I am always astonished by the range of people who claim their college degree was useless, citing rote memorization and bad classes. I had an entirely different experience and so did most people I know. University gave me the opportunity to talk to world-class researchers during office hours, to discuss ideas with my peers and have them either validated or critiqued by experts. Sure, all the information is available online (which is a miracle into itself) but without frequent contact with professors and mentors I wouldn’t have even known where to look or what existed in the field. University, for me, was a place where I was apprenticing full-time under highly experienced people, surrounded by people my age who also were doing the same. Years of self-teaching didn’t get me anywhere close to what a few semesters of expert mentorship got me. I never felt I had to memorize anything: exams consisted of system design or long programming projects or optimization challenges. I loved it, and I’m not sure if people went to different universities or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.
These people can’t possibly be at every university, let alone colleges, community colleges, or technical schools.
> … rote memorization and bad classes …
Not every school will be good. There are at least three post-secondary schools within driving of me that take the minimum required curricula as a script and offer nothing more than the bare minimum required to get certification, accreditation, and receive that sweet state and federal budget money.
I can’t imagine how someone with a good or great post-secondary education is confused that this would be the situation for millions of students.
Thank you; I feel similarly and wish I could go back as an adult to take even more advantage of all the incredible opportunities. Having four years to dedicate to learning new things in depth -- with zero pressure to take shortcuts so that the lessons become economically useful sooner -- was more of a privilege than I understood at the time.
And then of course, the people I met there have shaped my life and career in wonderful ways ever since. The sheer level of diversity among students and faculty is unlike anything I've experienced elsewhere. Many of them are still my lifelong friends (or in one case my wife :)) and others have opened professional doors to me 15 years later and counting.
But also, I went to a very well known and respected university with sufficient endowment and financial aid that it shouldn't be functioning as a "toll gate" regardless. I know things are not this rosy at a lot of universities.
Did you learn about selection bias in university? Maybe you went to a good one, but there are far, far more dogshit schools than good ones.
Just a few years ago my husband had all of his tuition refunded (and degree cancelled) because the school was so bad and so scammy that the government had to step in and force them to refund everyone.
The reality is that higher education in the USA is a for-profit venture, and like all for-profit ventures in the US, the number one explicit goal is to extract as much profit as possible by any means possible. Providing quality education and world-class faculty is completely disjoint and incompatible with that goal.
Most people in this country are not so privileged as you to attend one of our dwindling number of good schools. Everyone else has a predatory institution that technically meets the requirements to offer the degrees they claim. Usually, anyway.
> or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.
It's this. Most undergraduate students do not go to office hours, try to get to know their instructors, ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable, so yes, it's understandable why many would consider higher ed the same as secondary ed: rote memorization and "bad" classes.
> … Most undergraduate students do not go to office hours, try to get to know their instructors, ask follow-up questions
This was actively discouraged by the instructors in the school I attended. Not by policy, but by behavior - passive-aggressively belittling students for not “getting” the subject matter, showing a complete lack of interest in reciprocating any amount of getting to know the instructor.
> … ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable …
A failure of secondary education and students’ families.
My experience has been there is no correlation between skill at teaching and skill at research; maybe the two are even anti-correlated. To some extent, this is an artifact of the selection process for professors, but I think it's partly because there's a real tradeoff between spending effort on research vs teaching.
In some cases, an excellent researcher even has cogent papers but is absolutely abysmal at lecturing and in person teaching skills.
Peers are very important, but from talking to others, it's harder to know where you will get good peers than you would think. Even 1st tier universities will have majors dominated by students whose primary interest is in maximum grades with minimum work and where cheating is rampant. You've got to either get lucky (I did) or put in some leg work to find smart students who are actually interested in learning and doing things right.
I think how much rote memorization is encouraged or required is strongly dependent on the field. Pre-med students will sometimes memorize their way through calculus; a professor I knew once described it as "grimly impressive".
Teaching is a skill like any other. While I don't think the two are anti-correlated, you're going to find good teachers and bad teachers, no matter how good they may be at their other duties.
And I would gather you find more bad teachers than good, but that's true of many spaces from IT to sports.
