The YAGUI Program [1]
Why Go To University?
As I stumble towards the start of my thirties, I look back at the last few years of my life and, in a completely original and never before witnessed human experience, wonder what the fuck am I doing. More precisely, I wonder what makes me fulfilled.
In late night conversations with my partner, we often jest that all I really want out of life is to "drink tea and know things". Thus, I reminisce back to my earlier years where my prefrontal-cortex was still squidgy, with bones less creaky, and I was at university. I can honestly say I enjoyed studying, and I truly felt good at it (I truly mean studying, I never really gelled with lacrosse and party drugs). So much so that in my early years I never thought I would stop pursuing an intellectual career path.
Unfortunately, a personal bipolar blip followed by an impersonal nasty cold, that shut down the entire world, threw me off course. Many zodiac cycles later, like many others, I find myself lost in a corporate world - clueless as to why I'm doing what I do.
One could posit, time to ditch the work-wear and go back to school! Problem being I do not have the resources to give up what I do to start over. Beyond that, in my almost pearl-years of wisdom, having the benefit of retrospect, added with the current state of the world and the trajectory of humanity, I'm not sure it's worth going back to school. I divulge.
Credibility
"Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, Yale; with their framed degree placards, you'll prevail!" - Me
We forget that universities are brands: where you attend is part of your image whether you like or not. Your intellectual perception will be attached to your station, and your future employer will take note, regardless of what you're really doing for the role. While you may get some satisfaction wearing merch as pyjamas a decade later, we miss that some of this prestige is smoke and mirrors. In a 2023 paper, findings state: "just over 6% of children in England attended a private school... yet circa 30% of the intake to the elite Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were private school students." This proved important: "In 2021, 7% of the wider population of Britain had attended private schools, but representation in top professions was disproportionate... 44% of politicians had attended private schools (and 31% were Oxbridge graduates), and 65% of senior judges had attended private schools (71% were Oxbridge graduates)." If 6% of children are more open to a third of top university spots because of class, I'm not sure it's a game I want to play. I'm sure if I could be bothered to look harder, I'd find similar facts in the top 100 universities across many countries.
Why am I bringing this up? Am I just bitter that I'm not privately educated? In my judgement, if all valid degree programs have to be of a certain standard in order to present someone with a flashy piece of paper, if one achieves a high grade in the 50th best ranked university vs the 1st best ranked university, are they actually less capable? If the validation method is effectively the same, then a pretty emblem of redbrick prestige doesn't actually matter for someone who just wants to learn.
Obviously, a university provides a culture too. In Suits, Mike is asked where on campus they got square pizza and his cluelessness allows existential questions to bubble into the room. He, his superior, his peers all entertain a passing thought of "does this character belong?" Many classes, clubs, and sororities become the start of your life network - whose arsehole you licked in those spaces, figuratively or literally, may give you an upper hand in powerful (perhaps even presidential) positions 60 years down the line. However, today so many of our communities are online - do we really need to attend debate club on campus when I can do it on discord to a similar level of degeneracy.
When I think about it further, why would I want to join these intellectual communities? Perhaps it's because in my late-twenties, mature-student status I like a 9PM bedtime, or perhaps it's because often I see campuses these days attract Turning Point America booths or similar looking to make boring arguments about the solidity of gender binaries with children 10 to 20 years their junior. In a negation of video game journalistic talk, these locations don't make you feel like Einstein. When pseudo-intellectuals are coming into spaces to make TikTok reels on "owning leftist" - I think intellectual debate has been thrown out the window. It's not terribly sexy I must say.
In my country, unless you are incredibly wealthy, you get into debt for your degree. If my goal is to simply learn something, spending thousands on someone to place a tick or a cross next to some paragraphs seems like quite a large markup. This is without putting into perspective whether a degree is an investment worth making.
Marketability
Tactically ignoring the programmes that require training for a role: Engineering, Medicine, Law, etc; and those degrees which don't charter but you'd make a face if they didn't know what you were doing: Chemistry, Music, Russian, etc - what actually makes a degree useful?
