Universities should be more than toll gates

I am always astonished by the range of people who claim their college degree was useless, citing rote memorization and bad classes. I had an entirely different experience and so did most people I know. University gave me the opportunity to talk to world-class researchers during office hours, to discuss ideas with my peers and have them either validated or critiqued by experts. Sure, all the information is available online (which is a miracle into itself) but without frequent contact with professors and mentors I wouldn’t have even known where to look or what existed in the field. University, for me, was a place where I was apprenticing full-time under highly experienced people, surrounded by people my age who also were doing the same. Years of self-teaching didn’t get me anywhere close to what a few semesters of expert mentorship got me. I never felt I had to memorize anything: exams consisted of system design or long programming projects or optimization challenges. I loved it, and I’m not sure if people went to different universities or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.

> or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.

It's this. Most undergraduate students do not go to office hours, try to get to know their instructors, ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable, so yes, it's understandable why many would consider higher ed the same as secondary ed: rote memorization and "bad" classes.

> University gave me the opportunity to talk to world-class researchers during office hours

Neither world-class researchers or office hours exist in most Universities.

"Office hours" is entirely an American (and maybe British?) thing.

Thank you; I feel similarly and wish I could go back as an adult to take even more advantage of all the incredible opportunities. Having four years to dedicate to learning new things in depth -- with zero pressure to take shortcuts so that the lessons become economically useful sooner -- was more of a privilege than I understood at the time.

And then of course, the people I met there have shaped my life and career in wonderful ways ever since. The sheer level of diversity among students and faculty is unlike anything I've experienced elsewhere. Many of them are still my lifelong friends (or in one case my wife :)) and others have opened professional doors to me 15 years later and counting.

But also, I went to a very well known and respected university with sufficient endowment and financial aid that it shouldn't be functioning as a "toll gate" regardless. I know things are not this rosy at a lot of universities.

If you’re in an American University, then the professors will most likely be top researchers in some particular niche, and they will likely have office hours. I think the “college is a toll” argument specifically applies to American universities that are essentially pay to play.

That’s not true. Source: University of Warsaw. Poland. Not Illinois. I’ve had office hours with world-class mathematicians. Those office hours were required of every lecturer and TA.

> … world-class researchers …

These people can’t possibly be at every university, let alone colleges, community colleges, or technical schools.

> … rote memorization and bad classes …

Not every school will be good. There are at least three post-secondary schools within driving of me that take the minimum required curricula as a script and offer nothing more than the bare minimum required to get certification, accreditation, and receive that sweet state and federal budget money.

I can’t imagine how someone with a good or great post-secondary education is confused that this would be the situation for millions of students.

> … Most undergraduate students do not go to office hours, try to get to know their instructors, ask follow-up questions

This was actively discouraged by the instructors in the school I attended. Not by policy, but by behavior - passive-aggressively belittling students for not “getting” the subject matter, showing a complete lack of interest in reciprocating any amount of getting to know the instructor.

> … ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable …

A failure of secondary education and students’ families.

I was talking with a professor yesterday who claimed his students don't ask questions any more on Piazza. They used to, but now they go to ChatGPT which is always perky and ready to answer. Plus, there's no shame in asking a dumb question as there can be in class or on Piazza.

He says it's only a matter of time before the students realize they don't need him. Or need to pay tuition.

Most people don’t go to the university to learn, they go to get a diploma. If you don’t pay tuition they will not give you a diploma.

And we’ve all been sold a bill of goods on the necessity of diplomas and degrees. Because businesses have been sold a bill of goods on the quality of employees with diplomas and degrees.

Within at least the last 15 years, the paper provided by a school is no guarantee of better pay - but that’s how high schoolers are convinced to go into excessive debt for attending post-secondary schools.

We're already there with the "do my own research" crowd.

Im not a huge defender of college and lean towards it being mostly a waste, but the other extreme is problematic.

> the paper provided by a school is no guarantee of better pay

Perhaps not, but the lack of that paper IS a guarantee of worse pay.

At a top university in Scandinavia, lecturers will rarely respond (or even read) emails from students.

"Office hours" did not exist, but TAs attend scheduled labs/exercises.

Professors were even under instruction to not engage with students outside of scheduled and budgeted time.

Did you learn about selection bias in university? Maybe you went to a good one, but there are far, far more dogshit schools than good ones.

Just a few years ago my husband had all of his tuition refunded (and degree cancelled) because the school was so bad and so scammy that the government had to step in and force them to refund everyone.

The reality is that higher education in the USA is a for-profit venture, and like all for-profit ventures in the US, the number one explicit goal is to extract as much profit as possible by any means possible. Providing quality education and world-class faculty is completely disjoint and incompatible with that goal.

Most people in this country are not so privileged as you to attend one of our dwindling number of good schools. Everyone else has a predatory institution that technically meets the requirements to offer the degrees they claim. Usually, anyway.

My experience has been there is no correlation between skill at teaching and skill at research; maybe the two are even anti-correlated. To some extent, this is an artifact of the selection process for professors, but I think it's partly because there's a real tradeoff between spending effort on research vs teaching.

In some cases, an excellent researcher even has cogent papers but is absolutely abysmal at lecturing and in person teaching skills.

Peers are very important, but from talking to others, it's harder to know where you will get good peers than you would think. Even 1st tier universities will have majors dominated by students whose primary interest is in maximum grades with minimum work and where cheating is rampant. You've got to either get lucky (I did) or put in some leg work to find smart students who are actually interested in learning and doing things right.

I think how much rote memorization is encouraged or required is strongly dependent on the field. Pre-med students will sometimes memorize their way through calculus; a professor I knew once described it as "grimly impressive".

Teaching is a skill like any other. While I don't think the two are anti-correlated, you're going to find good teachers and bad teachers, no matter how good they may be at their other duties.

And I would gather you find more bad teachers than good, but that's true of many spaces from IT to sports.

Some for-profit companies build better education than schools. And I don't think it's about profit since public schools are bad too