USA is rich in universities. I wish people would focus less on the rankings and looking good credential aspect of college, and more on using it as an opportunity to learn / actually getting good at something. If we did the latter, we’d realize that people could go to pretty much any university (or coursera!) and get a high quality education here.
You are absolutely missing one of the primary points of US universities, which is to maintain a social hierarchy.
I mean, if you just want to learn stuff and get a good education, there are loads of resources where you can do that, often for free or near free. College is about much more than just learning new things, and if that's the only framework through which you value a college education, you'll be doomed to misunderstand the institution.
Nonsense. Education is not about taking a course or reading bunch of books. The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck. You can ask the community of course but the quality of community answers is more than often just trash.
> The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck.
Stuck on what? For an undergrad, those problems can easily be solved by going online or to a tutor for a fraction of the cost. And that's for STEM based problems, humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds.
The best piece of advice I got was from one of my english highschool teachers who told me a story about how when he was in university he was getting graded really poorly on essays until he basically regurgitated what he thought the the professor wanted to hear.
It's been a while since I've been to university, but I think it probably still holds.
Another unique bonus of university education: in my undergrad one of the professors noticed that I cared about the subject material more than my classmates.
Due to this he gave me opportunities to perform research in areas that I didn't even know existed.
Had I not gone to a university I never would have been exposed to these areas of technology.
"humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds" - maybe at some universities, but not at a good liberal arts school.
Good liberal arts schools don't really exist in the US anymore, unless we're talking about something like St. John's College or maybe some Catholic universities. I believe the capture of university humanities departments by critical theory is pretty complete at this point, and the sciences are rapidly being colonized.
It seems possible to me that people of a less analytic personality type can improve learning using the cue, "imagine you wanted to socially impress a particular person, an academic". The same way a weightlifter who doesn't study the anatomy of external hip rotation can get good results with "screw your feet into the floor", or GPT-3 from "Let's think step by step". It leverages instinct to do what isn't understood consciously. I agree you're going to need originality to really excel.
I think you’ve defined a tutor. Tutors cost less than college tuition. And top professors answer emails from non-students, sometimes they teach for free on MOOCs. Perhaps you’re on a very narrow field where knowledge is extremely scarce, but that’s atypical.
For the cost of a college education at some places you could likely hire a knowledgeable professor of the skill set you’re interested in to live with you for four years.
You get 1000 resumes for a job. How do you drop 95% of the applicants. One easy way is to look at the University and GPA as a quick snuff test. After running that cheap low-pass filter you now only have 50 Resumes. You now spend ~3mins on each of those resumes to determine the 10 people you plan to interview.
That's why university matters, it helps you get past the first level of screening. It's also fair of employers to assume that the average Top 25 university graduate is better than the AVERAGE bottom 50% university graduate.
There are far more effective ways to stand out as an applicant than your GPA and university — in particular, by actually contributing notable work to the field, but also by making social connections and leveraging those into a job.
I didn’t even graduate from high school, but I’ve never struggled to find employment with the companies I wanted to work for.
The idea of a degree as a first-pass filter is oversold at best.
Malcolm Gladwell explains why it's statistically FAR better to be among the smartest kids at a 2nd or 3rd tier school than struggling to get into some elite institution where you will be below average among your peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc&t=220s
If you're borrowing money to pay for a degree, going to a school where you are not at the very top of the class is really taking a big risk.
Given all the trash Gladwell has spouted as truth over the years, it's hard to take him seriously. Even if sometimes what he says has merit, it's hard to know when to believe him and when not to.
I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants.
While I think people should be much more accepting of 2nd- and 3rd-tier schools as options than they often are, kids should absolutely push themselves for the best-ranked school they can get into (assuming they also have a solid program for whatever field/major they're interested in). Not only is it beneficial to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, there are also second-order effects to attending an elite university, like making connections that can help you along with your career later. Not to mention that if a recruiter sees two recent-grad resumes that are identical except for the name of the school, they're going to pick the candidate that went to the "better" school.
Certainly you don't want to set yourself up for failure; if that elite school is going to be such a struggle that you're eventually going to be washed out, that's probably not a good outcome, and a lower-tier school would have been a better choice. But, absent that, I think it's good advice to attend the best school you can get into.
Thank you for posting Gladwell's talk, which should be required viewing for any young, bright and hopeful high-school graduate. I wish all my nephews and nieces had watched it.
What! A 2nd tier school still has strong peers which you can surround yourself in. If you're at the top of a 2nd tier school you can push yourself to be near the PHD researchers and graduate students giving you similar academic peer rigor.
I agree with you from an academic standpoint! Maybe my comment was too harsh, I think surrounding yourself with PHD researchers and graduate students counts as challenging and pushing yourself.
But it's more fun when the people pushing you are your friends and peers. In contrast, how many PHD researchers with a spouse and kids want to study and get coffee with a 19 year old undergrad?
I think with the rise of online communities, it's not as applicable anymore.
Gladwell says you're only comparing against yourself against your peers at your school, and not the world, but for me, I've absolutely compared myself from people from other universities (and for that matter, other countries).
For example, there are people 2-3 years younger than me who have a public output of projects/writing that is 100 times more than mine. I'm probably somewhat high up among in my own university in project output, but I still made this comparison, partially because online communities allow me to hear about these people.
The highest quality education I received was at a community college. The undergraduate education I got after transferring to a well-regarded research shool was lower quality, with larger classes and professors who weren't incentivized to put effort into teaching.
