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• @partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2026-04-23 04:40

  > Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university. This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree. > Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week. That's *part* of it, but its more that you have a basic education with the fundamentals of your field. More importantly, college teaches you *how to learn*. A Bachelors degree will make you no expert. However the effort you undergo to *get* the degree exposes you to the various resources and bodies of information that exist. It sets up opportunities for critical thinking usually with pretty vast resources at your disposal to research, answer questions, and build something on your own from start to finish. A degree usually also means you have a passable command of your native language and can put together a report or presentation that is on-topic and not embarrass yourself or your superiors when your work comes under scrutiny from others. I sometimes remember a couple of my myopic proposals I made before my degree and didn't understand why they were shot down. Today I completely understand. I was out of my depth before, yet I didn't have the self-awareness to even know that. For those 10 years prior to my degree, I didn't understand why the company made decisions that it made. It made, to my eye, wrong/inefficient decisions. What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics. None of this that if you go to college you'll come away with all of this. If you skate through doing the absolute minimum you might pass with your degree (and debt!) but you'll have wasted an immense opportunity to learn and better yourself. > Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees. While I completely agree that a corporate culture is good to learn to be successful in operating in it, I have doubts a designed curriculum would accurately capture the various "good old boys" or crony decision making processes or those that embrace rules not to end in a good result but just to slow you down from affecting change. Nor would that course explain the simmering resentment of below-average of middle managers that have been passed over again and again as they see their better or more agile peers continue to surpass them and how that can negatively affect your personal productivity or chances of advancement.

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