throwaway4612
I had two courses that, as part of their curriculum, had a couple lectures to teach me how to write a resume. One of them was a 200-level English Technical Writing course; the other was a 300-level CS course. I had never had an actual job, yet somehow I wrote a better resume than my peers; many of them completely half-assed theirs. In the speech/comms 101 course, apparently I was the only one who had ever synthesized an argument or done any sort of critical thinking prior to that class.
I frequently got told that it was unusual for me, the CS student, to be doing well in various courses. My physics E&M prof asked me how I was able to do so well, better than the engineers and physics students. My math profs asked me why I was taking math courses for fun.
CS courses generally were a joke; a prof told me he had been trying to figure out how/where he was failing in his teaching content, until I showed up and it was clear that the problem was not with the content, but with the quality of students. I am pretty certain the majority of folks who took the C programming course still don't know how to work with pointers.
In-state tuition was still ~$15-20k/yr.
I got quite frustrated by my peers. They just didn't seem to care about the content or technology. I'd internally think "why are you even here then in this degree program"? It was clearly frustrating to the profs, it was frustrating to me, etc. At the time, my peers would especially be loud/demanding that the profs put in more work in education, and to some degree struck me as rather entitled. I would tinker a bit beyond what was required in the curriculum / syllabus, primarily because it was fun and interesting, not motivated by any sort of desire to get ahead, etc.
The state of education is not great I agree, but imo somehow we have created generations of students who don't care or are less able to do critical thinking, and certainly that impedes and/or unravels the progress any educator could hope to do.