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ORIGINAL: Shroomy726

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College is obsolete.

Totally!! :)

This is a ridiculous statement. If anything, college is starting to be a necessity in some countries (*cough* USA *cough*). If you are telling me that this country is ready to be inherited by young Americans with just a high school degree, then you are mad. Public education in the United States is getting worse and worse. This is from own experience having taken the last two years of high school here in the States and also because my wife is an English high school teacher. Not only did I breeze through those two years without even picking up a book, but you should read some of the essays my wife's kids write, it's really quite shocking that in one of the most developed countries in the world the quality of education is so low... And yet they keep cutting the school's budget, ha! It's funny because this reminds me of my sister in law who dropped out of high school and has not been to college since. She spends all day on the net, reading wikipedia and learning random facts online, memorizing them, thinking this makes her "smart". Her attempt is specially futile because she is learninga lot of it from unreliable sources. She never had to research proper sources at school and so she does not understand that aspect of it.

And when it comes to highly complex and technical degrees, college is a must. Like Richard so clearly put it, the study and mastery of science is a very laborious task and would be extremely difficult without lectures and/or exercises. Not long ago, Deniz posted a question about a phase diagram. Why make a random post in a flamenco forum when you can so easily obtain this information online? Notice how my reply was not only to explain the diagram but to assign a sample problem. And yet the assignment went unsolved. In this I agree with Richard; some degrees require the solving of problems and the trials and errors that come with it. If the teacher or video instructor is just working problems in class and students not solving them on their own, then this presents no challenge to the student. Actually trying on your own molds the mind and allows you to develop your own way of thinking.

I dare you to try to become an engineer with only the internet.