Sometimes, however, attendance policies are also benevolent paternalism: I say this because I teach English comp at the University of Arizona. Students who don't show up tend to miss a lot of the material and don't do especially well—hence the attendance policy. And the stuff that's done in class (discussion, close reading, sentence construction, and so forth) is stuff that can't really be made up outside of class—as I tell students, if you could do it at home, I'd say, "Do it at home" and I'd do something else in class.

Yeah, there's a correlation != causation problem with weak students who tend to miss class being the ones who most need it, but the overall idea of class doing things that can't really be done otherwise still holds. There are also a certain number of students who say or believe, "I'm already a good writer; I don't need to take a composition class." Out of the ~300 I've taught, that's probably been true of one to five, or so, but far more seem to have believed it.

A school like the one listed sounds great. It also sounds like it'll work best for the highly motivated. One problem with the HN posts about how universities are wasteful, unnecessary, and so on, is that a pretty small percentage of people are willing to do university-caliber work without the structure of the university. HN posters tend to forget about the other 97% of the world. I tend to see them, and so do a lot of other teacher / prof types.

I find this very believable and would like to add that some people learn best by reading about a subject, some by performing exercises, some by listening and conversing and for some it's a mix of all of those. I wouldn't expect the typical 18 year old college freshman to be self-aware enough to know this about himself. That's not to say it's impossible, but I think for the majority, it's something they still need to discover. Graded attendance gives them an incentive to explore this.

From what I've noticed, the more you understand the subject, the better you learn from reading on your own and the less you learn from exercices, listening or conversing. I think the cause is that there is a difference in focus: With books, you can identify the things you already understand ( as-is or as an analogy to something you understand ) and focus on the new stuff, so the more you understand, the better you focus on the new stuff. The problem is that when you don't understand lots of things well enough, your concentration is not focused, so you end up with a superficial understanding and forgetting a lot as you go. The solution comes in the form of exercices, which provide an artifial focus, having your full attention until you understand them very well, which is good if you're a beginner, but redundant if you are experienced.

Baloney. It is a mechanism to keep the lower half of the bell curve in class and absorbing some level of information.

You are too charitable. I think it's a medieval tradition, dating back to the days when lecturers were real authorities on the courses they were teaching.

I'm not saying that lecturers are no longer competent at the stuff they teach, or that they aren't great authorities on something, but they don't have the edge that they used to.

If you want to understand the cutting edge of a field, you go to conferences, and listen to top researchers talking about their field. Perhaps that's what undergraduate lecturers used to be. But research gets more specialized and eclectic every year, while the foundations become more firmly bedded down.

Undergrad education is mostly a solved problem. Courses don't change much from year to year, except the useless faddish ones. New research gradually seeps down, but it's rare that you need an expert to bring it all together.

I'm speaking from experience.

edit:

I was a TA for early CS classes. Sometimes we took attendance, sometimes we didn't. When we did, more people showed up, and more people passed. Teachers have a responsibility to teach both sides of the bell curve, and generally pressuring people to learn helps the lower side pass. I understand that it's kind of old fashioned and authoritarian from the perspective of a top student, but it really winds up better for the bottom students in general.

Often it's required of the prof as well. Mandating classroom attendance is a way for colleges to retain students through two means:

1): Making N% of the grade attendance based means that students have to do even less well to fail the course.

2): For a student who would need to learn the material to pass, there is a learning benefit to attending the class. Moreover, more people in a lecture hall is going to create an impression that you do need to show up to pass.