I was always thinking this was only because of outrageous tuition in the US compared to my country where it was €1k / year. Recently though I saw some curriculum from a random university (might very been a community College?) and it looked closer to "learn html" than fundamentals.
A lot of courses that looked like they were just there to fill time. Obviously everyone knows MIT and other top university lectures on youtube and those are great, but I was surprised to see people paying outrageous amounts for what looked like a genuine waste of time. Any more informed thoughts about the differences between top / bottom universities in the US?
I’m French went to a French engineering school (INSA, ranked within the top 10), went to RIT (tanked 35th in the US) as an exchange student for a year. I found that the level at the RIT was really quite low. Especially when it comes to mathematics and fundamentals. On the other hand, RIT’s courses were much more pragmatic though, more up to date on more modern project management, much better entrepreneurship course. So, it’s different focus but not entirely bad. I still know that I ‘d take someone from a French engineering school in most cases though
During the time I was at RIT, I tutored in maths two students at the nearby community college (it was just down the road from where I lived), the level was abysmal and yes pretty close to learning html.
I’ve also hired and worked with people from top universities in my career, MIT’s reputation is deserving, people I’ve worked from there have been very good. Harvard not so much (but the sample is only 2 people and, well CS is not Harvard’s forte)
Note, this is most likely biased based on my experience but as someone educated in Europe that has spent most of my career working for US companies.
EDIT: oh one major difference between my mostly free(540 euros a year back then) French engineering school and the much more expensive (25000 usd per year at the time) RIT, the non-educational (sports etc) facilities were much nicer.
My guess is that out of the top 20 in the states, things fall off really quickly, since there is a lot of cherry picking before that. You really only have a few state flagship and Ivies (or near Ivies like Stanford) that are really good. As a counter, my experience at EPFL (one of the two Ecole's in Switzerland), I found it a bit behind where I went University of Washington (flagship research, public) in rigor and its grading curb. But UW CSE is top 5, so I wasn't really comparing apples to apples.
I went to a top 10 US university for CS, and while I completely agree with your disdain for things like 'write html classes', I experienced pretty much the equal but opposite. There was a relatively widespread disdain for application vs theory, to the point that I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of my graduating peers could not write a Tetris clone, even graphics aside - I just mean the logic/architecture.
I actually have an amusing anecdote there. In one lower level class the professor ended up asking about how to convert a lower case string to an upper case one, or vice versa. I immediately chimed in with the right answer - you flip the 5th bit. This is literally how ASCII was intentionally designed. Capital and lower start at 65, and are separated by 32, so changing the case is a single bitflip. The same even works in unicode english characters where they're still separated by 32, though in this case it was not a unicode input string anyhow.
He just about lost his shit trying to mock me and my 'inelegant hacky solutions' in front of everybody. It didn't bother me in the least because I knew I was right, but later (perhaps after he looked it up?) he actually went out of his way to find me outside of class and sincerely apologize. I just found it all pretty amusing. But if anything it really emphasizes the overly embraced gulf between theory and practice at higher tier institutions, or at least mine. And FWIW this was an algorithms class which should ostensibly be 100% about practical application.
I think your experience reflects high expectations that these CS students will be academics first and foremost. Also, if you have a big brand degree, you get away with knowing less. The expectation that you will learn on the job is higher among people that care about such things.
If you go to a lower-ranked school, it is full of working-class students who need to hit the ground running. So there is less abstract stuff and more practical stuff IMO. I've never been to a top school but I can tell you my program at a bargain state school was excellent and practical. It had theory as well but the university consulted industry people often to get feedback on the program.
Back when I was a teacher's assistant in college, the professor for an introductory "learn to program" course was teaching students this is the right way to define an array of chars:
{'h,', 'e,', 'l,', 'l,', 'o'};
He also gave them sample code where the assignment was to fill in the body of one of the functions, but in an unrelated part of the code he had a typo that resulted in infinite recursion in an object constructor.
I kinda went in reverse, as a kid I was (still am) very nerdy. I had consumed a tonne of MIT opencourseware years before entering university but usually at a freshman / *01 level.
