The point here, however, is what University is for all people, not just for individual cases like yours where things align nicely, and where maybe your own character and personality (and some of your professors and class mates) helped you get a meaningful experience out of it.

My personal opinion is that the article is mostly right about what doesn't make sense for Universities in 2020. Many things are wrong, including providing access to it for ALL valuable students irrespective of income or wealth.

Traditionally, that was not true and still is not true in places like Germany. A university is the place where you can get the highest education of a field, or ideally where you study a field on your own. Both requires a lot of prerequisites that not everybody fulfills. I am talking about knowledge, ability to learn although something is not flashy, and the will to endure. And it should be like that, otherwise you loose the ability to train the brightest people of a society. For everybody else, there are applied universities, dual study programs, and well established and respected vocational training programs, here in Germany.

Replacing universities with a netflix-esque experience may seem attractive to students, but is doomed to fail to train students. The question how much teachers should adapt to the wishes to their students is as old as learning itself. In the end the students have to trust, that a teacher knows which material to cover to teach students the desired skills, facts, and abilities. For an example of that, search your trusted video-streaming platform for the film Karate Kid. ;-)

Most people who go to university in the USA, go to what would be closer to a Fachhochschule. Smaller colleges and universities that don't grant PhDs and whose professors have research output is closer to "write a paper in the summer" than "run a research lab".

Most people who have negative views toward their university experience in the USA, I think, feel that way because they thought they were going to a Fachhochschule but actually went to a university (or vice versa).

I don't quite understand how the USA can look at our education system, look around the world, and then conclude that technology will be our salvation. No. Just build a system that works like the perfectly functional and affordable systems in much of Europe.

This. I wish this point were brought up more often in these discussions in favor of/against universities. People tend to have entirely different ideas when it comes to what a higher-level education should provide: For some people it's a scientific way of thinking about the world, for others it's just preparation for a future (and hopefully better-paying) job. Separating those ideas might be a good first step in solving this conundrum.

I don't see how that can happen until there is broader acknowledgement of what is actually appropriate in terms of education. No one is prepared to the admit that university degrees from PhD granting institutions aren't required, or are inappropriate, in all cases.

College is now a prerequisite for many jobs that don't need a university-level education. People are lazy and upping the bar is an easy option compared to handling the risk of choosing a "less qualified", but appropriate candidate.

Research drives investment while teaching doesn't. Even if you are a relatively bad at (or ill-equipped) for research you can still bring in money with this approach. In some cases, only parts of institutions should be participating, but you aren't a real university if your focus isn't primarily on "world class research."

Students are stuck with a bunch of bad options. They are unlikely to want to disappoint parents who want them to go to college and be successful. If they go down an alternative route them they'll be filtered out because systems are built around people have degrees.

If you don't take honors/AP courses throughout high school, then you're cut off from an entire world of possibilities. And if you are in the wrong ZIP code, you might not have access to those courses at all. Do you know what percentage of US high schools offer AP CS?

The US segregates pretty heavily starting the last year of middle school / first year of high school. You can jump tracks, but it's hard (and the same is true in Germany btw). Some tracks aren't even available to poor (esp rural) folks. Wealth determines which tracks are available. Within the set of available tracks, teacher recommendations play a big role in which path a student is suggested to pursue. Biases exist, and people will often follow whatever path their parents followed.

Although you can get into some college without honors/AP courses, those lower-tier colleges are typically closer to something like an applied university. With correspondingly similar differences in outcomes. So, in the USA, your ZIP code and teachers' decisions from freshman year of high school do have a large effect on your life path.

Germany's system isn't perfect, but "egalitarianism" isn't a strong defense of the US system relative to Germany. If anything, the US system is worse. The idea that living in some particular part of the city might mean you actually can't get a gymnasium-level education is insane in Germany, but AP deserts are a de facto reality in large swaths of the US.

At least in Germany it's explicit, people realize what's happening, it's at least somewhat merit-based, and your parent's ability to purchase expensive real estate doesn't play such a huge role.

Now, these 2, I won't say one's situation is better than the other but it is curious that both models of public education have their origin in Prussia/Germany and seem to be keeping the original 19th Century purposes of reducing social unrest.

