The Value of an Undergraduate Degree
<i>It was the mid-2010s and &quot;college dropout&quot; was the mark of an up-and-coming genius. Headlines were questioning the need for degrees at all and billionaire Peter Thiel was awarding high school graduates $100,000 not to attend college and become entrepreneurs instead. &quot;Not long ago, dropping out of school to start a company was considered risky,&quot; wrote the Wall Street Journal. &quot;For this generation, it is a badge of honor, evidence of ambition and focus.&quot;</i><p>This whole thing is a dangerous, scummy lie. Millions of people drop out of college, and most of them don&#x27;t end up founding billion-dollar companies. Why do they drop out? They can&#x27;t afford it, they don&#x27;t have the social support, they get sick, they lack the preparation or are too young for it... all sorts of causes. It is not glamorous. It is not a sign of great ambition, nor is it taken to be such. It is usually a case of failure (that may or may not be the person&#x27;s fault) and, in the real world, failure hurts. Sure, dropping out of Harvard to found Facebook is a winning play, but most people don&#x27;t have those kinds of options and can&#x27;t afford such a major misstep.<p>Peter Thiel&#x27;s anti-college push is something even worse. Our education system in this country isn&#x27;t as good as one might want it to be. It&#x27;s expensive, often elitist, and of dubious quality (even at prestigious schools) except for people with outlier levels (outlier among those under 25, at least) of self-motivation. All that said, it&#x27;s the one component of our society that still kinda works and that still, in some privileged subsections, is run by people with decent intentions. It&#x27;s the last bastion of meritocracy left. Perfect meritocracy? Not even close. But if a professor played favorites as brazenly as an average corporate manager (65% and &quot;culture fit&quot; = A+&#x2F;executive fast track; 97% without &quot;culture fit&quot; = C&#x2F;&quot;Meets Expectations&quot;) his life would be made hell. Getting &quot;screwed&quot; in college means studying your ass off and making a B, due to some tricky question on the final. Getting screwed in the corporate world means losing your income--possibly, your housing and your reputation as well--over the smallest infraction or none at all.<p>Education is the one component that&#x27;s left in our society where a working-class person can outperform his social &quot;superiors&quot;. This is the real reason why royalists and rightists like Peter Thiel want to destroy it. Think we lack social mobility now in the US? We do, but scrapping the colleges is going to make it worse... so keep that in mind every time some Silicon Valley asshat says that formal education is a waste of time.<p>I say the same thing about the SAT. Is it flawless? No, of course not. It picks up a number of cultural or socioeconomic factors with no correlation to true ability. However, without it, though college admissions are going to become more socioeconomic, not less.<p><i>When I was in college, I had to enroll in a course called &quot;Structured Systems Analysis&quot; for my computer science major. It remains, to this day, the most boring course I have ever taken. It was essentially a crash course in business for software developers: we discussed topics like software estimates, methods of team management, and company mission statements. It was slow, stultifying, mind-numbingly-boring information. The professor was actually great, but there was only so much he could do with the material. I fell asleep studying for the final - literally. And I was the kind of student who read textbooks for fun.</i><p>This is a common experience: finding the most boring class also to be the most applicable one on the job. The jobs are what&#x27;s broken, not the schools. I find it sad that software estimation is taught at all in schools. See, I&#x27;m a believer in the liberal arts education in the classical sense: <i>liberal</i>, in this context, means an education appropriate to a free person (as contrasted with servile arts). Real computer science is a liberal art, but giving estimates (or, say, doing user stories) is a servile art.<p>The problem with our society isn&#x27;t that a liberal arts education is outdated or elitist, so much as that our society has very few positions left in which a liberal arts education is actually useful or appropriate. Colleges are forced to take one of two options, neither free of ugliness. One is to dilute the program with servile skills like writing user stories to make graduates more employable in the strata of jobs they&#x27;ll actually be able to get; the other is to give people an education that wildly overestimates the quality of job positions that will be available to them. (As I said, the liberal arts education is designed for free people, but how many people really are free of the labor market? I&#x27;m a leftist, so I&#x27;d like to see this addressed, but I&#x27;m not holding my breath.) I&#x27;m not surprised that a course focusing on software politics turned out to be more useful than any of the others, but it&#x27;s sad that this was the case.