I wasn't challenged at all throughout my time, was extremely disappointed at the piss poor quality of eduction, and basically skipped class 2.5 years of a 3 year degree (still got the highest GPA somehow). (Btw, it sounds like I'm bragging about how smart I am but I was always always a middle/bottom of the road student, never the top but at least I never failed out and I enjoyed learning)
Maybe it was the "school" (not university it doesn't deserve that title) I went to that was weak, but I really expected more, at the very least to be challenged. Looking at my friend's course work from other universities it didn't seem much different except for the person doing nanobiology lol.
I think another factor it could be is the country I'm in (Denmark) has piss poor education throughout schooling (by the time they leave high school they can barely and I mean barely solve right angle triangle problems). I went through IB which is held to some modicum of a standard so that could also be what influenced this experience. Denmark for years has been reducing the challenge of its university level courses because students coming out of public education cannot keep up - nearly every year several professors from "the best" institutions complain about these students and have now started setting up extra courses to teach them the basics before they can actually go into the degree.
Also for those interested in learning more about how education takes place in Denmark you'll see a lot of crap about "the pedagogy of education" and a bunch of teachers espousing their personal philosophy of learning. Ignore them. Look at what the students actually do, look at what the parents complain about, and look at the passing grades (30% on a MC questionnaire).
From about age 11 they are introduced to GeoGebra, Maple, etc. and the remainder of their education focusses on translating problems from paper into the computer and hitting solve - the result is unsurprisingly a bunch of students who "are great at mathematics" but don't even understand what a %age is (I took to helping my uni classmates who were struggling and I blew a guys mind when I explained %ages are just fractions, take the number and divide it by 100).
The concept of the university is that you're supposed to learn a little bit about a lot of stuff. A significant amount of courses are a "waste" if you only want to consider things directly relevant to a specific career. This is changing a little because people have higher expectations for vocational training from schools these days (because the bar is higher for basic specialized work than it was in decades and centuries past), but the basic idea remains.
30 years ago I felt like my mid-grade "liberal arts" US university was definitely wasting my time.
Actually had to skip some Comp Sci (my major) and math electives because some required liberal arts thing was in the same time slot. I could have used more training on both of those, as I've dealt with a lot of unemployment because I'm naturally fairly weak in both.
Did not need liberal arts, had plenty of that in high school.
But compared to today, I didn't pay a lot nor did my parents, it just wasn't that expensive back then. College today seems to be a much worse deal, more filler content and way more expensive, as well as worse employment prospects overall when you do graduate, especially now that AI may be poised to smash a good fraction of those jobs.
Community colleges are for learning skills. “Learn HTML” is appropriate as a community college course. Universities are more… well, universal in their approach to education.
We have "community colleges" here but they're a little more holistic than that, so I'd always been assuming the US ones were more like ours.
But it sounds more like a US community college is more like what's usually branded and adult education centre here if "learn HTML" is the kind of agenda.
"Community college" in the US can offer everything from remedial high school for adults, via technical certification and job skills training to 'real' university level education and university associate degrees.
It really just depends. I went to a community college and took maths through calculus 3, a discrete math course, some gen eds like history, english composition, etc. But there are also those kind of remedial adult education and specialized "how to" courses as well.
The same problems exist everywhere. Nothing US specific about it. There is no institutional system within higher education to ensure quality across the board, so whether you get a good experience or not is down to the individual professors and staff, not anything you can systematically rely on. The same is true of research outputs. Pick a random paper from a random field. It might be good, if you're really lucky it might even be useful, but it might also be full of faked data, fake citations and built on false premises. My experience has been that there's no way to tell up front. Field has predictive value, brands mean nothing.
I went to a supposedly good university in the UK (Durham), to do a computer science degree. The university is in the so-called "Russell Group" of leading research universities and comes a little below Oxbridge in the rankings. That turned out to mean nothing: the course itself was garbage, with the department and its course being almost entirely fake. Cheating by the professors was rampant because they really didn't want to do teaching (teaching programming is notoriously hard), and universities mark their own homework, so if they don't want to do it properly there's nothing forcing them to do so as long as they team up and cover for each other. The students also didn't care because they were all struggling and happy to conspire a little with their teachers in order to get the bit of paper they were all there for. I was gutted, I'd been looking forward to doing CS at university literally since being a little kid. My parents had been singing its praises for years, but looking back I wonder to what extent they were just flattered to be allowed to go at all. My mother was the first of her family to go to university and they were all super proud of her, a common story in that era.
