College is useless?

[ThaumaturgicTheorist]

I see this sentiment everywhere: that formal education is unnecessary now because anything you want to learn, you can learn online. Why get a degree when

I'm too stupid for college (failed out, twice), I'm also too stupid to self-teach. I'm not creative or social. I'm definitely not smart enough to do something like start a business. I'm not really qualified to do anything but incredibly menial temp jobs. In fact, I've moved in back home and all my mother talks about is forcing me to go back to school. I sort of want to, until I remember that I should be able to learn it all online. Oh, the conversations we have about that - everything on the internet is a lie, MOOCs are unaccredited, everyone hates autodidacts because they don't actually know anything, no one has an respect for "The University of Oh-I-Taught-Myself", all those successful people have degrees, no one will even consider you for a professional position without proof you know anything. I've been hearing this all my life and, well, it's a little hard not to believe it. I mean, where's a high-schooler supposed to learn anything marketable? Online sure, but when? Unless you're a genius and everything comes naturally to you, I don't see how many people have much choice between the traditional college route, and scraping by on menial work.

Then again, my mom also still believes in the narrative of "go to college, have a job waiting for you when you graduate, be totally independent by 23 and work your way up professionally". No matter how much data I show her that that just isn't the case anymore, she has anecdotes of a few who did experience it, or worse, her experience from the 80s which "proves" that it's the norm. I have no faith in my ability to find steady work.

I was reading something a few minutes ago that the sooner you start working, the better, that one should absolutely forgo college for hands-on work experience. So far, that seems to me like a good way to spend the rest of your life broke and bored unless you're a genius entrepreneur. The only jobs a high school grad is qualified for is menial service work: how is that supposed to make you more money? People don't move up in companies anymore. So surely certification is still necessary...if you're smart enough to do anything of use. Which is a problem for me, because I can't do math, which kind of knocks out every respectable, marketable degree available. But that's something else altogether.


tl;dr: Is college truly useless in the wake of online classes? Is some magical acquisition of "experience" really more valuable?

Also, are there any marketable certifications for someone who can't do math or science (or tech, for that matter?)

 

[á´…eparted]

Simple answer: no

 

[Reborn Relic]

Something being conducive to getting a job and/or social standing and something being conducive to developing an understanding of a topic aren't the same thing. You can understand something pretty damn well and not be hired for a variety of reasons--not having had an opportunity to prove it in conversation being one of them. Degrees are considered proof that you have studied a subject, and so are useful to people that want a quick and easy "proof" of understanding.

And degrees do help with learning, too, mainly because the college process gives you an incentive to learn. Sure, you could learn online or through books, but the class format makes it so that you have to or else tomorrow you'll be socially shamed when your teacher asks you something and you haven't got a clue what they're talking about, or you do crappily on that one test. That's the advantage of college over self-teaching, and it's pretty powerful honestly.

The ability to teach yourself doesn't have to come from intelligence, but self-discipline. You have to be willing to actually put in the work even when there's no stick to make you do so.
[MENTION=20829]Hard[/MENTION] , would that about sum it t up or is there more to it?

 

[93JC]

I would also add that having a post-secondary education is evidence you can stick to schedules, meet deadlines, deal with other people, and are generally speaking punctual for lectures, tutorials and the like. Many of those day-to-day rigours of post-secondary education are very similar to what one faces in the working world.

You can teach yourself lots of things, and there's nothing wrong with doing so (in fact it's a very good thing to keep teaching yourself new things and new skills, even long after being "college-age"), but it doesn't demonstrate that you have any of these so-called 'soft' skills that are very important to successfully completing a task. Self-directed learning can be done at your own pace; the world does not move at your pace, it moves at whatever pace it needs to at a given moment. Self-directed learning doesn't demonstrate you can successfully apply your new-found knowledge outside of the very narrow confines of doing an online test; college programs usually involve completing projects, essays, experiments, theses.

So yes, a college education means a hell of a lot more to other people than your own self-directed learning.

Do you need a college degree to be "successful"? No. Do you need to "do math" to be successful? No. Learn a trade, for instance. The world needs electricians, plumbers, etc.

 

[1487610420]

no

is it worth dozens of thousands/semester? depends.

you can prob pay tuition and living expenses in some other countries with a semester's/year's tuition cost in North America.

 

[tkae.]

