I've noticed this too. Along with the everlasting nature/nurture debates. I think there are two reasons why people on HN (myself included) like pulling higher education into question.
1. People in CS realize that the field is changing rapidly and that their 50 year old professors are somewhat losing touch. This contributes to the feeling that one could just as well work and autodidact.
2. People in CS are notoriously bullshit averse and realize that higher education is riddled with social prestige and research projects that are of little value but sound sophisticated.
I would be interested in what others think of these two points. Thanks.
I can see some merit in those points, but mostly only because computer science as an academic field and the jobs real-world CS majors do are fairly disconnected at the moment. Most of the "50 year old professors" I've met are nowhere near losing touch with the bedrocks of "computer science": information theory, computation and algorithms, etc. But they probably don't know much about the rapidly-changing landscape of Internet technology, and there are good arguments in either direction whether they should.
I know people who've gone the autodidact route in CS and they do just fine, but I do notice it leads to a particular kind of snobbery against higher education because they learned everything online, so why can't everyone? Trouble is, a fairly high fraction of human activities don't lend themselves to that kind of learning. And some of them, like green energy technologies, are even the kinds of things some startups want to get involved in. Higher ed becomes pretty damn necessary in these cases.
1. People in CS realize that the field is changing rapidly and that their 50 year old professors are somewhat losing touch. This contributes to the feeling that one could just as well work and autodidact.
2. People in CS are notoriously bullshit averse and realize that higher education is riddled with social prestige and research projects that are of little value but sound sophisticated.
I would be interested in what others think of these two points. Thanks.