I do see it is more difficult to keep a good level of education in the vast extension of the US with the current system. Seems it is in need of an overhaul but way deeper than AP courses. Like how would AP courses benefit a rural schoolkid other than maybe getting access to work in a city? Could we think there is any education for him to be a good farmer? (as 1 example, not sure if it is practical) Ideally, moonshot, he would be able to choose whichever path suited him best, whether more education or moving, etc...

> Like how would AP courses benefit a rural schoolkid other than maybe getting access to work in a city? Could we think there is any education for him to be a good farmer?

I think this perhaps misunderstands the typical life paths of rural students.

20% of the US population lives in rural counties, but only 2% of the population works in agriculture. And even that over-estimates the number of school children who will grow up to be farmers because a huge amount of the unskilled farm labor in the US is done by first generation migrants.

So the average rural schoolkid in the USA isn't going to work on a farm (and the ones that do will often be skilled workers or owners and will therefore go off and get agricultural degrees.)

The government runs a lot of jobs programs for rural areas. Things like state/federal prisons and military bases are intentionally placed in rural areas to provide employment opportunities. And of course national forests/parks tend to be in rural areas and provide a small but steady stream of jobs. We also explicitly subsidize hospitals and schools in those areas; the local tax/consumer base probably couldn't support those services on their own. So the government sector is the lifeblood of many small towns these days, at least as far as employment goes.

I believe that:

1. the entry barrier is not fair and designed for a very straight funnel you either fit through or not.

2. If you would open up an university even more and you don't allow anyone to missuse it (by sleeping at the university, playing games instead of listing, getting money while attending but not caring for it) it would not have any downsight but might allow one or other mind being part of it.

I also have the feeling that people which were able to go through a bad university, already don't mind it anymore and don't care to optimize because it worked for them. We are not a poor soceity anymore and we have plenty of experience and technology. Its the duty of the university to try to help as many people as possible to learn the stuff you learn at the university. University is being paid by all people.

Its also the reason why OpenAccess should be mandatory.

I leveraged my Tier II undergraduate into a tier I graduate school experience and am now a PI/lead at a large defense contractor.

If you are smart,diligent and stay out of too much trouble, you can take advantage of the cheaper/smaller state schools for undergraduate and push yourself where you want to go. It's not Princeton or MIT but there is still plenty of affordable opportunity (especially in tech and engineering).

Granted my college experience, didn't have the glamour of the division 1 football tailgates, or the excitement of a big city, but those things cost extra.

[0] It was in a small town ~30,000, so local 3 bedroom apartment was $550/mo (split 3 was was ~190 a person), and tuition was about $4000 a semester. Currently tuition is $5000/semester and you can get $5000/year from the lottery scholarship.

To be honest, for very mathematical subjects the lectures are almost useless. Exercises and practicing is what gives insights, determines the grades and tells which part of the lecture is actually important.

I'd be curious how it is in other subjects, like literature or history. But I assume without writing texts, one doesn't get very far there either.

1. Go to the lectures, sit upfront (where you are definitely not going to use your phone or fall asleep)

2. Get the book or script that corresponds to your lecture. Almost all math lectures follow some sort of book. If unsure, ask your professor.

Just reading ahead for half an hour prior to the lecture will make _such_ a difference, as you won’t be lost and can focus more on contexts than on definitions.

3. Feel free to ask questions. If you know where you are (see 2.) it’s much easier to know what’s wrong. Professors are human and sometimes forget to give some theorem they are using. It’s really easy (and frankly surreal at first) to be that guy that points out errors to the professor (in a respectful way!).

If your shy or you have the feeling, that the problem is indeed on your end – take notes of things that are unclear and ask them after the lecture. Professors usually love to talk about their subject!

4. Last but not least: Keep calm and carry on. It’s completely normal to feel overwhelmed at first ;)

And community -- both the other students, and the professors. To motivate each other, and to calibrate expectations, and to fill holes in each others' knowledge. That seems like the big (academic) reason to be physically on campus, and ideally at a selective place.

My impression is that the same would be true of (say) history, but I don't really know.

In philosophy however - which for me this semester is entirely online without any video chat whatever interaction - the in person lectures were highly valuable to me due to their nature on heavily relying on discussion. While I do have a paper here and there to write my understanding mostly comes from attending the lectures.

University was never designed for all people. What do you think the admissions process is for?

The community college system is for all people. It’s open enrollment and will work with you wherever you are in your path to learn.

