At one of my former universities we had a glut of professors who were tenured, teaching courses no one wanted, or needed. The only way to keep these classes filled was to require students to take the classes, and if that didn't work, to require labs on classes that traditionally did not have, or need, a lab, and then make the professors teach those. That worked until the foreign student glut. Now that same university (George Mason fyi) has to dramatically increase the number of senseless labs so they can provide graduate teaching assistants jobs to the foreign students. It's more like a shell game than an actual education. Serious question: Does Research Methods in Psychology really need a four hour lab???

Out of curiosity, what sorts of skills/etc would you want to see for students to succeed in college, that they don't have now?

Not the poster to whom you posed the question, but in my experience as a prof

* Self discipline

* Study skills/how to study

* Motivation for learning, not just getting credentials.

Often kids have lots of motivation for learning but classes can really take the fun out of it. They add friction by poorly presenting the material (I prefer a well formed book or document over chalkboard scribbles and ambiguous powerpoint slides), competition, deadlines (read: mastery learning), or failing to connect the material to applications.

For all of theses reasons, I learn way more on my own than I do in my classes. Many of my peers do the same.

Not the one downvoting you, but I think that what is needed for college is the drive to learn despite these issues that you raise. We've all had teachers like that. Sometimes a prof can add brilliant insight; sometimes you are better off following along in the book and not bother taking notes except in the margin; and sometimes (rarely, hopefully) you are better off skipping class and reading, perhaps from a text different than the one assigned.

The class is important for giving you an organization of the material that helps to solidify your foundation for future learning, and also to hold you accountable for the pace. This doesn't work for everybody, admittedly; but often it is an intellectual maturity thing, and by making ourselves go through it we are much better off in our fourth year than our first.

Well if learning despite these issues, despite the added friction, is what college is for, I wish they told me that when I signed up. Intentionally adding friction while also claiming that formal education itself is supposed to lubricate learning are rather antithetical aims.

The keeping of pace and lectures are not intentionally there to add difficulty or responsibility, they are there for vestiges of an era from when the lecture and class model was invented, before we even had the printing press. They exist now mainly for logistical convenience and because people think they can find reasons for why we should keep them around and why they are the best pedagogical transmission method for most students. They are not. They really suck. It has long since been determined that most people can only even hold their attention on something for ~15-20min (hence the length of TED talks).

If the material was organized in a cohesive series of books, then you could just read those, and classes would mainly be for projects. There is a reason Sal Khan and Elon Musk both skipped nearly all of their lectures in college and both advocate for education to be massively overhauled.

You should be able to just study on your own and periodically show up for proctored exams, and take them as many times as you need to in order to reach true understanding. And you should be able to take such exams without having to pay for lectures.

I don't think people are intentionally adding friction, it just sometimes gets that way.

Most people would be completely lost studying on their own. They exist, however. But if most people could do it they would. And you are correct also about lectures lasting longer than most peoples' attention span. But they stem from a time when college wasn't for most people.