I think there is a lot of wisdom in these lines above. A degree (any degree) communicates some bare minimum qualification, rather than high standards of ability or talent.

A comment by a Phd. friend comes to mind: "A Phd. proves that a person can grind at one seemingly endless problem for years upon years, unperturbed by the countless setbacks and seeming lack of progress along the way to (hopefully) a breakthrough. Nothing more, nothing less."

Let's suppose that a Phd. really only proves this one trait about someone. Is this "signal" worthless?

I personally don't think so. I for one am a person who definitely cannot stick to one particular problem for years upon years. I'm not suitable for a position in, say, IBM Labs [1]. For a Hiring Manager in such a place, screening for a Phd. does in fact make sense.

[1] Thankfully, the world has options for invalids like myself.

Well, duh.

Every year I get a number of students whose entire motivation to be in my class is that they want to get the piece of paper. This sort of purely extrinsic motivation does not tend to make them very good students (although occasionally I have one that does well and gets an A, good for them). I'm always a little disappointed in them, because the class is more fun for both of us if they're more internally motivated; sometimes I can manage to get them actually interested, and then they perk up and are happier (and often do better), but sometimes they've just decided that they're not going to like college, and you know what? I can't force them to.

So, I guess they "win" that argument. But, it's an expensive argument to win; and it's kind of a shame, really.

As an aside, I also wanted to respond to this line:

> Getting an A is as easy as doing everything

Yes and no. In my class, and in those of my colleagues who have not overinflated their grades, As are gotten by the students who impress us with their outstanding work. Part of that is, of course, making sure they do all the pieces (don't skip anything, make sure it all works, check your work, etc), and the smart-but-sloppy students who skip things tend to be my A- and B+ students rather than my A students. But the students whose primary priority is checking everything off on a checklist, just "doing everything", rather than "getting it" or "making a cool thing" or whatever, almost invariably don't succeed in getting the A. It sounds like your background meant that you'd already learned a lot of the material independently, so your situation is different, but I think comments like the above are rather misleading for the bulk of students, who are learning this material on their first time around.

I know people who got high grades (in CS) at college who couldn't write a practical program to save their lives and are now working in some business role. I also know people with mediocre grades who are busy doing interesting stuff with machine learning and cloud computing.

The problem is, there are a lot of students that can grind a checklist that are worthless.

No, I went to college determined to learn a lot, spent about 2 years on pre-reqs, then dropped out because I wasn't really learning anything. Starting a company was far more interesting than going to school at the time, and still is. When I went back, I decided to go as fast as I could, because I wanted to get it over with, fully aware that there wasn't much to learn from earlier experience.

There were some instructive classes. I had a professor that was passionate about assembly, and another that I had for several classes, that gave me an FPGA board and told me I could build whatever I wanted, and he would grade me on that, since the coursework would be very easy for me. I built a basic processor, with an assembly language I devised, which was more instructive than anything I ever actually did in a class. The vast majority, however, were not worth much.

What's interesting is that I was interested enough in the subject to learn tons about it on my own over the course of more than a decade. A couple years of institutional bullshit was enough to change that. Today, I'd much prefer to do Udacity or Coursera courses than go to an actual school. At least I can study exactly what I want, and the assignments are well thought out.

Every year I get a number of students whose entire motivation to be in my class is that they want to get the piece of paper. This sort of purely extrinsic motivation does not tend to make them very good students (although occasionally I have one that does well and gets an A, good for them). I'm always a little disappointed in them, because the class is more fun for both of us if they're more internally motivated; sometimes I can manage to get them actually interested, and then they perk up and are happier (and often do better), but sometimes they've just decided that they're not going to like college, and you know what? I can't force them to.

Doesn't that really depend on the material. I flipped through some of the assignments you have on your website, and while you do have some interesting assignments, you also have stuff like Homework 5 in your sys admin class, where the student has to use traceroute to learn about the topology of the school's network. I am certain I could have done that assignment in 6th or 7th grade without difficulty. If I had to do it now, I would absolutely hate it. It is a fine assignment for students that have never troubleshot a networking issue, but if you have any experience whatsoever, its simply tedious and not particularly instructive. Nobody is going to be motivated by tedious easy assignments.

In my class, and in those of my colleagues who have not overinflated their grades, As are gotten by the students who impress us with their outstanding work. Part of that is, of course, making sure they do all the pieces (don't skip anything, make sure it all works, check your work, etc), and the smart-but-sloppy students who skip things tend to be my A- and B+ students rather than my A students. But the students whose primary priority is checking everything off on a checklist, just "doing everything", rather than "getting it" or "making a cool thing" or whatever, almost invariably don't succeed in getting the A.

