This comment thread echoes experience. I'm a soon-to-graduate CS student at an institution with an unspendably-large (in the billions) endowment, and yet the e

This comment thread echoes experience. I'm a soon-to-graduate CS student at an institution with an unspendably-large (in the billions) endowment, and yet the environments in which I've learned the most at this school, are those in which either (1) other students have been given the task of teaching me something or (2) vice versa. Notice the absence of traditional "classroom settings". Many of my fellow students feel the most lectures we've attended felt futile. It's not that we haven't learned anything from them (quite the opposite), it's just that it doesn't feel like the most efficient way to transfer knowledge, given 3 hours and an assembly of Smart People. Think – in what other time and place will you be able to assemble 30+ great minds, interested in a specific topic, and one of those minds is (hopefully) an expert in that topic? It feels like a waste, to assemble this magnitude of excellence and diversity, just for 1 person to speak for 3 hours. Obviously, the extreme alternative of chaotic 1-on-1 discussions between isolated friend groups would also be a waste – but it feels like there ought to be some goldilocks middle ground. The lecture environment's shortcomings are mitigated by a highly-engaged and question-happy audience, but large lecture halls/class sizes, and strict curriculum requirements dis-incentivize (1) paying attention enough to ask good questions and (2) answering good questions with detailed and fascinating tangents. A classmate recently shared this < https://www.recurse.com/ https://www.recurse.com/ > and it continues to strike me as an enlightened approach to CS education, as it directly leverages the imperfectly-overlapping distributions of knowledge of the "students" to further collective education – an idea which makes perfect sense, especially at the graduate or nearing-end-of-undergraduate levels. Perhaps we'd be better off running college as a continuous, 4-year Hackathon? :)