US film schools are more like the shady private film schools in Europe, which focus more on practical tasks and where you have to pay everything by yourself or by external sponsors. Teachers are horrible. A bit like in art schools or theatre, bit more extreme on the financial side. Less harassment though.

I mean, in Vienna (Haneke) they only take about 8 a year, sometimes only 2. They take only the best, where they see they will make it.

Majoring in film making, writing, and most non-stem degrees is a quick way to be deep in debt working minimum wage jobs. Even business (my degree) is a waste of money for most kids.

I am telling my kids to major in computer science or architecture, then they can mess around with fun stuff in their free time.

It then becomes nearly impossible (for me, anyway) to disassociate what you do with who you are. When times are rough, it's personal. When mistakes happen, it's personal. And when you score a big win or are sitting atop an awesome opportunity... the dial just gets turned up another notch.

Taking up gardening (in truth, being taken up by gardening) has been a huge sanity saver, but it's still hard to not look back and feel like I lost my way over time: what was an insatiable curiosity gave way to the expediency of being a paid performer. I still love it, but just not like before, especially after the shift ends.

It's not limited to the film/movie world either... this is the unfortunate truth of most MFA programs: they don't launch careers, unless you're looking to become a MFA teacher yourself.

I get what the quote is trying to imply, (and why) but it's totally backwards.

Obviously this is just anecdotal and probably changes at the Olympics levels and other places where the learner competency and affinity is already high.

When I got to university that was confirmed in spades (and I was glad to actually get something for my money, because the subject was "useless", I got great teaching, great feedback on my work, etc.). Obviously, business was the absolute worst (one professor taught a course on investing, he literally wrote a book on investing, he left at the same time I graduated to run a fund...just before the pandemic, he got fired because his fund was down 10-20%/year, he was one of the worst-performing fund managers in the UK at the time), stuff like law was pretty decent (although most people who studied law never became lawyers either, I don't understand how because the school was number #1 ranked for law...after I left, I saw quite a few lawyers who got a job due to family...so it might be that), and even CS had a great reputation in teaching but the actual linkages with industry were non-existent, so the teachers taught the theory and things they thought were fun to teach (lots of students struggled, I spoke to startups who said they had trouble recruiting, even though this school turned out hundreds of grads every year, because they all just went to larger companies that didn't require actual development skills).

It isn't the case everywhere but I think the idea that university is required for success outside university is misleading, particularly for high school students. A lot of the knowledge is definitely very useful but life outside university tends to be about things that aren't in any books. University is orthogonal to life.

Outside of certain subjects where the ability to work is tied to the education, university is mostly about signalling that you're able to learn stuff. Note I didn't say that you learn stuff.

To the extent that I "learned" stuff at uni, it was quite superficial and due to the sheer quantity it ended up getting very exam focused. So people would learn how to numerically solve PDEs, but only enough to pass the exams, which of course could not test this knowledge in a sensible way. The format of answering five questions in three hours by hand while wearing formal academic clothes just isn't suited to how a lot of these things work.

There were a load of subjects like this, where the content itself was interesting, but you just had to do a load of context switching because of the nature of the degree. One exam is PDEs, another is hydro, thermo, electronics, and so on.

Nobody would be unable to learn any one of them, but many people found it soul crushing to do all of them. And that's a shame, because in the world of work I've never needed to dive deep on 6 or 8 subjects at once. At most it's one or two broad topics, done with sane tools, judged in a sane way.

So at the end of university I'd indexed a bunch of knowledge in engineering and business. Useful, but still only scratching the surface of what is in those fields. It also gives you a beginner level bullshit filter, which is maybe even more useful than the survey of knowledge. You won't give time to the crackpot who claims to have a perpetual motion machine, because although you might not have all of thermo down, you'll have a very good intuition that such machines aren't possible, and you will know which arguments sound right in the field. You might give the emdrive a bit of an investigation though.

The BS filter is especially useful in the social sciences. I did Economics and Management as part of my degree, and while I don't have a cohesive theory of how everything works, I can spot an overconfident crackpot from a mile away. People who oversimplify how the economy works, people who think they can explain it all, people who say they know what will happen. You will know where the weaknesses are in arguments simply by having read the back-and-forth.

As for the real value of university, I think it's hard to spot. I have a suspicion that if we forced a reduction in places, we'd be just as well off. All the knowledge that you're taught is free for everyone to read, and in the modern world you can fund the best explanation of anything on the internet. All those intuitions I mention above can be learned by anyone who bothers to do so. My working theory is that it's a form of intellectual hazing. Prove that you want to be part of this group (intellectuals).

Where previously someone reasonably smart and eloquent could be found at the end of high school, that person now needs to complete university to get a chance to do a whole swath of roles. So the person who could have taken a professional job at 18 now has to be 22 to get the same job. We can tell because there's firms like PWC who have a program to hire exactly such people. Or for instance I had a private banker in Switzerland who started as an apprentice doing work/study, that seemed to work perfectly fine and seems economically sensible. I once worked with a talented guy who didn't have a degree, and he had self-confidence issues because he didn't have a fancy Oxford degree. Others I've met have felt compelled to go back to uni after years of doing a job.

George Bernard Shaw

Being able to do, and being able to teach aren't separate. I got value because my professors could teach and do, they were experts. If you can't do, don't teach either...just do...something else.

Teaching seems to attract all the dregs from society.