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It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive

It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Of course money is a factor, and schools have gotten insanely expensive. I’m glad to hear that more people are finding alternative routes - it shouldn’t be that everyone needs college because quite frankly many career paths don’t require it and many aren’t smart enough for it (and thus the debt will be crushing). But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do - learn one of those and you can do just about anything.

phpisthebest 4y ago
I think you have conflated college with education. One can get education, build professional networks, etc with out college and importantly one can go to college complete a degree program while receiving zero education. many (most) Colleges is more of a social guild than it is an educational ventures
- azinman2 4y ago
  Very few on their own would get anywhere close to what a college gives you in terms of an education. Particularly in ways that are far broader than what you’d do professionally. Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    >>4 years of education on a daily basis. Is it? Really??? For all degrees and all programs.. that is the claim... but I just do not see that manifest in reality. Seem you have a very inflated view of the programs... just how much debt are you attempting to justify?
    - azinman2 4y ago
      I carry zero educational debt. How do you not see that manifest in reality? What school doesn’t have classes 5 days a week that people are taking, or otherwise expected to be somehow participating in an activity related to education? Sounds like a school that should lose its accreditation.
      - 7thaccount 4y ago
        Agree with you here. I typically had at least 2 classes a day and spent most of the time outside of class studying or doing homework. It was easily more than 40 hours/week. That was for an engineering degree though. Friends in other programs (e.g. business, kinesiology...etc) had to spend much less time on homework and studying, but even they were learning daily.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        I have known alot of students, in many programs. On average I say students have classes 2 - 3 days a week, with 2 classes per day... I know more than a few students attending top rated public universities. According to one survey conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement, most college students spend an average of 10–13 hours/week studying, or less than 2 hours/day and less than half of what is expected. Only about 11% of students spend more than 25 hours/week on schoolwork. [1] a "Full time" course load is 15 credit hours, which is about 5 classes.. a student taking five 3-credit classes spends 15 hours each week in class.. In the past I have run college level internship programs, both for credit, and critically for this discussion not for credit (meaning no affiliation with the schools). I have had no problems scheduling students work around their course schedule, for which they normally have 2 or 3 open days for work. [1] https://www.collegiateparent.com/academics/student-study-time-matters/ https://www.collegiateparent.com/academics/student-study-tim...
      - EleanorKonik 4y ago
        I went to a public honors college / small state school, and arranged my schedule such that I only had 3 days of classes, so I could go home and take care of my sick mom and work a part time weekend job. Even then the schedule was not what I would consider punishing; significantly LESS academic work than I'd needed to do in high school taking APs, even with the reading load. That school definitely is not in danger of losing its accreditation any time soon. It also didn't have any frats/sororities, and there weren't any bars within a 15 minute drive.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    >Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis. For some, but for most, I bet it is a lot less. There are entire degrees (and schools) designed to require little more than for people to show up somewhere a few times per week.
    - azinman2 4y ago
      What degrees and which schools?
      - snerbles 4y ago
        In the US, full-time minimum is typically 12 semester hours (credits) - that is, 12 hours in the classroom per week. In practice students often take 12-18 credits, and are considered overloaded at 20+ hours - some institutions require approval to exceed a certain enrollment. I had multiple semesters while attending a California State University campus where my classes stacked up on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and depending on lab schedules I'd wind up having Tuesdays and/or Thursdays "off", usually taken up by part-time work or projects. Most of my classmates in the ECE department spent their spare days in a similar fashion. So, no, I was not attending class on a "daily basis". And personally, I've learned far more from professional development, personal projects and self-teaching than I ever did in the coursework for my engineering degree.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Business/psychology/criminal justice/communications degrees are generally considered the go to for easy degrees where you just want the status of having a Bachelors degree. For schools, any smaller private school charging $70k per year that is not in the top 10 or 20 probably fits the bill. They have a license to give rich foreigners a way to buy into the US, and I doubt rigorous education is their priority.
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    "According to one survey conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement, most college students spend an average of 10–13 hours/week studying, or less than 2 hours/day" "A recent study showed that college students spend between 8 to 10 hours a day using a cell phone. Every day." I agree with the parent comment. You have conflated college with education.
mfer 4y ago
> But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. Few universities teach how to think. Most teach what to think. Critical thinking, reasoning through ideas and concepts, and research are often lacking. > I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do I don't buy that. You can't by a psychiatrist. You can't be a medical doctor or nutritionist. There are a lot of useful things in this word, that we collectively need, you can't do with those. But, I do think teaching philosophy would be useful. That involves learning how to think things through which isn't, for the most part, taught. > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. There is an error in reasoning right here. The implication from the context is that you need to go to a college or university to be more educated. That's not true. It's also a complex question to ask, what level of education on what does who need?
- sidlls 4y ago
  The context within the social and economic structure of society matters, too. Very few good quality careers are accessible for the self-taught individual.
  - mfer 4y ago