After graduation relatively few of the students took jobs related to doing computing, let alone to do computer science. A lot went off to do things like accounting, subject switches, banking, one even became a VC. After graduating I went to work for Google and was assigned to interviewing rotation. On that road you learn pretty quickly that degrees mean nothing. The best candidates have random degrees in unrelated subjects. Back then people with CS degrees from supposedly top universities regularly couldn't start new projects in the editor/IDE of their choice, couldn't write programs that load text files from disk and struggled to manipulate arrays. Sometimes people with no degree at all managed to get past the recruiter firewall and breezed their way through it. Even job history was of little use back then, though I imagine it's got more signal now.
Asking people if college is worth it is a tricky thing, because it conflates two very different things. Is it worth it for the educational value? I suspect many realize the answer is no. Is it worth it to get past the ever escalating auto-filters HR departments like to mount? Maybe still, but that's not a sustainable perspective. Soon people will master the art of using LLMs to review CVs properly and cut HR out of the loop. The prompts probably won't be dwelling on elite universities outside of the few firms that have incorporated that demand into their cultural DNA.
I think one can do an engineering job as easily with or without a degree.
I think attending college may have value in terms of social life.
I think degrees are used today as a mean to filter job candidates in the absence of better ways to assess candidates. So degrees are inflationary in the sense that if everyone had X degrees, jobs would require X+1 degrees as they have to filter out candidates if they are saturated with applications.
As an engineer myself that studied in Europe I do not believe you can replicate the education without going to University, like having practice with real machinery and laboratories.
Having said that, education in the US is too expensive. It is captured by an olygopoly and it needs competition.
>I think attending college may have value in terms of social life.
College has a monopoly on social life if you're in the late teens/early 20s. I believe this is part of the reason it is still such a popular option, to the point that people will pay extortionate amounts to do useless degrees.
If you're thrust straight into work that isn't stocking shelves or being a fry cook you won't be around people your own age and it's very alienating. I'm in my early 20s and have considered changing course despite having a successful SWE career to go back to university just so I can have a social life.
I absolutely loved college and can understand the dilemma.
Most the social aspect for me though came from living near the college and not the actual classes.
If I was in this situation, I would just move as physically close to a major university as I could. Most of my social interaction at college came from eating lunch and all the people I met during lunch.
Actually paying tuition though for this reason is as bad an investment as I can think of.
I disagree, I did a lot of lab experiments I'd never be able to do by myself. Also used a lot of industrial software that I would never afford licenses for. Plus even knowing what to look into would require so much self discipline that it'd be very hard to replicate.
Who is going to sit down for 2-3 years (assuming you're faster by yourself to help your argument) and self learn with the same intensity, giving themselves the same amount of homework and projects?
No, specially vs €1k/yr which is what I paid. Just the electronics software related licenses I had access to with Cadence and Xillinx would be over €10k per MONTH.
not really, especially when you add them all up and hardware to run them on. Sure, you can find some cheaper open-source alternatives for some things, but the lack of exposure to the more commercially available ones can be difficult to overcome.
I personally don't think one can do an engineering job properly without a degree, especially those that required a chartership like civil engineering.
What I agree, however, would be to break down the learning into smaller steps and going back to the apprentice where one learn and earn at the same time.
> I think one can do an engineering job as easily with or without a degree.
In theory. In practice, few people have the intelligence and discipline to self-study engineering subjects for a couple of years - that's what higher ed schools are for. I sure as shit wouldn't end up in software engineering (by far the easiest branch of engineering to self-study and get a job in) without doing my CS degree - my motivation and tenacity when I was 20 years old weren't nearly on the level required.
> I think one can do an engineering job as easily with or without a degree.