If you’re in an American University, then the professors will most likely be top researchers in some particular niche, and they will likely have office hours. I think the “college is a toll” argument specifically applies to American universities that are essentially pay to play.
That’s not true. Source: University of Warsaw. Poland. Not Illinois. I’ve had office hours with world-class mathematicians. Those office hours were required of every lecturer and TA.
In contrast to many comments, I had a great time studying. Sure, the staff didn't have great teaching skills (classical prof with an unruly hairdo reading from the syllabus in a large hall), but after the first year, classes became smaller and teaching was --while not passionate-- certainly inspired in many cases. It was a period in which students could still pick an academic topic and write a (small) thesis for graduation, or do some internship and write a report about that. I had a supervisor who was into some of the newer stuff and gave me practically free reign with regular feedback.
That was in 80s. I stuck around, changed faculty (AI, cogsci, neuro), and saw university change. It became very financially oriented. The number of students kept rising, norms kept dropping (2nd year student asking: what does this symbol √ mean?), students participating in real research became rarer and rarer, even PhDs shifted towards more and more teaching, and 20 years later, the most influential member of a university's board was the one doing real estate, and an academic career was based on the amount of funding obtained.
I loved my time at a big Canadian uni in the 90's and smaller one in early 2000's. Grad school a few years later was kind of disappointing; I thought everyone would be smarter. Still some good profs and the best students were awesome and inspiring, but I watched a shift towards distance education & foreign students that meant way more adminstrators and way less of the environment that made uni so great. I suspect it's even worse in the US
Tangential, but I also loved studying and learned way more from textbooks than I ever did from class/lectures. I even went to a small school where there might only be 10 people in the class (the physics department was especially teensy), and I still just could absolutely never pay attention in class with any success.
When exams were coming up, I would start skipping class just to read textbooks and work through practice problems, and it was a lifesaver!! The professors were great for getting me unstuck with a concept, but 90% of the time I just needed to be studying alone
Yes, these organizations adapt to taking government money. The ideal flow for universities:
1. Set tuition high
2. Advocate for student loan systems
3. Advocate for loan forgiveness
In this way, universities can simply allocate government money to themselves. That's why "everyone must be educated" campaigns always argue for government loan forgiveness and full tuition coverage.
Students are a device to acquire money from the government. No more.
not in Canada. Funding & allowed price increases has mostly been capped for a very long time at many schools/programs, so they've had to find new revenue streams. This is mostly foreign students and continuing education / executive programs, or "professional" degrees (MBA, law, medicine). None of these moves encourages deeper academic research.
In the US perhaps, but it happened in Western Europe too, even where there weren't student loans. Simplistic explanation: the right wing parties were in favor of "austerity" measures, i.e. budget cuts, and the left-wing ones of getting as many people through college as possible. Unfortunately, both got what they wished for.
Makes me think of the "The purpose of a system is what it does" axiom. Universities were always about credentials whether professional or just to indicate social class. They can at the same time be places of learning, and many still are in some disciplines.
The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model. Its more profitable and university presidents can now earn millions of dollars, further intrenching the problem as it now attracts exactly the kind of people into those positions who only care about money (and themselves).
The true blame for this situation, (IMHO), are the employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees' for jobs that in no way need those skillsets. Bullshit requirements then led to the demand for bullshit degrees which the universities changed to supply.
This is true across literally millions of HR people across the whole country. Every one trying to make their job a little bit easier and thus creating an externality with the monstrous negative effect on the entire education system and years of people lives pursuing pointless degrees at great cost and debt that may take some lifetimes to pay off. Absolute madness.
This is definitely part of it, but after working - and hiring - in the software industry for several decades I can say that a university grad has probably at least heard of relational algebra or taken a course that covered costing algorithms. Do they use this every day or ever? Definitely not, but when I interview non-uni grads the odds they can write (let alone explain) a modest SQL query are lower. There's very little causation between uni grad and good developer, but IME the best uni grads are better than the best non-uni grads. There's some signal in there.