    Who defines good quality? Is this compensation? Is this satisfaction with what you do? Is this ability to pay your bills and save enough? How much does one need (what's enough)? This is all complicated and we tend to focus on compensation. That's why so many people stay in jobs for the pay while they hate the work. There are lots of good quality jobs out there if you expand your definition beyond "highest compensation". I know people who switched and were much happier in trades. They felt far more satisfied, could daily see their accomplishment, and meet their bills (and then some). Where did you get your view on good quality careers from?
    - sidlls 4y ago
      In our society jobs that are satisfying are often not an option (even for the trades), regardless of the pay and regardless of the educational requirements. In the context of this thread it is (almost) all about compensation. "Good quality" is in the sense that one can earn enough to "meet their bills (and then some)" and also weather a major event (such as a medical event). Satisfaction may or may not apply.
xyzelement 4y ago
I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleges themselves in recent decades are pivoting away from. A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost everyone" is expected to consume, and having the desire for intellectual growth as a prerequisite just wouldn't scale. I also think that some of the classes I took (20 years ago, at a state school) would not be taught this way today. Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. Ditto even on a class that focused on Soviet dystopian literature taught by an emrigre. The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I say this as a person with 3 degrees. Higher education worked for me because I made sure it did and colleges were more old school then than now.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Re: critical analysis. I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for. > If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I’m not sure what one would be hungry for that couldn’t be met in college. Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    Re second point, I mean something else. 200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated. So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people. Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.
zoogeny 4y ago
Your post makes me consider what other avenues to achieve the growth of intellectual souls and exposure to depth of thought could exist other than paid-for highly-structured institutions. I think people wax poetically about their own experiences without really considering the experiences of others. We've had free public libraries for centuries now. We've had a pretty open Internet for decades. There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning. For a lot of young kids, school is more like a prison than an intellectual garden. Yet a certain kind of thinking keeps these institutions mandated with the good intention of growing souls. My own opinion is that the current means is utterly failing at generating the desired ends. As the antiquated expression goes: You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. That can be really useful, especially when professors have enough free time to spend with individual students. It can also be really detrimental: every person has a unique education history that determines what order and perspectives are most optimal to their learning. The problem I see is that university is structure. The entire design is intended to be predetermined and inflexible. Edge cases are handled by bringing a student "back on track", assuming that track to be the best learning approach for every student. Most of the substance of "liberal arts" is exactly what a person needs to learn to progress out of this system. The irony of a successful university experience is that the more successful it is at teaching you, the sooner you can walk away and continue learning on your own.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    > What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. Also just touching on "these things exist", converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns. That's the single biggest thing I got from my degree (having already been programming for years before), that nowadays I'm occasionally reminded of in a relevant context and can now dig deeper into.
dmonitor 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Have you even seen a college classroom in the last decade? The STEM classes absolutely have dedicated learners, but most of the people in those other classes can barely write their name on the corner of the page and the classes are designed to cater to their abilities because if they flunk out, they don’t pay next years tuition.
marcosdumay 4y ago
That's #2 on the GP. At least if the college is as expensive as the US ones are, only the elite can get a positive value from those things.
sircastor 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. I think this is one of the more valuable components of attending university - in part just because it exposes one to more people, from more diverse backgrounds. It encourages you to see the world from more than one perspective, and to (I hope) be able to understand and be more compassionate about others. There is a segment of people (in the US at least) that don't want kids to go to college for exactly this reason - they don't want their kids, or other young people to be exposed to or trained in critical thinking and broad perspectives.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
College/University does not have a monopoly on intellectualism or networking. There is no guarantee that attending a college or university will help you develop more than you would outside that setting. There is, however, a guaranteed cost; and that cost can be debilitating.
- azinman2 4y ago
  You’re right. It’s not a guarantee. But it’s a situation where it’s served to you on a platter. If you’re not capable of receiving it on a platter, it’s doubtful you’ll get it on your own. Not everyone is capable of getting it in either scenario - as such as I said I’m glad more vocational opportunities are becoming in vogue again. Let’s just hope these vocations last another 20-30 years.
  - Master_Odin 4y ago
    I think a number of hands on vocational jobs will last longer than quite a few white collar jobs. The robotics necessary for those jobs is quite far behind where we are with the necessary software.
- juve1996 4y ago
  > There is no guarantee that attending a college or university will help you develop more than you would outside that setting. There is, however, a guaranteed cost; and that cost can be debilitating. Two things - that guaranteed cost CAN be debilitating. It also might not be. There are plenty of cheaper options available for higher education. And, in general, people with higher education make more money overall.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    You can't trust a generalization to direct you to a specific outcome.
    - juve1996 4y ago
anonuser123456 4y ago
