You go to college for the degree, networking opportunity, and the experience.
That shouldn’t have you in debt, but… America
Definitely. A good university will have you take courses from multiple disciplines to encourage curiosity and exploring topics that you wouldn’t have otherwise. I actually really appreciated my psychology and philosophy courses even though I definitely had no interest in them as careers. I also found that even though I had a lot of interest in being a nuclear engineer I’m not good enough at math, nor do I enjoy math at that level.
Let me guess
Engineering or CS?
Shit when I was going for cs most proffs didn’t even show up, that what grad students are for.
I don’t believe these stories and think it is only told by lazy privileged fucks that don’t respect or use the resources available to them by the school (teacher, lecture, notes, exercises, books, other).
Did you really never have a terrible prof?
I had a calc prof in uni that literally just read his slides in a monotone voice. I had already taken a calc course that I could have used at a college so didn’t even need the credit, but wanted to understand better. At the end of the course, my understanding was way down.
I’d say arguing that people are lazy for not using their textbooks and example questions is missing the mark entirely. The complaint is that profs do nothing… you can buy a textbook and practice questions for a lot less than $27,000.
So you took at course in calculus with bad lectures, read and worked through all the pages in the book/notes, did all the exercises but afterwards your understanding of calculus was worse. This is why I don’t believe these stories.
I got one better. I had a marketing professor who just told stories about how Norway was different from the US.
I took detailed notes because we couldn’t have laptops out and I had nothing better to do.
Exactly two sentences from all of her lectures applied to the exams. If she didn’t take attendance there would have been no point in going to class.
There are plenty of exploitative “schools” out there which make big promises, cost big money, and then do shit like this.
The rub is that they cost less than real university, so that is sometimes people’s only option.
When you live in a society that actively discourages education because they don’t want citizens to realize how bad they’re getting robbed by capitalism, you don’t make it cheap or free to go to school. They want to ensure the only smart ones are already so ingrained into the system (by way of being able to afford the education) that they’d never betray it, or risk upending their comfortable lifestyle.
You know, like Lords and Ladies
No I’m not because I live in a developed nation. That means education is heavily subsidized or free.
Yep, such developed atios as Brazil… The US is a joke.
Someone is still paying thousands for that PowerPoint reading, just not you directly.
No, many many ones are paying literally fractions of a penny for that PowerPoint reading, and it’s damn well worth it.
Unless you prefer a Bourgeois class that strangles the working man with taxes that go to oil subsidies and wars over said oil.
I’ll take smart and sane people over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing in America for the last 40 years
The fact that many people pay a little for something is not an excuse to waste that money. Quite the contrary, if you are taking everyone’s money to do it you are obligated to do it right.
What I want is that education money te be well used.
I can agree fully with that!
Still reduces the cost drastically to society, the whole exploitative college middle-man charging $150k for a degree is gone because the government says “fuck you, degrees are $40k or you don’t get govt places for your course”, and lo and behold… Suddenly the same courses are $40k.
Just like how the US healthcare advocates cry that “free healthcare is socialism that overburdens the taxpayer” - and yet in countries with socialised healthcare they pay 1/4 of what the US pays for the same health outcomes and usually even less for literally the exact same medicine from the same companies.
Collective bargaining.
Yeah, I agree with socializing education, healthcare and a lot of things.
But again, not because it’s a bargain for society means that we should allow lousy teachers in it.
No! It’s free!!
I pity you if your university experience was genuinely that poor. A good university encourages deeper thought than that, and surrounds you with people with a similar interest in your subject, and more people who are passionate about other subjects. A sane country then ensures you don’t end up in crippling debt to attend by covering part or all of the cost, and ensuring any debtvus handled fairly.
And who is going to answer your questions that you will have from a free pdf? The delusional AI that can’t get anything correct?
Y’all went to shitty schools and or think far you highly of your skills.
My professors were hands on and extremely helpful. There is not a chance in hell I’d have figured out algorithms efficiency or some of the absolute dumbest parts of bash without their help.
name the school and lets see what they rate online
I’ll start Reed College
1/3 the profs couldn’t teach for shit but it was still 60k USD
multiple examples
one prof kept forgetting how to finish his equations and broke down in tears (feel bad for the guy but still)
another had a middle eastern accent so thick the 80+ class auditorium couldn’t hear or understand the man
multiple cases of classes being ran by green post grads
and finally the prof that slept with multiple students, had a massive ego, only taught one lab but each physics major had to take, never actually taught a damn thing but ‘would leave the conclusion as an exercise’
fuck this ‘school’
Agreed. Sure there were some freshman level courses that were pretty basic and lectures that were skippable. But all of the Junior and Senior level courses were much more challenging and I really needed to understand everything for science lab work to not just be a pile of burnt crap. There were also the exams that were so hard they let us have open textbooks, just studying alone at home wouldn’t have gotten through those exams.
