be ready for “the job market” after graduation, or even academic life. Wholly different discussion.
Still, no way in hell I’ll doubt that a bajillion ton (tonnes, whatever) of inertia can bring down a bridge. That’s effectively an asteroid boulder slowly rolling down hill
I have no formal training in building bridges. I actually only learned what a bridge was yesterday. Anyway, here’s what I think happened and I will fight anyone who tells me different.
I have had more PhDs recommend against college than for it. I’m not joking. It’s scary.
They’ll tell you that if you can get by without a degree, by all means do or at least heavily consider it.
Education is undoubtedly important, as often evidenced by people’s lack of it. But even those who ran the gauntlet decades ago have lost faith in the system.
And now we have a whole new litany of problems on their way because of the rising prominence of GenAI and I can confidently say that academia is wholly unprepared for the shit storm coming it’s way.
I’m guessing that’s more because they’ve spent a good decade or so working on their degree, which is probably too specialized to get the job they want in their field.
There is such a thing as too much college too. PhDs are very handy if you want to be a professor or go into a very specialized field and hope there are available jobs. Not so much for everyone else.
I think there’s an inflationary effect where so many people go to university that a regular degree is devalued. It leads to people who wouldn’t otherwise do postgraduate study to do some to be as competitive as an undergrad degree was years ago. I see people sleep walking into postgrad study because they don’t know what to do after graduation because an undergrad degree is so limited nowadays
There is also the cost to benefit ratio. Even IF you can get a job in your chosen field, the cost of the education to get there and the increasing pace of industrial change as required knowledge grows and changes can make your degree not really worth the effort. While I certainly don’t know for sure, it could be conceivable that the world might not even miss half of collage graduates produced today. And most people could make a living with a “simpler and more focused” technical education.
The world will always need carpenters, plumbers, electricians, accountants, and garbage collectors. And perhaps not so many people with a Master’s degree in library sciences or maybe with the advent of AI, even human programmers.
^ This … my father has his doctorate, yet is talking about chem trails, stockpiling guns and food for the coming apocalypse, and is a full on Trump supporting MAGAT right wing Christian.
US. So perhaps not representative of international trends. Altogether worrying with implications for US education standards though. The whole college/trade/career decision logic among the US public is seriously out of whack because parents kept preaching it was either college or burger flipping, unless you had a talent or parents with money of course.
The US education system, academia, and workforce are all incredibly and seemingly unappealably fucked. The bigger picture is just some madman’s abstract expressionism. I’m convinced the Russians are behind it all, somehow because just wtf it is actually looney levels of destabilizing and I fear it all comes crashing soon enough. But whatever, stop worrying and love the bomb I guess.
Basically, America’s poorer majority have the free choice which rich conglomerates they want to be exploited and/or drained dry by? Legalised wage theft, student loan debt, ludicrous cost of privatised healthcare - spoiled for choice which monopoly to hand their entire fortune over to, really…
Pretty much. I had to explain to my mother on the phone last night why I absolutely refuse to order anything from Amazon if I can get it brick&mortar without any issue and she couldn’t understand it. “You’d rather pay more? Why not just wait the couple days for shipping?” That’s not it mom, yes I like being able to immediately receive what I paid for in a transaction, as well as the opportunity to inspect it’s package before I pay for it, but that’s only the tip of the shitberg. I will gladly go pay more elsewhere because that money is often times going back into my community in at least some fashion and I can trust that my experience as a consumer will be better when I shop with the little guy who says my patronage matters and that they appreciate it rather than the unaccountable tech conglomerate that got its start by exploiting a flaw in a book vendor’s billing system for their own profit.
“I’m voting with my wallet” “…by paying more elsewhere” “sigh yes mother that’s how this often works, welcome to late stage capitalism”
What the hell are people debating here? A 150.000 tonne object crashed into a structure made of thin sticks (comparatively speaking). There is no doubt that the bridge would collapse. Especially since an arch is only stable if it is undamaged.
Mean, median, and mode are measures of central tendency aka average. It’s usually context that indicates which measure we are using when we say average. A lot of the time, when speaking of the average person, we’re using the median or mode rather than the mean.
“Can a cargo ship really lose steering even if power is lost?”
That’s the caption of a video I just went and found on Facebook shared by one of my distant hillbilly acquantances. I’m not even going to watch to see what it’s about.
There were no construction workers killed in the collapse! It was all fake!
The CIA caused the ship to lose power!
The ship was remote controlled! There wasn’t actually anybody on board until after the collision!
The “construction workers” were actually deep state black ops agents that were there to loosen bolts on the bridge to ensure it collapsed when the ship hit it.
And so on… Never underestimate the fantasies that conspiracy theorists can come up with.
Why is it that hard to believe that accidents happen? Just because something was interesting enough to reach headlines that means there had to have been an ulterior motive???
I know you can’t make sense of these people, but how the hell do you even make those leaps in the first place…
My thought is they don’t have much positive going on in their lives so they get validation from these conspiracies. It makes them feel smart because they see the real truth.
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