I believe that you sincerely believe this. I sincerely believe it is not true. Checking boxes is indistinguishable from outstanding work, by your metrics. Somebody that is checking a checkbox by definition won't miss anything, the truly interested student is more likely to deeply explore one area and go lightly on another, becoming the A- or B+ student. If you have knowledge going in, the easiest thing to do is juke the stats and grind out as fast as possible.

That's the problem in a nutshell. If you choose a major where you already know 50%+ of the material, you won't get much out of it. I take it you took computer engineering (based on the FPGA class), but what if you had gone back to school and learned biophysics? You probably would have gotten more out of it.

I have lived this. I taught myself to programm in 5th or 6th grade. By 8th grade I was whipping up 3D games using OpenGL and what not. When I was picking majors and I absolutely did not want to go into computer science. I knew it was going to be a waste of my time.

My main 3 options were mechanical engineering, economics, and history. I based this solely on other areas I was interested in. I chose mechanical engineering and ended up taking about a dozen computer science courses for my major after testing out of the lower level classes. I learned a lot about AI, computer graphics, computer vision, and the like but skipped the BS 'learning how to programm' classes that would have been a waste. It worked out well. My mechanical engineering classes were all completely new material for me and I got a lot more out of it than if I had just taken CS.

To anyone who is a self taught programmer, I would suggest getting a minor in CS or double majoring. Simply getting a CS degree isn't enough new material to make it worthwhile. Math, physics, bio, chem, and economics all compliment a CS background very well. Obviously mechanical, chemical, computer, or electrical engineering match up very well with CS (but a double engineering major is TOUGH).

I think I agree completely with this last sentence:

> If you have knowledge going in, the easiest thing to do is juke the stats and grind out as fast as possible.

I guess my larger point is that a lot of your argument hinges on that first clause---"if you have knowledge going in"---which is not true of the typical student; and that even when you do have the knowledge going in, the "easiest" way is not the most productive, not the most effective use of your tuition money, and not, in general, the best.

More likely, the purpose of a university education is to learn.

And that does not necessarily require the professor to happen.

There should never be anything wrong with doing work outside of class, or any implication that doing the work is "not enough". Often learning happens in that time outside of class spent "just doing the work", not "in class" where a professor is struggling to "have fun".

You're also right that learning doesn't necessarily require a professor. But, if you're the sort of student that could learn something without the prof, and yet you have the prof right there, I bet that if you thought about it you could think of some relevant questions to ask that would let you learn more (or faster); and I can almost guarantee that if you're that kind of student the prof would be more than delighted to answer.

As I noted above, the problem is not that doing the work isn't enough; it's that if you go in thinking, hey, I just gotta check every box and I'll get an A, you're a lot less likely to actually succeed in getting the boxes checked in the first place.

Just like Y Combinator is a fantastic chance to be around mentors who know a ton about startups, college is an opportunity to hang around faculty who know a ton about whatever it is you are interested in. It's perhaps easy to get an A in a class by "doing everything" required of you on the syllabus, but that doesn't mean that the opportunity for learning isn't there. If you are legitimately interested in a topic, you almost certainly have some sort of open ended question about it. Ask said questions in class of office hours, talk to your professors, get involved with research. These are all things are at the very least much harder to do outside of college, even with the internet making communication between experts trivially easy.

I'm not trying to say that you can't educate yourself outside of college to the same level that you can within, and certainly there are people who don't need to go to college to do great things, but if, when presented with the opportunities that college provides, if you can't find any way to further your own "intelligence" and "understanding", then it seems like those are not the things that you are optimizing for.

How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this? When I went to school, I had about 10 years of programming experience already, but no java. That got me out of exactly zero classes, because the first two classes were effectively java syntax and apis. It also made the first two years of classes completely trivial, and was also unavoidable. At one point, I got accused of cheating because "it's impossible to learn C without attending lecture".

You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it. This is a real problem with computer science degrees. I did not need to sit around and hear what if statements and looping constructs are, or watch TA's that don't really understand memory management try to explain it.

How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this?

I agree with you here -- they suck and shouldn't exist. I had the luxury of attending a school that (with the strange exception of the Econ department) didn't allow mandatory pre-reqs as a matter of policy.

