I just graduated! Why college sucks and how to fix it

I just graduated with a computer science degree from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, halleluja. Don’t get me wrong the U of M is a great school and I learned a lot and made plenty of friends, but in my junior year I started noticing that something was fundamentally wrong with the direction we were being pushed. We were being pushed toward working for big companies, or worse — toward grad school, DUN-DUN-DUUUUN!!

Although I’m kidding about how scary grad school is, I think there is an underlying cultural push that has resulted in virtually everyone in my graduating class to pick these two routes. The culture reflected in these two paths, taken after undergrad, is that of a willingness of working for ‘the man.’ I say this, because implicit in going to grad school, is that after grad school many grads go off to work for an even larger tech company than their only-undergrad-underachieving counterparts — so the end goal seems the same, working for some massive tech company but for a higher paycheck.

For some reason, and I know this exists beyond just the U of M, people seem to be totally paralyzed at the thought of working for, or creating a startup and that’s insane. Sure working for a big tech company will get you money, but if you want to really make a product that people want and/or change the world in some way then don’t waste your time! I understand that there might be student loans to pay off but loans can always be paid off later, and CS jobs typically pay very well so that’s not a huge excuse. Really, I think people are afraid of the difficulty it takes to succeed and they don’t realize that if they push the world one way, that it might just move for them; this fear is strong enough to crush the potential inventions of a whole generation of midwest talent.

We need to fix this. I think the best way to do it is to start with the college itself on an institutional level. I think this means more than offering classes that promote startup classes, the university structure needs to be revamped so that the first 3 years are a constant learning grind with few breaks (no summer break) and where the last year is dedicated to building a project from what you’ve learned. This would take a total revamp of the system but I really think this would give students the opportunity to use what they’ve learned to not only build something awesome, but also and more importantly to build something awesome that’s theirs. This way, students would learn something and they’d be able to apply it so that they can see the results themselves, which is much better than finishing homework assignments because you have to just to make the grade.

I really think this would benefit the world and improve the quality of higher education because people would learn to think beyond the scope of what was introduced in classes. They might also learn how to better communicate their development struggles to their fellow students and to the university network that supports them, so that they learn some soft skills as well. I figure the best way to learn is to learn hard and fast, and the only way to test ideas is to try; currently, only some of this happens at the university level and that sucks.

Maybe someone could prove this idea wrong or maybe someone is already trying this in which case I support you. But I know we can build a better world with a better system for learning, and designing and implementing ideas.