So, I’m having one of those I-don’t-want-to-go-to-school moments again. I’m in my first year at a university, and, as often happens, I feel like it’s not worth my time.
As far as math goes, I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time—though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course. I have had the occasional fun chat with a professor, but the lecture was never it.
As far as other subjects go, I think forces conspired to make me not succeed. I had a single non-math class, though it was twice the length of a normal class and officially two classes. It was about ancient Greece and Rome, and we had to read things like Works and Days and the Iliad. Afterwards, we were supposed to write a paper about depictions of society in the two works or something. I never wrote the paper, and I dropped the class.
Is school worth it for the learning? How about for the little piece of paper I get at the end?
I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time—though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course.
Take it from me (as a dropout-cum-autodidact in a world where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental, I’m fractionally one of your future selves), that procedural knowledge is really, really important. It’s just too easy to fall into the trap of “Oh, I’m a smart person who reads books and Wikipedia; I’m fine just the way I am.” Maybe you can do better than most college grads, simply by virtue of being smart and continuing to read things, but life (unlike many schools) is not graded on a curve. There are so manylevels above you, that you’re in mortal danger of missing out on entirely if you think you can get it all from Wikipedia, if you ever let yourself believe that you’re safe at your current level. If you think school isn’t worth your time, that’s great, quit. But know that you don’t have to be just another dropout who likes to read; you can quit and hold yourself to a higher standard.
You want to learn math? Here’s what I do. Get textbooks. Get out a piece of paper, and divide it into two columns. Read or skim the textbooks. Take notes; feel free to copy down large passages verbatim (I have a special form of quotation marks for verbatim quotes). If a statement seems confusing, maybe try to work it out yourself. Work exercises. If you get curious about something, make up your own problem and try to work it out yourself. Four-hundred ninety-three pieces of paper later, I can say with confidence that my past self knew nothing about math. I didn’t know what I was missing, could not have known in advance what it would feel like, to not just accept as a brute fact a linear transformation is invertible iff its determinant is nonzero, but to start to see these as manifestations of the same thing. (Because—obviously—since the determinant is the product of the eigenvalues, it serves as a measure of how the transformation distorts area; if the determinant is zero, it means you’ve lost a dimension in the mapping, so you can’t reverse it. But it wouldn’t have been “obvious” if I had only read the Wikipedia article.)
(Because—obviously—since the determinant is the product of the eigenvalues,
It’s amazing how rarely people—including textbook authors—actually bother to point this out. (Admittedly, it’s only true over an algebraically closed field such as the complex numbers.) Were you by any chance using Axler?
it serves as a measure of how the transformation distorts area; if the determinant is zero, it means you’ve lost a dimension in the mapping, so you can’t reverse it. But it wouldn’t have been “obvious” if I had only read the Wikipedia article.)
While I certainly agree with the main point of your comment, I nevertheless think that this particular comparison illustrates mainly that the mathematical Wikipedia articles still have a way to go. (Indeed, the property of determinants mentioned above is buried in the middle of the “Further Properties” section of the article, whereas I think it ought to be prominently mentioned in the introduction; in Axler it’s the definition of the determinant [in the complex case]!)
I up voted this but I just wanted to follow this tangent.
as a dropout-cum-autodidact in a world where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental, I’m fractionally one of your future selves
This isn’t true in all worlds where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental. It is a reasonable thing to say if certain versions of the psychological continuity theory are true. But, those theories don’t exhaust the set of theories in which personal identity isn’t ontologically fundamental. For example, if personal identity supervenes on human animal identity than you are not one of Warrigal’s future selves, even fractionally.
I think you should ask yourself this: if you drop out, what realistically are you going to do with your time? If you don’t have a very good answer to that question, stay where you are.
View university in the same way as you would view a long lap-swimming workout. Boring as hell, maybe, but you’ll be better off and feel better when you’re done. Sure, you could skip your pool workout and go do something Really Important, but most people skip their workouts and then go watch TV instead.
Suppose you have an idea or desire for something to do instead of university. You should create a gradual, reversible transition. For instance if you want to work and earn some money, find a job first (telling them you’ve dropped out), work for a couple of weeks, make sure you like it, and only then actually drop out. Or if you want to study alone at home, start doing it for 10 hours every week, then 20, drop just one or two classes to free the time, and when you see it’s working out, go all out.
