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Learning in many fields is social. When you have a sufficiently nerdy student body, the best debates, mind-expanding and perspective-enhancing experiences, frie
by superuser2 11y ago
Learning in many fields is social. When you have a sufficiently nerdy student body, the best debates, mind-expanding and perspective-enhancing experiences, friendships, etc. are not in classrooms but in dorm common rooms at 3am. They're spontaneous conversations between people who bumped into each other at a coffee shop outside a reading room, both procrastinating a paper. They're at dinner with your dorm-mates at your table together in the dining hall. Common spaces, and a curated set of people (for intellectual ability, general passion, etc) spending a lot of time in those common spaces, are an incredibly important component of a modern elite education.
If lectures are all that matter, just do it on the internet. They aren't.
- klean92 11y agoIf that's the real value of college education, it's definitely not worth $40K a year x 4.
- StillBored 11y agoYah, see hacker spaces, and social dinners....
- superuser2 11y agoTake a look at NPR's "What you'll Actually Pay At 1,550 Colleges" [0]. To pay $40k at a good school you'd have to be pretty wealthy ($110k+ household income). At median income, good but not Ivy League private schools (UChicago, Columbia, CalTech, MIT) are running $8-12k. [0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/30/444446022/what-youll-actually-pay-at-1-550-colleges?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150930 http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/30/444446022/what-...
- SilasX 11y agoVery true, but the typical college student's experience does not include that.
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoI agree with you but what you've described is a kind of idealized depiction of a college student. In real life, there's a lot of partying that may build certain social skills but doesn't really justify the massive cost. The huge amount of substance abuse and generally immature behavior of my fellow 1st and 2nd year peers was ridiculous, as was their inattention to their studies. It was, for many, nothing but a prolonged adolescence as well as a big waste of time and (parents') money. Grad school was more like a scholarly atmosphere as you described; we'd regularly meet after class at the coffee shop and discuss nearly everything. But we all had our own apartments and private lives.