Even if you did, learning changes a person… by definition. You could forget it all and still be permanently marked by the process of having learned it in the first place.

The act of exploration and learning alters a person for the better, it permanently broadens your view of the world.

If nothing else, you have the understanding that a large portion of reality is knowable- it is both far more complex, and far more simple than most people understand… And that knowledge changes a person, it changes the way they view the world.

Learning does not resolve the mystery of reality… it only makes you aware of just how grand the mystery is.

I often ruminate on just how much of what I learned in college and grad school I have completely forgotten… not so much the basic facts- those stuck with me – but the ability do the more complex calculations… I was really good at solving problems in special and general relativity, it was my favorite subject… now? I have forgotten all the vector and tensor analysis I used to have at the tip of my fingers…

I just don’t use it in my job often… sometimes I have to apply something I forgot to my work… having learned it before means that I know where to go to relearn it, and I relearn it faster than if I were starting from scratch- but was it worth the years of intense stress and expense to get the formal education?

Yes, employers use evidence of formal education as proof that you have the tools needed to do the job- and to be fair they don’t have a lot else to go by- but lack of a formal education does not mean you can’t do the job, and a degree with honors does not PROVE you have what it takes… EVERY time I have taken a new job it has been totally outside what I have done before, and completely unrelated to what I did my graduate work on- the only common theme has been lasers.

As a student, I assumed whatever I worked on for my degree would be what I would be doing as a career. I clearly remember attending my first conference as a grad student and talking to a post-doc that had been involved in designing one of the instruments on a space probe to another planet… I felt deep disappointment in my choice of field, there was no way what I was working on would be of any interest for space exploration… I envied him and felt regret that I hadn’t given more thought to the field I went into, instead of just stumbling into it. I had always wanted to work on space exploration, and wished that I had put more thought and planning to guide my career in that direction.

My graduate work was exploring how atoms ionize in extremely intense laser fields- intensities approaching 10^16 Watts per square centimeter. It was interesting, and it had a lot of mysteries that were not understood- but not a lot of obvious applications aside from understanding the physics better. When I finished my graduate work, I assumed that I would have to get a post-doc position and then struggle to get a position at a national lab or university. But at the end I was burnt out, tired of academia… my life was in turmoil. On a whim I applied for an engineering position I saw advertised at a national lab… it paid more than a post-doc, seemed interesting, and was on the other side of the country. It had little to do with what I had done as a grad student.

I got the position, and moved to Livermore California… and found out that the person I was supposed to learn the job from, the guy that had hired me, had had a nervous breakdown and quit. I was now the sole laser engineer in charge of integrating a 1500 Watt laser into the multi-hundred million dollar project. The laser I had worked on previously for my graduate work was- on a good day- just over 1 Watt.

After a few days of being paralyzed in panic I was able to pull it together and do the job I was hired for- I was hired essentially to be a laser technician, but after a few weeks I had accomplished the main task of integrating the laser into the system and was able to take on other engineering roles on the project…

Aside from working with lasers, there was very little overlap with what I had studied or worked on before- but my education did allow me to have a good idea where to go to learn the things I needed to know.

I would say that the most important benefits of the formal education were some degree of confidence that I could learn whatever I needed to know for whatever task I was presented with… and knowing where to go to learn what I needed.

Every job I have taken since grad school (3 different jobs so far, but my current job has been a long string of sometimes very different projects) has had little overlap with anything I have done before… every job has been the result of random chance, stumbling across an opportunity and applying on a whim- and without any long-term planning or strategy.

And now, 25 years after that chat with the post-doc that had me regretting my choices, I am working on space exploration… had I planned my career strategically, I rather doubt it would have worked out as well as it did… sometimes stumbling around and acting on the whim of the moment is the best course.

Formal education gives you familiarity with the tools you might need, or at least lets you know where to find those tools. You can get this familiarity without the formal education, of course, but it really helps. However, the MOST effective way to learn how to do something is actually doing it. You can read countless textbooks on lasers, for instance, but only by actually working with them can you develop the understanding an intuition needed to be able to successfully get them to do what you want.