This may not be convenient if working for a couple weeks requires time you’ll only have if you drop out. If you end up not wanting to drop out after all, you can’t necessarily afford to miss the classes.
Is school worth it for the learning? How about for the little piece of paper I get at the end?
In the comment section of this post, “Doug S.” gives the most salient analysis I have seen. After stating, “the job of a university professor is to do research and bring in grant money for said research, not to teach! Teaching is incidental,” he was asked why parents would pay upward of $40,000 annually for such a service. His parsimonious reply: “In most cases, it’s not the education that’s worth $40,000+. It’s the diploma. Earning a diploma demonstrates that you are willing to suffer in exchange for vague promises of future reward, which is a trait that employers value.”
Before I started college, I read this professor’s speech, which attempted to explain, given your concerns, why an education may nevertheless be valuable. It’s biased towards its audience (UChicago students) but I think its relevant point can be summarized as: few jobs allow you to continue practicing the diversity of skills employed by academic work, and having a degree keeps your options wide open for a longer period. However, the real thesis of the speech is that university is uniquely a place to devote oneself to practicing the Art, broadly construed, of generating knowledge and beauty from everything.
Other considerations:
Becoming an academic is very hard without an undergraduate degree, so if you want that life, stick with it.
It takes a great deal of luck to pull a Bill Gates. It is otherwise hard to convince people that your reasons for not having a degree are genuine and not ex post.
At least in my case, it has been hard to find anywhere near as high a concentration of intelligent and interesting people outside the university as in the one I attended.
What do you plan on spending your time on if you don’t go to school? Most jobs largely consist of being forced to do some assignment that you feel isn’t worth your time. - you’re not going to be escaping that by dropping out. And I’d wager that a college degree is one of the best ways to snag a job that you DO actually enjoy.
I suspect the REAL value of a college degree, aside from the basic intelligence indication, is that it says you can handle 4 years doing largely unpleasant work.
Most jobs largely consist of being forced to do some assignment that you feel isn’t worth your time. - you’re not going to be escaping that by dropping out.
I can’t speak for all people or all jobs, but in my experience, there’s a certain dignity and autonomy in paid work that I never got out of school. After quitting University, I worked in a supermarket for nineteen months. Sure, it was low-paying, low-status, and largely boring, but I was much happier at the store, and I think a big reason for this was that I had a function other than simply to obey. At University, I had spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn’t following the professor’s instructions exactly to the letter, and being terrified that this made me a bad person. Whereas at the store, it didn’t matter so much if I incidentally broke a dozen company rules in the course of doing my job, because what mattered was that the books were balanced and the customers were happy. It’s not so bad, nominally having a boss, as long as there’s some optimization criterion other than garnering the boss’s approval: you can tell if you couldn’t solve a customer’s problem, or if the safe is fifty dollars short, or if the latte you made is too foamy. And when the time comes, you can clock out, and walk to the library, with no one to tell you what to study. Kind of idyllic, really.
I worked at a supermarket for three days, and was fired for insubordination. (I wanted to read a book when there were no customers coming to my register, and the boss told me not to...)
I have a similar story; except in my case I was fired because my shirt was insufficiently black.
Could you elaborate? Were you fired for once not having a black shirt, or for not being able to acquire / evaluate black shirts? or, if it’s possible to tell, having a bad attitude about the shirt rule?
I had a shirt I felt was black & meet the dress code; the manager felt that it didn’t. I felt that since I had already spent something like 60$ on new clothes to meet the dress code, and since I didn’t interact with the customers at all, I wasn’t going to go and buy a new black shirt. The manager felt I no longer needed to work there.
I suspect the REAL value of a college degree, aside from the basic intelligence indication, is that it says you can handle 4 years doing largely unpleasant work.
Letting your future employer know you’re willing to do all the unpleasant stuff you feel isn’t worth your time.
If you did it for a piece of paper, then surely you’ll do it for a paycheck… right?
If I’m not actually willing to put up with pointless stuff for a paycheck, would I benefit from signaling that I am? Or would I just lose a useful filter on potential employers?
The correct answer should have been “It depends”. Mostly on what you might want to do with that paper. I would mostly say “No”. Unless you want a fairly boring, routine job working for someone else.
If you intend to always work for yourself, owning your own companies, being your own boss, then a diploma is a waste of time.
