I think people who are entering college with the mindset that a degree is simply an accolade to garner large sums of money are misunderstanding the principal of college and higher-education learning. You go to college because you're interested in something enough to pursue a greater understanding of it. The degree is simply a token that you're not full of shit. So whether you're complaining about student debt or validating your academic decisions with shallow dreams of making six-figures, you're in for a pretty boring 4+ years of passionless note-taking and test-taking (fine by me).
That's one of the things to do in college. Gaining a shiny degree that will help you get a better job is another. Meeting people who will help you in your career is yet another.
There are many reasons to go to college. Learning interesting stuff is just one of them.
> Meeting people who will help you in your career is yet another.
I predict the Internet will increasingly replace this traditional function of the college experience. And do it for, essentially, just the cost of Internet access service each month. Yes we'll have to use a web browser and click on the right links to the right sites, chat in topic-oriented forums, and then go do "meetups" in meatspace (Dr. Evil saying "lasers") to meet them face-to-face, become friends, learn from each other, collaborate together, micro-projects, trial projects, earn F2F credibility, put things up on our online portfolios, become ambiant, self-promote, self-educate, iterate, rinse, repeat. Goodbye 4-6 years of grinding and $100K in student debt.
I agree that traditionally going to college was a great way to meet people who've been filtered for certain qualities. But this tradition comes from an era when the Internet didn't exist. Computers didn't exist. Even radios and telephony didn't exist for the earliest periods in which universities existed and operated. But we have all that stuff now. We have frickin FaceTime and Skype and Google Hangouts and Reddit and email mailing lists, oh my! Let's all get to meeting each other, and filtering for the qualities we want, while bypassing that big honkin expensive middleman industry. I'm also seeing this trend with hackerspaces and makerspaces. Meetup.com is a big enabler.
The quantity and quality of programming courses available online right now - completely free of charge - is astounding to me. I taught myself to program in high school in the mid-to-late 90's, and while there was a ton of information available online even then, I still kind of wish stuff like Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, iTunes University and MIT OCW were available back then.
Still, I think the social aspects of college are hard to fully replicate online. For many people, interactions on places like Reddit, mailing lists, etc are somewhat too anonymous and random, while things like Skype and FaceTime are more for people who are already familiar with each other.
I do think the Internet has huge potential to fundamentally change the way we obtain education. It certainly has fundamentally changed the way we obtain information, but it hasn't changed the way we get marketplace-accepted education yet. I think that is coming.
Agreement. My "college friends" have all but disconnected, even though we are still nominally linked via Facebook(which arrived on campus around our second year). We've all ended up going in mostly unrelated directions. In the meantime, the internet has done unimaginable things for both my career and social life.
For help and research, there are online references, online discussions, online correspondence...even if it's all "informal" and done in an IRC channel or something, it's all out there and you can, potentially, spend 24 hours a day immersed in a subject.
And in making more connections, there's an odd feedback loop between the local gatherings and the online stuff. It can start at either end, but the two complement each other well by presenting different situations.
> You go to college because you're interested in something enough to pursue a greater understanding of it.
Except you can already learn as much as you want, for free, on your own time, without limit, forever, without having to spend the money & extra time costs of college. It's like we live in a world with bodies and gravity and yet folks need to drive to a gym where they buy an expensive membership just so they can exercise their muscles and lungs. It's ludicrous from a certain point of view.
Pro-tip to all 18-somethings that are considering going to college: you can buy all those college textbooks, or equivalent, directly, without going to university. Even better, you can get the same instructional material and references cheaper or even free. But then you would already know that IF you truly had a thirst for knowledge and greater understanding. You already would have been self-educating long before reaching 18. (Unless your parents held you back, horrible family life, locked in a box, etc. all the reasonable exceptional cases -- but even then there is almost always a way to learn and gain greater understanding, without spending the big bucks.)
And I love college in many ways. But, "Death to college!" Let's keep the best parts and then trash or fix the rest.
