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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22305 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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College is 4 years to party, chill, smoke weed, play video games and do nothing (delete as appropriate) at the government’s immediate expense. If you’re smart and care about learning you can even go somewhere good and have great discussions with professors and TAs here and there.

There has been much made of the apparent ‘social pressure’ over the last 30 years for teenagers to go to college. But most kids want to go to college because, pay, wages, jobs aside, it looks like a hell of a lot more fun aged 17 than becoming a bricklayer or taking up an apprenticeship as a hairdresser or plumber or carpenter or electrician, or getting a job at a warehouse, or a call center. Even if you do those things eventually, at least you have 4 years before you have to do them. And it’s not like anyone else is going to lend you six figures to chill for 4 years.

And if a 17 year old was asking here or in real life, I’d tell them to go to a big 4 year college and have a great time. We might all be dead from some AI engineered plague in 4 years. We might be dead in WW3. We might be dead from microplastic induced colon cancer because we ate too many processed foodstuffs. May as well have fun for a while instead of spending your youth doing mind-numbing or back-breaking (or both) labor. Be good about 401k contributions or your local pension equivalent when you get a job and forget about it. It’s like these FIRE jokers living off rice and beans despite making 85th percentile incomes in their twenties so they can hypothetically retire at 47 instead of 64.

College is 4 years to party, chill, smoke weed, play video games and do nothing (delete as appropriate) at the government’s immediate expense.

Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college? Most of what I did then is more or less useful for me on a daily basis as a foundation. I didn't go to a great school, although I was (un)fortunate enough that there was no obligation to take a minimum of humanities classes and I managed to take >95% STEM classes. I don't, for example, use what I learned in phys chem all the time but every now and then Michaelis-Menten kinetics or Gibbs free energy pops up and it was useful to have taken that class.

Don't the engineers and other STEMlords have to work, and don't they learn things that are useful for their careers? Is it just Americans that are lazy and credentialist?

Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college?

No. The Motte just has a contingent of college haters who forget non-software related engineering degrees exist. I've yet to see a (edit: typo) self taught competent electrical engineer who didn't either get a college degree or be a rare prodigy. Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.

Jane Street's hardware desk would like a word.

?

You'll have to explain that a bit more.

High frequency traders that make the fastest lowest-latency hardware to enable their financial parasitism.

And you’re saying the people who design their hardware are self taught and didn’t go to university at all?

No, there's no way that's true. I don't know those people or specific details of their work, but that can't be the case.

Right. Which is exactly what I've been saying the whole time and why the earlier Jane Street comment was so confusing.

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