Diplomas are for people who want to work for others.
But if you want to work for others, then get a degree, by all means.
If you work for yourself, your customers are generally going to be moved by most other factors prior to being moved by the owner’s formal education.
Bosses and owners, however, are going to be moved by degrees.
Owners like to see their underlings to have degrees because it demonstrates a certain irrational loyalty, and a lack of business savvy. This assures the owner that he will remain in charge—that you won’t negotiate too hard for your benefits, or run away with his business plans and start a competitive company, etc.
Bosses like to see their underlings to have degrees because they had to get one as well, so why shouldn’t you suffer at least as much.
By getting a degree, you signal your acceptance of your humble status in the pecking order. This is a prerequisite if you want to find your place in the hierarchy, but pointless if you want to be at the top.
There are some people who prefer to work for others, and some who prefer to work for themselves; however, the vast majority of people prefer neither, and for them college is neither a waste of time nor a means to signal: it is a stay of execution.
If you’re excelling in math, move up to a higher level. Math departments are usually very flexible in this regard (engineering departments not always so). My freshman year I signed up for a couple of graduate level math classes, and believe me, the knowledge I gained is not to be found in Wikipedia, or any other written form. You have to struggle for an understanding of higher math, and the setup for the struggle is greatly helped by having fellow students, a professor to guide you, and hard deadlines to motivate you.
I also felt a lot of classes I was forced to take were incredibly lame. I dropped a few classes throughout my undergrad, including two English classes. All I cared about was math as an undergrad, and because of that the education I got was incredibly impoverished. Looking back, I think this was simply a defense mechanism. I knew I was a hot shot at math, so whenever I felt challenged in another subject it was easier to simply say, “This is trivial, I just can’t be bothered! I’m clearly intelligent anyway.” Don’t let the knowledge of your own intelligence prevent you from undertaking things that challenge your supposed intelligence! In particular, writing papers is hard, but is often misidentified by science oriented people as being lame or stupid.
Now, as a graduate student, I fantasize about being an undergrad again and having the luxury of being coerced into studying a variety of different topics. Yes, there are still lame aspects to many classes, but that is largely a factor in lower division work. If you can teach yourself then do so! Leverage your intelligence, learn more, and get yourself into upper division classes in multiple subjects where you can interact with intelligent people who are passionate about the subject, and where the professor will treat you like a valuable resource to be developed rather than simply a chore.
This depends on a lot of things: How much debt will you be in at the end? If you press on now, will you actually finish? Do you have the personality to make money without a diploma?
I made the mistake of pressing on early and incurring extra debt, but not pushing through to get a diploma.
Not having a diploma is hard if you want the kinds of jobs that often require one arbitrarily. Doing something freelance or taking a non-degree job are hard in other ways.
Fortunately you can test this with some time away from college.
There’s also a difference between what you CAN learn on your own and what you will actually take the time to learn. I know there are things that I would have been forced to learn which I have neglected to.
If you’re probably not going to finish, then cut your losses now, but make a clean break that will make it easy to go back. Finish the semester well.
In my experience schools value depends on how smart you are. For example if you can teach yourself math you can often test out of classes. If your really smart you may be able to get out of everything but grad-school. Depending on what you want to do you may or may not need grad school.
Do you have a preferred career path? If so have you tried getting into it without further schooling? The other question is what have you done outside of school? Have you started any businesses or published papers?
With a little more detail I think the question can be better answered.
I reservedly second Wedrifid’s comment that the little piece of paper at the end is worth it. I know people who have gone far in life without one, and I don’t mean amazing genius-savants either, just folks who spent time in industry, the military, etc. and progressed along. But I’ve also seen a number who got stuck at some point for lacking a degree. This was more a lack of signaling cred that smarts or ability. The statistics show that people with degrees on average earn more than those who don’t, if that’s of interest to you. But degrees don’t instantly grant jobs, and some degrees are better preparation than others for the real world. It sounds like you’re interested in a degree in math, which carries over into a lot of different fields.
I think it’s great that your taking stock of what your education experience is giving you. As Wedifrid mentioned, the motivation is an important part of schooling, and if you’re in a program that is known to be rigorous, the credentials are definitely worth it. But those have to be weighed against current employment options. I’d encourage you to consider working with professors on research, investigating internships, etc., so that you get the full educational experience that you’re looking for, and not be one of those graduates that only took classes and then expected a job to be waiting for them when they graduated.
