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> for the HN community, being given a set of learning goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work It depends very much on what you are learning

> for the HN community, being given a set of learning goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work It depends very much on what you are learning. Even in computer science, much of what there is to learn - and most of the important things - can't be found in the book. Personal advice by an expert on technique, concepts, and perhaps most crucially, on what you don't know that you don't know, is invaluable. Also, a university has computer resources that no student can match. Then imagine chemistry, history, drawing, etc. If you only mean passing courses in one field - that's vocational training, and passing courses is only a proxy measurement anyway. You're missing out on a lot if you think that's education.

leetcrew 8y ago
> Also, a university has computer resources that no student can match. this probably only matters for graduate+ level studies and perhaps a couple upper level electives for undergrads. in my whole time as an undergrad (at a well-regarded regional school), i only used our HPC cluster once for a trivial parallelism project in my algorithms class. the vast majority of my school projects required the compute resources of a 10 year old laptop, anyway. having paid experts on staff that are required to hold office hours and field questions is a much more compelling advantage of university imo.