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Harvard dropouts

2011-06-06 23:17:42.040426+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

Daniel Miessler says "The People Making the Best Arguments Against College, Went":

Thus, we’re left with a massive number of people who did go to school, benefitted greatly for it via a myriad of invisible ways, and yet are thoroughly convinced that it did very little for them. And they’re the ones doing the well-written blog posts about it.

And I believe that this is a classic example of the inability to distinguish correlation from cause, and that if you applied the same argument to, say, having seen television and talking about the lack of value of television in success, you'd see how silly the argument is.

Going to college is ubiquitous enough that you're extremely unlikely to find someone who can talk intelligently about it who hasn't been exposed. That doesn't mean that the exposure is a precondition to talking intelligently about it.

Which brings me to:Harvard Magazine catching up with 3 college dropouts from the class of 1969:

“The reason I dropped out was that it seemed silly for my parents to be paying a whole lot of money for me to do things I could do for free,” she explains. “It wasn’t Harvard that made me leave Harvard, it was me. I wanted to be young, alive, and free. Free to hitchhike around the country, check out California, try living in a commune. And I did all that. I have a number of friends who feel they missed out on the ’60s. I didn’t.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Weblogs Technology and Culture Television California Culture Currency Education ]

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