You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that the opportunities for hard things aren't there, just that you weren't motivated (and perhaps rightly so) to pursue them. Also, these things are only tedious because you already know them. It sounds like you went back to college because you saw an economic advantage in doing so and are upset because it wasn't also intellectually advantageous. In other words, you were optimizing for economics and not knowledge. If you were instead optimizing for knowledge, then it sounds like going back to college would not have been the best choice for you, although I still stand by the claim that it's impossible to go through college without being presented with an opportunity to learn something of deep and meaningful value.

Anyway, I think the problem is not so much that college is generally useless, but rather that there is an economic benefit for seemingly smart, self-educated people like yourself to go back to college even though the experience is perhaps not that useful for you otherwise.

EDIT:

My point is this: Just because you can pass classes you already know everything about with an easy A in college doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to learn more advanced things via the faculty and resources provided to you and it's partially on you to take advantage of those opportunities. Moreover, I think it's impossible to go through college and have none of those opportunities open to you.

With that being said, college isn't necessarily the best way to learn things, and whether or not it is is completely dependent on who you are. In your case, college was probably economically advantageous in the long run, but sounds like it wasn't the best way to learn novel skills. This doesn't mean college isn't a valid way for people to educate themselves generally, as not everyone comes to college able to place out of everything.

If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major, I know that not only can they "complete a list of work", but that they're also probably smart. If I see a person who has straight As but majored in social sciences, I really can't conclude much about them.

It astonishes me that you could come out with the attitude that everything is easy and college doesn't teach you anything useful.

Computer Science is not about learning to program C, or Java. If your college gave you that impression then it most certainly failed you.

Where did I say that?

When I went to school, I had about 10 years of programming experience already, but no java. That got me out of exactly zero classes, because the first two classes were effectively java syntax and apis. It also made the first two years of classes completely trivial, and was also unavoidable. At one point, I got accused of cheating because "it's impossible to learn C without attending lecture".

...

I did not need to sit around and hear what if statements and looping constructs are, or watch TA's that don't really understand memory management try to explain it.

What about graph theory? Complexity theory? Machine learning algorithms? Cache-aware and cache-oblivious algorithms? Randomized algorithms? Numerical computing? Cryptography? Scientific computing (fitting data, doing simulated experiments)?

I certainly learned some of these topics in undergrad CS, although only at a basic level considering each domain is quite deep.

Getting back to the point: if you really weren't that challenged by your coursework, why didn't you seek more challenging material? I find it hard to believe that everything you could ever study in college would be so easy for you, or anyone for that matter. It's just a shame b/c you say how college is mostly worthless because you weren't really challenged, but it sounds like you could've gotten more out if it if you studied something that pushed your boundaries more.

Well, on the other hand, if you secure grants or scholarships, you can take the 4 year pace and use the extra time to pursue your own interests. This has a bad rap (Underwater basket weaving, anyone?) but nobody says you can't be spending that time in a lab with a professor, or in the library, or any number of countless opportunities to explore. For example, I still wish I had made the time to learn a little about quantum physics and general relativity (both out of the scope of my studies). I can still learn about those things now, but at a university you have classes, professors and students all at your disposal.

You might think that sounds senseless now, but you already know what interests you, and have probably already explored other territory.

Protip: you can take "freshman physics/chemistry" as a senior if it's not a pre-req for anything else you need. And by then, you'll have learned to study more effectively than when you were a freshman and it'll be ~2 hours a week of work.

That said, at my university your major only takes up 1/3rd of your overall credit hours so I had tons of time for electives and courses far outside CS.

You don't have a representative experience. Try going to a top 5 school in science/ engineering/ math.

Maybe his experience is the representative of most colleges and yours from a "top 5 school" the exception.

The grading function you are paying for is important. Otherwise you could just take a syllabus, go off and complete the work on your own and be done.

You need to pay someone to assess the work.

Whether the amount you pay for this "service" is proportional to the benefit you get from it is for you to decide.

But you need to have those "assessments" done.

Admission to a top tier institution functions as an early assessment. You gain credentials just by being admitted, assuming you manage to graduate. This is interesting since the assessment is only based on a brief period of observation, e.g. the person's achievements up to the end of high school.

A criticism that has sometimes been levelled at Stanford is that once you are admitted you can coast your way to graduation.

Obviously that is certainly not true at lower tier universities. Faculty will fail students and those institutions will not hesitate to send them packing. There is always another student to fill the empty seat.

This is an odd criticism. While I was at Stanford, the school administrators were extremely concerned with a ubiquitous problem on campus called "Stanford Duck Syndrome": looking serene and peaceful above the surface, but underneath the water, paddling as hard as possible to keep from sinking.