Wonder if this problem would be reduced by some mechanism of incurring cost on job positions that advertise for more requirements. (A heavy handed approach would be to charge an additional fee/tax if you require university educated persons for a position not requiring one)
I agree with your general assessment, but not sure if the blame could be placed on employers mostly/entirely. They're also limited by bounded rationality and cannot (or should not) dictate what the purpose of an education should be. There's such diffusal of accountability that no one is really designing the system, just reacting to it. To your point, the system just do what it does. The ultimate unaccountability machine, per Dan Davies [1].
I think we're witnessing the collapse of the university value proposition. In the decades post WW2, the attendance/competition within universities was quite modest compared to today. Relatively fewer people went, and it was essentially a social class sorter, with a liberal education sprinkled throughout. This actually creates a better learning environment, as once you're "in", you can focus on the experience. Nowadays, the university is just another hamster wheel in the grind, in a never-ending arms race against the sea of other students/degrees/credentials. Failure to deliver results means you didn't consume enough, and must consume more. Eventually this dilutes the value of the degree, both from a signaling and a financial perspective. It seems like we're in the peak enshitification stage of higher ed.
For employers, requiring a degree doesn't cost them anything. So they're happy to keep piling on the requirements. I guess the question is what type of employers would actually be the first to decouple their recruiting/hiring from credentialism and rely on other metrics of competency?
You are correct, but the fact that employers are being rational doesn't make them blameless. To answer your question is that I don't see any employers decoupling from credentialism because why would they? So I think any solution to that would require there has to be a cost associated with university requirements for job positions. A fee maybe? Unless the job legally requires the credential (e.g. engineer, lawyer, nurse, etc.), then any other position you have to pay a fee to include that requirement? I know, not great, but what else could be done?
To blame are employers but also politicians and Uni admin staff enabling the narrative that a degree should always be about employable skills. First employers often eintreten know what they need and in general this focus on practice is exactly what promotes roteness imo
This was exactly like my experience, although mine was in the UK maybe 15 years earlier. I went to university and studied a particular subject so that I'd be employable and didn't enjoy what I was learning. (It's debatable whether I learnt much at all, though.) Like the author, many years later I also came across computer science and found it exciting and engrossing, but I have a slightly different take on that:
> Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too.
For me, I'm not sure that hypothetical alternative path was ever available. I really admire university students who are passionate about what they are learning, but I doubt that could've been me regardless of the subject (unless that subject was beer). I simply wasn't in the right headspace for that.
Perhaps I needed to grind out a dull degree as it ultimately set me on a path to a time/place/subject that I really do enjoy. My interests now have been shaped by my journey and if you'd tried to teach me computer science at 18 I'm sure I would've hated that, too.
Same. I didn't know how to express my passions, and I didn't know that I didn't know. I've since been (re?)discovering this. I'm still working on it.
I wish that we didn't talk down to kids to teach them, and instead approached them as equals, so that they wouldn't think that their passions and interests are below that of "grown ups". I recently learned that there's a term for that. Well sort of. It's "andragogy", which directly translates as education for adults, contrasting with "pedagogy" which is education for kids.
Historically universities began as church schools, and (more or less) existed to educate priests in persuasion and nobility in leadership.
You might think that's archaic, but that's still the primary purpose of the Ivy League in the US and the older equivalents around the world. The caste system works slightly differently, with priests (persuaders and marketers) replaced by economists, lawyers, and politicians, and nobility (doers with financial/political agency) by CEOs, financiers, and oligarchs. But it's recognisably the same idea.
There are also supporting castes - the military, which has its own pipeline, and researchers/technicians, which are a weird hybrid caste. Some have limited political agency - which peaked around fifty years ago, and has been declining since - but most are just worker bees.
The idea that universities are there for personal and cultural intellectual development is relatively recent, and much more tentative. There's still a lot of hostility to it because the primary purpose of the system is to maintain power differentials, not to erode them.
The point being that the modern system is the vector sum of at least four different competing trends. There's political hierarchy, there's increasing financialisation of assets and processes (which actually conflicts with research and education), there's a need for workers who are accredited and educated enough, but not too educated and independent-minded, and there are the personal expectations of students, which depend on personality, talent, and acculturation.
There isn't a stable solution for this problem.
A recent trend is the availability of university-level teaching outside of universities. Textbook piracy, YouTube videos, and AI are all making it much easier for motivated people to learn - pretty much anything.
