Of course. We cannot factor social matters out here. That is why these statistics are BROAD.

I have stueid and would argue that 70-80% are only motivated to study because "they dont want to server burgers" rather than "I want to achieve something." A lot of my former classmates only went to study because "When you do the German Abitur, you are kind of supposed to study something, right?"


My main point with the whole statistics is working against the advice that "College is a waste of time."
It can be a waste of time, depending on the costs. Also, I want to work against the diea that "University graduates dont become billionaires, they will work for the supersmart guys that skipped college." No, just no.

These are pretty persistent. The problem, and I think this is a real one, is that there is a considerable gap between what some colleges and universities do in terms of theory and how they teach application in practice. Oftne, they really don't at all. Some people go to a business school class, learn accounting, learn math and learn some basic in and out concepts and are then thrown into the wild and supposed to function.

Well, of COURSE there will be learning, since most of the learning was concepts, not processes and procedures of how to get them working. The flip side is, that many people in "the real world" do not like academics anymore. And say "their stuff is useless" while academics don't give a shit anymore about people in business. We call this the researcher pracitioner gap. You find it in a lot of places.

The problem is that in many cases, research has the better answers. But since the answers cannot be applied quickly, the question is "how do we implement change to implement the better answers?" And this is where resistance happens and you will see big falling outs. I am also one of the types that is rather pissing of a CEO by telling him he does not know what he is talking about. I have had lots of training to not do that and only in private. And in a way where he thinks my idea was his idea.

People who learnt by "streetsmarts" usually pride them on these, but represent a special case in a special environment, whose learnings might become irrelevant pretty fast. Some dinosaurs in business have gone out after the internet came and failed horribly. Changes like these are typical when people get stuck in their ways and their learnings from the environment.

These are all things that ask for self awareness and a kind of scientific way of doing things. Not overly anal science, but a testing, always in the air kind of way of doing business, always testing if their is something better. Big companies even source that out...


So if we ask if education is useful, we have to ask the question, what for? In what situation? For what motivation? In what area? Because overall, graduates are still winners (And even in the "liberal arts" majors, you will find statistically more money earned versus. non graduates.)

After being tormented with motivation psychology for years: Ignore the idea of "motivation" in general.

Money does not do anything for motivation actually. It is a small hygiene factor, where when you do not have enough, you feel annoyed, but for the overall motivation for work, it doesn't do much.

The keys to work motivation and satisfaction with work are different from money. We can't say absoultely sure what makes people motivated for work, but we have a pretty good idea that money is really only a small part of it.

I suggest this as a good read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_satisfaction

Most of it covers textbook motivation psychology quite adequately. Other than that, Lathams textbook is probably the best thing out there on motivation in general.

I'd simply use statistics, to make that point.


Statistically, university graduates world wide earn $186.000 more in their entire lives in comparison, in the western world, this increases to over 300.000 in the western world.
At current time, more than 80% of all billionaires on the Forbes list hold college degrees. 80% of millionaires are correspondingly college graduates.
Around 80% of millionaires in America today are first generation millionaires whose kids will loose their money, so no "rich kid went to college because he should" excuse there.


But, I have another contention: Discussing science with a non graduate is absolutely annoying. Basically, being taught basic science (Okay most colleges fail at this also, or the graduates, im not sure which) should be done even earlier. Discussing science with people that claim their individual inductive experience is relevant for deductive nomological reasoning because "BUT FOR ME IT IS DIFFERENT" and therefore demonstrate statistics very well, are a pain in the ass. An 80% chance still means 20 in hundred will loose, damnit...


Is university or college NECESSARY? No. Absolutely not. My university time is spent learning by myself the stuff that colleges have as topics. I don't need the infrastructure, I need the pressure to learn and ask for things. But it depends. I will guarantee you, that in many countries, not having a degree will haunt you. It haunts you at the latest when you try to fund a startup with more money. It will haunt you when you deal with insurances (No degree, higher risk, pay more). It will haunt many people in social life.



What are the risks? In my country, Germany, the risks are minimal. The degree costs you next to nothing and even people like me, who studied in the UK, have only accrued somewhere around the debt of a small car. Going to a US institution is a different thing.
If the advantage is at 300.000 over your life, would you pay 400.000 for it? Only if this is your true calling.

Funny enough, in the US; community colleges tend to create slightly more wealthy graduates than university bachelor degree holders.
Here in Germany, there is a starting gap of 5-10k a year, leading to statistical mean accumulated increase in earnings of somewhere around 30% across ALL fields. Laywers, Consultants and so son are thrown in the same pot as social scientists and language majors here, so you might get the deal on lifetime earnings...

You know, I've been at this about 30 days now and I've spent some money and i'm starting to feel the same thing.  I can't even effectively mine the cheaper coins like namecoin or litecoin.  It's getting ridiculous, but I'm still trying to make something work.

I even ordered 2 5GH units from Butterfly labs and now I just read a wired article which says it's  total scam and that they don't work as advertised.  What do I do, they already took my money out of my paypal account and their website says no refunds.  What BS.  can anybody confirm if BFL is really just a scam.  I wish you could use their units for mining other coins, that would be worth it since mining bitcoin is pretty much a lost cause right now unless you have a killer rig and free energy.

thanks in advance.