Bingo. College can (doesn’t always) give you the opportunity (not force you) to grow - in and outside of class. Often (not always) you are surrounded by like minds. Often you are away from home for the first time, learning to get along with a nearly randomly assigned dormmate. Often (not always) you are exposed to new ideas, new ways of thinking - inside and outside of a classroom.
And you CAN get those things outside of college. And a low end state commuter college is probably not going to give you much opportunity for any of those things. And you can go to some small elite college and manage to avoid gaining anything from the experience as well (although I think you might have to be pretty stubborn to manage it).
But when people talk about college they are often talking about the stereotypical experience - the dorm, the having to make it on your own, the scheduling, the exams, the dorm food, the kegger, the romances - and the discovery of Kant or James Joyce or Theoretical Physics or Marxian Freudian Analysis (and the subsequent discovery that its crap) or DifEQ or whatever expands and opens their mind.
For me, going to college forced me to learn about all kinds of things I didn’t necessarily want to learn. But I am very glad I did. There is a foundation of knowledge and ways of thinking that can be applied to so many areas of life. When I talk to intelligent friends that did not go to college I can sometimes see that the foundation is not there, maybe a specific way of looking at a problem requires them to ponder it longer, or maybe they require more background info, etc.
I’ll assume this was a reply to my post. I guess I missed your post where you later decried your own list. Sorry.
The contradiction is that that they aren’t willing to delay gratification. They want the education NOW, even tho they do not have the money to pay for it. So they find an avenue, via incurred debt, to gain what they want NOW, rather than wait until they can afford it or gain it piecemeal on a pay-as-you-go method. My point being, they really aren’t delaying gratification, so this bullet point on your list doesn’t really seem true or relevant.
No, I’m suggesting that “the ability to delay gratification” isn’t really a viable or accurate conclusion to be made about someone who incurs debt in order to get through school in four years, rather than work and pay-as-you-go and maybe take 7 or 8 years. The latter person I would say is more able to delay gratification (and also shows more focus on long term goals, IMO).
Irrelevant.
That’s not just your opinion; it’s also the law and thereby the opinion of the vast, overwhelming majority of people. But it really has nothing to do with delaying gratification.
Thanks for the explanation. I agree that people who “work and pay-as-you-go and maybe take 7 or 8 years (to finish college)” do demonstrate that they are focused on long-term goals, and have an ability to delay gratification.
I disagree with your assertion that “the ability to delay gratification” isn’t really a viable or accurate conclusion to be made about someone who incurs debt in order to get through school in four years. For many college students, even with student loans it is still a financial struggle to pay for tuition and living expenses for that four year period. Many students who borrow money for college also work at a job while taking classes (cite, cite), and still manage to get good grades and participate in extracurricular activities. For these students, at least, the financial struggle and hard work during those years is only worth going through if one takes a long-term view (e.g., that the degree and experiences will enrich your life and afford you a better lifestyle in the long run.)
Perhaps the question should be “on average, which is more beneficial for the majority of people, college or self education?”
Sure, you can gain more knowledge on your own than you can possibly get in college. If you are one of the few gifted. What percent of college students gain the “list” compared to the number of people that self-educate?
People are comparing the “worst” students, and the genius level self educated person like this is true for everybody. I think it is safe to say that employers like to play the numbers game.
If you want to quantify how smart you are, take a formal IQ test. It’s nonsense that IQ tests are unable to quantify intelligence.
If you want to quanitfy how knowledgeable you are, take a formal standardized exam in the area for which you want to test your knowledge.
Formal programs for post-high-school education can help make you more knowledgeable; they can’t make you smarter. They can also help you mature and allow you to demonstrate some of the qualities mentioned above.
I think this is probably the most important part of my college experience. I would have learned 95% or so of the things I was interested in already. The classes that were not part of my major taught me a great deal of things I would not have learned on my own. Additionally, I learned the lesson that almost any subject can become interesting to me if I have enough information on it.
In reference to the OP… How can I tell if I am smart and/or educated?
College by no means dinstinguishes you, or anyone, from the mentioned qualities.
I really can’t see how college gives you anything that’s otherwise unobtainable from general work/living conditions… here I will cite the five or six bosses that I have had, who, given due respect, probably performed quite well at the academics… yet sadly had a massively profound lack of understanding when it came down to the level of ‘actual work’ that needed to be done.
The trades assistants usually ended up telling one of these guy’s what to do… … so the tradies are…
Smarter? yes.
Educated? well, not at a college, but they knew a truckload more than the college brains trust.
… never mind that the piece of Paper the college man gets nets himself a bunch more money, even though they’re quoting job’s that they don’t know how to build (budget blowouts anybody?)