>It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. I am skeptical of this claim. In my experience, it just enshrines a different set of beliefs into students rather than new paradigms of critical thinking.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Then I don’t think where you went to school did a very good job of educating, or I’d suggest you didn’t pick up on what was being put down. For it to not provide critical thinking and/or depth of knowledge in a subject is a failed mission.
  - mtrower 4y ago
    If so many people are reporting this experience, it may be time to re-evaluate the current state of education.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kneebonian 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. "See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" - Good will Hunting > It also builds professional networks. Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow. > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. If colleges were still about educating I might agree with you but we are a long way from colleges being about educating people. At this points it's simply a social signal.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Few will spend a huge amount of time self educating, and even fewer can read the books and understand what to extract from it without guidance. That’s the whole point of having a subject matter expert design and teach a curriculum. If you don’t value that, then in your world we should abolish high schools and earlier as well. If you look at societies where people don’t go to school versus where people do, the results are quite different for society. The evidence speaks for itself. > Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow. There can be multiple benefits simultaneously at different levels. If whatever college you’re attending is only creating a social signal and not meaningfully educating, then that school lose its accreditation.
  - mtrower 4y ago
    So wait, if a person fails to benefit from college, it's their own fault for not taking what was "handed to them on a platter" (as you mention in another of your posts" --- but if they fail to self-educate, it's only natural and thus a problem of not going to college?
lr4444lr 4y ago
If a person is smart enough to receive it And this can't be the case, at least not in the sense that colleges can offer education at the caliber they once were when only educating 25-30% of the population 70+ years ago. Academic ability, like most other traits, exists on something close to a normal distribution. Not to mention the failings of the secondary education system feeding into it.
ryan93 4y ago
Id be surprised if 5% of college students "grow their souls" weirdly clueless thing to write. Not hard to find out that most people get business, psych and econ degrees. And even english or history majors half ass it just to get through.
ryeguy_24 4y ago
Everyone says that it teaches you how to think but I’ve never heard of a good reason why. I remember difficult classes but I don’t remember any special sauce that made me think differently than I did in high school. I’m not saying that I don’t believe that it teaches you this, I just have never heard more reasoning than the surface statement. Does anyone have any examples or theories of this?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
klooney 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. That's the "finishing school for the elite" function. If you have to ask if you can afford that, you cannot.
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
> If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Are you speaking narrowly of credential-granting schools or do you actually mean education here?
stainablesteel 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. oh are we talking about youtube? i love youtube
palijer 4y ago
>It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. This is a thing that happens to folks who attend school, but I don't think it is the school that causes this to happen. I think this effect is bound to happen to any young person who moves away from their home to live independently for the first time with a thousand other folks who are doing the same thing. Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development.
- juve1996 4y ago
  But not everyone moves far away to go to school and not all schools are in the big city. In fact, schools now have evolved closer to daycares with the amount of money being poured into dining halls and fitness centers. > Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development. Eh. Plenty of people migrate. That doesn't make them educated, necessarily.
gersh 4y ago
Are modern colleges actually succeeding: 1) Exposing people to depth of thought 2) Teach people how to think Maybe, at one time they did, and maybe some schools still do, but it doesn't seem like most modern colleges are really doing this very well.
jackmott 4y ago
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NathanNgata 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls maybe only a byproduct, it's more of a means to an end system. people are at the universities they are in because going to college still means something to the job market as opposed to learning everything else where. The people who really grow there 'intellectual souls' are those who would grow it regardless of environment/circumstance. while I do believe it is a great thing for people to desire to advance themselves intellectually I don't believe it should cost as much as it does. It's ridiculous. > If a person is smart enough to receive it + many aren’t smart enough for it the benefits of becoming educated in its most fundamental sense don't vary with intellectual ability. the way educational institutions are currently structured is one of many ways of educating people, so the question becomes whether that way of educating is optimal for an individual. ---- (opinion) universities should be purely for the pursuit of knowledge and shouldn't be there to provide relevancy to the job market. That should be the job of systems specializing in providing pathways to certain job market sectors. currently universities conflate the two which has lead to most of the problems they have been ascribed with today
bumby 4y ago
>more education is almost always good Yes, but we also need to be cognizant of the opportunity costs: 4 years of gainful, productive employment minus educational debt. I don’t think university has a monopoly on education any longer. But they still maintain one on accreditation. As a society we need to take a hard look at what credentials certain degrees really need.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought It doesn’t uniquely do this. You don’t need college to have intellectual conversations or be exposed to new ideas.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  This has changed over time. Probably simply because of the internet. It used to be harder to expose yourself to the variety of ideas and perspective that college did.
- thaw13579 4y ago
