Why going to University is still valuable
for a bachelor's, i'm still anti-PhD pilled
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I chatted with a Stanford undergrad last night who was interested in computational biology moonshots like BCIs and organoids. We had a fun conversation, he's how I'd imagined a Stanford undergrad to be, possessing a wide range of interests and driven to pursue big ideas. He off-handedly mentioned how he felt like he had to do a PhD before actually pursuing those ideas in full and it struck a chord with me.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking of the value of higher education, and how much of it you really need to do meaningful things.
The second question the Emergent Ventures application asks is - What mainstream view you do you agree with? My response (the first time) was that a degree in a research University is as valuable as society considers it to be. I still think this is true, at least for an undergrad degree (bachelors).
If I perform a principal component analysis of why I think this is true, it boils down to three dimensions - surface area with professors and peers, credentialism, and a force-field to cultivate agency.
Surface area -
In the best-case scenario, going to Uni puts you in frequent contact with deeply experienced knowledge miners/keepers (professors). From years of toiling away at the knowledge mines, they have come to accumulate hard-earned truths about the world. You can usually walk into their office hours and interrogate them on the object and meta level of what they’ve learned. This last point is important, a lot of times the most valuable insight I gleaned from such interactions was not some fact from actual research a professor did, but the context (and subtext) in which that fact came to be. One such insight is that research papers cannot be read in isolation, they have to be understood in the larger conversation of the field, and grasping this larger picture is crucial to understanding where current thinking runs short and when a paradigm shift (or breakthrough) is necessary/imminent. Piecing together a field’s language without the ability to frequently talk to experts is challenging (not impossible), which is why surface area with professors (and a University degree) is so valuable. This seems hard to get from outside a University, although it is possible, cold emails can work pretty well!
The value of surface area with like-minded peers is fairly self-evident. This seems a lot more replaceable though, the list of ventures that seek to create networks of passionate people who want to do pursue specific things is happily growing (see buildspace), and of course, if you’re a founder you have a wide pick of accelerators and their kin to choose from. However, few programs can match the duration and intimacy of college, where you study, eat, and live together with a bunch of people for 2-4yrs, though I’m hopeful we’ll see versions of this soon (also see buildspace).
Credentialism -
This one is also self-evident, sadly so. Status-games matter. I know my berkeley[dot]edu opened some doors, which otherwise might have stayed shut. This is changing, in the sense that new status-games are rising in rank (YC might be more powerful than Harvard if you’re a founder), but I don’t see this improving things much on the margin.
Force-field for agency -
If you’re lucky, going to Uni as a young person is your first real taste of agency. You choose your major and classes and your small-groups. Your possibility space is much larger than before, allowing you to smash the explore vs the exploit button. You have the ability to constantly experiment and iterate with your identity, with tight feedback loops. You come out of the furnace, more fully forged and complete as an individual.
All that being said, I think it’s totally possible to do amazing things without going to college, and I have immense respect for those blazing their own trail.
Godspeed,
Akash
