4 ms·

Colleges help you get out of them what you put into them. Harvard has more smart students and professors, so you can get more out of them. But any college wil

• gxs 16y ago
  >Colleges help you get out of them what you put into them. This is the most important point in this entire discussion. I had a pages long post about the wonderful years I spent at Cal, and the not so wonderful ones. But I think in the end, this comment sums it up much better.
• guynamedloren 16y ago
  I agree that there is a huge responsibility placed on the shoulders of students, as there should be, but there is a deeper problem here. Colleges should motivate students to inquire, to learn, and to challenge themselves. While this motivation could definitely be indirect, it should still be one of the primary goals of educational institutions (not only universities, but schools of all shapes and sizes). One of the best ways colleges could motivate students is by making sure the curriculum and corresponding coursework is up-to-date. Now, it may have just been my department (enterprise systems engineering UIUC), but 99% of the material covered during my college career was extremely dated. The 8th edition textbooks were almost identical to their 1st edition counterparts published 30+ years ago. The homework assignments were re-used year after year (which made the acquiring the solutions ridiculously easy). You have no idea how disheartening it is to walk into class every day or sit down to do homework knowing that you will never, ever in a million years use anything you are "learning". It's not motivating. It's not encouraging. It's not challenging. The 3.5 years I spent in college were, without a doubt, the worst years of my life. I just graduated (early, thank god) and I feel like my brain clicked on for the first time since 2007. Don't get me wrong - I am a huge fan of learning and critical-thinking (taught myself Ruby on Rails over the past few months with no prior programming experience), but it's pretty damn hard when you can get through one of the most prestigious engineering programs in the world on auto-pilot.
  • davidu 16y ago
    You went to a technical school and got a technical degree. That's very different from going to university and studying the liberal arts. I have no idea why we consider them the same in America, but in most places, even though UIUC is a fantastic technical school, a degree in something called "Enterprise Systems Engineering" should not be considered a university degree. You simply didn't have that experience. And, yes, I'm sure it was horrible. In my Anthro and other liberal arts classes, my homework was to read a famous literary work, study a movement, a people, a culture or an event and then be prepared to discuss it critically with my peers, often in classes with 5-8 students. PS -- I need to add that there are definitely students of engineering who treat the curriculum as the science and discipline and art that it is. These students relish understanding the provenance of the discipline and the state of the art and spend all their time in it trying to master the art. It's just more obvious how to do that in the liberal arts because they groom you to do that. I think you have to be more self-aware and self-motivated in the engineering side of things.
    • narkee 16y ago
      I completely agree. I've long said that we should separate academic pursuits from technical or vocational training. Arts and Sciences => Academic Engineering, Medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Business, and everything else => Vocational I think we need to recognize that there are two classes of people who go to college: Academic: those who wish to learn Vocational: those who wish to qualify for jobs