The statistics show that people with degrees on average earn more than those who don’t, if that’s of interest to you.
Correlation is not causation. Graduates as a group are smarter and more ambitious than nongraduates. The question is not whether people with a degree do better; the question is what the degree itself is buying you, if you’re already a smart ambitious person who knows how to study.
I recall some studies (I hate not remembering authors or links) that tried to control for the effect of the degree itself by comparing those who got into a particular school but graduated from somewhere else to those who graduated from that school. Controls for the general “graduate” characteristic, but still misses the reasons for the choice.
Upshot was that there wasn’t much difference in income, though I believe that was in part because the highest-level schools send a substantial part of their undergraduates on to become academics.
The fact that the average graduate of an elite college makes more money in adult life than does the average graduate of a less elite college has no bearing at all on the question of whether or not you (or your son or daughter) will make more money by going to an elite college. The only kind of research study that would help at all to answer that question is one that compares students who had equal initial academic ability and income-earning potential but chose to go to colleges differing in prestige level. Fortunately, such a study has been done; but not many people know about it.
In 2002, Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger published the results of an extensive study of the relationship between college attended and subsequent income for students who, on other measures, had comparable potential.[1] They used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972. As one part of their study, they focused exclusively on those students who had applied to and been accepted by at least one highly elite college and at least one less elite college. Then, from this pool, they compared the adult incomes of those who had chosen the elite school to the adult incomes for those who had chosen the less elite school, and they found no significant difference. In another part of the study, they used statistical means to equate students for income potential, based on information about them when they were in high school (such as their SAT scores), and, again, found that students with equal initial potential did essentially equally well, income wise, regardless of the prestige level of the college they attended.
That quote asserts that SAT scores are the same as prestige. The 1998 and 1999 drafts of the paper looked at both, with different results, finding that average SAT score didn’t matter, but various measures of prestige did. They have three versions of prestige: variance of SAT scores, Barron’s ratings, and tuition. Variance is dropped in the 2002published version. Tuition still predicts income. The most direct measure of prestige, rankings, seems to be quietly dropped in the few months between the 1998 and 1999 versions (am I missing something?). The final version seems to say on 1515, in a weirdly off-hand manner, that it doesn’t matter, but I’m not sure if it’s the same measure.
I remember reading about that study in the New York Times. I think that they said that they only found evidence of an income effect for black students...
Actual research on the subject is scant, and what exists offers conflicting evidence. One often-cited study from 1998, however, concludes that attending a more selective or elite institution does not translate to an economic advantage for students later on, as measured by their reported income. Attending a more elite college does seem to affect the later incomes of poorer students. The study, written by Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton, and Stacy Berg Dale, then a researcher at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, concluded that the qualities that students themselves bring to their education may be what matters most.
Professor Krueger says that he and Ms. Dale are updating the study this year, with new data from more recent students. But he says he sees no reason yet to question his original conclusions. What pays off for students in the end, he believes, is not attending a prestigious or highly selective college , but finding one with strengths that match a student’s skills, needs and interests.
Someone recently made the suggestion that it should standard practice to link the Welcome Thread in the body of all Open Thread posts going forward, and I think that’s a great idea.
* …but made as a reply to Warrigal to bring it to the attention of the owner of this open thread; not a PM so as to throw it open to general comment.
That non-math class sounds dreadful. Are you really in to classics or something? Also, I don’t know where you go to school but a lot of places allow students to do independent-study in an area with the guidance of a professor. This is a really good option if the best non-math course you can find involves reading the Iliad.
Also, I’m really just replying to this so that I can congratulate you on this sentence:
If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
This is maybe the best sentence I have read in the last few months.
That non-math class sounds dreadful. Are you really in to classics or something?
Well, there’s a choice of nine “Arts & Humanities” sequences I could be taking. Each one covers a single civilization (e.g. ancient Greece and Rome, early Europe, the Islamic Middle East) in detail, including history and paper-writing. Each consists of one double class each semester for a year. This sequence is the biggest component of the general education requirements here. Perhaps dreadfulness is mandatory.
This is maybe the best sentence I have read in the last few months.
Perhaps some is. But that requirement sounds especially bad. It definitely isn’t a universal requirement. Any particular reason you are at this university? I know some schools have gotten rid of core requirements altogether (though if you aren’t in the US you probably have fewer options).
