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Comment by ChadNauseam | Hacker News Reader

I don’t really get this mentality. I love coding and want to share the things I love about it with other people. If I knew someone out there was teaching a freshman-level class and deliberately leaving a bad impression or scaring people off, I’d be pretty annoyed.

I only took one programming class in college, which was designed as a weed-out class and it did succeed in weeding me out. Luckily I continued teaching myself how to program and now I make more than either of my parents doing a job I love. Part of a professor’s job is to educate, so I suggest they leave the hazing to the frats and at least try to be good at it.

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I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled. By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll. You can be an engineer without college. You're free to start your own university, if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man.

Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor doesn't bend just because some people interpreted it to be ill intent, when really the ill intent was their perception to academic challenge.

> I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled.

This is pretty bad faith of you to interpret the argument this way, the OP said nothing about being coddled.

> Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor

Again nothing about lack of rigor, maybe you should put more rigor into reading their comment.

> By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll.

By the time you find out, it is too late. See also "The Market for Lemons".

> You can be an engineer without college.

Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere.

> You're free to start your own university,

University is a protected term in many places, so again, you can't "freely" do that. This is to protect against the information asymmetry that the potential students have, precisely because of the aforementioned lemon market issues if they don't, and even then it's not perfect.

> if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man.

Except the potential students don't have any way to determine that until at a minimum of 15 years after you start, even if they're unusually highly informed and highly motivated. And university tuition fees in many places are fixed, so you don't get more reward than any other teacher.

>Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere.

I've repeatedly stated you can practice in the capacity of an engineer without a PE except in some exceptional circumstances. IDK why on earth you would equate "you can be an engineer" to "you can be in every single case." You don't even have to have the 'Electrical Engineer' 'term' title to do electrical engineer things in most cases, this is a total red herring.

>By the time you find out, it is too late. See also "The Market for Lemons".

Apparently not, because here and now we're discussing why EE programs are lemons . I've heard the same 'lemon' statement from plenty of people that washed away in the horrible attrition during my undergrad EE. The program wasn't a lemon -- those students were the lemons.

>University is a protected term in many places, so again, you can't "freely" do that. This is to protect against the information asymmetry that the potential students have, precisely because of the aforementioned lemon market issues if they don't, and even then it's not perfect.

"University" and "college" are not federally protected terms in US and many other places. But if you want to go one of those other places, fine, call it a "training institute." You're never going to find a completely free market, just because you are free to do something doesn't mean you are free to do it precisely how you like. You are free to work at McDonalds but that doesn't mean you won't be fired if you show up wasted half the time.

>Except the potential students don't have any way to determine that until at a minimum of 15 years after you start, even if they're unusually highly informed and highly motivated. And university tuition fees in many places are fixed, so you don't get more reward than any other teacher.

Great more entitlement. You're not entitled to have your business be instantly successful. You can start a private service teaching people if you want control of your own salary. If the market doesn't choose you, then you can make sad statements about how the "market is uninformed." Good luck.

> Apparently not, because here and now we're discussing why EE programs are lemons . I've heard the same 'lemon' statement from plenty of people that washed away in the horrible attrition during my undergrad EE.

Dropping out is literally after the point where it is too late for "don't enroll".

Also, I'm getting the vibe that you really don't get the point of what a lemon is: If I buy a second hand car, I lack the skills to tell in advance if it's right for me, even if I can find out 1000 miles later. The solution to this absolutely does not include "make my own car", which is essentially what you're suggesting in the educational environment for which I am using the car lemon market as a metaphor.

> Great more entitlement. You're not entitled to have your business be instantly successful.

You're the one who suggested the free market would reward competence, not me.

>Dropping out is literally after the point where it is too late for "don't enroll".

Yes so don't enroll in the first place after your research that universities are bad, or whatever it is you're saying you don't like about them. Apparently it is a priori known university programs contain attributes you don't like. I don't feel sorry for people that sign up for 10s of K in debt without even bothering to ask prior students what their experience was like -- not researching your purchase is just stupidity. You said yourself it takes 15 years before these programs even reach market penetration so that's plenty of time that you'll be able to find some prior students to ask before entering. The ones who didn't research are just the lemons, only they end up as EE dropouts and lemons on the labor market.

>don't get the point of what a lemon is

Yes I get it. Many of these dropout students are "lemons" of the labor market. Employers don't realize what hot garbage they're going to end up with -- low-quality talent that give up and whine about how challenging it is to actually have to realize your goal. They whine and complain about university and blame anyone but themselves for their own poor qualities.

>You're the one who suggested the free market would reward competence, not me.

This is pure gibberish as a reply and I have no idea what you even mean by repeating this. The market rewarding the value you provide is not incompatible with not seeing instant gratification because you're so arrogant as to think you're better than the university system. Your comment is the kind of busted logic that would impugn the notion that planting a tree provides shade, because you're upset you won't have shade tomorrow.

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