I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn. Now I feel like I'm in a position where I can appreciate academic material and concepts because I understand how they relate to the real world. Please give me those advanced graph algorithm, database, and real analysis classes that I couldn't appreciate 15 years ago due to a lack of real-world experience.
Far too many have just been screwed over time and time again from professors who reuse old (usually outdated) course content and whose lectures don't actually add anything to the textbook or slides.
Anecdote time: I took a class where a module taught Python 2.7 in Fall 2021, and I know it was taught again in Spring '22. My professor literally read the slide content to us in lectures, that was it. I found out that a professor wrote all the course content in 2017 and it's just been passed around by all the professors who got assigned to teach that class. The same assignments have been used, and apparently they've been published to every "student assistance" platform around.
There's good stuff there!
I think a big part of this is split attention, but I also don't feel comfortable taking 1-2 years off my job in the middle of my career just to study.
You love the idea of doing something you’re not doing now. I see further down in another comment, you dismissed the idea of learning from free online resources.
If you were in your 30s and in school, you’d love to be able to go off in the and work with your hands — or something else to distract yourself.
I'd love to have the "college experience" again now, but this time with a focus on learning instead of a focus on getting good grades. Focusing on good grades (over learning) is the rational choice as a young student and I don't regret doing so, but now my goals are different.
When you're faced with a public scandal at your hands as CEO after you've cheated your way up the ladder, are you going to admit fault and take a loss for the sake of society or are you going to make "the right choice" for the business and double down on your deception?
I think it's a combination of culture and every person's upbringing which sets priorities on students to waste time cheating. They have to be there because of expectations either from parents or society, but they don't really want to be there. Students who aren't trying are just going through the motions and will take the path of least resistance which is cheating.
You said it yourself.
> college is very limited in how much it can prepare you for a real job.
The goal isn't to be well prepared for a job. The goal is to get the job. For most students, including myself while I was there, university is a massive signalling exercise. I just cared about the magic combo that would lead to a good paying job.
I have also had the experience where a professor interviewed me and one other student because our homework appear too similar. That experience reinforced my impression that cheating is a risky venture and I want none of it. (Also, leaving printouts of your code around is extremely high risk if helping someone to cheat is roughly as bad as cheating at your university).
When people were offered a nearly complete fresh slate, they still cheated. And then plagiarized.
He at length describes how much of his class were blowing off almost every aspect of the class; not attending lectures, skipping assignments, almost never attending his office hours.
Many of them openly say in the whatsapp chat that they didn't do reading, classwork, or study.
This is not even remotely close to behavior of people participating in a high-stakes all-or-nothing, if-I-don't-graduate-I-am-fucked-for-life situations.
In my state college they had zero tolerance policy. You caught cheating, you're out.
have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job.
After a couple years, get a job at a small startup where you and 5 other people write the entire product. From there you will be a far stronger candidate just about anywhere with a real engineering culture.
My GPA was fairly reasonable, but I worked through college, so I got a position at a large name brand company. Drove me nuts after having worked at places where I had written more code in a single year than most of the lifer's had written in their entire career. That is when I went the startup route, and basically did small companies for ~20 years until wife/kids/stability drove me into the arms of a mid sized company where I only work ~40h/week. Now I write code on the weekends to keep my mind active.
[Edit]
To state something more on topic, I never once even considered cheating in school. I don't think it ever entered my mind, even when I was in danger of flunking out.
I sympathize with the reason why students cheat, but I can't see that those reasons are the same as what you say. You don't need to attend classes to learn the content nor display mastery - I appreciate a good syllabus for that reason where you know what is expected and can learn on your own time. I liked the approach the author of the article took for that reason. But none of this requires cheating.
I can see why this would lead students to cheat, but this looks to me like a strawman in addition to victim blaming (on part of the prof).
Everybody expects the fresh college grads to be fairly green, but you can really tell when someone has no clue about even the basic principals of their job, the one they supposedly have a degree in.
So the danger is having a good GPA but then washing out in job interviews with real companies. "Wow, a 4.0 in CS from CMU! So why do you seem to be completely mystified by Fizzbuzz?"
Your knowledge and skill level is the most important thing they will evaluate you for, for the three SW jobs that I've gotten nobody asked me for my college degree let alone my grades, including a FAANG-type company.
Glad that I at least dropped out when it stopped being fun. Highly recommend dropping out after ~2-3 years if you can get away with it.
You pay for school, do whatever you want with it.
None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.
If you have more information on the source of your confidence, please do share.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...
Also when I was teaching pre-covid I always assumed my undergraduates would cheat if I gave them anything cheatable. Even if they're cheating though some small percentage gets through and sticks with some small percentage of students.
My mentors always said thats who you should teach to, and to assume good intentions with the rest. It takes a long time to settle into an adult brain.
In several interviews we even went over some of the actual subject matter from some of the more interesting courses, and I was able to leverage algorithms from my genetic engineering undergrad work during some whiteboarding.
In general, cheating isn’t common in college.
This was simple game theory during the pandemic.
College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt totaling up to hundreds of thousands of dollars because you know that it will net you more money in the future. Not cheating is completely risking any hope of financial independence you can ever have for your entire life.
Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat? You take an extremely minimal risk (most profs don't have any clue, or do not care about cheating at all) to avoid a much greater risk (you not getting good grades and potentially never getting any return on your lifelong 6 figure deep debt).