Credentialism versus Autodidacticism

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If I was in a position to hire an individual; a college degree, charter, or certification would only be one variable to the equation. There is far too much weight placed on credentials in our society. Furthermore, I am a college graduate and work for a fortune 500 company that offers tuition assistance, but have chosen to educate myself with all of the various resources available. There are many reasons for this personal pursuit: I am extremely intellectually curious, autodidacts have great research and critical thinking skills, I don't want to limit myself to a narrow education but desire to learn about the intracacies of many different fields ( I love mathematics and plan to teach myself as much as possible; I took up to calculus 2 in college and taught myself calculus three and diff-eq), I learn a lot faster on my own and can engineer my curriculum, etc. I was recently in a meeting where one of my friends was recognized in front of the entire staff (hedge fund accounting) for his outstanding performance (taught himself VBA and developed some programs to automate a lot of repetitive tasks) and was recently promoted to a position to help build offices in Hong Kong. In contrast, there are many other individuals at our office with multiple graduate degrees that did what they had to in order to pass and have absolutely zero intellectual curiousity. Society has placed a perpetuating burden on us that grows as standards and competetion increase. This burden is credentialism. Am I against formal education? No, my bachelors degree helped me discover my passions and opened my mind to many things. Over the past 8 months, I have taught myself VBA, currently self-studying advanced mathematics in order to learn how to value complex derivatives, self-studied and sat for the CFA level 1 examination (self-study graduate level curriculum), taught myself everything about currency trading, technical analysis, fundamental analysis (I began trading Forex on my own as it is a great passion of mine), and continue to learn set up my own curriculums and learn about many different fields. When I was at Florida State University, I skipped many of my classes and studied at home as attendence was not required. I majored in Applied Economics and remember during my Game Theory class, I showed up 4 times. 3 times for my exams and once for the first day. I obtained the second highest grade in the class and it was all due to self-study. So who's to say that formal education is superior when most of mine was self-taught?

Simon pure autodidacts are, I suspect, rare if only because of universal public schooling. I would not quite have made it because in some areas - not all - I need some external discipline.

My schooling up through high school I would give a B+ - as opposed to the D deserved by the education brought to the U by students toward the endof the 20th century.

Undergraduate - State University - perhaps B-. Bear in mind, this included a lot of barely useful and often uninteresting breadth courses. In my field, except for perhaps three courses and the language learning, mostly I learned by listening and saying "this is wrong".

Masters - State University - different state. Give it C. I was required to take courses that mostly duplicated what I had already done.

From high school on, a large proportion of what I learned came from outside reading and research, NOT from the curriculum.

PhD - London. I was really not taking course work. Personal readimg and research.

In my junior and senior years and graduate work I benefitted from interaction with real scholars.

I totally concur that the modern American university is set up as a certifying agency. I just said so a day or so ago. That is deplorable.

At the same time, it does collect in one spot a slew of books and even a thin but important spreading of real scholars - hidden among the PC andoids and pretentious jerks.

I personally feel that the choice to university or not depends on your direction. Want to be the world's greatest linguist? Stay out of the U except for language courses, teach yourself - and wait until I am dead [I'm not arrogant, am I?]

Want to be a heavy reasearch physicist? Do the U.

autodidacticism can dramatically enrich one's life, but it can almost never make one an expert in the field of study for the simple reason that autodidacts cannot test themselves on what they don't know that they don't know.

Pithy.

As to whether it is relevant -

Well, Professor H in my Master's program one lecture fired at us a horrendously WRONG statement that [I am told] made me gasp audibly - a few of us waited on him after class and told him what is what.

And Professor G made it clear he was ignorant of a basic principle of the discipline that cursory reading of almost any elementary text would have explained to him.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

By the time you get close to being doctored,. you had BETTER know more of your subject than any two of your examiners.

Often the faculty test the students on their familiarity with the myths and falsehoods that the next generation of scientists,will, we hope, correct.

Ditto, ditto and ditto.

granted: not universally true.

However, I would be willing to bet money that it's at least 90% true.