4 ms·

You don't pay for the slides, you pay for the course design, the office hours, and access to experts in the field that not only know the course material but can

by jayd16 6y ago

You don't pay for the slides, you pay for the course design, the office hours, and access to experts in the field that not only know the course material but can also guide you to further learning outside the syllabus. ...But you have to actually show up and talk to your professor.

johncessna 6y ago
You're paying for the brand.
x86ARMsRace 6y ago
I would say that the idea is you pay for those things. Sadly however a lot of Universities put together programs for the sole purpose of offering that program. Often times CS programs (like the ones at my University) are put together for that reason. I've had an inordinate number of instructors who treat the lecture as the only teaching duty they have. No matter how much you would like to engage outside, the instructors have to participate as well. Many do not, and have no interest in doing so. As a consequence, the end result is often that you're just buying powerpoint slides and an optional seat in an auditorium.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Oh well that's certainly possible. Like anything else, you can still have a poor program or bad luck with a professor. I'm just sad to see comments from students that have no idea what a university has available outside the lecture. I'm also quite surprised by it. Did these people never talk to a teacher in grade school?
908B64B197 6y ago
Never really heard about Concordia CS. Some public universities seems to just be concert-hall sized lectures. Is it one of them?
thewebcount 6y ago
Yeah, not only that. I went to a state school and we had access to a lot of computing resources I likely wouldn't have had otherwise. I attended in the 90s and unless you already had a job in the industry, you were unlikely to find a network with hundreds or thousands of computers with different OSes on them. I not only got to use macOS and Windows, but VAX, and just about every flavor of Unix at the time (AIX, HPUX, Apollo, Solaris, A/UX, etc.), and even got time on an IBM mainframe to see what that was like. I remember, during my senior year, interviewing with a well-known company that had a grand idea for putting together a new documentation system that would allow cross-linking of documents so you could just click on a word and it would take you the definition of that word or the manual page for it. I asked, "Oh, like HTML?" to which they responded, "What's HTML?" This was around 1992-93-ish. Needless to say, I had a leg up on those already in the industry thanks to having had access to those resources at school. It also has a lot of job opportunities. I got to be a Unix sys admin on the school network which both helped pay my expenses and gave me real-world experience. It wasn't glamorous, but it looked better on a resume than having worked flipping burgers.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  The whole point of college is to figure out what you want to do, explore, network and learn how to learn. The amount of learning that happens outside of classes, during labs with peers, is on par with lecture halls if not more. I've seen side projects, discussed random technologies, even startup MVPs on Campus. That's where the real value lies. That and an environment where there's cutting edge research.

by jayd16 6y ago

johncessna 6y ago

You're paying for the brand.

x86ARMsRace 6y ago

I would say that the idea is you pay for those things. Sadly however a lot of Universities put together programs for the sole purpose of offering that program. Often times CS programs (like the ones at my University) are put together for that reason. I've had an inordinate number of instructors who treat the lecture as the only teaching duty they have. No matter how much you would like to engage outside, the instructors have to participate as well. Many do not, and have no interest in doing so. As a consequence, the end result is often that you're just buying powerpoint slides and an optional seat in an auditorium.

jayd16 6y ago
Oh well that's certainly possible. Like anything else, you can still have a poor program or bad luck with a professor. I'm just sad to see comments from students that have no idea what a university has available outside the lecture. I'm also quite surprised by it. Did these people never talk to a teacher in grade school?

908B64B197 6y ago

Never really heard about Concordia CS. Some public universities seems to just be concert-hall sized lectures. Is it one of them?

thewebcount 6y ago

Yeah, not only that. I went to a state school and we had access to a lot of computing resources I likely wouldn't have had otherwise. I attended in the 90s and unless you already had a job in the industry, you were unlikely to find a network with hundreds or thousands of computers with different OSes on them. I not only got to use macOS and Windows, but VAX, and just about every flavor of Unix at the time (AIX, HPUX, Apollo, Solaris, A/UX, etc.), and even got time on an IBM mainframe to see what that was like. I remember, during my senior year, interviewing with a well-known company that had a grand idea for putting together a new documentation system that would allow cross-linking of documents so you could just click on a word and it would take you the definition of that word or the manual page for it. I asked, "Oh, like HTML?" to which they responded, "What's HTML?" This was around 1992-93-ish. Needless to say, I had a leg up on those already in the industry thanks to having had access to those resources at school. It also has a lot of job opportunities. I got to be a Unix sys admin on the school network which both helped pay my expenses and gave me real-world experience. It wasn't glamorous, but it looked better on a resume than having worked flipping burgers.

908B64B197 6y ago
The whole point of college is to figure out what you want to do, explore, network and learn how to learn. The amount of learning that happens outside of classes, during labs with peers, is on par with lecture halls if not more. I've seen side projects, discussed random technologies, even startup MVPs on Campus. That's where the real value lies. That and an environment where there's cutting edge research.