  It's hard to find opportunities for this outside college. Most people are not interested in intellectual talk, so the question is how to meet like-minded folks? I can't seem to find better alternatives to universities, for both number and diversity of opportunities. Book clubs seem like the best option but are often too narrowly focused on literature.
castella 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. As a (not so) recent grad from a top public university in the US - for STEM fields, absolutely. But from my exposure to the humanities and liberal arts side of the campus, be it gen ed classes or just day-to-day interactions with those students, it was far more like a brainwashing factory designed to churn out professional activists. Those classes were far more about rote memorization and regurgitation of the professor's political opinions than any sort of critical thinking; diverge from that "Overton window" and your grades will suffer.
- Tanjreeve 4y ago
  And you're sure that you aren't the one who was upset at being exposed to new ideas and perspectives?
rayiner 4y ago
> it also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought This illogical trope is responsible for so much suffering, being responsible for driving millions of people to waste their time and money pursuing useless college educations.
Consultant32452 4y ago
>It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. This is a thing that people say, but I've never seen it happen. To the extent that people are exposed to depth of thought or new ideas, the people interested would have found those things faster, cheaper, and more frequently if they avoided the rat race parts of university programs. It's similar to the thought that university degrees help people economically, but that is rarely the case. We've spent many human generations trying to figure out how to move the needle and it's mostly IQ + big 5 personality + luck. The people that COULD have gotten into Harvard but chose to go elsewhere wind up with the same outcomes as the people who DO go to Harvard.
Varqu 4y ago
I would argue that it nowadays teaches more herd-behavior and political correctness than depth of thought (example: last Stanford Law dean case)
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> more education is almost always good There is a lot of nonsense credentialing in America. My most rewarding liberal arts classes in college were electives. Scratch that: the only liberal arts classes I took that had merit were electives. The others’ reading lists were fun. But the discussion, assignments and evaluation stupid to the point that I spent years thinking up clever quips to the absurdity of it all.
muyuu 4y ago
out of all the reasons, IMO that is most anachronistic given the way that both Universities and society at large have changed away from these dynamics - and given also that the need for that personal access has also decreased dramatically over the last few decades
AmericanChopper 4y ago
> grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought It’s honestly cringe when people talk about colleges as if they have some sort of monopoly on thinking. If you want to be intellect stimulated, then do intellectually stimulating things, like reading lots of books. Will Hunting was basically correct about library cards (though it’s not like you really even need libraries any more).
alphanullmeric 4y ago
Philosophy? A subject so useless the only jobs it qualifies you far are those that have you teach it to others. I have no idea why you’d group a pyramid scheme with two sciences.
lumb63 4y ago
I suspect the folks here defending philosophy had a very different experience with philosophy than I did. I took an ethics class in college through the philosophy department and all I remember from the class was the professor telling us that pro-choice was the only philosophically defensible position, and reading various excerpts from Plato, etc., without ever discussing “how to think about it” like some siblings mention. Does anyone have any recommended resources for learning about philosophy? I’ve read some Aristotle and Plato but I think I’d benefit from something more structured.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  A single class is too little to really learn anything. As a rule of thumb, a semester of full-time work is enough to learn one "thing". That thing can be wide, in which case you get an overview of the topic, or it can be narrow, allowing you to dive deeper. Anything less, and the only thing you'll likely retain is a random selection of ideas and factoids. If the degree nominally takes 4 years to complete, you have enough time to learn approximately 8 things. Use one slot for a subject, and most universities will give you an introduction to the topics covered by the subject. Use another, and then you may start understanding the arguments and issues in one subfield.
bastawhiz 4y ago
> If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. This presupposes that college provides a good enough education. Arguably, the more you pay for school, the better the quality of education. A community college CS education is probably not as good as getting your CS degree at MIT. I made the mistake of going to a college for my first two years with only two CS professors. I'd taken all of the first professor's classes, and the second professor grilled us on binary => decimal, no calculator allowed, on each of her finals (even for Cyber Security and Java!). Not every education is worth the ink the diploma is printed with. > Of course money is a factor, Money is THE factor. The cheapest educations that aren't useless are still too expensive for most Americans to afford. Almost nobody can pay for college up front, and the financing is extremely predatory. That's literally the crisis. No matter how good "learning to think" is, college simply isn't the right place to do it for millions of people. It ruins futures, and knowing how to think doesn't dig you out of crippling debt that only gets discharged if you die.
nine_k 4y ago
It's definitely great to have all these wonderful things like wider general knowledge and being exposed to a serious depth of thought. The problem is, of course, the expense. Unless you have an independent source of income (a family-taught trade, or inherited wealth), you end up with all this more advanced knowledge at a position where you have little opportunity to apply it, and a crippling debt. To my mind, the right way to proceed is not to eliminate this kind of study, but to transform it so that it does not cost an arm and a leg. Which, I think, is completely doable.
waynesonfire 4y ago
the people that can learning math, physics, and philosophy will have no troubles regardless of whether they study math, physics, or philosophy.
JamesBarney 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Is there any evidence of this?
eru 4y ago
> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Eh, you can get all that without college. And you can go to college without getting any of that.
arthur_sav 4y ago
> It also builds professional networks You know what else builds professional networks? Working and interacting with the real world.

