141–150 of 410 posts
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Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” - Good Will Hunting
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It might be different now, but I remember my computer engineering degree could have probably been done in 3 years, if not for 1. the artificial dependency/prerequisite tree requiring you to take certain courses in a certain order and 2. all the required filler courses you needed to take in order to meet the university's arbitrary definition of well-roundedness. I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a MO…
TBF you can learn how MOSFETs and compilers work on your own too, you don't need college courses for those either. A higher education degree is a package deal and isn't necessarily intended to be a vocational training course, for better or for worse.
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We have infinite free/cheap educational resources on the internet. University only exists for the credential now.
I wouldn't say it's just for credentials. Having passionate and smart colleagues and professors does wonder for your own passion and determination. It's the same reason companies have much more innovation in offices compared to remote working. The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
Maybe if they charged reasonable prices they'd have more applicants. The university I went to let you go for free if you kept a 4.0 GPA and had high SAT scores.
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There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…
Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program? Why can't they test or interview folks into master's programs? Schools are precluding themselves from good candidates that didn't see the value in bachelor's degrees (often for the reasons found in this thread).
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There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…
For what it's worth, the things you call out don't seem to be the case in the Canadian public university that I attended, the University of Waterloo. > why are all degrees four years? UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inqui…
I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…
Seems to me like further polarization. Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be “smart” enough to get in) will be educated, while the rest will skip any personal development and just go right into the market. Educating people in the skills necessary for being good citizens doesn’t cost that much. Most of the books required are free. Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of…
this one hundred thousand times.
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There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…
For what it's worth, the things you call out don't seem to be the case in the Canadian public university that I attended, the University of Waterloo. > why are all degrees four years? UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inqui…
Not just in Canadian universities, I believe it is pretty common and the parent commenter is just not aware.
I went to Georgia Tech, a public school in Atlanta. While the "planned" curriculum is supposed to fit in 4 years, the median is actually around 4.5-5 years. But there are some people who manage to graduate in 3.5 or 3 years (I know 2 of those personally).
In most schools in the US, there is no such thing as "years". You have the classes you need to take to graduate in your program, and it is up to you how to manage that workload. Wanna take 12 credit hours per semester and graduate in 5 years? Sure. Want to take 18-20 hours per semester and graduate in a bit over 3? Absolutely.
Of course some classes have prerequisites and time overlaps, so it isn't 100% freeform, but you can always control the pace at which you graduate. At least that was the experience at my public college, as well as that of almost everyone else I talked to.
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I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in highschool as most college language classes work much better if you took it in high school). I literally couldn't…
I'm not trying to be a dick, but introductory foreign language courses were, in my opinion, broadly perceived to be a complete joke, and passable without the slightest capability of forming a complete sentence. Is it possible your community college was just unreasonably difficult?
Yes, infact I took French again at a different community college and passed.
The first community college I went too tried to cram 6 semester units into a single class. This still had the effect of derailing my life as I had to pick a different school to transfer to.
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Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adult or counselor in their life told them they have to go to some college no matter what.