Universities bring together bright, motivated people to work on things that are difficult to do by yourself or spread around.

That is what they’re for.

We overload the system to also educate people who just want to do their assignments and get out. Those people would greatly benefit from an online education I believe. There should definitely be more options than for-profit “colleges” that mostly rip you off. This is a service that is desperately needed.

"University is a place where teachers and students who are interested in a field meet to learn and research together."

I guess this is a problem of all people, then. You have a perfect opportunity of free time, networking and connection with your peers, if you are not leveraging it it's your own fault.

Online education is great and all, but the crowd that argues that it is the end-all-be-all of learning is missing a key element of the experience.

I think about how much I spent over those 4 years. I could have travelled around the world during that time and come out of it with a much richer experience.

Universities are like venture capital investments...it’s that one single class that will matter the most. 1/10 classes will have the biggest impact on your life...

It were the night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago for Walt Disney.

It was the calligraphy class for Steve Jobs.

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mass-for-shutins-the-gin-an...

It would be nice to have places like this open to the general public and not gated off like universities are. There are a lot of people who become interested in these things after university, people who didn't attend university that are interested in them, who were interested and involved in these things while they were in university but then drifted away from them, etc.

It seems like we'd be better off trying to encourage the public at large to continually improve (and also connect more with their community and improve civil society) than acting like all of this should only exist in a 4 year window that many people aren't even a part of.

I definitely think University should be open for all people and there is a lot of cool things you could do if you attracted morn people from different backgrounds.

When I ever move back to the countryside where I grew up, I definitely plan to start a Makerspace that combines an open workshop, a youth center (with tutoring), some low level research work.

Actually, this conversation has me excited to go do that :)

If you get in touch with me by email, I can send you some links (math book recommendations and Kolibri Learning Platform which is like the best thing ever - works totally offline on localhost).

Far too many people go through college for no other reason than to get some degree, doesn’t even matter what degree. And it’s no surprise, as it’s much harder to find a decent job without any old college degree.

The entire US education system needs an overhaul. You can't really fix our university system without making corresponding reforms in K-12.

A lot of it grounds out in trying to be overly egalitarian, realizing that doesn't work, and then hacking the system by introducing an honors/AP track. As a result, things are no longer egalitarian (the split between honors/AP and not-honors/AP happens freshman year or before). However, instead of having a gymnasium-like true high school liberal arts curriculum, we instead just moved some fairly boring college 101 courses into the last year or two high school. Which really isn't the right thing to do.

We should now make the split explicit. And then, instead of teaching mediocre university 101 courses to the honors ("gymnasium"-like) students, simply study the high school material but at a much deeper level in the "honors" track.

Then, the university system should split in a corresponding way, with non-honors students going to applied universities designed for them and honors students going to universities designed for them. NB: this split already de facto exists; there's a whole class of universities you can't get into without doing the honors/ap track in high school.

Which would those be? I don't have much insight into the "traditional" admissions system since I took quite a few years off from school between high school and college, but I didn't have any trouble at all getting into a well-regarded UC without any honors/AP classes. I did go to community college first, but I'd advise that for virtually everyone who's not funded by wealthy parents and interested in the social experience as much or more than the academic. No one needs to pay for the privilege of going to $TOP_SCHOOL just to do freshman level coursework.

Most of the top-tier R1 universities; i.e., ivies and similarly competitive institutions. Also, similarly competitive departments at otherwise less selective universities (e.g., UW's or CMU's CS programs. Getting into either university is considerably easier than getting into the CS program).

NB: I guess the sentence you quoted is slightly too strong. You can first go to community college and then transfer. But it's not the default path, and request some special effort. That's also true in Germany, by the way. You can go to University without going to a gymnasium.

Sure you can, have an opt-out model for students like they have in Germanic countries by the time you're in your mid-teens and apprenticeships in a various crafts and professions to help them into working Life. It works really well, and prepares them for a life in a ROBUST manufacturing Industry, especially now as the West is finally trying to decouple form the CCP's horrible Human Right's violating dependence and corruption.

I'd say outside of STEM there really isn't a need for most to go to a University campus, there really isn't. I often philosphized with grad students despite declining my honorary position in the department as I couldn't afford to deviate from my studies and debate moral ethics for fun, despite being promised a 'fast track' career in Law.

