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Universities should be more than toll gates

(www.waliddib.com)
140 points wdib | 3 comments | 21 Sep 25 07:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.806s | source
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Peritract ◴[21 Sep 25 13:08 UTC] No.45322388[source]▶
> Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too. Then I caught myself, realizing I was being melodramatic about a decade-old grievance.

This is incredibly self-indulgent. You were given opportunities you refused to engage with and are now continuing that pattern by blaming everyone else for your failures.

University has no value beyond credentialism only if you don't put any in.

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thunky ◴[21 Sep 25 13:26 UTC] No.45322521[source]▶
> You were given opportunities you refused to engage with

That's not what I read at all. They went to a good university and got good grades. They did what they were supposed to do.

Then they later realized how little of value the actual education was.

The university missed an opportunity to educate them, not the other way around. The student is not responsible for having a bad teacher.

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1. Peritract ◴[21 Sep 25 14:19 UTC] No.45322975[source]▶
They got good grades by panic cramming the night before exams. I've had lots of students like that (I've even been a student like that) and in every case one thing is true: they would have accomplished more with less effort if they'd focused on learning to understand rather than trying to treat everything as a memorisation task.
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2. wdib ◴[21 Sep 25 16:13 UTC] No.45323992[source]▶
I think there's a misunderstanding on your behalf. My chief complaint was about the poor educational quality of universities in my country (Jordan). Forcing students to study 5 years instead of the standard 4, or teaching you mandatory subjects irrelevant to your major are not things where I could have accomplished more with less.

Not going to university was not an option. It would have been the only way to guarantee work in my region.

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3. Peritract ◴[21 Sep 25 17:08 UTC] No.45324608[source]▶
> I had some of the highest grades in my class, but this came at the expense of learning very little about my actual courses. Getting good grades exclusively depended on your rote memorization skills the night before an exam. Not only do I remember nothing from what I studied, I detested every minute of every subject I took there. Passing subjects was significantly more important than understanding them.

I don't think I'm misunderstanding anything; you've been very clear. This is not a description of someone who was let down, but of someone who never had any interest in learning.