If none of that is convincing, just look up the average pay of people with and without degrees. Whether or not you enjoy learning and education or feel like the time is wasted, the sad fact is that the good jobs are being given to people with degrees, by and large. I honestly thought 4 year degrees probably gave, statistically, like maybe 15% pay advantage. That would be a pretty big boost, it’s already pushing 4 years of raises for most people. However, the reality published by The Fed is that people in the US with 4 year degrees earn twice what people without degrees earn. I was blown away when I learned that. It’s probably not fair, and it doesn’t mean people with degrees are smarter or harder working than people without, but that is the surprising reality of the job market.

MIT has a intro to programming with python.

Degrees are unfortunately a check mark to gate keep positions that's why the pay is higher. Not because your some how smarter with the degree or more capable.

In the last 10 years I have never used physics developing software, never needed calculus. Learned networking at a deeper level then my college network class by self studying for a ccna.

All this info is available online. Compilers, operating systems.

I disagree that studying humanities makes a difference for people. Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something? I have a liberal arts degree, from a little over 10 years ago. I can't remeber most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point? Saying things like that puts degrees on a pedestal. Life experience does way more thinking then any class.

Lessons from school are like anything else, use it or lose it.

Why does it matter if the reason having a degree pays more is because of credentialism? If that’s true, then the best advice to someone is to just get the degree, no? Unfortunately for your argument, both the comment you replied to and mine personally attested to the coursework being very helpful and your experience doesn’t counter ours. On top of that there’s a whole field of research trying to study whether the average salary premium of degree holders is due to credentialism or to actually learning useful things during four years of schooling, and they find it’s a mix of both. Your armchair claim that one doesn’t learn anything in four years of school won’t convince me or anyone else without a whole lot more effort, data, and serious analysis. What is plausible is that you didn’t learn much in your time at your school.

Is the lack of math & physics in your career due to not wanting to do those things? Of course people can have careers that don’t use some or even any of the subjects they learned in school. That doesn’t demonstrate that school is a waste of time. At worst it demonstrates that you didn’t use your time wisely. At best it demonstrates you wanted to learn more and other things. Either way, I didn’t (and still don’t) expect for every single thing learned in school to be relevant to life or my own jobs, but many things I learned have been useful for me, including math and physics, as well as some social studies and history. It was eye opening to learn a bit about how global class hierarchies and economies work. If you didn’t learn any of that or anything else interesting, maybe your school failed you, maybe you should have gone somewhere else.

> Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something?

Something. Around 25 years since graduation.

> I can’t remember most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point? Saying things like that puts degrees on a pedestal.

Obviously I have no idea how your degree is shaping your thinking, are you suggesting that it’s not? I mean it’s a bummer if you really got nothing out of it and it hasn’t helped shape your life at all, but I can’t speak to your experience.

I’m not exactly sure why suggesting that someone who spends four years of their life learning things actually learns something is putting a degree on a pedestal. From my perspective, saying that four years of learning yields nothing for anyone, aside from being demonstrably false, doesn’t make that much sense. If you spent four years learning and didn’t learn, isn’t that on you?

> Lessons from school are like anything else, use it or lose it.

This highlights a vocational style of thinking. What you say is true if you only care about the list of facts a professor said in class. The lessons that I took from school are more meta level, longer lasting, and less about practicing or remembering specific things. How to approach problem solving, how to do research, and what have been the high level outcomes of other people’s research. On top of that, yes, I am keeping some of my math and social studies and history and art skills around by practicing them. If what you say is true, then one way to make sure your degree was useless is to not use it.

I would just point you to my other comment, since it probably addressed like 90% of your reply and maybe suggest getting out of your academic bubble and see how most people are using their degrees.

Why do you think I’m in a bubble? What evidence do you have that it’s not you wallowing? I’ve read some of the research that tries to tease apart credentialism from skills, read maybe a dozen papers about it. And I’ve looked at the data on pay gap on average across the US for degree holders vs non degree holders. Have you?

BTW, your other reply does almost nothing to address either my comments nor @sarchertech’s. You’re arguing a straw man, asserting that it’s possible for people to learn on their own, which neither of us has disgreed with. The facts are that very few people actually do it without a guided curriculum, and conversely that people who choose the guided curriculum often do learn things they wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

> Lets go back to my original point, related to spending 3-4 years studying CS. You and the other guy that responded are getting way off topic and putting words in my mouth.