I'm not convinced the formal system is sustainable. But it's clear current ideas about employment aren't sustainable either. So there's going to be a period of complete chaos, and - at best - some new system of semi-formal self-motivated open education is going to replace what we have now, perhaps with some kind of external testing and accreditation for specific skills and abilities.
There is a difference between learning about things that you find interesting at your own pace, and learning about things that interest other people with tight deadlines. Even if I enjoy learning, there were absolutely courses that were just a waste of time.
> Even if I enjoy learning, there were absolutely courses that were just a waste of time.
My university experience is somewhat different, and I believe whether this holds true or not depends a lot on the degree course:
- In mathematics, there are barely any "filler courses". Basically all of them were interesting in their own right (even though because of your own interests, you will likely find some more exciting than others).
- On the other hand, computer science more felt like every professor had their own opinion how the syllabus should be, and the hodgepodge that came out of it was adopted as syllabus (design by committee). Thus, there were quite a lot of interesting things to learn, but also "filler courses". Additionally, the syllabus did not feel like a "consistent whole" with a clear vision, but rather like lots of isolated courses that you had to pass.
> ...there were absolutely courses that were just a waste of time.
How? Surely over 15 weeks each course taught you something about either the world or yourself.
I just looked back over my undergrad transcript to double check my experience. I took something away from every single class. It wasn't always the material itself.
My neighbour was telling me about how his 18-yr-old daughter was taking a liberal arts degree at a new-style sounding school. For a kid out of HS it sounded terrible, but to 40 yr-old me it sounded amazing as a second degree!
This resonates with me. BS in Computer Science starting when 18. All very overwhelming. Graduated with 3.0 GPA.
Twenty years later. More experienced, working as a software and systems engineer. Masters in Systems Engineering and achieved 4.0 GPA. College was easier.
The annoying thing is that: when universities aren't toll gates and you actually learn something, then people don't believe you and you have "0 work experience".
So often, I've had the experience with work that it just feels like a long elaborate lab and there really is not much of a difference. Whether I make Jupyter notebooks analyzing things in a computer lab or for colleagues, I still use the same skills. Whether I present in front of classmates or colleagues, same skill.
Nah it's completely different and experience in a workplace isn't really about proving what you're describing it's about knowing someone else trusted this person to be able to deliver in a professional context which is very different from what is considered delivering in an academic context.
Also you have to keep in mind just how oversubscribed academic qualifications are now so you're more just placing yourself at the starting line and whats more important is what you did outside that institution.
> it's about knowing someone else trusted this person to be able to deliver in a professional context which is very different from what is considered delivering in an academic context.
How is it different? When you work in motivated groups at uni you split the work and rely on each other to do your part at a high quality. That’s also true for real work. Often enough you depend on certain things that your team mate does like finishing some part of a codebase while you worked on the theoretical underpinnings of an exploit and drafted that code. And now you can place your code into her code and rowhammer via JS works now.
I just don’t see the difference. Oh, and my performance reviews are “we are really happy with your work”. I used to work as a SWE and now as a data analyst. It all feels like school to me.
> Also you have to keep in mind just how oversubscribed academic qualifications are now so you're more just placing yourself at the starting line and whats more important is what you did outside that institution.
Well, they used to be, but the modern industrial age needed institutions that could train workers - and universities fit the bill. I don’t think it’s possible to detach the credential aspect from universities without a parallel work-focused system existing, and even then, the prestige of universities will still mean that the wealthy and privileged will prefer universities, which means that that prestige will trickle down to everyone else.
The only real solution IMO is to support institutions like St. John’s [1] and others that are explicitly not career-focused, and work on making similar institutions affordable and accessible. There’s no real reason why someone can’t start a student-operated (to keep costs down) university that focuses on the liberal arts, classics, mathematics, etc. that is affordable enough for the average person. I suspect the main problem is the lack of prestige and precariousness of the economy at large.
I think this is also a specific difference between germanic education and english/us education.
Does the US not have something like a fachhochschule?
A institute where peoeple are trained for specific fields/jobs?
This systems seems to exist in most european countries that i know of, and it is specifically focussed on education related to a specific field or career.