If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
It is simple. And the notion that we should celebrate unwieldy discussions (and do so by expanding them!) perfectly encapsulates the culture of Less Wrong. But celebrating and unwieldy are two words that are never related in this way which makes the sentence seem fresh and counter to prevailing custom.
Oh god, this is still an issue for people in college?
And here I was assuming that after I got out of high school I wouldn’t think along these tempting-yet-ultimately-ruinous lines ever again.
It depends. The first few years may be like this as you take a bunch of classes in areas your probably aren’t interested in, but if you choose a major you like, it gets better as you schedule becomes dominated by those classes. Your own personality is another important factor here.
Ach, I had not realized that required classes in college might feel as useless as required classes in high school.
But perhaps college classes will be more rigorous and less likely to induce I-Could-Learn-This-On-Wikpedia Syndrome. I can but hope.
So, I’m having one of those I-don’t-want-to-go-to-school moments again. I’m in my first year at a university, and, as often happens, I feel like it’s not worth my time.
As far as math goes, I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time—though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course. I have had the occasional fun chat with a professor, but the lecture was never it.
As far as other subjects go, I think forces conspired to make me not succeed. I had a single non-math class, though it was twice the length of a normal class and officially two classes. It was about ancient Greece and Rome, and we had to read things like Works and Days and the Iliad. Afterwards, we were supposed to write a paper about depictions of society in the two works or something. I never wrote the paper, and I dropped the class.
Is school worth it for the learning? How about for the little piece of paper I get at the end?
Take it from me (as a dropout-cum-autodidact in a world where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental, I’m fractionally one of your future selves), that procedural knowledge is really, really important. It’s just too easy to fall into the trap of “Oh, I’m a smart person who reads books and Wikipedia; I’m fine just the way I am.” Maybe you can do better than most college grads, simply by virtue of being smart and continuing to read things, but life (unlike many schools) is not graded on a curve. There are so many levels above you, that you’re in mortal danger of missing out on entirely if you think you can get it all from Wikipedia, if you ever let yourself believe that you’re safe at your current level. If you think school isn’t worth your time, that’s great, quit. But know that you don’t have to be just another dropout who likes to read; you can quit and hold yourself to a higher standard.
You want to learn math? Here’s what I do. Get textbooks. Get out a piece of paper, and divide it into two columns. Read or skim the textbooks. Take notes; feel free to copy down large passages verbatim (I have a special form of quotation marks for verbatim quotes). If a statement seems confusing, maybe try to work it out yourself. Work exercises. If you get curious about something, make up your own problem and try to work it out yourself. Four-hundred ninety-three pieces of paper later, I can say with confidence that my past self knew nothing about math. I didn’t know what I was missing, could not have known in advance what it would feel like, to not just accept as a brute fact a linear transformation is invertible iff its determinant is nonzero, but to start to see these as manifestations of the same thing. (Because—obviously—since the determinant is the product of the eigenvalues, it serves as a measure of how the transformation distorts area; if the determinant is zero, it means you’ve lost a dimension in the mapping, so you can’t reverse it. But it wouldn’t have been “obvious” if I had only read the Wikipedia article.)
Forces don’t conspire; they’re not that smart.
It’s amazing how rarely people—including textbook authors—actually bother to point this out. (Admittedly, it’s only true over an algebraically closed field such as the complex numbers.) Were you by any chance using Axler?
While I certainly agree with the main point of your comment, I nevertheless think that this particular comparison illustrates mainly that the mathematical Wikipedia articles still have a way to go. (Indeed, the property of determinants mentioned above is buried in the middle of the “Further Properties” section of the article, whereas I think it ought to be prominently mentioned in the introduction; in Axler it’s the definition of the determinant [in the complex case]!)
Mostly Bretscher, but checking out Axler’s vicious anti-deteminant screed the other month certainly influenced my comment.
I up voted this but I just wanted to follow this tangent.
This isn’t true in all worlds where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental. It is a reasonable thing to say if certain versions of the psychological continuity theory are true. But, those theories don’t exhaust the set of theories in which personal identity isn’t ontologically fundamental. For example, if personal identity supervenes on human animal identity than you are not one of Warrigal’s future selves, even fractionally.
