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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

While I do think a lot can be learned on your own, university in the traditional way gives you some things you might find useful:

- 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.

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The main benefits I would agree on are signaling and networking.

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.

The statement "being told exactly what to learn" is so counter to my own university experience (admittedly almost 20 years ago now).

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.

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