What is missing from that thought is: can everyone learn online what's required to do an engineering job? No.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the education system, but I don't think that promoting it as a scam is a good thing. Nor do I think that saying "anyone with internet can learn X to do Y" is fair - because while it's true anyone can, but the missing detail is that not everyone can.
My anecdote is that I enjoyed both systems - college and learning on my own, and I think they complement each other.
We have failed the poor and working class especially young men of all backgrounds.
At one point, you could graduate high school OR even not graduate and get a good job that let you buy a car and move out of your parents house.
Within a few years you could save up and buy a starter home for a family.
Until there’s meaningful reinvestment into public school education that helps young men obtain the skills to become gainfully employed at 18 years of age as an apprentice or junior anything in a meaningful career then we’ll continue to have problems with wealth inequality, crime, drug use and apathy.
Basically everything that gets you a decent paying and stable job if that's what you're after: STEM, law, medicine, management consulting, banking, finance. Did I miss any?
I'm sure we all have our suspicions about which degrees lead to better careers, and which are luxury purchases, but it would be nice to have some data to prove it.
law in most countries unless you get to sucessfully practice on your own or as a partner of a firm doesnt pay well. Banking/finance is similar to a lesser extent with few good positions open compared to the talent pool.
I got a worthwhile (for those who wish to be paid in scenery) non-CS degree, but nobody cared about that when applying to CS (well, SWE) jobs because of where it came from — although for that matter, it was almost 20 years before anyone (in this instance, for nation-state reasons) bothered to check that I actually had it, at which point I had to call my school and sheepishly ask if they still had my "sheepskin" on file anywhere...
ProTip: catalogues are for people unwilling to do social engineering; if you can get the relevant people to sign off on it, you can turn just about any cursus into a degree programme.
EDIT: CMU produced both Olin "Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag" Shivers and Tom "imagine that instead of chainsaws, we are juggling something more dangerous" [Murphy] 7, so I assume that despite my current lack of ghits, "useless CS degree" is a term of art there?
[Not to mention Perlis, Newell, Floyd, Feigenbaum & Reddy, Clarke, etc., but all of these, while duly recognised by more august bodies, are far less likely to have ever been Gonzo Informaticians, finding themselves somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when attacked by "huge bytes, all swooping and screeching and diving". In https://fictionadvocate.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/gonzo... I guess that'd be Tom7 driving with Dr. Shivers riding shotgun?]
This kind of garbage data and opinions really gets me seething in anger. Why do people continue to throw gender studies, law, medicine, business and engineering into the same pot?
For medicine, to become a doctor, you literally HAVE to go to college/university and becoming a doctor is the best guarantee that exists to live a life in wealth. Pretty much the same requirements, with more wiggle room, for most engineers, with less of the guarantee. Some business degrees set you up for a lucrative career as big4 consultant. And many liberal arts degrees set you up for a future as Starbucks barista and life long student debt.
> Why do people continue to throw gender studies, law, medicine, business and engineering into the same pot?
Because my generation grew up having all of those thrown into the same pot. Kindergarten to high school the constant mantra from parents, teachers, to counsellors was to, "Get a degree! It doesn't matter what the degree is, just get one and you will have a good job! If you don't you will be a garbage man for the rest of your life!"
And the adults all genuinely believed it. Because it was true in their generation. An fine arts degree was basically a ticket to a decent paying office job as some manager's administrative assistant typing out letters, taking phone calls and scheduling meetings.
It's not that true anymore, even when I entered into the work force. And that was a long time ago.
Not even as blatant as gender studies, for example history is quite popular here relative to the prospects after getting the degree.
I know two history majors well, both found it very hard to use it for anything. One started over on a math major as math teachers are in high demand. Other had taken a single psychology course as one of their self-selected courses during their degree, and ended up teaching psychology in high-school, as the school had plenty of history majors to pick from but hardly any with psychology.
The problem is how student loans work in America. They can't be defaulted on, so they loan to anyone, even people who can never pay them back.
If they could be defaulted on, the loans companies would have to figure out which degrees they should loan to, and not everyone would go to college and get a degree that will never pay back.
My stance is that if the loans were only made on degrees that could reasonably pay back, the administrative bloat that has driven up costs would not be possible.
