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.