I think you should ask yourself this: if you drop out, what realistically are you going to do with your time? If you don’t have a very good answer to that question, stay where you are.
View university in the same way as you would view a long lap-swimming workout. Boring as hell, maybe, but you’ll be better off and feel better when you’re done. Sure, you could skip your pool workout and go do something Really Important, but most people skip their workouts and then go watch TV instead.
Suppose you have an idea or desire for something to do instead of university. You should create a gradual, reversible transition. For instance if you want to work and earn some money, find a job first (telling them you’ve dropped out), work for a couple of weeks, make sure you like it, and only then actually drop out. Or if you want to study alone at home, start doing it for 10 hours every week, then 20, drop just one or two classes to free the time, and when you see it’s working out, go all out.
This may not be convenient if working for a couple weeks requires time you’ll only have if you drop out. If you end up not wanting to drop out after all, you can’t necessarily afford to miss the classes.
In the comment section of this post, “Doug S.” gives the most salient analysis I have seen. After stating, “the job of a university professor is to do research and bring in grant money for said research, not to teach! Teaching is incidental,” he was asked why parents would pay upward of $40,000 annually for such a service. His parsimonious reply: “In most cases, it’s not the education that’s worth $40,000+. It’s the diploma. Earning a diploma demonstrates that you are willing to suffer in exchange for vague promises of future reward, which is a trait that employers value.”
Before I started college, I read this professor’s speech, which attempted to explain, given your concerns, why an education may nevertheless be valuable. It’s biased towards its audience (UChicago students) but I think its relevant point can be summarized as: few jobs allow you to continue practicing the diversity of skills employed by academic work, and having a degree keeps your options wide open for a longer period. However, the real thesis of the speech is that university is uniquely a place to devote oneself to practicing the Art, broadly construed, of generating knowledge and beauty from everything.
Other considerations:
Becoming an academic is very hard without an undergraduate degree, so if you want that life, stick with it.
It takes a great deal of luck to pull a Bill Gates. It is otherwise hard to convince people that your reasons for not having a degree are genuine and not ex post.
At least in my case, it has been hard to find anywhere near as high a concentration of intelligent and interesting people outside the university as in the one I attended.
Hope something in there helps!
What do you plan on spending your time on if you don’t go to school? Most jobs largely consist of being forced to do some assignment that you feel isn’t worth your time. - you’re not going to be escaping that by dropping out. And I’d wager that a college degree is one of the best ways to snag a job that you DO actually enjoy.
I suspect the REAL value of a college degree, aside from the basic intelligence indication, is that it says you can handle 4 years doing largely unpleasant work.
I can’t speak for all people or all jobs, but in my experience, there’s a certain dignity and autonomy in paid work that I never got out of school. After quitting University, I worked in a supermarket for nineteen months. Sure, it was low-paying, low-status, and largely boring, but I was much happier at the store, and I think a big reason for this was that I had a function other than simply to obey. At University, I had spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn’t following the professor’s instructions exactly to the letter, and being terrified that this made me a bad person. Whereas at the store, it didn’t matter so much if I incidentally broke a dozen company rules in the course of doing my job, because what mattered was that the books were balanced and the customers were happy. It’s not so bad, nominally having a boss, as long as there’s some optimization criterion other than garnering the boss’s approval: you can tell if you couldn’t solve a customer’s problem, or if the safe is fifty dollars short, or if the latte you made is too foamy. And when the time comes, you can clock out, and walk to the library, with no one to tell you what to study. Kind of idyllic, really.
I worked at a supermarket for three days, and was fired for insubordination. (I wanted to read a book when there were no customers coming to my register, and the boss told me not to...)
I have a similar story; except in my case I was fired because my shirt was insufficiently black.
Could you elaborate? Were you fired for once not having a black shirt, or for not being able to acquire / evaluate black shirts? or, if it’s possible to tell, having a bad attitude about the shirt rule?
I had a shirt I felt was black & meet the dress code; the manager felt that it didn’t. I felt that since I had already spent something like 60$ on new clothes to meet the dress code, and since I didn’t interact with the customers at all, I wasn’t going to go and buy a new black shirt. The manager felt I no longer needed to work there.
Letting your future employer know you’re willing to do all the unpleasant stuff you feel isn’t worth your time.
If you did it for a piece of paper, then surely you’ll do it for a paycheck… right?