I see this sentiment everywhere: that formal education is unnecessary now because anything you want to learn, you can learn online. Why get a degree when

I'm too stupid for college (failed out, twice), I'm also too stupid to self-teach. I'm not creative or social. I'm definitely not smart enough to do something like start a business. I'm not really qualified to do anything but incredibly menial temp jobs. In fact, I've moved in back home and all my mother talks about is forcing me to go back to school. I sort of want to, until I remember that I should be able to learn it all online. Oh, the conversations we have about that - everything on the internet is a lie, MOOCs are unaccredited, everyone hates autodidacts because they don't actually know anything, no one has an respect for "The University of Oh-I-Taught-Myself", all those successful people have degrees, no one will even consider you for a professional position without proof you know anything. I've been hearing this all my life and, well, it's a little hard not to believe it. I mean, where's a high-schooler supposed to learn anything marketable? Online sure, but when? Unless you're a genius and everything comes naturally to you, I don't see how many people have much choice between the traditional college route, and scraping by on menial work.

Then again, my mom also still believes in the narrative of "go to college, have a job waiting for you when you graduate, be totally independent by 23 and work your way up professionally". No matter how much data I show her that that just isn't the case anymore, she has anecdotes of a few who did experience it, or worse, her experience from the 80s which "proves" that it's the norm. I have no faith in my ability to find steady work.

I was reading something a few minutes ago that the sooner you start working, the better, that one should absolutely forgo college for hands-on work experience. So far, that seems to me like a good way to spend the rest of your life broke and bored unless you're a genius entrepreneur. The only jobs a high school grad is qualified for is menial service work: how is that supposed to make you more money? People don't move up in companies anymore. So surely certification is still necessary...if you're smart enough to do anything of use. Which is a problem for me, because I can't do math, which kind of knocks out every respectable, marketable degree available. But that's something else altogether.


tl;dr: Is college truly useless in the wake of online classes? Is some magical acquisition of "experience" really more valuable?

Also, are there any marketable certifications for someone who can't do math or science (or tech, for that matter?)

Online classes have a few shortcomings. They're miles better than they used to be, and I'm in the online program of my school's MSSW program. So long as they're online classes for a brick-and-mortar school or for an extremely, highly reputable school online-only school (of which there are few, to be honest), then you're fine. Online classes by themselves aren't wrong. The problem is that online classes are breeding grounds for for-profit colleges that are basically scams. They've basically trashed the reputation of online schools, to the point that you have to not only be in an online program for a brick-and-mortar school, it has to be a highly respected brick-and-mortar school and its online program be ranked highly. But there's nothing wrong at all with taking unaccredited classes from Khan University or something if your goal is just to learn more about something that interests you. That's no different than me paying for a subscription to a chess website for more content to learn from, or for buying a book or documentary to learn more about a historical event. Learning is learning, period.

In general, part of the reason college is beneficial to everyone, even if you don't complete it, is that it teaches the critical thinking schools high schools have stopped providing students in order to prepare them for the tests that they need to get into college at the expense of preparing them with the skills they need to succeed in college. Seem dumb? Yes, it is very. B.A. degrees are getting more worthless each year because of the way the system has shifted. And the reason for the shift is because of people like your mom. The 80s started the trend of people going for higher education specifically to make themselves more marketable and to improve their income, which has caused a glut of colleges that cashed in over the past three decades and has made a bachelors degree the new high school diploma. Masters degrees are the bachelor degrees of yesteryear (doctorates can actually hurt you in some cases). If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to explain to your mom that I have TWO bachelors degrees and still never had a job waiting for me at any point; I had to use them to get into a masters program to get an internship to start building a meaningful resume and to get the education necessary to qualify for licensure (which, granted, is a personal venture, but the internship situation is true in many fields). The rest of my non-masters friends? They're working at Walmart and Target and working as waiters, because every other person that applies for jobs has a college degree and is also trying to pay off their student debt. God help the ones who stayed in our liberal arts field and didn't find some other route. Another of my friends from high school got an associates degree in welding after she realized her biology degree put her in a field where she wasn't happy (veterinary technician), and now she makes as much as both me and my librarian friend (~$55k to $60k for me, $55k for her), and has to the potential to make as much as us combined if she did something like underwater welding. Basically, the big lie is that degree = job. That is simply not true, and it's our generation that's suffering from being lied to our entire lives with a carrot that never existed.

So to answer your question, here's what you're looking for: get an associates degree or an apprenticeship in something you enjoy, preferably something with a union. Locksmithing, plumbing, HVAC, or other associates programs at your local college. The curriculum is skill-based and not exactly rigorous, and those are where the high-paying jobs are. The only well-paying jobs that require post-graduate college degrees are doctors, lawyers, computer programming (which you can in theory teach yourself successfully and still get a job), and business if you get an MBA (although as an entrepreneur you can make a business succeed and that be your credentials). After that, it's the union jobs with associates degrees or apprenticeships. Having only a bachelors puts you firmly in the lower middle class (unless you do something like nursing or engineering). College is about learning because you love to learn, and improving yourself intellectually. If that's not what you're into and you just want training in a career, get an associates degree. Beyond that, yes, you will be doing temp jobs waiting for an opportunity that may or may not come.

