There are a lot of geniuses who have gone to college, and there are a lot of geniuses who have not. However, I do think that universities have a higher concentration of thoughtful people than most other places. Yes, it also attracts the rich, ignorant snots that you and I specifically grew up being disgusted by, but frankly, they’re almost everywhere. The nice thing about universities is that you can ignore them and instead spend your time with people who are genuinely and intensely interested in something thoughtful that you’re also interested in.

And the apathetic idiots whose parents just paid the way for them don’t actually make it to the more advanced degrees (how could they unless they actually understood the stuff?), so if you can endure and ignore them during your undergraduate studies, then you’ll be surrounded only by people who actually think and care about things during your graduate studies, and you won’t even need to see them ever.

If you had to have surgery to save your life, you’d want to be able to have some way of narrowing down the list of possible surgeons so that you don’t end up with just anybody. Even if they somehow managed to show me an example of their skill but cutting into a chunk of meat with a scalpel, it’s not like I know anything about surgery, so I wouldn’t be able to evaluate them. A degree gives you a general idea about a person’s overall competence in a field, and you can verify the authenticity of the degree itself with the institution that gave it.

Admittedly, that’s a very particular hypothetical, but the same idea applies to getting jobs. Take me as a second example! My current big, dreamy goal is to work at Google. However, Google is famously selective about who they hire (possibly because working for them is basically heaven, completely with free massages, dry-cleaning, that whole spend-20%-of-your-time-working-on-anything-you-want thing, and everything else). If I want to even be able to apply there, then I’m going to need a solid degree from a reputable school, and they definitely will be making sure that I don’t lie about anything on my resume.

I’m a particularly greedy bastard, too. I don’t just want to work for Google. I want to work for them, and I want to be able to rise up within Google high enough to be able to decide what projects from the open source community to sponsor and assign art developers to them (something else Google does that earned my admiration). Oh, and getting a raise to go with it would be nice. But to be even be eligible to elevate to that position, I might even need to get my master’s degree (which Google would sponsor, which is yet another thing I love about Google).

That’s my story, but the idea of needing a degree to work for who you want to work for is… well, that’s why most people care about graduating and getting their diploma. Even at places that don’t require a degree to be employed, there’s a certain point at which you’ll need a degree if you want to keep rising up.

So yeah. What you learn is what’s important since your skill is what actually makes you competent, not your pedigree. I think that’s what you were getting at. But the degree is what you can show others so that they can verify that you have indeed studied something.

Something else that I like about degrees and universities that I don’t actually hear from people for some reason (possibly that they’re ashamed it sounds “elitist”) is that they promote intellectualism and the progression of humanity. Frankly, I think most people are fools, and I think that they’re basically proud of it. They care about the most uninteresting, stupid things. They aren’t curious about anything with a hint of depth, and they don’t care enough about anything to pursue true expertise. They nod and smile approvingly of some figures from history, but they do so mindlessly, and whatever admiration they have for those figures is meaningless because they don’t act anything like them. I could walk up to people and ask them if they felt like they were doing anything at all to meet their potential, and they would probably know they weren’t, but still wouldn’t. It’s not even the sloth that bothers me, because I can get pretty lazy too, just like anybody else. It’s that proud apathy and willing ignorance that I find myself looking down on (gasp, what an “elitist” I am), and I think that the pursuit of higher education is one opposite of it. Really, it doesn’t have to be higher education. Any way of rebelling against stupidity is good by me. It just so happens that the whole idea behind college is to promote intellectualism and the progression of humanity by doing so. And I like that.

Thats because all degree’s are pretty much useless. Nothing is like what they get you to believe about anything in high school. Degree = instant job career and total security. It’s like high school degrees. Nobody double checks that shit, you can write whatever you want! Not saying that you’re wasting your time or anything. I have two doctorates (going on three) and a masters degree and all I do is sit around at home. Oh yeah, and I have all this without graduating high school. Boo yah biotches.

If it is IT, then they say Can you fix my or so and so’s something IT Related or build a website for so and so ?, if it is something to with Art or Design, they say Can I see your work or can you make me or so and so and something arather (logo, sketch, etc, etc) ?

Then they asked the dreaded question “What are you going to with your degree ? or What you going to after you finish? ” and when you actually tell them you find out that they weren’t actually interested unless you have given them an interesting enough answer.

I am almost finished my undergraduate dual degree in Mathematics and IT and I find it hard to believe the number of people that ask me to fix stuff and ask the question, Oh your studying mathematics, what are you going to do with that after you graduate ? As though the field I have chosen is a useless plush toy that you carry around and people laugh at you for doing so.

Best of luck in your endeavours and in San Francisco.