I hope so. You can learn from youtube same as a professors lecturing.
I think this sort of learning can, for somebody who is motivated, exceed the knowledge gained at a university. College is meant to give you a holistic, comprehensive overview of your major. But you can get that from sheer experience and from continuing to learn from a variety of sources. Books are also great at providing holistic knowledge on topics.
Learning is inherently painful. You are encoding boring new information into your brain, and most of it will be useless. From personal experience, 95% of the things you need to learn in CS or mathematics are boring. It is extremely difficult for most people to find motivation to do this. Schools (with grades, etc.) provide a structure to incentivize this.
Why do kids have fun playing? Because they learn this way.
Playing is learning.
Or it used to, until the philosophy settled in, that playing is meant for wasting time (and you surely can waste time playing as most modern games are made for time killing) and learning has to be intentionally hard.
The most effective way to learn new things for me, is still to play around with them. Whether it is compilers or a new graphical framework. And then systematically move on and read documentation about it.
People can do this alone, but you are right that for most, including myself - a structured class can be very helpful. But it does not have to be a pain. The most I learned was in classes where the tutor understood how to teach in a fun and easy way.
Compilers and UI APIs are easy to learn. I did it too. Education is the problem of teaching people much harder things.
> It hurts me to read this
Hey man, look, I was a great student and graduated from a good college with a 4.0 GPA with a math and CS degree, and now I've made a lot of money in industry. I am a huge proponent of the U.S. educational system and of the freedom of the individual to become educated.
But there are hard things you have to do in life; unless your name is Erdős, who, btw, was on speed the whole time.
It was relatively easy for me, but learning something real is something that is hard for all humans. The subjective experience of encoding millennia of information into your fleshy brain. Just like working out. The best way to work out is with a coach or buddy. There's a reason humans evolved to be social. Same is true with educational structures.
Play-based learning is a fad designed to satisfy liberal white women. Real, practical results come from overcoming challenge.
After more research about the history of alternative education, I don't think this was accurate. I feel bad for resorting to stereotype.
"Liberal" is absolutely correct here, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_education
"White" is iffy. In my experience in the U.S., thinking about alternative education is a luxury that only some can afford to do. Therefore, it is an issue of affluence.
"Women" was out of line. This is not an issue of gender, not role, and I think it was harmful to reinforce certain traditional roles here.
I lied about my GPA btw, it was around 3.8. Math is hard. And I only went to a mid-tier state school. It was only "good" in that I enjoyed it and learned a lot. It was difficult for me to find a job even in the bull market of 2009-2020. But even though my personal outcome wasn't completely ideal, I still believe in the value of structured education with its grades, sorting, ranking, etc. because, at its best, it drives you to separate the learning from the intrinsic reward (which is necessary to learn the boring things you need to), and to simply be accountable for yourself. I don't think another human (besides Thoreau), or play, can provide that;
these lessons must come from the heartless industrial machine.
The vast majority of tech nerds turned IT professionals self-taught themselves how computers work by being concerned only on what interested them at the time.
I imagine many folks who have watched a lot of videos on, say, economics or history or physics or whatever else hugely overestimate what they understand since they get no expert feedback to test their understanding.
Programmers tend to like self-teaching since it's very easy to get that feedback--write the code and see if it works! But not every subject is that way.
The places where professors should beat a YouTuber is being able to use experience from past classes (which they kinda don't seem to, since there's always a video for common misconceptions). And cases where it's impossible to "watch" with classes that need a high level of participation.
Of course something like grades are a good driver to get students to cover every topic, instead of grazing the ones they like. (Again not something impossible to get gamified a different way).