College as an academic institution is not useless, it's very worthwhile to improve yourself academically. The problem is that college is not longer an academic institution for the greater thinkers and intellectually hungry to pursue the great truths of their field. It's become a career move more than anything else. Even still, the benefit of college is that you have the experts in the field teaching you the basics and guiding your path to learning, rather than just setting you loose on the internet to just learn everything and not know what's important and what's not. College as a degree printing shop, yes, that's making them more useless than they should be, and maybe a few decades ago you could float your degree as something that puts you above the rest of the other applicants for a job, but today that's simply not a viable strategy.

 

[1487610420]

The most valuable skill I got from college (engineering) was learning how to learn. Self teaching isn't a hobby unless you take is as such. Structure discipline and countless hours immersed is the default to make sense of things; which is why having someone else's support can be essencial for success, be it a professor or someone on the internet, even if in a passive-recorded way. Arguably human interaction will facilitate the process, at a price.

 

[kirsten]

You really don't sound dumb... you're able to write coherently, as well as analyze a situation. I know people who get Bs in college who couldn't do either or those things.

A job definitely won't be "waiting for you" with a B.A. or B.S., but it seems like it's pretty impossible to get a decent job without one... (with a few certain exceptions... and the few exceptions I can think of have to do with science and/or math, specifically comp sci or government intelligence work).

Maybe go back to college and just try harder?

 

[kyuuei]

We have several threads on this very subject.. Short answer: No, but it may not be right for everyone, and people should be mindful of the way they learn and prosper in life.

 

[indra]

I've been chatting with some conservative business owners and 2/2 conservative business owners think you should roll into a ditch and die

 

[ThaumaturgicTheorist]

Regarding myself, I've been toying with business ideas lately (no faith in them, but it's nice to think about stuff) and studying finance; yet I feel like it wouldn't be worth it to go back to college unless I major in some STEM subject. If I cold magically make myself good at math and science I would probably study engineering of some kind.

In general: I hear a lot of people complain about useless courses and say they didn't learn anything new in college they couldn't have taught themselves (I guess I was raised to see college as an educational place, not a 'vocational school'. You don't go there to learn and study one thing to do for the rest of your life, but to genuinely explore intellectually, even if it has to be forced. Also, you really do need more than just your exclusive job skills). Others point out that only a very limited number of majors is worth it, and to get a "worthless" degree is anything from stupid to immoral.

I hear a lot of people talk about trades, but not too many people seem to gravitate that way. I tend to think of trades as too limiting, which I guess is the main reason I'm more uneasy about even looking into that. You can switch tracks and transfer skills with a college degree; with vocational training, that's all you can do. I guess the limitation worries me, probably others too...

 

[CitizenErased]

Why it IS useless:
- it makes you be tired of the career/field you're studying because the system is somehow obsolete and it doesn't adapt to the new way of thinking people have developed (I abandoned architecture school halfway through because the stress and consecutive all-nighters made me physically ill, now I changed career)
- you end up believing you're worth the grades you get
- the fact that you get a diploma doesn't mean you know how to do your stuff
- there are so many graduates that for washing dishes in a lame restaurant you need to have a Ph.D in neuroscience (exaggerating, of course), which means that the diploma doesn't guarantee a job afterwards
- footballers/Youtubers, etc earn way more money than any other job that requires an intense preparation

Why it ISN'T useless:
- for introverted/shy people like me, it's probably the only way to interact with other people
- it prepares you to deal with bureaucracy and the whole social system we live in
- helps to develop patience
- helps to learn how to acquire new knowledge, how to study, make relationships between concepts you may not be able to do on your own
- having someone making you read and study for exams prevents noxious procrastination (if I decided to study by myself, I'd never do it)
- having a diploma is better than not having it (even better when one doesn't have innate skills, because it's a paper that compensates that "flaw")
- despite the horrible times school may force us to experience, I like to think that instead of the university "making me do it", I'm making university do something for me. Grades are just a way to know what I have to review more and what I know well. Long story short, I'm using university to obtain knowledge I WANT TO HAVE.

I hope I could help! I myself hate school because I'd rather live in a cave in the middle of the forest (with Wi-Fi, of course) and refrain from all human institutions, but well, I try to take advantage of what is given to me ("I laugh because I must not cry")

 

[1487610420]

Regarding myself, I've been toying with business ideas lately (no faith in them, but it's nice to think about stuff) and studying finance; yet I feel like it wouldn't be worth it to go back to college unless I major in some STEM subject. If I cold magically make myself good at math and science I would probably study engineering of some kind.