Its basically a credential that they refuse to let you just test for to justify the price and the institution around it
Yep. University was also a scam for me. Learn nothing that couldn’t be learned by myself. Hell, many courses I passed thanks to youtube videos, teachers failed to teach me how to pass their own class.
You’re not paying for the knowledge. You’re paying for the piece of paper that states you have the knowledge.
At it’s best you’re paying (or better, your country is paying) to learn how to learn, with a specific discipline as a workspace. As with so much else it has enshittified due to rampant greed and power’s fear of a well educated populace, still, if you go into it with that goal, some vestige can still be had.
At place where I teach, only small minority of students pays tuition, most have their education paid by state.
Saddest part is that reason to study for most of them is simply pressure from their parents or from peers, so good luck finding motivation in there.
I always tell people who ask me what I did with my PhD: I managed to get a good education and become a trusted professional despite the schooling system.
The only thing my degree did for me was prove to my first employer that I was willing to sit tight for years and go through the pointless motion of getting a degree. I managed to grind through to the end to get an idiotic piece of paper, and that told him I was unlikely to flake out on him after 3 months on the job. That’s all my degree was ever useful for.
A degree is a piece of paper that says you’re able to be trained, it comes with a side of “and you’re wildly in debt so you’ll take what you can get”
PhDs are a little different because they really vary based on your field and on your advisor. (at least in the US and in the sciences.) It’s your advisor’s job to make sure you learn all that you need to learn to do research. Schooling is just a distraction that you get done with on the side and as quickly as possible so you can get back to research.
In the best cases, your advisor will also introduce you to the research community if you want to be a researcher, or help you get teaching gigs / TAships if you want to be a teaching professor, or help you get internships if you want to do industry. The university is just the context in which you and your advisor work, and the degree tells your peers that you’ve gained a certain level of expertise.
Consequently, my primary gratitude is to my advisor, not to the university.
It is such a stupid barrier to entry.
I went a couple of years but never finished undergrad. That first job tangentially related to what I wanted to do required a personal connection because no one was going to hire a kid to hack code. But after that first job walking away with some (embellished) experience and me listing the university on the CV without mentioning a degree, I was able to break into the field.
Weirdly, you don’t need a uni education to do software engineering because of how democratized the information is on computer science and how freely people share their code and techniques online for you to study. You can Good Will Hunting yourself by your own bootstraps in this area, trivially. But places really wanted to know you had that piece of paper. Even when I knew friends with that piece of paper and were incompetent at the actual craft.
Only a few times have prospective employers asked about the degree and it was a problem (some ten years past lol). It ends up being really good signal on if that place is worth it.
Yeah this is not surprising because at the end of the day, the degree is a class signal. The upper class want a system where their kids don’t have to put in much work to benefit and that requires increasingly impossible barriers of entry for the lower classes. You having the balls to call the bluff worked out in your favor, and you’re definitely not the first to figure it out.
Some of these commenters are so naive. Loads of kids pay their way into Harvard and Yale, then party through them, easily get the degree (because learning and discipline is not the point, the point is the exclusivity and the network), and then get a job through their family or family’s connections where they don’t actually have to know anything to do it.
I did 1 year at some crap local polytechnic and figured out I learn more off the internet and now I am quite senior and self taught
The main problem for me was that the classes can only move at the speed of the average student, where as I get interested in a topic and cram in as much learning as quick as possible
Some people are more suited to the school style and that is fine also
Students: I’ve paid for this, it’s my right to get a degree in return, even if I never attend.
Lecturers: No! That’s not ho-
University Leadership: Yes valued customer, course content will be simplified to facilitate this. We will also pressure modules to be 100% coursework, so that your AI can do it for you my liege.
Lecturers: FFS…
University Leadership: Please remember this moment when you become wealthy alumni and we come begging for donations!
Alumni: I’ve never heard of this university before in my life officer!
Holy shit! I pay €6000 per year and I already think that’s massively expensive… it is more expensive that regular universities in NL, because my school is private, e.i not funded by governmen. Funded schools cost like €2000…
US higher education is uber expensive because whenever americans put something in between the service being delivered and how it is paid, it is out of sight out of mind. The borrowing doesn’t feel real because repayment is deferred. Universities love money and they figured out that they can jack up the tuition and build lots of buildings and hire lots of useless administrators because it is all borrowed money without any kind of reasonableness applied. You would think the US government would demand due diligence not just from the borrower but also from the institution not to waste that money.
You would think so, but it was US state and federal governments that changed a working system with government subsidies for state schools into a loan shark feeding frenzy. They dropped government funding of state schools and changed the law so that it was difficult to shed their student loans in a bankruptcy.
The government doesn’t work for us because we keep electing people who don’t work for us.
Also the borrowers are generally 18-22 year olds who received little to no education in financial literacy beforehand, AND have been told that college is their only shot at a “real” job. It’s a group that’s preyed upon pretty severely.