> My stance is that if the loans were only made on degrees that could reasonably pay back, the administrative bloat that has driven up costs would not be possible.
The administrative bloat that has driven up costs will eat every single penny that will still be available.
It wouldn't be as many pennies as it does today, but it would still capture every bit of that free money that it can.
I can appreciate some of the other replies here. I didn't finish school and I disagree with respondents to this poll (at least from the perspective of a SWE).
In my experience if you want to work in the kind of software fields and companies that enable you to retire then you should go to school. These places often gate your acceptance behind algorithm problems. Those problems you will only know the tricks to solving if you have a decent background in math, unless you want to spend a lot of time memorizing answers. A lot of SWEs have a pretty intuitive understanding of math that they don't even realize when compared to average people. This was something I noticed immediately about myself when working with degreed peers. That's to say, I spent a lot of time early in my career reading books on math primers and algorithms. I understand people who have degrees do this at times as well, but believe me when I say my primer and your primer were different in their thickness.
What I wish is that software application (as opposed to theory) were taught in more in the way that we teach and level up trades. You could even split this out among some high level fields. On top of that, I'd really enjoy watching us ditch LeetCode interviews and base them on this certification and work history. I think we'd retain people in software longer, it'd counter ageism, and it'd attract a lot more diverse talent.
Tertiary to that, college is an experience. It's where a lot of people grow up, make mistakes, learn to grow quite a bit, etc... not that it's entirely worth the price of admission, but it is an important place for young people imo.
I have a degree of some (pretty OK) French business school, and been working as a developer for 8 years already
I always find myself reading some random courses that I find around on Internet; so many times I wished to have followed a well organised, coherent theoretical learning track, for ex, in compilers
Is my business degree worth it? I paid it dearly, around 12000/y for 3 years, it adds absolutely nothing to the ability to perform my job.
It does however, act like a signal for recruiters, signalling that I am "smart enough", and multiple times I found that it did play a non-negligible role
The college degree has become diluted over time. As more people go to college and receive degrees, the less special those degrees are treated. Then it becomes the type of degree you get, then the major.
It's relatively easy for most people to get into college but not always to completion. That is the only benefit that college bestows - recognition that you are capable of committing to a program, and meeting deadlines in a formal, adult-oriented environment.
This makes sense in countries where education is publicly funded, it's there to broaden the knowledge and culture of the population. If you're having to take a huge loan to do it then you start having to do a ROI calculation.
> I feel like if you think of extended study purely for financial gain you might be doing education wrong.
Thing is, employers don't leave another choice. It's either jobs on the level of flipping burgers, the trades, or it's going to college because even mediocre paper-pusher jobs require a college degree these days.
The reasons for that are pretty simple:
- college degrees save employers money on training cost, as the students have to shoulder it (you know, it used to be a red flag for scam jobs if you were required to pay for the privilege of getting the job - but with college, it's accepted that we saddle 18 year olds with five figures of debt)
- they are a versatile proxy... they weed out people from entire classes of society (the poor, the disabled, people of color, people with mental or physical health issues - all of that has close correlations with lower chances of academic degrees) completely legally
- they reduce risk of hiring a "dud" - if you can't get out of bed reliably in the morning and stick to deadlines you won't get an academic degree, so requiring degrees weeds out this as well with no financial risk to the employers.
There is only one way out: legally mandating that requiring a college degree for a job is only allowed if there is a material need for the knowledge acquired during a matching academic degree.
Oh indeed they are. The problem is, not many young people wish to enter the trades - here in Germany, the homeland of the "Duale Ausbildung", the biggest issue is boomers with toxic attitudes and wages one can't survive on. You gotta be able to afford a trades education these days.
Also the result you get out of college very often mirrors that mindset: if you are there to primarily learn and expand your skillset, I'd say college is virtually always worth it.
I studied at 6 different universities (with varying teaching quality and approaches) and always learnt tons.
Doesn't really add up for me, because it's very obvious that university is definitely not purely about learning, and even if that was the case why does self-teaching from open university courses tend to have zero weight with employers? Because the degree itself has status/signal/meaning.