I could enjoy music, without the theory or the knowledge behind it, and began to bedroom DJ, eventually I even got to meet and know what would later become really famous EDM composers from the UK by going to clubs and just talking to them on the forums and eventually going on the decks myself in a club. Many of them super eager to share their knowledge, some were classically trained, and did Master Class series for free on Youtube!

I could go on, but I think most non-STEM degrees, and even the ones that don't require physical labs like Math or CS, can be moved to an Online model saving the resources for those that do require Laboratories and guided lectures and office hours for experimental designs and Scientific Journal publications.

I'm sorry to say but if you go to University to study Classics, Theology or Music Theory (or any of the Arts really) you really are doing yourself a great disservice if Knowledge is your real aim as so many more opportunities exists outside of academia. And you aren't stifled by a curriculum that forces you to limit your breadth or understanding of a subject in order to fit a paradigm of what pretty amounts to a churn system trying to maximize its profit model to the detriment of what an Education should be.

One of the most enriching classes I took was The Art of Listening to Music.

It was a grand tour through music history and practice up until the early 20th century. I learned how to understand the compositional elements that go into making music, and while the class was biased towards western classical music, by the time the quarter was over I found I had an appreciation for an incredibly wide variety of music, whereas prior I listened to only a few genres.

> I'd say outside of STEM there really isn't a need for most to go to a University campus,

Have you ever met someone who can do 0(ish) delay translation between languages? With no accent? A non-university program to teach that would end up looking like a university. To do it properly the translator needs deep cultural understanding of the target language, professional training in pronunciation, and a lot of practice.

And why are arts programs useless? Sure art collectives can form and group buy resources, hire models, pay for trips to destinations, and bring in more experienced artists to help teach technique, but at some point again you've recreated a university.

None of this even goes into the value of the core classes. Having people educated about their own country's history, and about world history, having an understanding of economic systems, geopolitics, and mathematics, these are all worthwhile endeavors. A University offers are curated selection of courses and subjects, with pedological methods that have, presumably, been tested over time (some over centuries!) to be effective.

Is the system perfect? Heck no, spiraling costs are evidence of that, but throwing away a system that has, at minimum, allowed for the past 2 centuries of dramatic growth of civilization, seems a bit hasty.

I have met quite a few professional translators that work for the European Union and all of them add a significant delay to translation. And accent.

You are probably referring to speaking different languages like a native, but that is not translating anything: When I speak Spanish(as a native speaker) I just think in Spanish, the same in any other language like German or French.

In fact if you speak for example in French or Italian you need to add some "music" to each phrase. Usually when you are translating you subconsciously carry those tones to the other languages.

E.g If I translate from French to Spanish I will carry the French intonation to Spanish even when I am native in Spanish.

My point is more that learning this skill is an academic pursuit that involves a lot of training.

There is a delay, (word ordering, brain time) but the top translators I've met have zero accent. (Most impressive was meeting someone, not a translator IIRC, who had not only gotten rid of their accent but learned a California American accent!)

But again, doing all of this involves a lot of study, from the biology/mechanics of speaking, to the deep cultural knowledge that is needed to translate idioms.

Yes. My friend from Croatia was born in Germany and worked as a Barista in the kitchen I took over when I lived in Istria, but he majored in Tourism in a tech school and learned to speak 5 languages seamlessly to get an advantage on his peers for work: German, Croatian (which is really 5 languages as it spans all the dialects of former Yugoslavia and with enough effort Czech can be understood, too), Italian, English and French. The first 4 he learned by the time he was 15, and French he learned online using things like chat-roulette, MSN chat and watching French TV.

He wasn't alone, either his roommates also spoke Swedish and Finnish as they often had seasonal work in Scandinavia for the skiing season. Its not as rare as you think, I personally speak 4 (5 if you include my broken mundart/Berndeutsch) but after returning to the US for several years now I can only speak English/Castilian/Italian (each with an accent) as I've gotten really rusty with no one to speak with.

My Japanese has gotten to the point where I'm having to force myself to at least listen to a few podcasts and watch anime to refresh as my vocabulary is completely abysmal now. I'd never say I was 100% fluent in any of them, as a language is an ever changing system of communication, but I could get by enough to work and communicate without ever taking a class and just immersing myself in the Culture/Country.