If I’m not actually willing to put up with pointless stuff for a paycheck, would I benefit from signaling that I am? Or would I just lose a useful filter on potential employers?
In as much as most people require the motivational structure and then if you consider the material worth learning.
Yes.
Well… that isn’t the answer I wanted. I wanted “no”.
The correct answer should have been “It depends”. Mostly on what you might want to do with that paper. I would mostly say “No”. Unless you want a fairly boring, routine job working for someone else.
In general, the answer is:
If you intend to always work for yourself, owning your own companies, being your own boss, then a diploma is a waste of time.
Diplomas are for people who want to work for others.
But if you want to work for others, then get a degree, by all means.
If you work for yourself, your customers are generally going to be moved by most other factors prior to being moved by the owner’s formal education.
Bosses and owners, however, are going to be moved by degrees.
Owners like to see their underlings to have degrees because it demonstrates a certain irrational loyalty, and a lack of business savvy. This assures the owner that he will remain in charge—that you won’t negotiate too hard for your benefits, or run away with his business plans and start a competitive company, etc.
Bosses like to see their underlings to have degrees because they had to get one as well, so why shouldn’t you suffer at least as much.
By getting a degree, you signal your acceptance of your humble status in the pecking order. This is a prerequisite if you want to find your place in the hierarchy, but pointless if you want to be at the top.
There are some people who prefer to work for others, and some who prefer to work for themselves; however, the vast majority of people prefer neither, and for them college is neither a waste of time nor a means to signal: it is a stay of execution.
My two cents:
If you’re excelling in math, move up to a higher level. Math departments are usually very flexible in this regard (engineering departments not always so). My freshman year I signed up for a couple of graduate level math classes, and believe me, the knowledge I gained is not to be found in Wikipedia, or any other written form. You have to struggle for an understanding of higher math, and the setup for the struggle is greatly helped by having fellow students, a professor to guide you, and hard deadlines to motivate you.
I also felt a lot of classes I was forced to take were incredibly lame. I dropped a few classes throughout my undergrad, including two English classes. All I cared about was math as an undergrad, and because of that the education I got was incredibly impoverished. Looking back, I think this was simply a defense mechanism. I knew I was a hot shot at math, so whenever I felt challenged in another subject it was easier to simply say, “This is trivial, I just can’t be bothered! I’m clearly intelligent anyway.” Don’t let the knowledge of your own intelligence prevent you from undertaking things that challenge your supposed intelligence! In particular, writing papers is hard, but is often misidentified by science oriented people as being lame or stupid.
Now, as a graduate student, I fantasize about being an undergrad again and having the luxury of being coerced into studying a variety of different topics. Yes, there are still lame aspects to many classes, but that is largely a factor in lower division work. If you can teach yourself then do so! Leverage your intelligence, learn more, and get yourself into upper division classes in multiple subjects where you can interact with intelligent people who are passionate about the subject, and where the professor will treat you like a valuable resource to be developed rather than simply a chore.
This depends on a lot of things: How much debt will you be in at the end? If you press on now, will you actually finish? Do you have the personality to make money without a diploma?
I made the mistake of pressing on early and incurring extra debt, but not pushing through to get a diploma.
Not having a diploma is hard if you want the kinds of jobs that often require one arbitrarily. Doing something freelance or taking a non-degree job are hard in other ways. Fortunately you can test this with some time away from college.
There’s also a difference between what you CAN learn on your own and what you will actually take the time to learn. I know there are things that I would have been forced to learn which I have neglected to.
If you’re probably not going to finish, then cut your losses now, but make a clean break that will make it easy to go back. Finish the semester well.
This is going to sound horrible but here goes:
In my experience schools value depends on how smart you are. For example if you can teach yourself math you can often test out of classes. If your really smart you may be able to get out of everything but grad-school. Depending on what you want to do you may or may not need grad school.
Do you have a preferred career path? If so have you tried getting into it without further schooling? The other question is what have you done outside of school? Have you started any businesses or published papers?
With a little more detail I think the question can be better answered.
I reservedly second Wedrifid’s comment that the little piece of paper at the end is worth it. I know people who have gone far in life without one, and I don’t mean amazing genius-savants either, just folks who spent time in industry, the military, etc. and progressed along. But I’ve also seen a number who got stuck at some point for lacking a degree. This was more a lack of signaling cred that smarts or ability. The statistics show that people with degrees on average earn more than those who don’t, if that’s of interest to you. But degrees don’t instantly grant jobs, and some degrees are better preparation than others for the real world. It sounds like you’re interested in a degree in math, which carries over into a lot of different fields.