In reality the benefits are far closer to purely financial gain than purely learning, and personally I found that the structure of university severely limited the amount I could learn.
The trick is to break through the self-imposed constraints and go audit/listen to whatever class/course you like, even if outside your program (in less modern/flexible universities, make sure to ask for permission, especially if the number of students is low.)
If the time doesn't allow that, make friends with people in those courses/classes and ask them to forward to you the slides/presentations of their classes (or trade yours for their if they want to).
Contact professors working on projects you are interested in, regardless of whether they are your professors and/or if it is your major. Since you'd be generally unpaid, you might have lots of freedom to modify the project as you need/please, or join what they are already doing.
Check out facilities/available materials and other tools that the university provides.
If you do that, you'll learn several orders of magnitude more than most students there.
I did that pretty much at every uni I went to, and still managed to do some good amount of partying and part-time job.
Everything has opportunity cost and therefore constraints. I feel like you are oblivious to this.
If I'm going to audit whatever classes I want, why would I even enroll in the university? Chances are if I asked nicely I could sit in, talk to the professors and even use some facilities.
Part of the package with university is the structure. If you're saying people should throw that away, why are they even going to university?
University is almost always "worth it" in terms of absolute gain, but I think its alpha over other approaches is very dubious when it comes to how much you will learn and improve your skillset. Depending on your goals, it can be a very poor learning environment.
Some degrees are worth it and some are not. The ones that don't should focus more on funneling a small pool of talented students to research and higher degrees in order to expand human knowledge rather than having hoards of students doing a degree just for the sake of having a degree
Do you know how to calculate sample sizes? For a population around 300m people you can survey some 7500 (if those are representative of the overall population, not just a homogeneous cohort of the population) and get a confidence level of 99% with 1.5% margin of error.
I recommend studying a little of basic statistics.
Does this also balances out the fact that these are people who choose to respond to their survey and not random sample of all Americans? Are you saying the list of people who choose to respond to their survey is an accurate sampling of the entire American population?
Also why not say we surveyed 6000 people in our list instead and 30% of them have this view? That is more true than saying 30% of Americans have this view which is quite a big jump. There is ofcourse some lying going on here. What are they trying to achieve by lying here is my question.
survey statistics work by computing the margin of error for a specific sample size.
for example, if you toss a coin, say 10times and it shows heads 9 out of ten times, would you say "oh this was completely coincidental, you have to throew it more times before you can know!" or would you already say the coin is biased after ten tosses?
And the key thing is: there is math for that. "How probable is it that this result that I see is representative for all the possible coin tosses that I could ever make with this coin?" or, in our case here "How probable is it that the result of _these_ 6000 people here is close enough to what I'd get if I ask all Americans with a College degree?"
and let me assure you, a sample size of 6000, properly controlled for biases, gives a very representative result.
If you'd cry foul for 30 respondents, I'm with you.
but for 6000? and a professional research institute which klnows how to do their homework? nah.
If you doubt what I say here, feel free to brush up your statistics (udemy, udacity, ...) and then review the Pew methodology. I'll be curious about your findings.
> Also why not say we surveyed 6000 people in our list instead and 30% of them have this view? That is more true than saying 30% of Americans have this view which is quite a big jump. There is ofcourse some lying going on here. What are they trying to achieve by lying here is my question.
Because their methodology is designed to work through sampling, and sampling can determine results with very high confidence (95-99%) from a quite small sample size of the overall population, they don't need to qualify further given Pew has a trustworthy methodology for sampling.
It's not a big jump, it's how sampling works. I really recommend you read about it, it might be very helpful to understand and stop thinking "they're lying!", they are not.
It's basic statistics, you are trying to argue against very established mathematics.
These links will hopefully help you understand surveys and statistics more. If you need more links, let me know. I can find a lot more courses on these topics if you need.
A lot of courses that looked like they were just there to fill time. Obviously everyone knows MIT and other top university lectures on youtube and those are great, but I was surprised to see people paying outrageous amounts for what looked like a genuine waste of time. Any more informed thoughts about the differences between top / bottom universities in the US?