While liberal arts are under attack as being worthless, including on this forum in the past, I am a huge advocate. I learned how to learn. I was exposed to music theory. I had enough credits to be an English major. And, as you say, critical thinking developed not only in the classroom, but through discussion and debate with my peers. It was worth every damn dollar.

It allows you to know about at least one discipline at a deeper level than most people do. So even if you never work as, say, an astronomer, you at least get an idea of what’s involved in astronomy, how its related to other fields, and how it fits in with the totality of human knowledge, history and culture. You also pick up information on related areas, like physics, chemistry, math, programming, and some of the engineering involved in astronomical technology.

When I started working with remotely sensed satellite imagery for the exploration department of an oil company, I found that my knowledge of imagery, spectroscopy, optics, orbital mechanics, sensor technology, atmospheric physics, was invaluable. The geochemists I was working with, who were specialists in the infrared spectra of minerals, were usually working with programmers who often had no idea just what a spectrum was! They found out that at last there was a programmer who could understand what they were saying, and what they wanted the code they were requesting was supposed to calculate.

Another advantage of having at least a basic grounding in a specific field is that you realize how much there is to learn in any other specialty you may encounter. You suddenly grasp that ALL fields are like that, filled with mysteries, unplumbed depths. Even if you don’t know as much about geochemistry as you do about astronomy, you appreciate that geochemistry is just as deep and vast a discipline as astronomy is.

And I was further blessed with attending an institution of higher education that gave you a basic grounding, through elective courses, of the humanities, foreign languages, the behavioral and social sciences, and other fields outside your own major. You are taught critical thinking, and how to express yourself in writing. And of course, you were exposed socially to, and interacted constantly with, students and teachers in those fields and the issues they were concerned with, that were of vital importance to them.

Its not the University of South Florida’s fault that I never became a successful and productive astronomer, but I believe it did an outstanding job of making me a better citizen and a well-rounded and educated human being.

You can do all this without going to college, of course, but its harder, especially for a young person suddenly facing the crises and distractions of suddenly being on their own in a complex and mystifying world. The University system of higher education was first introduced in Medieval times. It has turned to be one of the most valuable cultural achievements of Western Man. It is NOT a trade school designed to grind out mindless corporate worker bees, or a means of generating sports journalists, event planners, rock critics and real estate investment counselors.

And then they make getting the degree so expensive you have to spend the rest of your life paying off the student loans.

I spent eight years in college getting 3 college degrees (astronomy, math, geography), spread out over a total of 13 years (I did a hitch in the Navy and worked overseas for a year). And the only thing I ever needed and used on the job was how to program in Fortran, which took me only one course lasting one semester–and which I could have picked up in a tech school or by reading about it at the public library. I don’t regret my time in college, I learned a lot of neat stuff, got to hang out with a lot of smart people, and learned a lot of stuff that was outside my field. Its called an education. And it was cheap; I went to a State University, got a little help from my family, worked construction in the summers, and GI Bill. I graduated totally broke, but debt-free, with a Master’s in 1977. It was possible back then.

I once had one of my bosses tell me “For the vast majority of jobs, you don’t really need any specialized college training. You pick up the skills you need on the job. The degree only demonstrates you are willing to work hard, put up with bullshit, and postpone expectations for a few years.”

Fortunately, I was lucky. My minimal training in programming made it easy for me to get my foot in the door, I got a job as a scientific/engineering programmer in a shop where about half my colleagues had degrees in stuff like Business, French, Pharmacy Science, and other non-STEM fields. They had picked up programming on the job, or as a sideline or hobby. Today, that wouldn’t be possible, the degree would be used as a filter to keep out the non-degreed.

I was able to use my job experience to leverage from one job to another–navigation, astrometry, photogrammetry, computer graphics, remote sensing, image processing, Geographic Information Systems, City Planning–all based on the ability to write code in one simple computer language. By the time Fortran was obsolete, I was a fucking manager, and didn’t need to know anything at all.

I feel sorry for the kids coming up the corporate ladder now. I know I wouldn’t be able to compete in today’s elitist business environment.