I think it’s great that your taking stock of what your education experience is giving you. As Wedifrid mentioned, the motivation is an important part of schooling, and if you’re in a program that is known to be rigorous, the credentials are definitely worth it. But those have to be weighed against current employment options. I’d encourage you to consider working with professors on research, investigating internships, etc., so that you get the full educational experience that you’re looking for, and not be one of those graduates that only took classes and then expected a job to be waiting for them when they graduated.
Correlation is not causation. Graduates as a group are smarter and more ambitious than nongraduates. The question is not whether people with a degree do better; the question is what the degree itself is buying you, if you’re already a smart ambitious person who knows how to study.
I recall some studies (I hate not remembering authors or links) that tried to control for the effect of the degree itself by comparing those who got into a particular school but graduated from somewhere else to those who graduated from that school. Controls for the general “graduate” characteristic, but still misses the reasons for the choice.
Upshot was that there wasn’t much difference in income, though I believe that was in part because the highest-level schools send a substantial part of their undergraduates on to become academics.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200810/reasons-consider-less-selective-less-expensive-college-saving-money-is-jus
That quote asserts that SAT scores are the same as prestige. The 1998 and 1999 drafts of the paper looked at both, with different results, finding that average SAT score didn’t matter, but various measures of prestige did. They have three versions of prestige: variance of SAT scores, Barron’s ratings, and tuition. Variance is dropped in the 2002 published version. Tuition still predicts income. The most direct measure of prestige, rankings, seems to be quietly dropped in the few months between the 1998 and 1999 versions (am I missing something?). The final version seems to say on 1515, in a weirdly off-hand manner, that it doesn’t matter, but I’m not sure if it’s the same measure.
I remember reading about that study in the New York Times. I think that they said that they only found evidence of an income effect for black students...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/business/19money.html
I suppose black students do tend to be poorer...
There it is. Thanks!
Thanks for that link. I had wondered.
Off-topic*:
Someone recently made the suggestion that it should standard practice to link the Welcome Thread in the body of all Open Thread posts going forward, and I think that’s a great idea.
* …but made as a reply to Warrigal to bring it to the attention of the owner of this open thread; not a PM so as to throw it open to general comment.
I read your comment when you posted it. I wonder why it took me until now to realize that by “the owner of this open thread”, you meant me.
That non-math class sounds dreadful. Are you really in to classics or something? Also, I don’t know where you go to school but a lot of places allow students to do independent-study in an area with the guidance of a professor. This is a really good option if the best non-math course you can find involves reading the Iliad.
Also, I’m really just replying to this so that I can congratulate you on this sentence:
This is maybe the best sentence I have read in the last few months.
Well, there’s a choice of nine “Arts & Humanities” sequences I could be taking. Each one covers a single civilization (e.g. ancient Greece and Rome, early Europe, the Islamic Middle East) in detail, including history and paper-writing. Each consists of one double class each semester for a year. This sequence is the biggest component of the general education requirements here. Perhaps dreadfulness is mandatory.
Awesome! Now, if only I could figure out why.
Perhaps some is. But that requirement sounds especially bad. It definitely isn’t a universal requirement. Any particular reason you are at this university? I know some schools have gotten rid of core requirements altogether (though if you aren’t in the US you probably have fewer options).
It is simple. And the notion that we should celebrate unwieldy discussions (and do so by expanding them!) perfectly encapsulates the culture of Less Wrong. But celebrating and unwieldy are two words that are never related in this way which makes the sentence seem fresh and counter to prevailing custom.
Oh god, this is still an issue for people in college? And here I was assuming that after I got out of high school I wouldn’t think along these tempting-yet-ultimately-ruinous lines ever again.
It depends. The first few years may be like this as you take a bunch of classes in areas your probably aren’t interested in, but if you choose a major you like, it gets better as you schedule becomes dominated by those classes. Your own personality is another important factor here.
Ach, I had not realized that required classes in college might feel as useless as required classes in high school. But perhaps college classes will be more rigorous and less likely to induce I-Could-Learn-This-On-Wikpedia Syndrome. I can but hope.