There’s a great lie in American discourse today. They say education is too expensive. We need to subsidize this or that, pay for some years of college, etc…
It’s all bullshit. Education is FREE. Yes. Right now. You can download all of MIT’s coursework, today, right now, for free. One professor I really respect, a Dr. Kelley Ross from California, runs a website http://www.friesian.com/ that has the most comprehensive writings on philosophy, economics and history that I have ever seen. The man is a machine. And, as I have conversed with Francis over at Liberty’s Torch, I realized there are resources for learning the art of storytelling, too.
Now, I don’t trust Wikipedia anymore, but Britannica is online, and you can buy a DVD version for like $20. Project Gutenberg gives us access to classic literature. There are Youtube channels dedicated to teaching you foreign languages. Your local library is even a resource. If you’re in my industries (I am both a DJ and a Web Developer), there are so many resources to teach you these fields it is ridiculous. I am entirely self-taught in both careers.
Now, I get it. People still go to college because they need the certifications, they need the sheepskin, so to speak, in order to get by the GateKeepers in HR departments around the world. But now we’re talking something entirely different. We’re not talking about getting an education, we’re talking about proving that you’re educated.
I submit that, for many fields, there are better ways to prove your education than a college degree that often costs over $100,000.
The fact of the matter is, College is obsolete.
People today are spoiled, in many ways. If you’ve ever read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can get a sense for how difficult gaining knowledge once was. This was a life’s work for Gibbon. He had to travel all over Europe, digging through ancient monasteries, noble libraries, and universities in order to dredge up the information required for his work.
In those days, education had to be centralized. There were not enough books and knowledge had to be concentrated in only a few places. Universities and Monasteries were the only places you could really get a substantial education.
Today books are cheap, and with the advent of the computer and the Internet, knowledge is so cheap it doesn’t even need to be printed anymore. Gibbon wouldn’t have had to spend 25 years scouring Europe for reference material, he could have done it all in 25 minutes on Google.
So the old centralized model of education is outdated. Oh, institutions still have a place, but more as practical, hands-on teaching. A man who wishes to become a mechanic or a surgeon will need tools, practice material and internship-style work in order to fulfill his role. Institutions can provide that component. But those institutions won’t be colleges or universities in any traditional sense.
But the rest? College is worthless for that, because the education can be obtained far more cheaply and readily elsewhere. And in my field of web development, advancement moves so fast colleges literally cannot keep up. By the time a class is formed and a professor is taught… the industry has moved on.
Heh, no kidding. As a software engineer myself — and also one largely self-taught — I said 15+ years ago my degree was both a B.S. in CS and a total load of BS. Oh class environments are handy for practicing and hands-on experience, if well done and well taught. Few enough professors fit that criteria even 15-20 years ago. I doubt they’ve gotten any better since.
That said, I do figure I probably will need a certification of some sort eventually. My degree is pretty old now and proving my value to the idiots in HR departments (and/or business owners) is a LOT easier with the right paperwork…
I distinctly remember – yes, I’m that old and it has been _that_ long ago – needing tutoring, or at least someone knowledgable to talk to, in order to understand some of the concepts I was having difficulty with in organic chem and in calculus. I’m not incredibly slow – started college at 16 – but some concepts were just foreign enough that I couldn’t grasp them from our class textbooks and/or what I found in the university library. Being able to hash it out with a tutor/teaching assistant was a real help.
I haven’t yet stumbled upon that kind of resource on the net. On-line tutoring might provide a bit of income for folks who paid $100k and then found themselves without a job. Probably there are such available, and I’m simply ignorant of them.
Online tutoring does exist (you can Google them, there are many options). But, more to your point, real-life tutoring exists also. Now, granted, it’s usually not free. The knowledge is free, but someone’s time and effort generally is not.
Nonetheless, if a person found themselves stuck on a particular problem or concept, tutoring is a viable option. Note that, if done right, it’s still considerably less expensive than college. This is mainly because even in a subject that is difficult for you, you will not need the tutor for *everything*. You only pay for the hours you need to get you “unstuck” as it were. Furthermore, college classes are sometimes so large (lecture-based classes often are) that you would need the private tutor anyway. Grad students often make side money doing exactly that for undergrads.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say education *can* be free, but you may need to pay for specific things you need. Nonetheless, I submit that those costs are an order of magnitude lower than that of your average college degree and would probably be affordable for most individuals.
I saw a comment once that stuck with me:
“I have in my pocket a device which can access all of the wealth of human knowledge from the beginning of time. I use it to argue with people and to look at pictures of cats.”
Still, I’m a bit with RegT. My BS in Civil Engineering from the late 80’s would have been much much more difficult done as an autodidact, and I’m not sure I could have gotten past the gatekeepers for professional licensure in the various states without it. But we had small classes where you could actually talk with the professor.
I think college is about 90% obsolete, but it does serve a purpose for certain professions. The current costs are an entirely different discussion.
I attended the University of Florida in the late 90s. It was already rather bad. The small classes you speak of were, if not entirely extinct, becoming increasingly rare. I remember Chem lecture was in an auditorium with 100+ students. Raising your hand to ask a question was considered bad form. If you weren’t an attractive female, forget about getting help after the lecture.
Then I’d trudge off to a CompSci class that was teaching me Fortran. In the late 90s. I paid for this education by DJing frat parties at night. I quickly learned what college was really used for: partying for 4 or 5 years while swimming in booze and sex. Don’t misunderstand me, I enjoyed this aspect as much as any other young man might, but it was difficult to call it an education. These people would trudge into class the next day, hungover and strung out. They might retain knowledge just long enough to get through an exam. Then again, they might not, either.
Eventually I left without finishing my degree, and got a decent job doing Web Development, using absolutely none of the knowledge gained from the University.
You’re probably right, Weetabix, in that there is some utility left in College for some individuals. But they aren’t in the main, and even many of them wind up burnt out and partied out instead of properly educated. These days the best that can be said of most college degrees is that they get you past HR gatekeepers and regulatory agencies.
Exceptions exist, of course. After all, as Francis put it, College once served a very vital, if significantly smaller, purpose in preserving Western cultural norms among the scions of industry.
You’re right of course. I was at a small, private university. I did not accept an offer from Tulane because I knew I’d never make it through there. đŸ˜‰ And I had those same worthless Fortran classes.
I’ve actively discouraged my kids from going to college unless they need a degree for one of the gatekeeper type professions that they’re sure they want to do.
My daughter is in college right now on basically a full ride for violin performance, which is what she wants to do for a living. I told her to go more for the contacts than for the education, though the education has turned out to be good (for her), too. She’s there getting the “who you know.” And she’s personally resistant to the partying and wastrelling, and living at home, so I’m not too worried. She’s not in the main, as you said.
As a PS: One thing it does for those professions is that it allows the aspirants to weed themselves out at their own expense rather than making private firms bear the expense. As a free market guy, that appeals to me.
But on the whole, I agree with your post.