phpisthebest 4y ago

I think you have conflated college with education. One can get education, build professional networks, etc with out college and importantly one can go to college complete a degree program while receiving zero education. many (most) Colleges is more of a social guild than it is an educational ventures

azinman2 4y ago
Very few on their own would get anywhere close to what a college gives you in terms of an education. Particularly in ways that are far broader than what you’d do professionally. Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  >>4 years of education on a daily basis. Is it? Really??? For all degrees and all programs.. that is the claim... but I just do not see that manifest in reality. Seem you have a very inflated view of the programs... just how much debt are you attempting to justify?
  - azinman2 4y ago
    I carry zero educational debt. How do you not see that manifest in reality? What school doesn’t have classes 5 days a week that people are taking, or otherwise expected to be somehow participating in an activity related to education? Sounds like a school that should lose its accreditation.
    - 7thaccount 4y ago
      Agree with you here. I typically had at least 2 classes a day and spent most of the time outside of class studying or doing homework. It was easily more than 40 hours/week. That was for an engineering degree though. Friends in other programs (e.g. business, kinesiology...etc) had to spend much less time on homework and studying, but even they were learning daily.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      I have known alot of students, in many programs. On average I say students have classes 2 - 3 days a week, with 2 classes per day... I know more than a few students attending top rated public universities. According to one survey conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement, most college students spend an average of 10–13 hours/week studying, or less than 2 hours/day and less than half of what is expected. Only about 11% of students spend more than 25 hours/week on schoolwork. [1] a "Full time" course load is 15 credit hours, which is about 5 classes.. a student taking five 3-credit classes spends 15 hours each week in class.. In the past I have run college level internship programs, both for credit, and critically for this discussion not for credit (meaning no affiliation with the schools). I have had no problems scheduling students work around their course schedule, for which they normally have 2 or 3 open days for work. [1] https://www.collegiateparent.com/academics/student-study-time-matters/ https://www.collegiateparent.com/academics/student-study-tim...
    - EleanorKonik 4y ago
      I went to a public honors college / small state school, and arranged my schedule such that I only had 3 days of classes, so I could go home and take care of my sick mom and work a part time weekend job. Even then the schedule was not what I would consider punishing; significantly LESS academic work than I'd needed to do in high school taking APs, even with the reading load. That school definitely is not in danger of losing its accreditation any time soon. It also didn't have any frats/sororities, and there weren't any bars within a 15 minute drive.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis. For some, but for most, I bet it is a lot less. There are entire degrees (and schools) designed to require little more than for people to show up somewhere a few times per week.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    What degrees and which schools?
    - snerbles 4y ago
      In the US, full-time minimum is typically 12 semester hours (credits) - that is, 12 hours in the classroom per week. In practice students often take 12-18 credits, and are considered overloaded at 20+ hours - some institutions require approval to exceed a certain enrollment. I had multiple semesters while attending a California State University campus where my classes stacked up on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and depending on lab schedules I'd wind up having Tuesdays and/or Thursdays "off", usually taken up by part-time work or projects. Most of my classmates in the ECE department spent their spare days in a similar fashion. So, no, I was not attending class on a "daily basis". And personally, I've learned far more from professional development, personal projects and self-teaching than I ever did in the coursework for my engineering degree.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Business/psychology/criminal justice/communications degrees are generally considered the go to for easy degrees where you just want the status of having a Bachelors degree. For schools, any smaller private school charging $70k per year that is not in the top 10 or 20 probably fits the bill. They have a license to give rich foreigners a way to buy into the US, and I doubt rigorous education is their priority.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  "According to one survey conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement, most college students spend an average of 10–13 hours/week studying, or less than 2 hours/day" "A recent study showed that college students spend between 8 to 10 hours a day using a cell phone. Every day." I agree with the parent comment. You have conflated college with education.

mfer 4y ago

> But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. Few universities teach how to think. Most teach what to think. Critical thinking, reasoning through ideas and concepts, and research are often lacking. > I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do I don't buy that. You can't by a psychiatrist. You can't be a medical doctor or nutritionist. There are a lot of useful things in this word, that we collectively need, you can't do with those. But, I do think teaching philosophy would be useful. That involves learning how to think things through which isn't, for the most part, taught. > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. There is an error in reasoning right here. The implication from the context is that you need to go to a college or university to be more educated. That's not true. It's also a complex question to ask, what level of education on what does who need?

