by dahart | 2025-05-27 15:11:18+00:00
Thanks, that MIT page really highlights how exaggerated your first comment was. Your job wasn’t to show that an intro to Python course exists, of course an intro to Python course exists, duh. Your job was to show that intro to Python made up the 25% of in-degree coursework, that the rest was math and gen eds, and you’ve shown that your own description doesn’t fit MIT at all.

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.