But learning to critically question statements and judging them yourself (which requires some knowledge, for example you can't question anti-vaxxers when you don't know anything about how vaccines work) instead of simply believing them is extremely important in a democracy.

Cant you find out the answer for these questions with a series of short tests?

I once applied for a job at IBM and instead of an initial interview they sent me a series of interactive tests to check my skills. I ended up moving to another country and didn't follow through, but still liked this approach.

Also in the EU I can see lots of job listings are using now a system where you either have a certain type of education/degree or a certain previous experience to be eligible to apply.

Still you need to have knowledge of the specific field, but technically if you started at the bottom with an entry level low skill job you can get higher with experience alone and without a university degree.

Ah, Elementary through Highschool teaches you to be an employee.

Higher education is being sold dreams and taking on debt to learn to be a better employee. Sounds about right.

I teach myself new complex skills all the time, but I imagine I'm still written off a ton because I didn't pay for at least the four year license to learn to learn. Lol

(I want to emphasize I'm being playfully sarcastic about our clown world society and not attacking you, you are very correct about needing to understand before one critiques!)

The original idea behind school isn't to educate the masses. Why would a factory worker need to know calculus and Shakespeare? He needs to read the clock and timetables, be on time, wake up in the morning early enough to be punctual, ...

In certain country reading clock and timetables was deemed not enough for factory worker.

A factory worker seems like one of those jobs that doesnt require a college degree.

I never managed to land a job in the field but of the 4 interviews I ever got actually related to IT every single one mentioned that I was technically overqualified for these entry-level jobs despite never officially going to school or working in IT, one of them called and had the lead back-ens guy come and sit in since I was a potential fit for an entirely different and much higher up role

Of course that's probably the reason I was never hired over other options (as well as why I didn't get many interviews, who wants the guy with 0 education if the other 20 applicants do?) and so now every time I do IT work for home I just get super sad. It's taking a lot of therapy to undo that and it's not reeeeally working lol

25 years after graduation in CS I’m still waiting for the Pumping Lemma to have any relevance to my work as a dev.

Brother, recently i landed my first official job as system administrator (I'm still in university as EE), even though i know almost all things, i just don't know nuances of how they adapted these technologies we know of in their specific case, and i am too felt terrible imposter syndrome

CS degrees, at least in my experience, prep you for a bunch of things that honestly don't matter too much. Like, I don't think knowing what P versus NP means really helps me at my job. I think learning to use build tools and frameworks rather than just the language itself would've been more useful.

The best professor I had in that regard at college was younger and also working at a "real" company while also teaching (I believe he was getting a master's degree). He taught us about Spring and Maven and had us make a REST API. The only downside is that this course was about making GUIs and the majority of it was about Swing which nobody really uses. I have a feeling he added the other assignment because it was.more relevant to things most folks do with Java.

You don't work where I work then.

Family-owned business. Realizes they're behind-the-ball on technology and practices. Hires college-educated & outside people to make suggestions.

"Well none of that makes sense to us. Forget all that and do it our way."

"That way is wrong."

"Well it's our business, we'll do it how we want."

Then they get all when the talented people get burnt out and quit after a few weeks. Eventually it's "well these kids just don't want to work hard like we do."

From what I understand it's fairly common in engineering, but less of a forget everything you learned and more of a that’s all gonna be pretty much useless in the context of the specific job you're doing so just pay attention to the training

For the US, id certainly agree with you. College is free here and some employers require it (less and less though). A coworker once told me a degree shows you can be serious for one thing and see it through. It shows you are capable of achieving a goal.

Yeah, some of the computer science theory I learned occasionally comes in handy when I'm reasoning about problems or when I'm picking apart some spec. My husband who attended a code school instead is a perfectly apt developer, but he struggles more. College also just gave me the time and resources to get a survey of knowledge outside of formal coursework. On the job, I tend to go more in-depth on topics closely related to the job.