sidlls 4y ago
The context within the social and economic structure of society matters, too. Very few good quality careers are accessible for the self-taught individual.
- mfer 4y ago
  Who defines good quality? Is this compensation? Is this satisfaction with what you do? Is this ability to pay your bills and save enough? How much does one need (what's enough)? This is all complicated and we tend to focus on compensation. That's why so many people stay in jobs for the pay while they hate the work. There are lots of good quality jobs out there if you expand your definition beyond "highest compensation". I know people who switched and were much happier in trades. They felt far more satisfied, could daily see their accomplishment, and meet their bills (and then some). Where did you get your view on good quality careers from?
  - sidlls 4y ago
    In our society jobs that are satisfying are often not an option (even for the trades), regardless of the pay and regardless of the educational requirements. In the context of this thread it is (almost) all about compensation. "Good quality" is in the sense that one can earn enough to "meet their bills (and then some)" and also weather a major event (such as a medical event). Satisfaction may or may not apply.

xyzelement 4y ago

I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleges themselves in recent decades are pivoting away from. A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost everyone" is expected to consume, and having the desire for intellectual growth as a prerequisite just wouldn't scale. I also think that some of the classes I took (20 years ago, at a state school) would not be taught this way today. Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. Ditto even on a class that focused on Soviet dystopian literature taught by an emrigre. The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I say this as a person with 3 degrees. Higher education worked for me because I made sure it did and colleges were more old school then than now.

azinman2 4y ago
Re: critical analysis. I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for. > If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I’m not sure what one would be hungry for that couldn’t be met in college. Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Re second point, I mean something else. 200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated. So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people. Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.

zoogeny 4y ago

Your post makes me consider what other avenues to achieve the growth of intellectual souls and exposure to depth of thought could exist other than paid-for highly-structured institutions. I think people wax poetically about their own experiences without really considering the experiences of others. We've had free public libraries for centuries now. We've had a pretty open Internet for decades. There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning. For a lot of young kids, school is more like a prison than an intellectual garden. Yet a certain kind of thinking keeps these institutions mandated with the good intention of growing souls. My own opinion is that the current means is utterly failing at generating the desired ends. As the antiquated expression goes: You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

thomastjeffery 4y ago
What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. That can be really useful, especially when professors have enough free time to spend with individual students. It can also be really detrimental: every person has a unique education history that determines what order and perspectives are most optimal to their learning. The problem I see is that university is structure. The entire design is intended to be predetermined and inflexible. Edge cases are handled by bringing a student "back on track", assuming that track to be the best learning approach for every student. Most of the substance of "liberal arts" is exactly what a person needs to learn to progress out of this system. The irony of a successful university experience is that the more successful it is at teaching you, the sooner you can walk away and continue learning on your own.
- Izkata 4y ago
  > What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. Also just touching on "these things exist", converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns. That's the single biggest thing I got from my degree (having already been programming for years before), that nowadays I'm occasionally reminded of in a relevant context and can now dig deeper into.

dmonitor 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Have you even seen a college classroom in the last decade? The STEM classes absolutely have dedicated learners, but most of the people in those other classes can barely write their name on the corner of the page and the classes are designed to cater to their abilities because if they flunk out, they don’t pay next years tuition.

marcosdumay 4y ago

That's #2 on the GP. At least if the college is as expensive as the US ones are, only the elite can get a positive value from those things.

sircastor 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. I think this is one of the more valuable components of attending university - in part just because it exposes one to more people, from more diverse backgrounds. It encourages you to see the world from more than one perspective, and to (I hope) be able to understand and be more compassionate about others. There is a segment of people (in the US at least) that don't want kids to go to college for exactly this reason - they don't want their kids, or other young people to be exposed to or trained in critical thinking and broad perspectives.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

College/University does not have a monopoly on intellectualism or networking. There is no guarantee that attending a college or university will help you develop more than you would outside that setting. There is, however, a guaranteed cost; and that cost can be debilitating.

azinman2 4y ago
You’re right. It’s not a guarantee. But it’s a situation where it’s served to you on a platter. If you’re not capable of receiving it on a platter, it’s doubtful you’ll get it on your own. Not everyone is capable of getting it in either scenario - as such as I said I’m glad more vocational opportunities are becoming in vogue again. Let’s just hope these vocations last another 20-30 years.
- Master_Odin 4y ago
  I think a number of hands on vocational jobs will last longer than quite a few white collar jobs. The robotics necessary for those jobs is quite far behind where we are with the necessary software.
juve1996 4y ago
> There is no guarantee that attending a college or university will help you develop more than you would outside that setting. There is, however, a guaranteed cost; and that cost can be debilitating. Two things - that guaranteed cost CAN be debilitating. It also might not be. There are plenty of cheaper options available for higher education. And, in general, people with higher education make more money overall.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  You can't trust a generalization to direct you to a specific outcome.
  - juve1996 4y ago

anonuser123456 4y ago

>It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. I am skeptical of this claim. In my experience, it just enshrines a different set of beliefs into students rather than new paradigms of critical thinking.