(this is also is there for different levels of practicality) for instance, you have also have schools for things like construction workers, hairdressers, etc etc.
University's are more seem as a very high level of education, but which does not train one for a specific job.
There are schools like this, called various things like “technical schools” or “vocational schools.” But they tend to be looked down upon by the American middle class and higher; e.g., the average parent wants their kid to go to college, any college, over a vocational school. In other words, vocational schools are (unfortunately) associated with people that don’t do well in traditional school.
From what I understand Germany is much less classist in this regard.
> here’s no real reason why someone can’t start a student-operated (to keep costs down) university that focuses on the liberal arts, classics, mathematics, etc that is affordable enough for the average person.
Seeing the comments here, I thought I'd quickly share my experience at Matfyz (Charles University in Prague), specifically the computer science programme:
I applied for admission and was accepted based on having not-too-terrible grades from an optional high school exit test, but later all admission tests were cancelled due to COVID. The idea is to admit hundreds of applicants and keep those who pass the nontrivial first semester, which I much prefer to hard exams.
Despite some missteps caused by COVID and just me being me, I really enjoyed my years of study and am now continuing in the masters programme.
Some lectures were great, and most were at least decent. I learned to check who taught what class and ask around for feedback, and I'll shamelessly admit to choosing my specialisation based mostly on that feedback and personal experiences.
I almost never felt that rote memorisation was being asked of me, or that it was the key to success. The vast majority of issues I had could be solved by understanding more, not just knowing more. Some examiners even allowed small cheatsheets (and plenty of people still didn't pass, so no free exams).
I know that not all university students in the Czech Republic have had such a good experience. I've heard about plenty of problems with stubborn teachers or unfriendly bureaucracy, but on the whole I'd say it's about more than the degree.
Readit News
These people can’t possibly be at every university, let alone colleges, community colleges, or technical schools.
> … rote memorization and bad classes …
Not every school will be good. There are at least three post-secondary schools within driving of me that take the minimum required curricula as a script and offer nothing more than the bare minimum required to get certification, accreditation, and receive that sweet state and federal budget money.
I can’t imagine how someone with a good or great post-secondary education is confused that this would be the situation for millions of students.
And then of course, the people I met there have shaped my life and career in wonderful ways ever since. The sheer level of diversity among students and faculty is unlike anything I've experienced elsewhere. Many of them are still my lifelong friends (or in one case my wife :)) and others have opened professional doors to me 15 years later and counting.
But also, I went to a very well known and respected university with sufficient endowment and financial aid that it shouldn't be functioning as a "toll gate" regardless. I know things are not this rosy at a lot of universities.
Just a few years ago my husband had all of his tuition refunded (and degree cancelled) because the school was so bad and so scammy that the government had to step in and force them to refund everyone.
The reality is that higher education in the USA is a for-profit venture, and like all for-profit ventures in the US, the number one explicit goal is to extract as much profit as possible by any means possible. Providing quality education and world-class faculty is completely disjoint and incompatible with that goal.
Most people in this country are not so privileged as you to attend one of our dwindling number of good schools. Everyone else has a predatory institution that technically meets the requirements to offer the degrees they claim. Usually, anyway.
It's this. Most undergraduate students do not go to office hours, try to get to know their instructors, ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable, so yes, it's understandable why many would consider higher ed the same as secondary ed: rote memorization and "bad" classes.
This was actively discouraged by the instructors in the school I attended. Not by policy, but by behavior - passive-aggressively belittling students for not “getting” the subject matter, showing a complete lack of interest in reciprocating any amount of getting to know the instructor.
> … ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable …
A failure of secondary education and students’ families.
In some cases, an excellent researcher even has cogent papers but is absolutely abysmal at lecturing and in person teaching skills.
Peers are very important, but from talking to others, it's harder to know where you will get good peers than you would think. Even 1st tier universities will have majors dominated by students whose primary interest is in maximum grades with minimum work and where cheating is rampant. You've got to either get lucky (I did) or put in some leg work to find smart students who are actually interested in learning and doing things right.
I think how much rote memorization is encouraged or required is strongly dependent on the field. Pre-med students will sometimes memorize their way through calculus; a professor I knew once described it as "grimly impressive".
