4 ms·

This is all good, but if you have to go $220k in debt to learn about stuff, that's ridiculous. There are ways to learn and grow outside of academia, and until

This is all good, but if you have to go $220k in debt to learn about stuff, that's ridiculous. There are ways to learn and grow outside of academia, and until the costs become reasonable again, I don't pooh-pooh anyone who decides to learn about Modern China by traveling to China for a year instead of taking the class.

patio11 16y ago
I was going to say, for my three courses on non-Japan countries I could have lived virtually anywhere for a year. $80 an hour, yay.
cageface 16y ago
If you're bright and motivated, you can learn a lot more on your own. Why should you be forced to march through every subject lock-step with 30-100 other students at a median pace that's probably unsuitable for 2/3 of the class in any given week? Why should your learning be doled out in time chunks that are arbitrarily convenient for administrative purposes and nothing more? Why limit your study to the handful of sanctified texts when you have the entire internet at your fingers? Why pay that hefty tuition to sit in a lecture hall so crowded you may never ask the teacher a single question only to move to a T.A. section run by a harried grad student that often barely speaks English? The traditional academic learning model is an artifact of 500-year old technology. Not only that, but the academic humanities are totally infested with continental post-structuralism. If anything you're just setting yourself up to be the victim of the next Sokal's Hoax.
- dgabriel 16y ago
  > Not only that, but the academic humanities are totally infested with continental post-structuralism. If anything you're just setting yourself up to be the victim of the next Sokal's Hoax. That's not entirely fair. My beloved has an English PhD, and I have brilliant conversations with him about art that never descend into the absurd (unless that's the point). Which reminds me -- if you're paying for your PhD in the humanities, you're wasting your time. He had the good fortune to get full scholarships plus grants to cover fees, room & board. Now he's off to get an MFA... at least one of us pays the bills. :)
  - cageface 16y ago
    Fully paid spots are rare in the humanities though, aren't they? When I was in grad school in science pretty much everybody got a free ride but my impression was that things on the other side were very different.
    - dgabriel 16y ago
      They are rare, and generally only go to people who are perceived as having a future in academia. So if you don't get a paid spot, that's the career fairy telling you this may not work out...
- harshpotatoes 16y ago
  If you're bright and motivated, and can learn a lot on your own, you can learn even more when you are with people who already are knowledgeable. I don't know why people don't do this. If you go to class, read more than what the teacher assigns, and think of interesting questions, the teacher will talk to you and give you insight, even if that teacher is teaching a 300 person lecture. I don't see how you can advocate self directed learning, and yet in the same breath suggest that a person with such self motivation and discipline would somehow drudge along with the rest of the class.
  - cageface 16y ago
    You don't have any choice but to drudge along. The pace of the lectures is set before the class starts. If you're the kind of student that can race ahead on his own speed through the text then why do you need the lectures? I was in a lot of 100-300 person classes and there were always at least 10-20 people chasing after the lecturer at the end of every class. You were damn lucky if you got more than 2 questions in the whole semester. Upper level classes were better, of course.
    - argv_empty 16y ago
      The professors I had were always excited to help students who wanted to run ahead of or branch out from the lecture schedule. Catch them in their office when it's not just before or just after class.
      - cageface 16y ago
        I think the real problem, at least here in the U.S., is that most people learn next to nothing in high school so they have to spend 1-2 years in college in huge auditorium classes catching up. If you want to fix college you first have to fix high school.
    - achompas 16y ago
      What about office hours? I was in a lot of big lecture classes too and office hours salvaged my college experience (to an extent).
- parfe 16y ago
  Sokal submitted a paper to a journal that practiced no review. That's on par with me submitting a nonsense comment to news.yc and then bragging to my friends how stupid the startup community is.
harshpotatoes 16y ago
Well, the costs are reasonable, it's just that generally people make unreasonable choices. Yes, $220k is an unreasonable amount of debt. However, at big public University, the costs are much closer to $60K (for four years + living expenses, assuming in state tuition).

patio11 16y ago

I was going to say, for my three courses on non-Japan countries I could have lived virtually anywhere for a year. $80 an hour, yay.

cageface 16y ago

If you're bright and motivated, you can learn a lot more on your own. Why should you be forced to march through every subject lock-step with 30-100 other students at a median pace that's probably unsuitable for 2/3 of the class in any given week? Why should your learning be doled out in time chunks that are arbitrarily convenient for administrative purposes and nothing more? Why limit your study to the handful of sanctified texts when you have the entire internet at your fingers? Why pay that hefty tuition to sit in a lecture hall so crowded you may never ask the teacher a single question only to move to a T.A. section run by a harried grad student that often barely speaks English? The traditional academic learning model is an artifact of 500-year old technology. Not only that, but the academic humanities are totally infested with continental post-structuralism. If anything you're just setting yourself up to be the victim of the next Sokal's Hoax.

dgabriel 16y ago
> Not only that, but the academic humanities are totally infested with continental post-structuralism. If anything you're just setting yourself up to be the victim of the next Sokal's Hoax. That's not entirely fair. My beloved has an English PhD, and I have brilliant conversations with him about art that never descend into the absurd (unless that's the point). Which reminds me -- if you're paying for your PhD in the humanities, you're wasting your time. He had the good fortune to get full scholarships plus grants to cover fees, room & board. Now he's off to get an MFA... at least one of us pays the bills. :)
- cageface 16y ago
  Fully paid spots are rare in the humanities though, aren't they? When I was in grad school in science pretty much everybody got a free ride but my impression was that things on the other side were very different.
  - dgabriel 16y ago
    They are rare, and generally only go to people who are perceived as having a future in academia. So if you don't get a paid spot, that's the career fairy telling you this may not work out...
harshpotatoes 16y ago
If you're bright and motivated, and can learn a lot on your own, you can learn even more when you are with people who already are knowledgeable. I don't know why people don't do this. If you go to class, read more than what the teacher assigns, and think of interesting questions, the teacher will talk to you and give you insight, even if that teacher is teaching a 300 person lecture. I don't see how you can advocate self directed learning, and yet in the same breath suggest that a person with such self motivation and discipline would somehow drudge along with the rest of the class.
- cageface 16y ago
  You don't have any choice but to drudge along. The pace of the lectures is set before the class starts. If you're the kind of student that can race ahead on his own speed through the text then why do you need the lectures? I was in a lot of 100-300 person classes and there were always at least 10-20 people chasing after the lecturer at the end of every class. You were damn lucky if you got more than 2 questions in the whole semester. Upper level classes were better, of course.
  - argv_empty 16y ago
    The professors I had were always excited to help students who wanted to run ahead of or branch out from the lecture schedule. Catch them in their office when it's not just before or just after class.
    - cageface 16y ago
      I think the real problem, at least here in the U.S., is that most people learn next to nothing in high school so they have to spend 1-2 years in college in huge auditorium classes catching up. If you want to fix college you first have to fix high school.
  - achompas 16y ago
    What about office hours? I was in a lot of big lecture classes too and office hours salvaged my college experience (to an extent).
parfe 16y ago
Sokal submitted a paper to a journal that practiced no review. That's on par with me submitting a nonsense comment to news.yc and then bragging to my friends how stupid the startup community is.

harshpotatoes 16y ago

Well, the costs are reasonable, it's just that generally people make unreasonable choices. Yes, $220k is an unreasonable amount of debt. However, at big public University, the costs are much closer to $60K (for four years + living expenses, assuming in state tuition).