> What I didn't say is that computer science knowledge is useless. So lets not get distracted by this imaginary point.

> Most of the unrelated degree for CS work is useless.

I think your in a bubble because it sounds like your surprised by people finding their time in college to be mostly useless. This isn't about the degree it self being something that is used to gatekeep and lead to higher salaries. Just that your not really spending 4 years studying CS, your wasting time with gen eds.

Go ask some 30 year old + people about their college and experience with gen eds.

I have asked some 30 year olds, in addition to reading quite a bit of research on this topic. I’m not at all surprised some people find their time in college to be mostly useless. Some people are lazy and contrarian and see school as authoritarian and useless from the start, and so they don’t pay attention and getting nothing out of it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - something they did to themselves because of their attitude. Maybe you’re one of those people. That reflects on their attitude and choices and not on school in general, since it’s a fact that many other people find their time in college valuable, many people take advantage of the time and seek out classes that teach them things they want to learn. My school had lots of choices for classes that fill gen ed requirements, and I chose my gen eds wisely.

The research that has statistically sampled all 30 year olds found that on the whole they are learning things and taking skills away from their university experience. It would be totally weird if they weren’t. Your point makes very little sense that people would spend 4 years of their lives learning and end up not learning. I think @sarchertech is right that you’re projecting your own experience on everyone else, making the incorrect assumption that because you didn’t learn much then nobody did.

> This isn’t about the degree it self being something that is used to gatekeep and lead to higher salaries

Yes it absolutely is. A degree that gets you into a 2x better paying job has utility, and is not useless, even if you waste your time and learn nothing.

Nothing you’ve said yet addresses the point that even though people could learn on their own everything that college teaches, we have loads of evidence that it just doesn’t happen very often.

BTW, I think you meant “you’re”. I wouldn’t have said anything, but you did it 4 times in a row.

I also never said don't go to college. Idk why you keep expecting me to defend this point? What did you learn in these classes exactly lol

If you never studied it in-depth, it's hard to recognize when it would be useful. It's not like your boss is going to tell you that you need to compute the differential of some function. But understanding physics and calculus are incredibly useful when you need to think about how things grow, or when you need to model some process.

But calculus isn't even remotely the most useful branch of math for CS. I use discrete math, statistics and probability constantly. Just last week I had to come up with a plan to validate that a data migration of several billion rows was working correctly and it's nice to be able to understand how to calculate sample size to give you an appropriate confidence level. You don't even need to remember exact formulas just remembering enough to look things up is a huge productivity benefit.

During the first part of the data migration project, we realized that we need to migrate accounts that shared users directly or indirectly at the same time. I looked at the problem and realized it was just a graph theory problem to find all of the connected components of the graph and was able to whip up a little visualization tool that showed us this was impossible, and then showed us a few superusers that we could eliminate to break the graph up in to much smaller components.

The graduate level networking class I took has been insanely useful. A month ago someone at my company had spent weeks working on a system to keep 2 systems in sync and he asked for help. I could recognize immediately that his solution could just never work and essentially he was trying to solve the 2 generals problem, and then help him find a solution that can solve a relaxed version with tradeoffs we can live with.

I use what I learned in Automata all the time as well. Computer Hardware and Assembly have been incredibly useful for understanding how to write high performance code.

I 100% could have learned everything I learned in college on my own. But I never would have. I never would have developed a holistic understanding of how the whole system works together.

> Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something? I have a liberal arts degree, from a little over 10 years ago. I can't remeber most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point?

I remember a ton from the first time I went to college 20+ years ago. I took a business law class that has been useful many times in my life. Biology was incredibly useful.

I know someone who went back to nursing school much later in life. She told me that before she went back to school and took anatomy, her model for the human body was that all your organs just floated around inside your torso and when you ate food it just mixed in with all of it. Everyone has gaps, but a general education does a lot to make sure that they are hopefully not so large. Even just looking at vaccine hesitancy by education level, college is probably worth it for that alone.