And I would gather you find more bad teachers than good, but that's true of many spaces from IT to sports.
Neither world-class researchers or office hours exist in most Universities.
"Office hours" is entirely an American (and maybe British?) thing.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
That was in 80s. I stuck around, changed faculty (AI, cogsci, neuro), and saw university change. It became very financially oriented. The number of students kept rising, norms kept dropping (2nd year student asking: what does this symbol √ mean?), students participating in real research became rarer and rarer, even PhDs shifted towards more and more teaching, and 20 years later, the most influential member of a university's board was the one doing real estate, and an academic career was based on the amount of funding obtained.
When exams were coming up, I would start skipping class just to read textbooks and work through practice problems, and it was a lifesaver!! The professors were great for getting me unstuck with a concept, but 90% of the time I just needed to be studying alone
> The number of students kept rising, norms kept dropping
All due to the student loans scam.
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-first-myth...
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-second-myt...
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/03/myth-3-college...
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-last-myth....
1. Set tuition high
2. Advocate for student loan systems
3. Advocate for loan forgiveness
In this way, universities can simply allocate government money to themselves. That's why "everyone must be educated" campaigns always argue for government loan forgiveness and full tuition coverage.
Students are a device to acquire money from the government. No more.
The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model. Its more profitable and university presidents can now earn millions of dollars, further intrenching the problem as it now attracts exactly the kind of people into those positions who only care about money (and themselves).
The true blame for this situation, (IMHO), are the employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees' for jobs that in no way need those skillsets. Bullshit requirements then led to the demand for bullshit degrees which the universities changed to supply.
Somebody from HR admitted to me that they often do it to simply trim the applicant pool to a more manageable size.
I think we're witnessing the collapse of the university value proposition. In the decades post WW2, the attendance/competition within universities was quite modest compared to today. Relatively fewer people went, and it was essentially a social class sorter, with a liberal education sprinkled throughout. This actually creates a better learning environment, as once you're "in", you can focus on the experience. Nowadays, the university is just another hamster wheel in the grind, in a never-ending arms race against the sea of other students/degrees/credentials. Failure to deliver results means you didn't consume enough, and must consume more. Eventually this dilutes the value of the degree, both from a signaling and a financial perspective. It seems like we're in the peak enshitification stage of higher ed.
For employers, requiring a degree doesn't cost them anything. So they're happy to keep piling on the requirements. I guess the question is what type of employers would actually be the first to decouple their recruiting/hiring from credentialism and rely on other metrics of competency?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
Deleted Comment
Conversely, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
Perhaps I needed to grind out a dull degree as it ultimately set me on a path to a time/place/subject that I really do enjoy. My interests now have been shaped by my journey and if you'd tried to teach me computer science at 18 I'm sure I would've hated that, too.
I wish that we didn't talk down to kids to teach them, and instead approached them as equals, so that they wouldn't think that their passions and interests are below that of "grown ups". I recently learned that there's a term for that. Well sort of. It's "andragogy", which directly translates as education for adults, contrasting with "pedagogy" which is education for kids.
You might think that's archaic, but that's still the primary purpose of the Ivy League in the US and the older equivalents around the world. The caste system works slightly differently, with priests (persuaders and marketers) replaced by economists, lawyers, and politicians, and nobility (doers with financial/political agency) by CEOs, financiers, and oligarchs. But it's recognisably the same idea.
There are also supporting castes - the military, which has its own pipeline, and researchers/technicians, which are a weird hybrid caste. Some have limited political agency - which peaked around fifty years ago, and has been declining since - but most are just worker bees.
The idea that universities are there for personal and cultural intellectual development is relatively recent, and much more tentative. There's still a lot of hostility to it because the primary purpose of the system is to maintain power differentials, not to erode them.
The point being that the modern system is the vector sum of at least four different competing trends. There's political hierarchy, there's increasing financialisation of assets and processes (which actually conflicts with research and education), there's a need for workers who are accredited and educated enough, but not too educated and independent-minded, and there are the personal expectations of students, which depend on personality, talent, and acculturation.
There isn't a stable solution for this problem.