> And why are arts programs useless? Sure art collectives can form and group buy resources, hire models, pay for trips to destinations, and bring in more experienced artists to help teach technique, but at some point again you've recreated a university.

They aren't as an Intellectual pursuit, as a study in the University format where you're coaxed to have limit your scope and Interests is where I take issue with it. Especially when you consider its immense cost to do so, and for something that is so widely available online for free or at a library if you have the desire to search for it.

You can spend a lifetime on just the Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece, and some do, but you're often rushed and only get a superficial view of what was said or how they were viewed that gives you the illusion of an understanding of its role in Greek Society and are graded on how effectively you can repeat what was said to you.

The Arts as a means to better ones own edification is incredibly rewarding, and I too am a benefactor of it.

As I said earlier, I received honors in Philosophy for my work in a General Education class by my post-doc Professor and I was invited to start upper division courses under his guidance while I was awarded an opportunity to travel the country to debate Moral Ethics in a collegiate division--all while we were facing budget shortages in the Health Sciences which forced me to transfer to yet another University for the 3rd time. This, I'm told was another way to avoid going to Law School and just take the BAR exam and enter a career in Law, where they felt I'd be am effective litigator.

It may have been a missed opportunity to refine my oratory and rhetoric skills, but the truth is I needed to graduate for financial reasons in order to start paying off the debt I accrued mainly owed to my family and friends who helped me offset my ever growing expenses. Also, I had enough opportunities to do public speaking outside of University due to my personal interests.

> None of this even goes into the value of the core classes. Having people educated about their own country's history, and about world history, having an understanding of economic systems, geopolitics, and mathematics, these are all worthwhile endeavors.

Agreed, but these can be achieved rather well in compulsory K-12 Education if we reformed it. I used to speak with my Senior year English Lit. teacher in HS in my free time about various topics and he wished he could engage other students in class in the same way but he was limited and forced to follow the curriculum for testing standards and public funding.

His job depended on being able to maintain the status quo, and being so close to retirement he had given up trying. Things weren't that much different in University either, the only ones that challenged the system were those who already had tenure, had published journals/books and were close to retiring and didn't need to play the game any more, in my experience.

That's one of the biggest issues with Education in the US: teaching toward the exam is the constraint, not lack of funds, resources, knowledgeable teachers or material to share. The US has outspent most of the West in Education for very little in return for most of my existence--and after my personal experiences in school and those shared by Gatto I think that's by design and not a flaw.

> with pedological methods that have, presumably, been tested over time (some over centuries!) to be effective.

Pedagogy is a very loaded word with many implications about how Education is formatted, specifically in a regimented conditioned format; the most prevalent one being the Prussian model which I will refer you to read books by John Taylor Gatto [1] who was awarded the best teacher award in NY who's views on formal education in the US (and I'd argue in Europe and Australia as well) are far more valid than my own anecdotal ones and reflect the discord and division the US based class system relies on.

> allowed for the past 2 centuries of dramatic growth of civilization, seems a bit hasty.

You do realize that the Hellenic era in Athens, with institutions like the Lyceum and other public forums in the Agora for philosophizing proved to have the most literate and Educationally engaged society/Polis for most of Western History? One that has withstood not just centuries but millennia. The fact that we still reference much of what was taught back then in Law and in certain Sciences (not Aristotle's stuff on Biology of course, but on topics like Math, the Nature of Matter and to a certain degree Astronomy) and still holds up today should be enough of refutation for what is and isn't capable of withstanding the test of Time.

I think we've deviated so far from what an Education was in the West and what you're describing (Prussian Pedagogy) is exactly what has many feeling so resentful for being sent to a sort of mind prison where young minds are forced to do repetitive tasks, in a designated manner that was optimized for a system that simply will not exist in their lifetime--expendable workers for tedious manual labor in factories.

I'll agree it has certain benefits, the US space program may have been a byproduct of Ex-Nazi Scientists in things like Rocket Propulsion, but the Engineers and Techs that followed at NASA for the Apollo Shuttle program were mainly US educated and despite the Soviet Union probably had having more People in STEM per capita, the US had a less State based oppressive system that favored and ultimately allowed them to win the Space Race. And this ultimately would pave the way for Private Space Companies like SpaceX that quite honestly would not be possible anywhere else on Earth. And as ITAR requirements demand, most outside of the first hires when it was created, are products of the US Education system as you must be a US citizen to obtain clearance.

