With the risk of starting something, I thought I would inject some observations:

I do watch Charley Kirk on YouTube for a quick fix of watching him dissolve 
some of the woke ideology being spouted by young college kids.  For me it is 
like junk food for my worldview.  Can only take so much of it, like eating too 
many sweets.  And he can get a bit too alt-right for me at times.   

Yesterday he was preaching something that I think he was partially, perhaps 
mostly wrong about.  He is a college dropout and preaches that college is a 
scam and you would be better off just learning to code and find an internship 
that does not require a degree.  

I think he is only partially right.  
By and large, most BA programs are probably not worth the money unless they go 
onto grad school.  A BA in art history doesn’t have much value when searching 
Indeed for a job.  It can however get you into law school.  

And we all know that if you start and successfully run a WISP you absolutely 
must be an autodidact.  An autodidact with ambition.  Cannot pick up either of 
those at a college.  And do not need college to be a superior ISP or WISP.  It 
does however take a special type of person.   

But there are a couple of areas where I know, from personal experience, that 
you really benefit from formal education:

1)    Computer Science – the part where you learn hardware theory, operating 
system design, compiler design, advanced data structures, OO methods etc.  
Really hard to pick up this stuff by watching youtube videos.  And really hard 
to get any good at it unless you are forced to do homework and labs.  
Understanding what happens with the hardware, the stack and OS during a 
hardware interrupt is important and not so easy to learn on your own.  Try to 
write some DSP functions from scratch on your own... or perhaps some machine 
code to hand optimize a MCU routine.  Much easier if you had a class on 
assembly.  

2)    RF and antennas.  Reflection coefficients and the mastery of Smith 
charts.  EM simulation software and optimization.  S11 and PCB stripline and 
microstrip layout.  Etc etc.  Again, a good autodidact can teach themselves 
anything.  But I tried for years to master Smith charts and it was not until 
college that I finally got to where I could use them.  Now-a-days the software 
does it all for you but you still need to know.  

3)    To understand some of this stuff, like DSP etc, you also need some upper 
level math, calculus and trig.  Hard to do on your own.  

I also imagine that if you want to get into medical school, classes on 
chemistry, biology etc are essential.  All PE programs will always need degreed 
engineers.  So yeah Charley, if you get a liberal arts degree, I would tend to 
agree with you that your fathers money was probably wasted.  But many of the BS 
degrees are not a scam or waste.  
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