You could say I was an academically-inclined kid. I started high school a year early. And during that year, I passed AP Calculus with the maximum score of 5. I studied for the SAT for a week, took it only once, and if I recall correctly scored in the 98th percentile. And finally, I matriculated at Stanford at age 16.

But still, Stanford was by a large margin the most difficult thing I'd ever done up to that point. And it would not be a huge stretch to include everything I've done ever since.

I've come to understand since graduating that, for many other institutions, the professor applies a curve to an exam in response to the overall performance of the class being poor. At Stanford, it is expressed at the start that the exam will be curved -- because the professors intend to make it so difficult that they are confident that, in their classroom of highly motivated, intelligent students, only a small handful will be able to get As; it is intended to be a way to differentiate the very top students.

Let me give you a sense of what this feels like. I was taking the freshman physics series with the world champion in physics. Blake Ross, one of the guys behind Firefox, was attending while I was there. Even while I was learning how to swim at Avery Aquatic Center, I saw Don Knuth finishing up lap swimming....

I am not saying that this term or even this phenomenon is strictly unique to Stanford, but I simply have never observed "duck syndrome" used in this sense in any other context. This includes the Internet, personal conversations, and so on. And now, it includes this Hacker News thread, because aside from Drbble's vaguely plausible remark no one has yet come forth that their institution employed this term as well.

My take on it is that, just as everyone has their own mascot, everyone has their own vocabulary, which probably includes their own coinage for this experience if they indeed have this experience to describe.

It's also possible that Stanford might not be the best place for you if you are unable to get grants/scholarships, and it places too great of a financial burden. You can have a successful career with degrees from other universities as well.

One of my professors (Dr. Mazumdar, NMT) had a saying about complexity theory: "A computer science degree will never get you a job, but it may keep you from getting fired."

I have a question about this observation. How is this different from someone with years of work experience, who demonstrated in practice that he or she was able to finish large software projects on time, on specification and on budget as a lead developer?

I'm asking this because I dropped out of college because of money constraints. I had a three hour commute each day, had a job next to my studies, and slowly but surely piled up debt in order to cover my basic expenses (food, rent, insurance, books). I had zero support from my family or the government.

I make the same observations as you, it seems to me that many doors will remain closed to me. Not all, mind you, over time you get to know people and build a network of sorts.

First is that except for college, you have almost nothing in common with HR people that are filtering the CV, so they may undervaluate your experience.

Then there is the generation gap with the middle managers that have risen to their position before the big waves of outsourcing by following the now mythical career path. They will overvalue college degrees vs experience.

Then there is the prestige of the company: lot of companies only hires people with college degree as a policy, period. Other companies have implicit policy: nobody has ever been fired to hire a Stanford graduate.

Finally there is bias - if you paid a lot for your education, or are paying a lot for your kid education - you will have a positive bias toward people with education (and sometimes, negative bias against people that dropped out)

The sad conclusion is - having a degree is never perceived as something negative, at worst, it is ignored. Not having a degree is never a positive thing, at best it is ignored.

Cheating at solitaire? Of course you can go through the motions, but for the money (even public) education costs, that seems like quite a waste of opportunity.

Memorization will do a lot for you. First of all it will get the building blocks for all that "thought and understanding" into your head. Just like lego: you may arrange bricks in very creative and novel ways, but bricks must be there to begin with.

It's also worth bearing in mind that spending 3-4 years focused on learning stuff like math,econ and CS rigorously can help your abilities to build a business later.

You might be able to setup your web dev shop at 18 and make a nice living for a few years making CRUD apps or whatever but once the market starts to demand something else then you are likely to get stuck if you haven't put some study into higher level principles.

Besides there is nothing stopping you from running a simple business at the same time as going to college. Myself and a few others on my CS course used to build websites and fix PCs during the holidays and made more money for about half the hours as the people working at the supermarkets and pubs.

A common mistake people make is that any given subject (math, econ, etc) is limited to your studies in college. I have studied biology, architecture, the classics, geology, meteorology, botany, and much more outside of college.

It does depend whether or not you are a self learner, but is paying 120k+ really worth it to have someone twist your arm? Everything you can learn in college, you can learn outside, for free -- the interent has democratized information.

That aside, you can learn anything you want outside of college, for free. Information is free, thanks to the internet.

A person may decide that it's not worth investing 4 years and lots of money for the sake of a degree, but a degree has advantages that should not be ignored.

I'm mostly speaking from personal (and vicarious) experience - when I graduated from college, I put out around 100 job applications -- no response. Then I released my first project, and had employers coming to me (Electronic Arts and Pixar, to name two). Make your own destiny -- all a degree gives you is an unwarranted sense of entitlement.