The Top 40

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak comes to mind here. I met Wozniak just after he and Jobs founded Apple and way prior to Wozniak earning an Engineering degree. Wozniak was a natural electronics/programming genius. If he had finished his studies and degree'd prior to the founding of Apple I doubt the company would have been a success. From my personal experience, American Universities are dead end roads of un-education and political indoctrination. They stifle independent reasoning. Of course there are some few exceptions.

Terry,

In some ways, it's worse than that -- it seems that some schools are basically scams, fleecing their students out of many tens of thousands of dollars, and giving them an education that won't help them on the job.

Case in point: I work for a mom-and-pop electronic service company -- if it involves low-voltage electricity we'll fix it or service it. Security systems, audio-video systems, computer networks, gate controls, access-control systems -- you name it, we'll make it work again (usually).

A few years ago, we hired a guy that we wound up having to let go after close to a year. "Joe" was a good guy, and tried hard, but he just didn't "get" it -- and the worst part of was that he had spent close to $100,000 on courses (and a couple years of his life) getting an "education" from a big-name technical school, and he didn't know the basics of electricity! And if you don't know enough to not short-circuit a power-supply, you won't be able to fix gate-operators or devise basic circuits using relays and timer-modules to solve a customer's problem.

I hate to sound like a grouchy old fart, but they don't teach kids these days nothin'. We could really use some 20-somethings around the shop, but they're hard to come by -- the two young guys we do have commute 30 miles one-way to come to work, and we're located not far from the Baltimore Beltway -- surely there are youngsters closer to us who are looking for work!

*sigh*

Hale Adams
Pikesville, People's still-mostly-Democratic Republic of Maryland

All the real thinkers that have come down life's road came with the opinion that education got in the way of learning.

C'mon folks, let's get our terminology straight. These kids come out of college with 17+ years of schooling (counting K-12) and a paper degree. But they have not received an education. If they had an education, they would know how to read, write, do basic math, and most of all, how to think. But no, most of them have no education to show for those all those years and loans. It's sad.