Re: College is useless?
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 9:54 pm
I definitely agree that college gives you a lot of opportunities in terms of job fairs and internships and friends who are going into the same field and may be in a position to recommend you for a job etc. And employers do tend to screen employees by their college degree.
My own experience with college is that it was very inefficient. Let's define the efficiency of a class as (stuff learned) / (work put in). Obviously, you want to maximize this ratio. But professors are lazy, and have more important things like research to attend to, so students get screwed. I spent 6 years in college getting a master's and I could have learned everything that I learned in college in 1 year with a private tutor, easy.
I'm little torn on required classes. On the one hand, I think that a well rounded education is definitely a good thing.. but then most college students treat required classes as blowoff classes. Skip class, turn in the homework online, cram the night before tests, forget everything the next day. Get a grade, yay! ^___^ It's pretty hard to force someone to learn something that they don't care about. And if they do care about it they'll probably learn it better on their own anyway. Read a few books, read a few blogs, talk to some people who already know it. College students probably could learn a lot by going to professor's office hours and asking questions or discussing theory, but who has the time or motivation to do that!? lol.
Hm.. perhaps this is a business opportunity.. we've got a problem involving the waste of lots of money and no one's really solved it yet... some sort of tutoring corporation could gain enough reputation as turning out excellent people and take a nice slice of the job market.
My own experience with college is that it was very inefficient. Let's define the efficiency of a class as (stuff learned) / (work put in). Obviously, you want to maximize this ratio. But professors are lazy, and have more important things like research to attend to, so students get screwed. I spent 6 years in college getting a master's and I could have learned everything that I learned in college in 1 year with a private tutor, easy.
I'm little torn on required classes. On the one hand, I think that a well rounded education is definitely a good thing.. but then most college students treat required classes as blowoff classes. Skip class, turn in the homework online, cram the night before tests, forget everything the next day. Get a grade, yay! ^___^ It's pretty hard to force someone to learn something that they don't care about. And if they do care about it they'll probably learn it better on their own anyway. Read a few books, read a few blogs, talk to some people who already know it. College students probably could learn a lot by going to professor's office hours and asking questions or discussing theory, but who has the time or motivation to do that!? lol.
Hm.. perhaps this is a business opportunity.. we've got a problem involving the waste of lots of money and no one's really solved it yet... some sort of tutoring corporation could gain enough reputation as turning out excellent people and take a nice slice of the job market.