20th
adamgotterer:mikehudack:johncarney:
A lot of you have probably heard me put down going to college or graduate school. Well, this is the exception. In fact, it’s so exceptional that you really have no excuse not for taking MIT’s courses regardless of whether you are in high school right now or already in the workforce.
Also, I explain how to overcome common objections like (a) lack of a peer group and (b) lack of an alumni network.
Finally, degrees are way overrated. You don’t need one now, and in the future they will be even more worthless.
I’ll add one other thought: your real alumni network is formed after college, from friends you meet at bars and parties, and folks you meet at work. In my experience, at least, these are the most valuable people to your career.
First off — a lot of schools offer their courses online for free, including Stanford. I would bet that over the next few years you’ll start to see a lot of Universities posting lectures into the public domain. This is a great trend in academia.
The person who wrote the above excerpt from their longer piece on Business Insider is a fellow named John Carney. I know nothing about Mr. Carney other than what I just read on his bio page. John went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania (a top-rated ivy league school) and then worked at Skadden Arps, one of the premiere corporate law firms in New York City. This guy telling the world that formal education isn’t necessary is like a millionaire saying that you don’t need money.
“Finally, degrees are way overrated. You don’t need one now, and in the future they will be even more worthless.”
Degrees, in addition to symbolizing the accumulation of knowledge, also represent ability to commit to something and finish it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if you have an Associates Degree from Devry or a Bachelors from Harvard, but completing an academic program shows potential employers that you can follow through and that you have some expertise in the academic canon. I can’t really see how this is going to change. Having hired more that I’ve been hired , I can tell you honestly that I would not hire someone without any post-high-school formal education. Those that truly don’t need it — The Bill Gateses and Sam Reichs of the world, for example — aren’t coming to me for a job (also also probably not reading Business Insider for advice). People like that were drawn away from school specifically to do something else. I must leave college/high-school to pursue this amazing thing that is more improtant than school. I think that’s legitimate, but that’s really not what John Carney is saying. He’s saying that you can find any knowledge that you need on the Internet and therefore don’t need formal education.
And that, dear readers, is a load of bullshit.