In general: I hear a lot of people complain about useless courses and say they didn't learn anything new in college they couldn't have taught themselves (I guess I was raised to see college as an educational place, not a 'vocational school'. You don't go there to learn and study one thing to do for the rest of your life, but to genuinely explore intellectually, even if it has to be forced. Also, you really do need more than just your exclusive job skills). Others point out that only a very limited number of majors is worth it, and to get a "worthless" degree is anything from stupid to immoral.

I hear a lot of people talk about trades, but not too many people seem to gravitate that way. I tend to think of trades as too limiting, which I guess is the main reason I'm more uneasy about even looking into that. You can switch tracks and transfer skills with a college degree; with vocational training, that's all you can do. I guess the limitation worries me, probably others too...

You reap what you sow. What one gets out of college (or anything really) depends on what is put in: effort, attention, focus, drive, etc. If you know what you want and where to get it, ie: career/job skill set, or subject of interest and which college to get it from, and are focused and driven, it can be the best route to acquire it, immerse yourself in it and learn from your peers, have people knowledgeable in that field to assist you in walking through it etc.

If you don't yet know, it can also be a place of exploration where maybe you can find those answers. Even if the mindset is 'go to college to get a paper and land a job', all the former potentially will allow that pov to shift.

And with anything else in life, becoming good at it is directly proportional to the amount of dedication and the quality of that dedication, to the former mindset/motivation/drive + good mentorship/support group will greatly contribute. I used to suck at math cuz highskool was ez and I never cared/tried, and when engineering became a goal, I had to actually try study/get tutoring and basically give it true effort. That being said, diff stroke to diff folks, not everyone will want to be an engineer/doctor/teacher/programmer/teacher/cook/etc.

Just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's worth doing. Replace hard with any other construct/peer pressure. At the end of the day, worth is self determined, because YOLO, emphasis on Y, unless you allow your life to be controlled/determined by others, directly or not.

 

[CakeByTheOcean]

For me, I think finally being on my own, getting to truly make my own decisions, & take care of myself have been more valuable to me about college than the actual classes I've taken. The life experience itself is what I think I really need about it. Sorry, I don't think I'd be much help with academic advice.

 

[highlander]

The only jobs a high school grad is qualified for is menial service work: how is that supposed to make you more money?

That's why it's important to go to college.

People don't move up in companies anymore.

Who is telling you this garbage? It's not true. Think about it logically.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

I would caution against online education in any form. A fews ago I made the acquaintance with the head of online education at a major research university. He had been in online education for several decades and was an absolute expert on the science of learning, the neurological and psychological aspects, etc.

He summed online education this way: the most diligent online student, who uses all the tools, does all the reading, participates in chats, etc will learn less long term than a frat boy sleeping off a hangover in class who does the bare minimum.

So, for personal educational benefit, an in-person course will always be better.

He could find nothing to explain it, but every bit of the unbiased research confirms it.

He also told me that many schools have found that students tend to drop out more if they are online.

Now, super disciplined students can get knowledge from online, but it just will not benefit most everyone.

But he said schools are heading that way to reduce costs and increase revenue.

 

[ThaumaturgicTheorist]

Who is telling you this garbage? It's not true. Think about it logically.

I admit it's a conjecture of my own: it simply appears to me that gone are the days when you can start out sweeping floors and retire as president of a company. I suppose I've hard enough anecdotes about lack of promotions and mobility that it seemed like workers tend to be stuck where they are.

Where's the logic I'm missing?

 

[prplchknz]

we're all useless we just pretend not to be.

 

[highlander]

I admit it's a conjecture of my own: it simply appears to me that gone are the days when you can start out sweeping floors and retire as president of a company. I suppose I've hard enough anecdotes about lack of promotions and mobility that it seemed like workers tend to be stuck where they are.

Where's the logic I'm missing?

The CEO of a big company most likely has an MBA from a top business school. It's been that way for years. People with the ambition to be a CEO generally go to college.

 

[Reborn Relic]

I would caution against online education in any form. A fews ago I made the acquaintance with the head of online education at a major research university. He had been in online education for several decades and was an absolute expert on the science of learning, the neurological and psychological aspects, etc.

He summed online education this way: the most diligent online student, who uses all the tools, does all the reading, participates in chats, etc will learn less long term than a frat boy sleeping off a hangover in class who does the bare minimum.

So, for personal educational benefit, an in-person course will always be better.

He could find nothing to explain it, but every bit of the unbiased research confirms it.

He also told me that many schools have found that students tend to drop out more if they are online.

Now, super disciplined students can get knowledge from online, but it just will not benefit most everyone.

But he said schools are heading that way to reduce costs and increase revenue.

Do you have any good links? I'm interested in hearing about this.