But this is a rare exception, one I do admit it exists.

I think the best thing to do is we admit that formal education has limited purposes for much of the populace, and the sooner we can free them from the drudgery of said tasks and help them dedicate their time and efforts to more fruitful endeavors that benefit society as a whole the sooner we can stop feeling the World is going to end every second because we have people engaged in sectors that help curtail those imminent dangers.

It's already been happening, you need only look at things like Extinction Rebellion, which was already going strong in a pre-COVID world, because young people are mortified of the state of the planet that the previous generations will have left them with, and they'd rather boycott school and protest than ignore that the World they're inheriting is terrifying. I bet if you found better outlets for their energy that street demos and used the funds they use for public schooling they'd be way better off planting trees and focusing on renewable energy, and recapturing wasted materials in certain Industries under the the proper supervision they'd be way better off in every possible respect. And probably create more sustainable forms of employment in the process they can dedicate themselves too.

When I was a farm manager in Hawaii I'd get applications from all over the World of all ages for an unpaid internship, unfortunately because of budget constraints I could only select 2-3 outside of Hawaii because of the program/grants we had with the Department of Ag.

Personally speaking after seeing the impact Gretta Thurenburg's work has had amongst th eyouth, especially in a post-COVID World where these very institutions have broken down, it has probably shifted an entire Generation's attitude of the entire Establishment and it will force them to collectively seek answers and look for change that simply is incompatible with modern Formal Education. Many felt their Future depended on it, now they were forced to accept and see how these institutions have failed them.

1: https://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/ref=dp...

What people don't know is how good this stuff is, that they can actually get it done in parallel to the classes and how rewarding and educational it is.

This is definitely something where kids with parents who went to uni have a benefit, since they will know more about how to navigate the system and about things like this.

I didn't have this benefit, my parents never went to uni, but we had a lot of books and dad taught me to poke at everything :)

In fact, at my uni there is fear that going online will result in students deferring for a year, since undergraduate surveys are overwhelmingly in favor of in person class, to the point of not paying tuition for online offerings and extending their degree plan as a result.

Everyone has good and bad breaks. The mistake is thinking that we can somehow create the same experience for everyone.

The entire American experiment is based on individualism. We have to have some responsibility in our lives.

I wonder if over the long term there might be a way to replace that experience too, because I agree with the OP that it’s the most valuable part.

I didn't mean that the classes were a waste of time, but I wish I had started doing extracurricular stuff earlier.

It is true that the clubs usually do not have a lot of use for the 1. Semester people, as they don't have a lot of skills yet, but the bigger clubs have their own "course" system and will definitely invest in helping you develop.

I actually think all my classes were useful and I am happy I had them. It just that they were not what was fun, motivating and special about my time at uni.

My space engineering class was taught by an actual astronaut, so that was a definite highlight.

Edit: saw below you said Technical University of Munich

Would be great if that would be the case though.

I did work 8h per week through roughly all my time at uni. My grades sucked, tough. And some people had to work more to get enough money. I actually had enough help from my parents to need to work, but I liked the extra cash and experience.

Helps that uni in Germany is basically free.

Most of the time you could find an unused computer to work on your own thing. Frequently you could find several contiguous ones for you and some friends. Some of the most capable people in my class were pulling B-C grades because they spent so much time working on their own projects instead of cramming for tests.

I had hardware problems for four classes, but only one of those was a CS class, and by then I'd written enough code that I'd just shell into a machine to get a rough draft to compile, then spend a couple hours in front of the box debugging. Get an internship or programming job on campus, kids. Programming assignments are a lot easier once you've written real code.

1. failed to start a startup about hardware tutorials in local languages

2. failed at productionizing a propeller display, they are pretty popular popular now.

3. failed at productionizing a gas sensors with high resolution

The list of failures go on and on actually. But the real utility I had was the nice cozy university bubble where failure of projects isn't really ... accounted for.

Something that can cost so much, and require such a huge time commitment shouldn't have such a high failure rate of people who fail to "figure out how to use it".

It was the opportunities I had and the people I met who enabled me to have this experiences.

