College is (probably) worth it (for now)

Ok before you hate read this, please just try your damned best to keep an open mind here.

This year I started graduate school, which was something I never really thought I would do. Throughout my bachelor program I basically never went to class. Why would I? I can build projects at home and be a fun hacker man, wtf do I need to go to school for. And honestly, this is still true, for my first jobs out of college, I didnt need any schooling or degree, just the experience and skills to back shit up.

Now college is a fine supplement to building those skills (the extent of which being program dependent) and if you are at all interested in learning the theory along with those skills, a BS in computer science is actually great value in that respect. The problem is, the avereage CS student doesnt give a shit about computer science, they just want to be a software engineer, and those are not the same things. And now that LLMs are widely popular, you can very easily and quickly get those skills through experiemnting and building on your own. So naturally, college appears to be last valuable. That said, often the structured learning college provides is better then self implemented learning plans. Not always, there are people with great self-learning methologies, but usually. This is much more obvious when it comes to more of the theory side, its much harder to learn that entirely on your own, but not impossible. Its just having a theorist (your prof) to bounce off of can be super useful.

So, to some extent, how you value college is outcome driven.

Even so, there are benifits outside of the things you learn. The people you meet. In fact, building a network is probably the best overall value prop for college in 2026, where networking has become cloudy. Digitally its a lot of cold outreach and fake personalities desperate for a job, and this is now becoming the case at “networking events” too, as more and more are laid off of their jobs. But college provides an organic oppurtinuty to build a network of people who “havent made it yet”. This is actually advantagous. You are befriending people for a more genuine sake of getting to know them, which is really how networking should be.

The reason I personally decided to go back was to double down on computer science (my subs on X have a long article I wrote on why). Because now more then ever, learning, no, understanding is critical. I don’t need to know how to cut the wood to build the house. But I do need to know how the house comes together, why the wood needs to be cut in special ways, when to use certain types of pipes, etc, etc. Understanding, and comprehension cannot be offloaded to the models. Yes, they are able and very capable of chain of thought reasoning, but that does not mean they have the same context as you. Every task, a model starts fresh(ish), regardless of the memory systems and all the new harness-y things built to help with this, none truly reproduce the human mind. You cant outsource understanding. Otherwise you are useless.

Maybe you can get good understanding self teaching, but honestly, I doubt it. I doubt you are able to reach high level learning/studies on your own. Not because you suck, but because learning how to learn is a skill in itself. So really, you end up doing two things at once, splitting your focus. In school, your prof guides you, structures the learning, etc, things you would have to cognatively take on by yourself. Naturally, a higher load. I dont have the room for a higher load. I have a little kid at home, a team of engineers that rely on me, and a wife to keep pleased. I absolutely want to continue learning, but today, I dont have the cognative room to learn and create my path. I need to off load it to something. Could I offload it to an LLM? Sure. But remember, you cant outsource thinking right! I don’t want nor need a model telling me how I should think about a human subject. I need something organic, flexible, that can adapt to my interests.

Yes there a lot of shittty teachers out there in the world, but I do think we are hitting a point where prehaps college is becoming underrated. Or at least, overhated. But who knows, maybe I will change my mind by the end of next semester.