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> But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer
by jimmywanger 10y ago
> But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer (with a couple of outliers).
It's funny that a lot of the outliers are the degrees that can actually help you with financial stability later. Universities love humanity courses, exactly for the reasons you point out. It's easy to shoehorn a couple more undergrads into a literature or philosophy class, all you need to do is buy a few more chairs, and the books sort of buy themselves, and you're paying the TAs starvation wages anyways, what's a few more students between friends.
Whereas in a material science lab, you need a rockwell brinell hardness tester. For a computer science lab, you need some heavy iron if you're going to be doing heavy algorithms (might have changed lately, it's been going on 20 years for me). For electrical engineering, you need the CAD workstations with licenses for VHDL programs and the hardware to reprogram FPGAs.
So that's kind of interesting
- digler999 10y ago> For a computer science lab, you need some heavy iron if you're going to be doing heavy algorithms Not for 200 undergrads learning how to bubblesort. For that you need a lab with 50-100 PC's. For grad courses in parallel comp. or AI, you might need a semi-expensive cluster to play around with, but if you want something that just works you could just buy cluster time on AWS, which I'm sure they'd give a discounted academic rate. I'd expect the most expensive thing in a CS lab to be the electricity to power the computers.
- tim333 10y agoIndeed there seem few disciplines where you really need much equipment for bachelor's degree study. Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books.
- jimmywanger 10y ago> Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books. I think most life/physical sciences mandate a lab requirement. I think you can learn the facts from books, but if you want a job in those fields after you graduate with a bachelor's, you'll be spending most of your time in a lab.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago"A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple hours in the library." - Frank Westheimer That is, if you don't know what's in the books, you can waste a huge amount of time re-discovering it in the laboratory...
- jimmywanger 10y agoThat is only if you're doing stuff on the cutting edge of basic science. What you learn in lab classes in college is what's important in most industry and academia. Being careful of cross contamination, religiously keeping up your lab notebook, being able to troubleshoot experiments, keeping things documented and repeatable. That's 99.9% of industry research, not coming up with new reactions or processes.
- test6554 10y agoCan you imagine a raspberry pi for every student where you just buy a new microSD card for each class and all notes/assignments are stored in the cloud or a gitlab type site for higher-education? That way it's a snap to set up with the exact development environment you need and if you mess something up badly, the T.A. could re-image your sd card and you just grab your assignments from your git.
- str33t_punk 10y agoAt my university they gave is all a free hundred dollars worth of aws creds for our parallel course - who needs clusters?
- jazzyk 10y agoAt least in CS, more expensive hardware/software is often either donated, or part of a research grant.