To some, it might seem like a strange question. If you think of being college-educated as a marker of class (or personhood), the fact that I don't have a degree at age of thirty-six (!!) probably looks like a scandalous anomaly, which it would be only natural for me to want to remediate at the earliest opportunity.
I deeply resent that entire worldview—not because I've rejected education, properly understood. On the contrary. The study of literature, history, mathematics, science—these things are among the noblest persuits in life, sources of highest pleasure and deepest meaning. It's precisely because I value education so much that I can't stand to see it conflated with school and its culture of bureaucratic servitude where no one cares what you know and no one cares what you can do; they just want you to sit in a room and obey the commands of the designated teacher. Whereas in reality, knowledge doesn't come from "taking courses."
How could it? Knowledge comes from high-quality study and practice. Sure, it's possible that someone could study in order to "pass" a "class" that they're "taking" in school. But once you know how and why to study, it's not clear what value the school is adding that can't be gotten better, cheaper, elsewhere. Just get the books. (And start a blog, go to meetups, chat to large language models, hire a private tutor—whatever makes sense to get better at doing the things you want to do, without having to worry about whether the thing that makes sense can be made legible to distant bureaucrats.)
The people who believe in being college-educated probably don't believe me. They probably think my pæans to the glory of self-study are the rationalizations of a lazy student who doesn't want to work hard.
I can understand some reasons for skepticism. Sometimes people really are lazy, and suffer from self-serving delusions. Probably there are some confused people out there who have mistaken consumer edutainment for production scholarship and—maybe, somehow—could benefit from being set straight by the firm tutelage of the standard bureaucratic authority.
But without vouching for everyone who calls themself an autodidact, I think I can present third-party-visible evidence that my self-study is for real? I worked as a software engineer for eight years; I have 173 commits in the Rust compiler; I wrote a chess engine; I've blogged 400,000 words over the past dozen years on topics from mathematics and machine learning, to formal epistemology and the philosophy of language, to politics and differential psychology, and much more.
This is not the portfolio of an uneducated person. If someone is considering working with me and isn't sure whether I'm competent, they're welcome to look at my work and judge for themselves. (And I'm happy to take a test when that makes sense.) If someone would otherwise consider working with me, but are put off by the lack of a magical piece of paper, that's their loss—maybe I don't want to work with someone with so little discernment.
If I believe everything I just wrote, explaining why I have nothing particularly to gain and nothing particularly to prove by jumping through a few more hoops to get the magical piece of paper—then ... why am I considering it?
One possible answer is that it passes a cost–benefit analysis mostly by virtue of the costs being low, rather than the benefits being particularly high. I'm at a time in my life where I have enough money from my previous dayjob and enough uncertainty about how long the world is going to last, that I'm happier having maximally free time to work on things that interest me or add dignity to the existential risk situation, than to keep grinding at software dayjobs. So if my schedule isn't being constrained by a dayjob for now, why not "take" some "classes" and finish off the magical piece of paper? I need five more math courses and three more gen-eds to finish a B.A. in math at San Francisco State, which I can knock out in two semesters. The commute is terrible, but I can choose my schedule to only be on campus a couple days a week. And then if the world lasts and I need to go get another dayjob, "I finished my Bachelor's degree" is a legible résumé-gap excuse. In short, why not?—if I'm going to do it ever, now is a convenient time.
A less comfortable possible answer is that maybe I do have something to prove. I often wonder why I seem to be so alone in my hatred of school as an intellectual. Why do people put up with it? Why is there a presumption that there must be something wrong with someone who didn't finish the standard course?
I think part of the answer is that, separately from whether the standard course actually makes sense to require as a class or personhood marker,
[TODO—
- There's a presumption that people who haven't finished have something wrong with them. That's, um, ... actually true of me. If I had been more psychologically stable, I could have done my own projects and also passed my classes.
- Chris Olah didn't finish undergrad, but I'm not Chris Olah
- I won. I don't have to go back. But precisely because I'm at a point in my life where I'm using my software money to do my own thing, finishing up the coursework while doing my own thing seems feasible
- If it were just gened bullshit, I wouldn't bother, but I actually want to take Schuster's Analsysis II; Alex Mennen's math lectures lacked the coordination/homework aspect
- realism for "I Hope You're Happy" ]
Real Analysis II: https://webapps.sfsu.edu/public/classservices/classsearch/detail/2247/REG/6041 Probability Models: https://webapps.sfsu.edu/public/classservices/classsearch/detail/2247/REG/3712 Applied Linear Algebra: https://webapps.sfsu.edu/public/classservices/classsearch/detail/2247/REG/9309 Linear Models: https://webapps.sfsu.edu/public/classservices/classsearch/detail/2247/REG/2185 Queer Literatures and Media: https://webapps.sfsu.edu/public/classservices/classsearch/detail/2247/REG/9542