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Knowledge and skills have great value! Yes, we should all pursue them with enthusiasm, even for their own sake! But I'd argue that colleges are purporting to s

• jltsiren 2y ago
  They charge us so much, because they are selling something, and the barrier of entry to the industry is high. Prices are naturally set to the level people can afford to pay, rather than being based on how much it costs to provide the service efficiently. Some of the main benefits of institutionalized education are social. It's more acceptable to go to a college instead of spending a few years self-studying. And if you are not exceptionally motivated, the institutional pressure probably makes you study more than you would do on your own. And some fields are easier to study on your own than others. One common pitfall of studying on your own is that you may learn the content without understanding it in the right context. Each field has its own ways of thinking, its own implicit assumptions, its own approaches to things, and so on. Theoretical frameworks, if you like big pretentious words. Those things are difficult to learn without people who are already familiar with the field. Software engineering is probably one of the easiest fields for self-study, as a lot of activity happens in public in open source projects. Computer science is already much harder.
  • xp84 2y ago
    > Each field has its own ways of thinking, its own implicit assumptions, its own approaches to things, and so on. ... people who are already familiar with the field. Agreed. Would you say that sitting in a lecture hall with 300 other people, receiving a boring lecture from a grad student, does a good job of imparting this deep understanding? It seems to me that there are a few dozen people in any given field who have truly meaningful insights to impart. Maybe a tenth of those people are college professors, and some fraction of those bother to teach students, preferring to do research and publish papers to accrue additional clout in the Academia Game. So most college students are actually taught by grad students or Lecturers/adjuncts with mediocre levels of "familiar with the field" knowledge. The ones who were lucky enough to be taught directly by the real experts probably get their money's worth. I don't think most do. I'd rather that the few experts who truly do want to teach students, were hired with tax dollars to create content for study at free virtual universities, and do away with the facsimilies of 'expert instruction' being sold to most students today for $20k+ a year.
    • jltsiren 2y ago
      Universities are more about learning than teaching. The heavy focus on teaching, and the expectation that every class is taught, is large part of the reason why American higher education is so expensive. During my undergrad, in a European public university poorly funded by American standards, seminar classes were the key for actually understanding the field. Students would read papers and other primary sources, give presentations and write papers based on them, and discuss what the others had done. The person in charge would usually be either an active researcher or a senior professor who had been active in the past.
• hirvi74 2y ago
  I agree with many of your points. However, one thing I think you might be missing is that many people, like myself, benefit greatly from structure. I could have learned many of the subjects on my own. Would I have? That is a better question. I seriously doubt I would have. Academics aside, I had some good, bad, and ugly times while in college. It has been about a decade out and think that period of my life nearly every day. I learned a lot of lessons that videos cannot convey and had experiences that cannot capture. I met the love of my life there -- in a computer ethics class.