Micro and macro economics have been great for understanding the world. I'm fairly certain that Austrian economics is mostly just people that don't understand calculus.

I used what I learned in physics constantly in wood working, 3d printing, CNC machining and other hobbies.

Again you can 100% pick all of this stuff up on your own. But vast majority of people don't have the discipline to do it.

What I didn't say is that computer science knowledge is useless. So lets not get distracted by this imaginary point.

Most of the unrelated degree for CS work is useless. You already admitted that the three calculus classes required for a BS weren't useful. I pointed out the into python class isn't useful. We already knocked off a semester of classes.

We really aren't using physics developing most software by CS graduates.

> I never would have developed a holistic understanding of how the whole system works together.

Kids coming out of school don't have this. Most people working don't understand the entire system. I worked at decent companies. There are plenty of people who will just stop at "JVM does something with my code". I see this especially bad with the people coming out of AI specializations

The gen eds were all intro level classes, the only thing to take away is there are more to know. If your making decisions about the world based on an intro to law class or your if knowledge of economics is still at the level of supply and demand I think your being naive about your level of competence in those areas. In hindsight after living life after school and working these classes really weren't a great use of time.

I don't think college is the place to support your hobbies. Things like art workshops provide a better learning experience then art history or w/e. Even reading is more enjoyable post school for me.

Getting some pop sci level books and reading for a bit would have been better all around then sitting in intro lectures with 100 other students.

You're ignoring what I said about time being required for understanding. Your CS and directly relevant math prereqs are going to be spread out of 4 years anyway. Might as well get a well rounded education while your there.

If you want to save money you can CLEP out of at least a year of classes (assuming you have the discipline to teach yourself), or if you were motivated in high school take AP classes.

You're also completely ignoring the part where I said number of credit hours isn't really indicative of total time spent. I'd say I spent 75% of my total active studying time on CS classes.

>You already admitted that the three calculus classes required for a BS weren't useful.

Nope I said they were just less useful than discrete math and stats. But there's overlap, it's hard to understand a big chunk of either of those without calculus.

> I pointed out the into python class isn't useful.

My intro programming class was pretty useful because it didn't focus on syntax, but on concepts. There were definitely a few gaps I had that were filled in there even though I had several years of experience before I took it.

>We really aren't using physics developing most software by CS graduates.

I have used physics directly a few times, but most software doesn't. However that's not why physics is useful, it reinforces your understanding of calculus. An intuitive understanding of growth is incredibly useful in CS.

>Kids coming out of school don't have this. Most people working don't understand the entire system. I worked at decent companies. There are plenty of people who will just stop at "JVM does something with my code".

If you went to a decent school and you paid attention at all you would. If you took the classes I did you'd honestly have to have worked at it to not have a pretty good understanding of the whole stack.

>The gen eds were all intro level classes, the only thing to take away is there are more to know.

I think the problem is that you either never learned all that much from your classes or you've just forgotten it all and you're applying your experience to everyone else.

>making decisions about the world based on an intro to law class

1 semester of business law was pretty useful when I was running a startup. Doesn't make me a lawyer, but I bet I know more than 90% of people in a similar position.

>knowledge of economics is still at the level of supply and demand

I took 2 semesters of micro and 2 of semesters because I found it interesting. I'd wager 2 years of Econ puts you somewhere near the 95th percentile or so among the general population. I've continue to learn certainly, but most people have nowhere near that level of understanding.

>Getting some pop sci level books and reading for a bit would have been better all around then sitting in intro lectures with 100 other students.

Again if that's the level of education you got, I can understand why you think it was a waste of time.

But ignoring that, a huge and often overlooked component of understanding is time. You need the entire 3 or 4 years even if technically you could cram all your CS classes into 2 (well you really couldn't because of dependencies). If you do it right, you'll have CS classes mixed in with your other classes, so that you'll pretty much always be studying CS over the entire 4 years. In a decent CS program, you'll also spend far more time on CS projects out of class than you will on homework in other classes.

The average person will probably spend 75% of their total active time on CS classes.

As far as intro classes go, there was maybe 1 class where I learned almost nothing and I had been programming professionally for a while before I went back. The whole point for me was to fill in the gaps of things I didn't know I didn't know.