Adventure Capitalist

I have a bachelors degree in computer science. I spent three years at university getting it. After the first twelve months, I learned very little. I learned more in the first four months of working than I did in the entire three years of university, but that’s not the worst part, the worst part I had to spend several years unlearning many of the things that where taught in university that where just plain wrong and counterproductive! This in spite of me going to a top university in Sweden which is considered a pioneer in the computer science area (they where the first university in Sweden to have degrees in computer science some 40+ years ago).

I know I’m not alone in my experience, I know as far as the IT industry goes, degrees are mostly useless, and it’s probably true of many other industries. It’s passion for the subject/industry, willingness to learn, adapt and keep up to date with developments that counts. I don’t care if you have a fancy PhD, if you’re not willing to keep moving forward, I want nothing to do with you. In fact, some of the worst and most useless wastes of space I’ve worked with have had PhD’s. Some of the smartest guys I’ve worked with have had no formal education apart from being self-taught from a very young age.

Certification, not Skills & Knowledge?
It begs the question: if formal education is often so useless, why do we spend years and masses of money trying to get the degree papers? Is it simply to have some sort of “certification” to get into the corporate world? Knowing that at least 3 years at a university, preferably more is the price of entry, regardless of how good or smart you are?

It seems to me like the certification papers are sometimes more important than the actual skillset and will to hone those skills. Why has it come to this? Education IS important, but it is the skills and knowledge acquired from education that is what is important. Education, formal or informal is a means to an end, namely skills and/or knowledge. If education is not a means to skills and/or knowledge, but to receive a paper certification that certifies that yes, indeed, you where present for most of the 3-5 years, what is it really worth, to you or anyone else?

Autodidactism vs. Academia: Academia Considered Harmful
Of course, there will always be exceptions to my observations, I’d be hesitant to have brain surgery done on me by someone who was not formally trained in the subject for years (though I’d be most interested in their surgery track record). 

However, for many areas, formal education has little value except as certification for corporate gatekeepers, what really counts is how an individual applies themselves to learn the subject. For instance, Albert Einstein was mostly self taught. Does his lack of early formal academic credentials make his Theory of Relativity less relevant? Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin are a few other prominent, mostly self taught scientists.

I’d even go as far as saying that academic education can be considered harmful for furthering yourself in a number of fields:

• Computer Science: PhD’s rarely know much about how to write good software or run IT projects or operations. In fact, most of what they’ve theorized in academia is often downright bad and needs unlearning.
• Economics: most of the economics taught at modern universities is in plain language, useless nonsense. 
• Languages: want to learn a foreign language? Don’t go to school, move to the country, immerse yourself and you’ll learn more in 6 months than in 6 years at university. 

The list could probably go on for as long as my arm, but I’ve made my point.

Somewhere, sometime ago, the educational system in western society has gone off the rails in a bad way, as has our perception of what education should be and achieve. The results I see from education and the attitudes I see towards education in the West, that it is simply an entry ticket to the corporate ratrace makes me even more sure that Asia will run rings around Europe and the US in this century. Westerners have the wrong idea, and that makes them ill prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the future. Stagnation can only follow unless something changes dramatically.