So, The Paper gets you the cash, but in some cases it also gets the derision and general “massive pain in the arse” qualities rather than respect for being ‘smart, and well educated’…
I think that college was a much better indicator of an “educated” person before it became High School II, something that everyone just does, because a BA is now considered a bare minimum qualification for pretty much any white-collar job.
Someone upthread mentioned that the quality of one’s education is dependent on the quality of the institution attended, and I disagree. Not that I’m knocking the schools, which are great. I do believe that there is no BETTER environment for learning than a good university. I just believe that the quality of the education is much MORE dependent on the quality of the student. Generally, we get the education we want, if not necessarily through the channels we’d prefer.
I know plenty of smart people, and plenty of less-smart people, and I can assure you that both sorts can be found within both the Ivy grad and GED crowds. It’s entirely possible to educate yourself, and it’s entirely possible to get through college without learning much more than how to tap a keg. It’s all up to you.
The way you can tell is if you are educated is if you have an education. That is to say, you have deliberately set out with the specific purpose to accumulate knowledge, skills and values. The key here is that it is “deliberate”. Considering yourself “educated” because of the wealth of knowledge you passively accumulated over your life to date doesn’t count.
Certainly people can acquire an education on their own, but rarely does someone pursue some intellectual interest with the same intensity that one would find in an academic institutional environment. And for a significant number of subjects, most people do not have the academic resources at their disposal to properly educate themselves.
There seems to be a great deal of debate over what knowledge, skills and values constitute being considered “educated”. Is it specific vocational knowledge? A broad understanding of various academic or philosophical concepts? Skill and knowledge in language, music and the arts? The answer IMHO is “all of the above”. Someone who is properly educated has studied and gained exposure to a wide variety of subject matters and topics so they can better function and contribute to society. And educated person should be equally adept at discussing a topic with a bunch of longshoreman in a bar as they would be with a bunch of attorneys or PhDs in a cocktale party. They should not be an ivory tower intellectual any more than they should be an ignoramus.
The nice thing about a college education, especially one from a well-respected academic institute, is that one can reasonably expect a certain amount of intelligence and education from its graduates. frootle - I do not consider deep knowledge of a narrow focus of vocational study to be “educated”. “Trained” and “experienced” maybe, but not educated. But an educated manager should be educated enough to not be so arrogant as to think that he doesn’t need to confer with the people who actually have been performing the job day in and day out for years.
I would say that if you are so arrogant to never think you need to ask the question of other people, you are probably not. It’s very easy for an uneducated person to think they know everything when they are surrounded by other uneducated people who do not challenge them intellectually.
Also, how does one figure out what they are “good at”?
But I think ‘‘what it is’’ varies from person to person. I feel like too many people in this thread are placing the onus of the responsibility on the institutions to magically make people into better thinkers. It doesn’t work that way. It requires active participation on behalf of the learner.
I would argue one of the greatest problems with education at this time is that it is viewed by many as nothing more than a means to an end, with that end becoming increasingly less and less of a guarantee. The idea that college is an investment is less and less true, unless that investment involves some intrinsic value of learning for learning’s sake.
Arrogance is a character trait, again, not something magically handed down along with your degree. I would posit that perhaps arrogant people are more likely to attend prestigious universities, but even if I’m wrong, it’s completely possible to garner the benefits of a good education while resisting the elitist attitudes of your peers.
My personal resistance to working at Walmart would more likely involve my past experience having been a min. wage employee and being treated as completely expendable and never wishing to have that experience again. On the other hand, I’d take Walmart over waitressing any day.
Exactly this.
I am really struggling to articulate myself here.
Yesterday I was cruising ‘‘rate my professor’’ to help determine how I should register for my courses, and I noted two things:
The overall quality of the professor is partly determined by how easy the course is. That is, the easier the course, the higher the professor’s overall rating.
Most of the people who rated my own professors rated the course to be much easier than I found it to be.
Regarding #1, I am appalled. You would think that the value of education would be measured by how HARD the material is, not how easy it is. But I am the sort of person who loves being challenged. If something is kicking my ass, I feel like I have to become worthy of it, thus the victory is all the more sweet at the end.
Regarding #2, I was really challenged to think about why others perceived the courses as easier than I do. A relevant fact is that I am kicking ass in all of my courses, and often go above and beyond the required course material because I just really want to get everything I can out of it.
Could it be then, that ‘‘easiness’’ is subjective, not in terms of intelligence, but in terms of motivation? If you do the bare minimum to pass a class (or even the minimum to get an A), it seems you would find it less challenging than someone who does everything they possibly can with the material they are given.
I really don’t know what else to say. I was a naive, arrogant, bloviating idiot before I attended college. I had no practical knowledge and certainly no understanding of how to use it. College forced me to confront the limitations of my intellectual capacity, but it also taught me to do remarkable things with the capacity I do have. I can’t even properly list the number of passions I discovered as an undergraduate, my husband being not the least of them. It is ridiculous how much better I understand the world as a result of my college education. All these little discrete pieces of information are gradually synthesized into a cohesive whole. I’m fascinated by the whole process.
