No offense but I think your post is wrong in pretty much every respect (and I say this as someone with an ivy league undergraduate degree and nearly done with a Top 10 law degree).
You say people are harmed in their careers by lack of a college degree. This may be true in some of the more traditional, salaryman-type career paths. But there's lots of people who are harmed by college/graduate school! Tons of debt and years wasted on useless degrees are a tremendous drag on people's development and growth in their knowledge and careers. And if one has a positive and open attitude, there's way better opportunities one can find than the traditional salaryman type office jobs.
Also, as someone with an Ivy league degree I find your citation to "doors opening" and the recent Presidents just kind of amusing. It's true that you can go to an Ivy League school and do well and do things coming out of it. But the people going into an Ivy League school are often either 1) hard-driving people who'd do well in any setting, or 2) connected people whose families are going to make their lives easy no matter what. So it's not the school doing any of the heavy lifting in terms of these people's success. And on the flip side, there's way more Ivy League barristas then Presidents!
Finally I've always found the "well-rounded person" thing to be a huge myth. I've gotten way more out of the Internet -- reading forums, learning about books, interacting with interesting people, doing online courses etc -- than I ever did in college. And not like 50% more, but orders of magnitude more. The "well-rounded person" thing is just some sort of conventional meme/rationalization for school attendance that doesn't have much content. They don't teach quality ideas in the humanities or social sciences (except maybe economics) -- so you don't really become a well-rounded person, and if you're not in some hard sciences or math program you don't really learn anything at all in general (for context, I was a social sciences major). You just become a person who's been exposed to some weird mixture of stuff taught because of Tradition, and whatever faddish developments are going on in your field.
And yeah, Jobs took a typography class before dropping out. But if you want to learn stuff, there's way more effective ways than college now.
Our culture has a very strong pro-school bias, though that's starting to break down (LSAT takers were down 16% this year!!) People bucking the norm like OP are a big step towards a better and more critical attitude towards education, and one which I think would help lots of people be happier in their lives.
I'm just about done with an Ivy League degree in CS, and I've already seen the advantages of it. Recruiting here is ridiculous; I've gotten an interview with every company I've applied to, and that was true two years ago when I was applying for internships as well. My resume at the time wasn't anything special, but all of my friends and I all were having to pick between top tech companies.
> But the people going into an Ivy League school are often either 1) hard-driving people who'd do well in any setting, or 2) connected people whose families are going to make their lives easy no matter what.
This is probably true. But there's no doubt that this reputation benefits all of the students here. Many of my peers work much harder than I do and place a much higher priority on schoolwork and research than I find healthy. The fact that they do, though, reflects well on my institution and therefore on me.
People bucking the norm like OP are a big step towards a better and more critical attitude towards education, and one which I think would help lots of people be happier in their lives.
And that, right there, is the crux of it. It's not about whether college is or isn't necessary per se; it's about doing it for the right reasons, and recognising what those genuinely are, quite apart from the incumbent force of Tradition and the very deliberate propagandistic meddling of its institutional exponents.
Also, as someone with an Ivy league degree I find your citation to "doors opening" and the recent Presidents just kind of amusing. on the flip side, there's way more Ivy League barristas then Presidents!
You say people are harmed in their careers by lack of a college degree. This may be true in some of the more traditional, salaryman-type career paths. But there's lots of people who are harmed by college/graduate school! Tons of debt and years wasted on useless degrees are a tremendous drag on people's development and growth in their knowledge and careers. And if one has a positive and open attitude, there's way better opportunities one can find than the traditional salaryman type office jobs.
Also, as someone with an Ivy league degree I find your citation to "doors opening" and the recent Presidents just kind of amusing. It's true that you can go to an Ivy League school and do well and do things coming out of it. But the people going into an Ivy League school are often either 1) hard-driving people who'd do well in any setting, or 2) connected people whose families are going to make their lives easy no matter what. So it's not the school doing any of the heavy lifting in terms of these people's success. And on the flip side, there's way more Ivy League barristas then Presidents!
Finally I've always found the "well-rounded person" thing to be a huge myth. I've gotten way more out of the Internet -- reading forums, learning about books, interacting with interesting people, doing online courses etc -- than I ever did in college. And not like 50% more, but orders of magnitude more. The "well-rounded person" thing is just some sort of conventional meme/rationalization for school attendance that doesn't have much content. They don't teach quality ideas in the humanities or social sciences (except maybe economics) -- so you don't really become a well-rounded person, and if you're not in some hard sciences or math program you don't really learn anything at all in general (for context, I was a social sciences major). You just become a person who's been exposed to some weird mixture of stuff taught because of Tradition, and whatever faddish developments are going on in your field.
And yeah, Jobs took a typography class before dropping out. But if you want to learn stuff, there's way more effective ways than college now.
Our culture has a very strong pro-school bias, though that's starting to break down (LSAT takers were down 16% this year!!) People bucking the norm like OP are a big step towards a better and more critical attitude towards education, and one which I think would help lots of people be happier in their lives.