Why do it through university when you have the internet and can more effectively learn things by yourself?
But universities really make you push through those things you are not motivated enough to do (and subjects that seems to have no purpose) and many times you find out it was fun after grooking it and it actually made a lot of other things way easier. The first week after the exam you might be upset over the exam, feel something was unfair, but eventually those feelings fade away and you have another telescope to view the world through and arguably you have gained some grit. The universities are a guiding hand off what the experts in their field find important to know.
It's a bit like ordering the chef's choice in a restaurant. Sure you might hate a piece and never come back, but you might also find new combinations of flavours that you start to love but looked tasteless.
Anyway how many of us haven't felt great because we can code and suddenly we are more logical? What happens when you suddenly start to study logic or even learn something extremely simple as De Morgan's laws [1]?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws
PS. I would also say that good universities are very, very different from high school. When the professors say something, they've studied it for years so they use precise language and are strict in their teaching. Definitions mean everything for them and you can't just say language is fluid to score a point which seems popular nowadays.
PPS. University is free in my country, so I don't consider cost-effectiveness to get a job. Especially as it seems pretty much anyone can get a coding-gig (we had a hot-shot consultant from a very prestigious firm (if you have lived in US, you've heard of it) ask me why his CSV file wouldn't work in our software. He had just taken an Excel-file and renamed the file-ending to CSV instead of exporting it! He could code, it was just that his knowledge was very, very shallow. We where quite expensive too).
I really strongly disagree with this. Good learning is inherently pleasurable[1] and if it isn't then there's something wrong. If a subject doesn't feel like it has enough purpose, it's not worth taking. Your brain is a fairly good predictor of that, contrary to what school would lead you to believe.
I think overall you'd be way better off just learning the things that you want to learn, that are applicable to something you actually care about instead of taking a class and learning things your brain tells you are useless and you will probably never use. I haven't read it in depth but I think ultralearning is interesting for the learning-for-application approach.
I'm probably a bit biased though because I use incremental reading[2] and no matter how good university teaching is it just can't compare to learning by myself (with occasional help from an expert, rather than being handheld)
[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Pleasure_of_learning [2] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading
I doubt it even makes sense for adult education - I don't enjoy learning JavaScript nearly as much as I enjoy C#, but I require both for my job. SQL was an afterthought at the time, but it's proven to be incredibly important. If I only did what made me happy my career would be incredibly limited.
It’s seems they redesigned it recently and it’s not super usable in mobile, but this is golden mine.
There are sites like MIT courseware that are completely free and allow online learning. Though of course, there are signaling benefits to online degrees.
Czech and Sumerian. Too much ressources is also a problem, as you said, because navigating into them is difficult for a beginner.
University is also an excellent facility for making contacts in your field. Not every expert hangs out on Slack.
That's not to say you can't learn remotely, but rather than in many fields, it certainly helps to have a teacher/guide.
It’s a skill that cannot be learnt from books or lecture videos. You need intimate apprenticeship under an expert.
- Peers that aren't just voices on an internet board
- Validation of the syllabus, and a sense of which parts are more important in the field. For instance, my econ tutor who was a famous Marxist didn't find it of high importance for me to study Marx.
- A timeline that is relatively inflexible. If you're in uni you need to learn how that proof works be the time of the exam, and you'll have to put off other things in your life. Outside of uni you can learn it today or when those things have happened.
I am much less certain about the depending on university to force yourself to study things and being handheld by a prof/tutor.
Flagellation by university to get yourself to learn things is not a reliable long-term means of learning. I think it's far better (and I have had more success) when I learn for myself.
While there is some benefit in having a mentor, I think being handled and being told exactly what to learn isn't the most productive. A lot of times you'll end up learning really useless things as opposed to listening to your brain which generally has a decent grasp on figuring out what is worth learning to actually apply.
It seems to me that going to university to be told what to learn is counter to the actual goal of going to university, namely to have first-class access to resources (people resources, knowledge resources, laboratory resources) to pursue your own learning goals.
I've been tempted to go back to university in order to learn more about organic chemistry and chemical engineering, for instance. There's certainly a lot of information online, but a world-class chemistry lab with access to chemicals would be a great resource to have available to me, along with readily available mentors to help guide me when I have questions.
As for homework and essays, that sounds more like high school than university, from what I remember. It's always possible things have changed in the last 15 years, though.