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Universities should be more than toll gates

(www.waliddib.com)
140 points wdib | 2 comments | 21 Sep 25 07:19 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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arn3n ◴[21 Sep 25 14:12 UTC] No.45322914[source]▶
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.
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1. slowking2 ◴[21 Sep 25 17:02 UTC] No.45324545[source]▶
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".

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2. p_ing ◴[21 Sep 25 19:43 UTC] No.45326004[source]▶
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.