azinman2 4y ago
Then I don’t think where you went to school did a very good job of educating, or I’d suggest you didn’t pick up on what was being put down. For it to not provide critical thinking and/or depth of knowledge in a subject is a failed mission.
- mtrower 4y ago
  If so many people are reporting this experience, it may be time to re-evaluate the current state of education.
deleted 4y ago
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kneebonian 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. "See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" - Good will Hunting > It also builds professional networks. Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow. > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. If colleges were still about educating I might agree with you but we are a long way from colleges being about educating people. At this points it's simply a social signal.

azinman2 4y ago
Few will spend a huge amount of time self educating, and even fewer can read the books and understand what to extract from it without guidance. That’s the whole point of having a subject matter expert design and teach a curriculum. If you don’t value that, then in your world we should abolish high schools and earlier as well. If you look at societies where people don’t go to school versus where people do, the results are quite different for society. The evidence speaks for itself. > Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow. There can be multiple benefits simultaneously at different levels. If whatever college you’re attending is only creating a social signal and not meaningfully educating, then that school lose its accreditation.
- mtrower 4y ago
  So wait, if a person fails to benefit from college, it's their own fault for not taking what was "handed to them on a platter" (as you mention in another of your posts" --- but if they fail to self-educate, it's only natural and thus a problem of not going to college?

lr4444lr 4y ago

If a person is smart enough to receive it And this can't be the case, at least not in the sense that colleges can offer education at the caliber they once were when only educating 25-30% of the population 70+ years ago. Academic ability, like most other traits, exists on something close to a normal distribution. Not to mention the failings of the secondary education system feeding into it.

ryan93 4y ago

Id be surprised if 5% of college students "grow their souls" weirdly clueless thing to write. Not hard to find out that most people get business, psych and econ degrees. And even english or history majors half ass it just to get through.

ryeguy_24 4y ago

Everyone says that it teaches you how to think but I’ve never heard of a good reason why. I remember difficult classes but I don’t remember any special sauce that made me think differently than I did in high school. I’m not saying that I don’t believe that it teaches you this, I just have never heard more reasoning than the surface statement. Does anyone have any examples or theories of this?

deleted 4y ago
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klooney 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. That's the "finishing school for the elite" function. If you have to ask if you can afford that, you cannot.

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

> If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Are you speaking narrowly of credential-granting schools or do you actually mean education here?

stainablesteel 4y ago

palijer 4y ago

>It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. This is a thing that happens to folks who attend school, but I don't think it is the school that causes this to happen. I think this effect is bound to happen to any young person who moves away from their home to live independently for the first time with a thousand other folks who are doing the same thing. Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development.

juve1996 4y ago
But not everyone moves far away to go to school and not all schools are in the big city. In fact, schools now have evolved closer to daycares with the amount of money being poured into dining halls and fitness centers. > Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development. Eh. Plenty of people migrate. That doesn't make them educated, necessarily.

gersh 4y ago

Are modern colleges actually succeeding: 1) Exposing people to depth of thought 2) Teach people how to think Maybe, at one time they did, and maybe some schools still do, but it doesn't seem like most modern colleges are really doing this very well.

jackmott 4y ago

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NathanNgata 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls maybe only a byproduct, it's more of a means to an end system. people are at the universities they are in because going to college still means something to the job market as opposed to learning everything else where. The people who really grow there 'intellectual souls' are those who would grow it regardless of environment/circumstance. while I do believe it is a great thing for people to desire to advance themselves intellectually I don't believe it should cost as much as it does. It's ridiculous. > If a person is smart enough to receive it + many aren’t smart enough for it the benefits of becoming educated in its most fundamental sense don't vary with intellectual ability. the way educational institutions are currently structured is one of many ways of educating people, so the question becomes whether that way of educating is optimal for an individual. ---- (opinion) universities should be purely for the pursuit of knowledge and shouldn't be there to provide relevancy to the job market. That should be the job of systems specializing in providing pathways to certain job market sectors. currently universities conflate the two which has lead to most of the problems they have been ascribed with today

bumby 4y ago

>more education is almost always good Yes, but we also need to be cognizant of the opportunity costs: 4 years of gainful, productive employment minus educational debt. I don’t think university has a monopoly on education any longer. But they still maintain one on accreditation. As a society we need to take a hard look at what credentials certain degrees really need.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought It doesn’t uniquely do this. You don’t need college to have intellectual conversations or be exposed to new ideas.

comfypotato 4y ago
This has changed over time. Probably simply because of the internet. It used to be harder to expose yourself to the variety of ideas and perspective that college did.
thaw13579 4y ago
It's hard to find opportunities for this outside college. Most people are not interested in intellectual talk, so the question is how to meet like-minded folks? I can't seem to find better alternatives to universities, for both number and diversity of opportunities. Book clubs seem like the best option but are often too narrowly focused on literature.

castella 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. As a (not so) recent grad from a top public university in the US - for STEM fields, absolutely. But from my exposure to the humanities and liberal arts side of the campus, be it gen ed classes or just day-to-day interactions with those students, it was far more like a brainwashing factory designed to churn out professional activists. Those classes were far more about rote memorization and regurgitation of the professor's political opinions than any sort of critical thinking; diverge from that "Overton window" and your grades will suffer.

