Comment by const_cast
10 months ago
> I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently.
Not to burst yours or anyone else's bubble, but no, probably not.
The hard part of learning isn't access to content, it's discipline and dedication. School provides structure, goals, timelines, and deliverables. The value of this cannot be understated.
I've heard from many people how they're going to learn programming online and then get a job as a developer. Almost all of them fail.
I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least where it comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a bubble. There are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine, if not even better, without the external discipline and structure. And even more those who could do it with something like a MOOC or just a posted curriculum. And to be able to work without an external discipline is IMHO one of the main learning goals of university, and a decent rationale for why a university degree is taken as a signal for recruitment.
I learned programming online and got jobs as a developer (I did later study CS at a university though). In my experience the best developers are those who taught themselves. Admittedly this may have been more the case for my older generation where formal education for programming wasn't that great nor widely available.
Those students do exist, but there are an exceedingly small minority. Of course, they won't tell you this, because everyone likes to believe they're self-motivated. Most people just aren't.
The simple question to ask is, when you go home, what do you do? If the answer is learn how to sew or work on your project car you've had for 10 months, you can probably learn on your own. If your answer is watch TV, play video games, go on a walk - then you can't, and you should go to university. Some people have told me this question is unfair. I mean, they're so tired from work, of course they want to relax. Well, guess what - your life doesn't stop if you're learning how to code on your own or whatever. If that's all it takes for you to not do it, then you don't have what it takes.
How often are people picking up new and complex skills that takes years to get the hang of? Almost never. So there you go, most people require a formal, structured education to pull that off.
There are plenty of students studying out of interest. It's very common to e.g. study excess courses. Many doing their theses can work very independently and go way beyond what's required.
Highly self-driven students are a minority, but not a rarity. People do things out of being interested and enjoying learning. It shouldn't be a surprise in a website called hacker news.
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> There are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine, if not even better, without the external discipline and structure.
How do you know? It's easy enough to assert, but what kind of proof can there be for this assertion? Obviously the students are enrolled in university, and their accomplishments without it are only hypothetical.
> I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least where it comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a bubble. There are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine, if not even better, without the external discipline and structure.
I don't understand how you can make this claim based on observing students who are in an environment with discipline and structure.
I thoroughly believed this to be true when I was younger. I thought the explosion of the internet and availability of free course materials, videos, MOOCs, and any information you want was going to change the education game forever.
What finally changed my mind was when I became a hiring manager. I decided I'd give an interview to almost every self-taught developer who applied. If someone didn't have a college degree listed on their resume, I'd schedule a call to hear their story. I thought I was going to be uncovering diamonds in the rough that other companies overlooked.
With a few notable exceptions, it did not work out that way. Don't get me wrong: A couple of the self-taught developers were absolutely brilliant. However, I found that most were, to be blunt, not even progressing their intra-career knowledge as fast as peers with traditional backgrounds. We hired a few, but a common theme was that they needed more guidance for dealing with the structure and expectations of an office job.
I also had a few very above-average friends in high school who went the self-education route. "College is a waste of money" mindset. Voracious readers in their youth. Last I checked, both of them were bouncing from entry-level job to job.
Of course, there are students who go to paper-mill colleges who also learn very little.
I think the value of a demanding, structured college education is partially the education, but largely about learning how to learn. Learning how to deliver, learning how to operate on a schedule, and having some structure to check your understanding relative to peers. Almost everyone I know (including me!) who does self-studying reading thinks their understanding is better than it is right up until they have to apply it, at which point they realize they didn't understand it as deeply as they thought. It's easy to read course materials and think "That makes sense" because it's logically consistent, but integrating the knowledge in a way that you can apply it and reason about it is harder. Structured learning forces people to do the latter, whereas self-guided learning leaves it as an exercise for the reader. An exercise that many don't follow up on.
In my experience people who have learned to code by themselves write the most incomprehensible balls of spaghetti. Then when everyone else struggles with their garbage code they convince themselves it's because they're so good because they didn't need to go to uni and learned it all on their own.
Universities have all sorts of pathologies, from academic fraud to parasitic admins, but they also have people with deep knowledge of their field and who occasionally are even good teachers, and undergrad courses at least leave you enough time to explore and direct your own learning.
They also put you in an environment where you can measure yourself against others, which you sure don't get sitting in your bedroom hacking your games. As a consequence, your head doesn't get inflated so much (unless you're top of the class, which kind of naturally resolves itself when you get your first job where everyone thinks you're a useless moron with no life experience).
Also: university libraries.
Edit: oh shit. I just realised. I did learn to code on my own O.o
>School provides structure, goals, timelines, and deliverables. The value of this cannot be understated.
That _may_ be true for the vast majority, but it's criminal to waste the time of bright young people by putting them though hoops. I would even speculate that that they phoney goals, timelines, and deliverables in school actually damage kids.
It's presumably possible, but I feel like people might underestimate what's required. Mind you, I went to university so maybe I'm biased and don't fully understand, but I feel like the structure given by the university is very important.
If I wanted to learn JavaScript or .NET or CSS or whatever I could easily do so online. But that's different from becoming a software developer. The important thing is that university doesn't focus on one topic, it teaches a variety of topics that they think will be useful for your career. You can do this without uni, but you need to be good at figuring out what to learn, not just how. And of course the discipline to complete your goals by yourself, like you mention.
Although maybe something you could do would be to look at a university's course structure and copy it.
It's really concerning how many thing they can curate their own course curriculum and master it to the equivalent and rigor of a 4 year degree. You don't know what you don' know so that's exactly waht a teacher is for. o help you close gaps and push you a bit further. An athlete wouldn't think they can train as efficiently without a coach, I'm not sure why acedemis is seen any differently. Because people had a bad teacher here and there? Yeah, that's life. Don't typecast an entier population over one bad experience.
Also, do I really need to remind people here of the "resources" used when you struggle and need help while self-guided?
- I probably don't need to rant about StackOverflow. Discord can be incredibly hit or miss, many forum pleas goes uncalled. It can be really hard to get unsuck compared to asking a teacher about their own assignment
- worse than asking quesions, forget getting high quality feedback on your project: getting people to do more than a quick skim takes effort in and of itself. You'd truly find an angelic soul if anyone decided to disect and correc your source code.
- there's also so, so, so many domains to explore. How will you specialize without knowing they exist? And if you've dug deep into any domain, you know that this is where the publicly free knowledge truly dries up. You won't find a nifty course on low level optimization hacks, nor network architecture (beej gets close, but only touches the surface), nor modern rendering techniques. You'll find some 300 level material, but 400 level stuff will likely require a mix of cobbling project ideas together that's within your reach but also pushing you. Scoping is always hard to do, and nearly impossible while still a student.
And Software is one of the easier domains to self learn. Good luck with the lab based STEM, getting proper feedback in art while learning theory, taste testing as a cook, using power tools in any given blue collar work, etc.