I bet you're right about the survivorship bias, but it's nonetheless reassuring (comforting?) to hear that. That's also been my impression, though it's hard to actually believe schooling doesn't accomplish more.
On that note:
Had I stayed in college, I would've been a senior this year. I recently brought over a college friend to discuss a paid internship at my company with him, and was very underwhelmed with what he had accomplished during his university tenure (this being a quite prestigious institution). From the stories he told of professors assigning grindingly futile projects to his lack of knowledge about relatively widespread concepts like distributed hash tables, it was a rather disappointing conversation.
I still think the institution of the university is hard to replicate elsewhere, but the content (and maybe the people) certainly need an update!
Thank you for the note about Knuth's book. I'll check it out in more depth — I have the PDF version sitting in my downloads folder. My startup is currently being acquired, but once that's settled I'll have time for some holiday reading :).
On that note: Had I stayed in college, I would've been a senior this year. I recently brought over a college friend to discuss a paid internship at my company with him, and was very underwhelmed with what he had accomplished during his university tenure (this being a quite prestigious institution). From the stories he told of professors assigning grindingly futile projects to his lack of knowledge about relatively widespread concepts like distributed hash tables, it was a rather disappointing conversation.
I still think the institution of the university is hard to replicate elsewhere, but the content (and maybe the people) certainly need an update!
Thank you for the note about Knuth's book. I'll check it out in more depth — I have the PDF version sitting in my downloads folder. My startup is currently being acquired, but once that's settled I'll have time for some holiday reading :).