It's meant to be motivating to other youngsters to go try. That's why I sound a bit cheerleads as well ;)

I think higher education is an opportunity shape a person during a crucial stage of their development as a young adult. It's a time when you get the opportunity to get exposed to many of different ideas, views and beliefs; to learn how to have a healthy debate and formulate a well-founded argument; it's a time to reflect on what you have learned thus far and what you will do with it in the near and far future. It's a time of start off discovering the world away from your parents and your guardians.

To me, that's what higher education is about. It's that phase between adolescence and becoming an independent adult in your own right.

I don't think that's something you can ever acquire by passively consuming content via the Internet. Some of the good and critical things do take time to learn and aren't really quantifiable.

Not sure if that applies or even how the system works, just a thought

I agree with you that most do not take advantage of the opportunities that exist on some University campuses; personally speaking I had to do my Flow Cytometry training at the Scrip's Research Institute (where several Nobel Laureates were on staff) because my campus only had one FACScan on campus and it was often reserved months ahead of schedule. That the only time I ever sought anything from what my University offered and it failed to deliver. (I won't even talk about how hard it was to get into the lower/upper division classes for my Major, either.)

And while this ended up being a good opportunity for me in the long run as it was both free for me as a local student it also helped me network for job interviews in the Industry, the truth this was happening at the same time I was working 40+ hours in catering as prep cook/chef. I couldn't afford to eat outside of work due to tuition/books obscenely high rent and had to stop attending on daily basis and set up a study group where we recorded lecture on voice recorders because gas shot up to $5+/gallon and many of us were struggling to keep up with expenses as we all worked.

Hell, I showed up to my Microbiology final after an 11 hour service at a lunch and dinner banquet for AMD only hours before the exam and I had to tell my professor I needed to have a few drinks during the exam just to stay awake and he reluctantly accepted as he understood what I had to do for work.

I think you HIGHLY underestimate how broken this situation really is because of your idealized experience, and you assume it is a choice to have to have our attention so grossly divided solely because of the economic distress it demands of some students.

And this is mainly because University can charge what they do and has never come back to reasonable costs and they ultimately act as the gate keepers into most Industries and force you to contort your Life/Work to suit its demands unless you can afford to stay in University indefinitely.

I hated University, mainly because 75% of it was a total waste of my Time, 15% was useful albeit dated (experimental designs based on 19 century reactions that have been refined and outsourced by Industry for a reason), and the other 10% was actually really worth it under really passionate professor(s) who actually gave a damn about the subject they taught.

That's a horrible ratio for anything with such a high cost, in fact I saw exactly 1 single slide (that they even glossed over) in my entire undergrad for what I'd eventually do in my profession as a Lab Scientist in Diagnostics.

This model has to be disrupted.

Also, I didn't need a school to teach me how to wrench on cars.

I began when I was 11 and even had a stint in professional motorsports as a privateer driver and worked on my own chassis while I was in University where ASE shop foremans and Race Team chief mechanics were recruiting mechanics from the pits during the bubble era; Motorsports was actually my desired profession and University was my plan B before the crises dried up any sponsorship opportunities in the financial crises.

I still ended up in the Auto Industry working for VW/BMW/Nissan after I left the Sciences because of my experience back then. Had the Industry not been so wasteful and broken I might have stayed but I chose to go into Fintech and Culinary instead.

My point being, is that University, and its severe costs, do not reflect the ever-changing Job Market (assuming it ever did) they act as vanguard for and for the costs and time demands it cannot be justified. Much less when you have such blatant corruption [1] staring at you in the face.

Had I not been so multi-faceted in my skill-set I would have been like most of my Millennial cohort with tons of unpayable student debt and ever diminishing prospects in Life instead of the immensely rich career(s) that has spanned 4 different Industries that I can move between depending on the project(s). I'm a total outlier, and to be honest even though my opportunity at SpaceX in post COVID World didn't materialize and I have to go back to Supply Chain/Logistics in the end I still cannot believe most of it actually happened given what a f'd situation I had having gone to University and then being thrown into the abysmal Job Market in 2009. I really feel for those currently graduating in this Market, I really do. They're simply cannon fodder and will soon be forgotten in the news cycle just like we were back then.

They'll know just how expendable they were seen as by this system really soon as they won't be able to pay their debts, which had already exceeded a Trillion+ Bubble in the US prior to COVID.

1: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-college-admissions...

University is an opportunity to do rather than just learn out of a book.