I have a degree in Mathematics, specialising in Pure Maths - when I finished my degree, I hadn't done a calculation in 2 years. Unlike my peers whom were Applied Mathematicians and Statisticians, I had nothing numeric to bring the work force. Arguably any Physicist, Engineer, Accountant was better at arithmetic than me. There was nothing employable from my courses in Complex Analysis, Topology, or Galois Theory, and it certainly didn't matter that I achieved well in them; my degree was useless. Nevertheless, my degree had a perceived importance - or, as I would argue, it was easily marketable. There's a strange aura around STEM degrees that they are almost otherworldly. My parents would talk about me to their friends as if I were an alien for simply taking an interest in numbers and their patterns. At dinner parties (yes, I actually got invited to those) people would always remark "oh, I was no good at Maths in school. You must be really smart!".
Dual comes the perceived unimportance, or by my hypothesis: difficult marketability, of other domains. The degrees parents would roll their eyes at - Humanities and Art degrees. My fellows would often make snide remarks about Philosophy or Art History students and have round tables about how the pursuit of anything other than STEM was futile. An intellectual elitism was encouraged of a similar song to Sokal's Hoax (Watch Dr Fatima's "the physicist who tried to debunk postmodernism" if you're unknowing). I've grown to think they were just jealous that those students were hot, but really who were they to talk? How was memorising the proof to the Lagrange's Theorem any more (or less) important than a breakdown of characters in Goethe's Faust. Sure, I'm not going to piss on my certificate and say that Pure Maths doesn't give you "transferable skills": deductive and inductive reasoning, research methods, scientific writing - great examples to wack on your grad CV that will make you completely indistinguishable from your competition. What I'm saying is, a degree on the shadow-side does the same, no? Critical analysis, resource crunching, creative writing - as mirror examples.
Universities, though impressive spaces of innovation and research, also act as factories for the workforce. To quote Chicken Run: "Students go in, corporate slaves come out". Passed the hyperbole, what has this got to do with subject choice? The sciences are seen from the outside with a kind of mysticism, destined to land you your "dream job". Coding, abstraction, formulae form an arcana, whereas writing and reading are seen as easily accessible, almost trivial. Hand-in-hand comes professions of the electronic world that are seen to be in the STEM school of magic - finance for example - and the forecasts and predictions made by these spooky subjects line the pockets of the, noteably uneducated and not produced by the aforementioned university-industrial complex, vultures at the top. Making an article, though, any one could do that, right? A well-ordered digital class system arises where journalists and graphic designers are measurably less useful than software engineers and data scientists. At the same time, all the media you consume is made by the prior - with art, music, films, literature being our common entertainment. The entry bar is artificially lower. Trust me, you'd know if I wrote your books, and not humorously.
If the point of studying a degree is to optimize the career ladder, it's not about choosing something you enjoy. If you're spending thousands on something you do not care about, I just can't commit to it. This is also without considering how the landscape of work is transforming with AI.
YAGNI and AI
In software development, the acronym YAGNI, "You Ain't Gonna Need It", is often used as a term to make you slow down and think about what you need. It'll be followed with "KISS"-ing, "MVP"-isms and such - but what's interesting is your usual aggravating suspects (billionaires) pedal the same rhetoric about your degree and career prospects. My favourite of these simplifications, and the most peeving one, being "The best credential in tech is working at Palantir.” Albeit, these characters may be aggravating but they may not be wrong. If a degree is a serious monetary investment for today's youth, you should consider it's worth. What business, real world skills do you get from your degree? I certainly didn't have anything that prepared me for the uncomfortable scenario where my boss asked me if I find it difficult to work with a client because of some unwritten Freudian dynamic where I see the client as someone I should have relations with. Though, I'm not sure any degree program really needs to teach you to say "not something I've put much thought into, sir".
All this is put into perspective of the latest trends in Artificial Intelligence. This year, I can say I have started to take AI seriously for the first time. After years of telling my friends it's all deceptive, I can no longer accept that it is not useful. I'm not sure whether I can formally accept that it is intelligent, but I don't think that matters. As of this week, Terence Tao has noted through a combined use of LLM models and a programmatic theorem prover, an unsolved Erdos Problem now has a solution. As of the hour I'm writing, OpenAI has released "gdpeval" that measures AI's capability to effectively replace 44 professions from tech to entertainment; even medicine and engineering make the list.
We are inching closer everyday to a reality where a computer can do parts of your job, perhaps even all of it, more or less autonomously, and if AI truly knows everything you'll learn in your degree - then an 80k education isn't worth it.
So Don't Bother Then
So, is that it? I've talked myself out of doing something with life? I've convinced myself a university degree is not valuable enough for my time or money.
In the next post, I'll abandon all the above arguments and discuss why I'm going to study in my own archaic way.