Tanjreeve 4y ago
And you're sure that you aren't the one who was upset at being exposed to new ideas and perspectives?

rayiner 4y ago

> it also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought This illogical trope is responsible for so much suffering, being responsible for driving millions of people to waste their time and money pursuing useless college educations.

Consultant32452 4y ago

>It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. This is a thing that people say, but I've never seen it happen. To the extent that people are exposed to depth of thought or new ideas, the people interested would have found those things faster, cheaper, and more frequently if they avoided the rat race parts of university programs. It's similar to the thought that university degrees help people economically, but that is rarely the case. We've spent many human generations trying to figure out how to move the needle and it's mostly IQ + big 5 personality + luck. The people that COULD have gotten into Harvard but chose to go elsewhere wind up with the same outcomes as the people who DO go to Harvard.

Varqu 4y ago

I would argue that it nowadays teaches more herd-behavior and political correctness than depth of thought (example: last Stanford Law dean case)

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> more education is almost always good There is a lot of nonsense credentialing in America. My most rewarding liberal arts classes in college were electives. Scratch that: the only liberal arts classes I took that had merit were electives. The others’ reading lists were fun. But the discussion, assignments and evaluation stupid to the point that I spent years thinking up clever quips to the absurdity of it all.

muyuu 4y ago

out of all the reasons, IMO that is most anachronistic given the way that both Universities and society at large have changed away from these dynamics - and given also that the need for that personal access has also decreased dramatically over the last few decades

AmericanChopper 4y ago

> grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought It’s honestly cringe when people talk about colleges as if they have some sort of monopoly on thinking. If you want to be intellect stimulated, then do intellectually stimulating things, like reading lots of books. Will Hunting was basically correct about library cards (though it’s not like you really even need libraries any more).

alphanullmeric 4y ago

Philosophy? A subject so useless the only jobs it qualifies you far are those that have you teach it to others. I have no idea why you’d group a pyramid scheme with two sciences.

lumb63 4y ago

I suspect the folks here defending philosophy had a very different experience with philosophy than I did. I took an ethics class in college through the philosophy department and all I remember from the class was the professor telling us that pro-choice was the only philosophically defensible position, and reading various excerpts from Plato, etc., without ever discussing “how to think about it” like some siblings mention. Does anyone have any recommended resources for learning about philosophy? I’ve read some Aristotle and Plato but I think I’d benefit from something more structured.

jltsiren 4y ago
A single class is too little to really learn anything. As a rule of thumb, a semester of full-time work is enough to learn one "thing". That thing can be wide, in which case you get an overview of the topic, or it can be narrow, allowing you to dive deeper. Anything less, and the only thing you'll likely retain is a random selection of ideas and factoids. If the degree nominally takes 4 years to complete, you have enough time to learn approximately 8 things. Use one slot for a subject, and most universities will give you an introduction to the topics covered by the subject. Use another, and then you may start understanding the arguments and issues in one subfield.

bastawhiz 4y ago

> If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. This presupposes that college provides a good enough education. Arguably, the more you pay for school, the better the quality of education. A community college CS education is probably not as good as getting your CS degree at MIT. I made the mistake of going to a college for my first two years with only two CS professors. I'd taken all of the first professor's classes, and the second professor grilled us on binary => decimal, no calculator allowed, on each of her finals (even for Cyber Security and Java!). Not every education is worth the ink the diploma is printed with. > Of course money is a factor, Money is THE factor. The cheapest educations that aren't useless are still too expensive for most Americans to afford. Almost nobody can pay for college up front, and the financing is extremely predatory. That's literally the crisis. No matter how good "learning to think" is, college simply isn't the right place to do it for millions of people. It ruins futures, and knowing how to think doesn't dig you out of crippling debt that only gets discharged if you die.

nine_k 4y ago

It's definitely great to have all these wonderful things like wider general knowledge and being exposed to a serious depth of thought. The problem is, of course, the expense. Unless you have an independent source of income (a family-taught trade, or inherited wealth), you end up with all this more advanced knowledge at a position where you have little opportunity to apply it, and a crippling debt. To my mind, the right way to proceed is not to eliminate this kind of study, but to transform it so that it does not cost an arm and a leg. Which, I think, is completely doable.

waynesonfire 4y ago

the people that can learning math, physics, and philosophy will have no troubles regardless of whether they study math, physics, or philosophy.

JamesBarney 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Is there any evidence of this?

eru 4y ago

> It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Eh, you can get all that without college. And you can go to college without getting any of that.

arthur_sav 4y ago

> It also builds professional networks You know what else builds professional networks? Working and interacting with the real world.