As a self-taught SWE myself, I agree with your observations. Two of the most talented engineers I've ever met were self-taught. The interesting thing about the two people I'm thinking of is that, besides being self-taught, neither one of them actually even went to college. One of them actually dropped out of college, then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.

Me, I have a degree in math, but 97% of what I know is stuff I picked up either on the job, or because I found it interesting. Besides those that picked up CS as a major when it was a hot field, I'm betting that some of them get the love of tech beaten out of them by their college experience. I certainly know more than one science major who felt that way after graduating. (Not me, though. I'm weird, and I still love math just as much as I always did. Maybe even more.)

Whoops, I noticed a mistake!

> One of them actually dropped out of ~~college~~ high school(!), then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.

Great colleges teach some people how to think. Most people cannot critically think, they simply parrot others, go with the herd, although some of those can perhaps communicate effectively. But for those that go to college and get some manner of STEM degree, something that requires analysis, these people can think from first principles. They are worth 10x what the others are at a technical company. Any college that manages to train students how to critically think is well worth the price. Our economy is quite literally held back by the fact that we do not have enough people who can actually think. Perhaps AI will help solve this problem, but so far, AI just seems to replicate the non-thinkers.

I know any number of people with STEM degrees who are unable to think critically or reason from first principles.

STEM are also, I think, the wrong field(s) in which to rely on critical thinking to, _broadly speaking_, be taught. The technical background - programming languages or maths or basic biology / chemistry - that have to be assimilated before reaching that point are too high a hurdle for most students. Humanities, with a natural-language corpus + common experience, are a more-accessible approach. (The trivium, if you're familiar with classical-education terminology.)

That's not to say STEM courses can't teach critical thinking - they can, and must - nor that educators in Humanities haven't done a piss-poor job of it over the last half-century or so. That is to say that the general decline in critical thinking skills is mostly attributed to the decline in the status of and standards within the Humanities disciplines.

It seems to take both STEM and Humanities imho.

Fair point. I agree that everyone should have an introductory background in both. The tide at the moment, though, is STEM, STEM, STEM... Which I don't think does society any favors. I emphasize Humanities because that's the corrective movement needed right now.

Learning/teaching how to think is:

(1) Not entirely a function of bachelor's programs that produce conformant wage workers.

(2) Not worth the high tuition and debt at all.

I can't help but imagine that there have got to exist far better and cheaper ways to learn how to think. I would like to see more entrepreneurship colleges that force people to innovate, also to bootstrap without external investment.

We'd all love to hear the plan.

I agree with your thesis, but I don't think there are 5 colleges or universities in the US that actually truly teach people how to think critically, with genuine curiosity. I despise people who are smart and educated, but not the least bit intellectually curious. The sad part is that the entire US education system is literally designed to beat the curiosity out of people, at least until you start talking about graduate schools.

I think it is very difficult to do it. You need professors who challenge assumptions and break with the crowd. In college you want many kinds of thinkers teaching the students, and even if you're successful, it takes years for those seeds to grow in young minds to break through prior indoctrinations. And if you think US school systems are bad, they are far better at this than the rest of the world. Please forgive me for the blanket statement, I speak generally not specifically of a particular country.

I get it.

One of the things I was lucky to have as a part of my college experience was access to a group of professors who, while they certainly were not on the cutting edge of their fields in terms of research, cared a lot about good teaching. I wasn't an lit major, or a linguistics major, or a French major, but I was able to take courses in contemporary literature, history of the English language, and modern French literature with people who were, taught by experts in those fields who were there for the sole purpose of doing so.

Then there was the course I took that was ostensibly a political science course, titled simply "General seminar." General seminar was a 1 credit course taught by one of our two political science professors. The only required prerequisite was an invitation. He taught the course generally once a year, and he'd invite 5-6 students, generally juniors and seniors, to literally come over to his house once a week, eat dinner, and discuss a book that was the chosen topic for the semester. There was a rotation for who was supposed to be the facilitator for the evening, but that tended to be an easy job. With ~5 hand-picked, upper division college studnets from multiple majors, discussion generally chose its own direction after the initial introduction and maybe a couple general questions to the group to bootstrap things.

Because I came in to college with 8 college credits already from having taken the calculus sequence at one of the local colleges, rather than screw around with AP, I was nearly a semester ahead of everyone else in my cohort when classes started freshman year. These were not introductory courses, so, often, I'd be the only non-major in the room. Even so, I was held to every bit the same standard as they were.

With only 5 professors in the entire math department, the catalog offerings were mostly limited to the basics: calculus I-III, linear algebra, abstract algebra I-II, differential equations, geometry, probability, mathematical statistics I, real analysis, and a course in foundations that was a capstone course. I took literally all of those, due to having started with those 8 extra credits.

I won't say it was a plus or a minus, but one property of going to a school with only 1200 students is that people will get to know each other. I swear, when I was in college, more people knew my name than whose names I knew. But, that also led to me being able to take independent study courses in elementary field theory, introductory Galois theory, and axiomatic set theory.

Oh, and the foundations course? Yeah, that was a weird combo of like, a month of elementary number theory, followed by a course in point set topology. The topology portion was taught via the Moore method. To this day, I still remember standing up in front of the class (all 5 of us ), and giving what was, and probably still is, to this day, the world's worst correct proof that the real line is connected. The classroom was a small auditorium, equipped with blackboards that rolled up to reveal a second set of blackboards behind them. That gave me 4 blackboards to fill up, and fill them up, I did! But, by golly, when I put my piece of chalk down, Theorem 23 was proved, and C (for "continuum") was well and truly known to be connected!

The point is, although I said in another comment that I now believe I made a suboptimal choice by going to the school I did, given that I was at a SLAC and not a large, research university, I also believe I took full advantage of the resources and strengths of the school I did go to. You might say I learned something about how to think and formulate ideas during my undergrad, but I'd be willing to bet many of those in my graduating class just did it for the piece of paper. You know, the key that unlocks the gateway to the middle class.

But, who am I to question them? :)

I think you are making a fantastic point about what we would hope students would get out of a good college. And it doesn't need to be a big research university, or a top 10 college. The goal is to learn how to critically think, and while working with brilliant people can help with that, so can working with smart, intellectually curious people in a safe environment. In fact it is likely much better in most ways, because while the 'piece of paper' may be perceived to be worth less, the critical thinking skills are what pay back for decades into a professional career.

College degrees still make sense for things that involve math (like mechanical engineering or physics) because I have never met a single person who put the effort in to raise themselves to a professional level on their own.

Your self-disagreement, as manifested in your first two paragraphs, should be eating you alive, but it isn't because you haven't fully come to terms with it yet.