My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

> it became impossible to get a middle-class job without a college degree

Not true, I did fairly well as a software engineer after dropping out of school, and having finished my degree it hasn't made any difference in my day to day (except people think I'm a decade younger than I actually am based on the date on my resume).

> And the world does owe people a fair chance at a living. To the extent that that involves a useless college degree because people want the credential, yes, the world owes them that.

The world owes you exactly nothing.

I'm sure you've brought this behavior up with the professor though, right?

Context: I attended a small (1500 students, no grad school), private (read: expensive), liberal arts college from 2004-2008 and dropped out. I finished my degree in 2014 at the same institution because I was so close it was pointless not to.

> I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition.

Some people pay a shitload of tuition, yes. It's somewhat like buying a car (in the US). Nobody pays sticker price. There is a lot of very cheap money floating around (gov't loans, grants, scholarships), which is keeping the price artificially high.

The sticker price of my school was about $35k/yr, or $140,000 for a degree. I left in 2008 with about $22k in loans. The rest was grants and scholarships. I did well in HS but not so well that you would immediately think people would throw $120k at me for school. The important thing here is that the school actually received the $140k. They've got zero incentive to control costs.

> If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money.

This is true to an extent, but I had no instructional interaction with the professors prior to my first day of classes. I spoke to a few as a visiting HS senior, but even the professors were in sales mode at that point.

> It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it.

It's misaligned incentives (mentioned in greater detail elsewhere in the comments here). The professors do not get any more money if all of their students understand the subject perfectly and go on to become professors themselves compared to if half the class fails. The only mitigating factor to this is some universities place promotion/review weight to student evaluations, but even then it's only an issue until one receives tenure.

My college was primarily a teaching college, and approximately 2/3 of the professor workload was teaching, grading, and related. Some of the larger survey classes would have a few TAs that would do reviews for smaller groups, but a TA leading a class was unheard of. There was no graduate school (they've since added a few Master's programs), so the TA's were just other undergrads who had gotten A's in the course in previous semesters.

> If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken.

I don't think anyone will disagree with you here :)

> I could recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester.

> I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt.

> Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers.

Which is to say, you just did do all those things; you were just passive-agressive about it.

I have no degree. I attended exactly two of the three semesters of college for which I paid. I make a very nice living running servers and writing code at my company. Before this, I have worked in construction and as the guy under your car in one of those quick oil change places. I've been an outboard mechanic. The world owed me nothing. I have made my own way and earned everything that I've gotten. I respect hard work and I understand that I will sometimes fail. I learn something from every experience.

I'm sorry but your attitude here that the world owes you _anything_ just goes to further prove my point. Life is not fair. It never has been and never will be. You can sit there feeling sorry for yourself because the world treated you unfairly...for which will get you absolutely nothing...or you can go out there and do whatever you need to do in order to make it through this day so you can try for a better day tomorrow. The onus is on you and not the world. You want something better then show the world that you will work for it.

Two things come to mind for me in this:

1. The "younger generation" is going to have to learn to take responsibility for their failures as well as successes. There seems to be a real problem with the former.

2. To use the words my father repeated to me almost daily during my teenage years when we worked together: "If you aren't going to give it 120% in whatever you do, don't even bother getting out of bed."