Technology

I have several mixed opinions on this.

University is deliberately prolonged. They give you small snippets of knowledge and tell you that you need to wait a week for the next snippet, frequently with knowledge that makes sense only when you have all the pieces shown together referencing each other. And then exam at the end - it rewards people who laze through most of the course and only start learning in the last month or week before exam, turning most of the education into stamp-collecting game similar to watching a tv series (and people marathon/binge those too).

Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university. Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week. Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.

Then again I firmly believe no skill can be attained through theory alone. Not every university has practical exams, but no online course has them at all. This is, I guess, the only advantage of universities. Perhaps a hybrid system would be best? Theory can be learned at your own pace from online course, but then exams - both theoretical and practical, must be done at the physical location.

Online course generally implies online assessment.

The level of academic misconduct in those is insane; I caught 35% of my cohort cheating (using a method (one we never taught) they could not replicate in an in-person test) one year, and those were the ones I could prove. Online assessments just test what a search engine/AI knows really.

(For those about to tout "lockdown browsers"; it's called "a second laptop" or just "my phone")

They're concerned they won't be able to keep fucking people with four years of fees funded by FAFSA loans they end up defaulting on

Some things are useful and some aren't, and colleges have a tendency to not know the difference.

My brother is a bona-fide math genius, and the summer after he graduated high school, I walked past his room, and there was a 2 foot stack of math textbooks next to his bed. I asked what that was about, and he had driven to every local library and checked out all their books on advanced math, and was teaching himself advanced trig and calc before he started college in the Fall.

When he got to school, he took a bunch of tests, and started college halfway through his sophomore year. He graduated with his bachelor's in 3 years, then got his masters in one more.

Being smart enough to get through college quickly has always been an option. Colleges today don't like it because they are more interested in the money than education.

Another reason I don't have to worry about the next generation coming for my job.

I dont know how I feel about this.

On one hand, degrees are somewhat good for education in lots of industries.

On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.

Degrees are also very expensive.

I guess if it was a useless degree then it wouldn't matter in the first place.

You won't be able to remember anything you learned if you whoosh on by. You should suffer at least a little bit from learning it, then it'll stick much better.