A recent trend is the availability of university-level teaching outside of universities. Textbook piracy, YouTube videos, and AI are all making it much easier for motivated people to learn - pretty much anything.
I'm not convinced the formal system is sustainable. But it's clear current ideas about employment aren't sustainable either. So there's going to be a period of complete chaos, and - at best - some new system of semi-formal self-motivated open education is going to replace what we have now, perhaps with some kind of external testing and accreditation for specific skills and abilities.
He might just have discovered he is more mature at 30 than he was at 18...
My university experience is somewhat different, and I believe whether this holds true or not depends a lot on the degree course:
- In mathematics, there are barely any "filler courses". Basically all of them were interesting in their own right (even though because of your own interests, you will likely find some more exciting than others).
- On the other hand, computer science more felt like every professor had their own opinion how the syllabus should be, and the hodgepodge that came out of it was adopted as syllabus (design by committee). Thus, there were quite a lot of interesting things to learn, but also "filler courses". Additionally, the syllabus did not feel like a "consistent whole" with a clear vision, but rather like lots of isolated courses that you had to pass.
How? Surely over 15 weeks each course taught you something about either the world or yourself.
I just looked back over my undergrad transcript to double check my experience. I took something away from every single class. It wasn't always the material itself.
Twenty years later. More experienced, working as a software and systems engineer. Masters in Systems Engineering and achieved 4.0 GPA. College was easier.
So often, I've had the experience with work that it just feels like a long elaborate lab and there really is not much of a difference. Whether I make Jupyter notebooks analyzing things in a computer lab or for colleagues, I still use the same skills. Whether I present in front of classmates or colleagues, same skill.
Also you have to keep in mind just how oversubscribed academic qualifications are now so you're more just placing yourself at the starting line and whats more important is what you did outside that institution.
How is it different? When you work in motivated groups at uni you split the work and rely on each other to do your part at a high quality. That’s also true for real work. Often enough you depend on certain things that your team mate does like finishing some part of a codebase while you worked on the theoretical underpinnings of an exploit and drafted that code. And now you can place your code into her code and rowhammer via JS works now.
I just don’t see the difference. Oh, and my performance reviews are “we are really happy with your work”. I used to work as a SWE and now as a data analyst. It all feels like school to me.
> Also you have to keep in mind just how oversubscribed academic qualifications are now so you're more just placing yourself at the starting line and whats more important is what you did outside that institution.
I see that it’s oversubscribed.
The only real solution IMO is to support institutions like St. John’s [1] and others that are explicitly not career-focused, and work on making similar institutions affordable and accessible. There’s no real reason why someone can’t start a student-operated (to keep costs down) university that focuses on the liberal arts, classics, mathematics, etc. that is affordable enough for the average person. I suspect the main problem is the lack of prestige and precariousness of the economy at large.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_College_(Annapoli...
Does the US not have something like a fachhochschule? A institute where peoeple are trained for specific fields/jobs? This systems seems to exist in most european countries that i know of, and it is specifically focussed on education related to a specific field or career. (this is also is there for different levels of practicality) for instance, you have also have schools for things like construction workers, hairdressers, etc etc.
University's are more seem as a very high level of education, but which does not train one for a specific job.
From what I understand Germany is much less classist in this regard.
... so a book club?
But maybe that's just me.
I applied for admission and was accepted based on having not-too-terrible grades from an optional high school exit test, but later all admission tests were cancelled due to COVID. The idea is to admit hundreds of applicants and keep those who pass the nontrivial first semester, which I much prefer to hard exams.
Despite some missteps caused by COVID and just me being me, I really enjoyed my years of study and am now continuing in the masters programme.
Some lectures were great, and most were at least decent. I learned to check who taught what class and ask around for feedback, and I'll shamelessly admit to choosing my specialisation based mostly on that feedback and personal experiences.
I almost never felt that rote memorisation was being asked of me, or that it was the key to success. The vast majority of issues I had could be solved by understanding more, not just knowing more. Some examiners even allowed small cheatsheets (and plenty of people still didn't pass, so no free exams).
I know that not all university students in the Czech Republic have had such a good experience. I've heard about plenty of problems with stubborn teachers or unfriendly bureaucracy, but on the whole I'd say it's about more than the degree.