There are definitely kids from the same school, program, and courses who didn’t get nearly as much out of college as I did. They wanted their degree so they could get a shiny new job.
What happened is, the kids who actually bothered to make the most of the experience are the ones getting the shiny new jobs. In a sense, I feel like you have to value learning for learning’s sake in order to be competitive in the job market. I think employers know the difference between active intelligence and the ability to jump through hoops, and they value active intelligence more. It makes sense, because if you exploit all of the resources at your disposal as a student, then you will probably do the same thing as an employee.
Do I think you can learn to be actively intelligent outside of college? Absolutely, and many people are born that way, but not most people. I definitely wasn’t. And I do read on my own, but I find I learn at a slower pace, I retain less of the information, and some things are just too hard to understand without formal instruction. I need formal education like I need air to breathe.
In my experience (part of my current job entails reviewing engineering resumes for hire) would would say categorize it this way:
[ul][li]B.S. = Should have basic understanding of engineering fundamentals in field and can learn more with guidance[/li][li]M.S. = Will have a more focused understanding with a particular discipline, but otherwise no better or worse than a B.S. in terms of training[/li][li]Ph.D. = Typically only knowledgeable about specific focus area of discipline, and will often actively refuse to learn or do work outside that area[/ul][/li]
Experience modifies all of the above. I’ll take a B.S. with ten years of experience in field over an M.S. with just three or four years almost any day, and I’ll take either over a Ph.D. for almost any position that doesn’t require a very specific and narrow set of analysis skills. The only Ph.D.s I’ve worked with who have really been worth a damn have been men and women who worked in some industry for several years before returning to school to pursue a doctorate, and who maintain interests outside their specific field. Of the smartest people I know and have worked with, only a small proportion of them have a Ph.D.
The thing about college is (at least ideally) it exposes you to ideas, works of art and research, and people who would not otherwise meet in the normal course of work or vocational training. Of course, for many people college is just a time to hang out with people who are pretty much like you, party hard, and cram for finals.
As far as arrogance that comes from ignorance, that comes even from people who are ‘well-educated’ in a general sense, but not comprehending of the required depth of knowledge to speak about a particular field. This is particularly true of people who are well versed in the liberal arts but non-technical, and yet believe that they can render a detailed opinion on some science or engineering topic despite lacking the fundamental grounding in the basics of mathematics and the natural sciences. (The converse may be true to some extent as well, but most technical people that I know don’t claim to have an extensive knowledge about the arts or literature that they don’t actually have; they’re just sometimes dismissive of that which they’re just not interested about.)
If you aren’t constantly learning, and realizing how much you have yet to learn, you cannot consider yourself to be educated. And if you aren’t even interested in learning about pretty much anything and everything (to a certain extent), then I’d say that you aren’t even really educable. Really educated people crave learning for its own sake rather than the apparent material rewards vocational knowledge can provide.
Exactly. I was lucky enough to be in an immense high school (1500 in my graduating class) that was big enough to have one or two classes worth of people who cared about thinking. College was even more so, and grad school more so still. Before I moved to Silicon Valley I lived in and near Princeton and worked for Bell Labs, so I had the benefit here also. It is depressing to be around people who hate to think. There are plenty of people like that in colleges also.
As for my answer to your original question, the difference I feel is that in college (a good one) your knowledge gets challenged. You may think you know something up until the point you open your exam book. Careers with apprenticeships (like cooking) actually are similar, but much more narrow. In college I got challenged not only on computer science but on philosophy.
The so-called self-educated person may or may not really know anything. Many people slip by in their jobs at a mediocre level with work that would get a C at best in any decent school. (I’ve seen code written by some.)
Your dissertation area is indeed narrow. However, to get the chance to write one, you need to demonstrate a very broad knowledge of the broader field, far broader than your average M.S. student needs to demonstrate (assuming they have to demonstrate any at all.)
In my rather broad experience, Ph.Ds who go into academia might start out narrow, as they try to get grant money in the area of their dissertation, and fill in unfinished business. I’ve never seen an engineering Ph.D who expressed the sort of snootiness you mention, and I interviewed dozens at Bell Labs and hired quite a few. They quickly jumped onto the problems we had and made them their own - and exhibited the ability to do independent work at a level far above the average M.S. grad. Not all M.S. grads - some of them were just as good, and some of those went on to get a Ph.D. After 20 years it doesn’t matter that much, but when I look at the very senior people in my field of interest a very high percentage have Ph.Ds - and most of these are in industry, not universities. My field, btw, has absolutely nothing to do with what I studied for my dissertation. The research skills I learned writing that, and having a couple of good advisors, have stood me in good stead for 30 years now.
