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Comment by mp05 | Hacker News Reader

I say this with 90% sincerity: I thought this was STEAM now?

But with all seriousness... I went to university out of high school in 2005 to get a mech engineering degree but never finished because I liked to party too hard and web dev was easy and paid better than most people I knew with entry-level engineering jobs.

Flash forward to now as a non-trad student and I'm in my 400-level coursework. It's all easier than it was, 100%. "We only need you to pass the FE" is what they say. I'm getting a 3.7 GPA by just showing up to class and doing the homework they assign. It wasn't like that ~20 years ago.

Makes me wonder about the quality of the graduates we're cranking out even at ABET-accredited schools.

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I thought this was STEAM now?

The "STEAM" thing was invented by a guy at the Rhode Island School of Design.[1] It hasn't had much effect on education or hiring, but it transformed the maker movement into a branch of arts and crafts. Newer "maker spaces" tend to be heavy on construction paper and hot glue, light on milling machines and drill presses.

[1] https://www.risd.edu/steam

So you think the classes are much easier? Might it be related to your life experience and focus you have now? Or are there things that simply aren't are rigorous as it used to be?

Obv this is anecdotal, but I graduated in 2023 from a T10 CS school and it was not very challenging. Most of my friends in college agreed that besides 1 or 2 classes, we never had to work late nights or seriously stress about passing a class. I wasn't a 4.0 student, but I got a 3.7 with very little studying. University is getting a lot easier, and I genuinely think that as long as you are trying to ask the professor questions and for help, you cannot fail a class.

https://gradeinflation.com/

It's hard to say, it may be both! But we get a page of notes for every exam in all of my classes pretty much without exception. I don't recall that ever being a thing.

> thought this was STEAM now?

What's the A?

EDIT: It's the arts [1]. It looks like a classical education.

[1] https://theconversation.com/explainer-whats-the-difference-b...

> It looks like a classical education. "[...]humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design and new media."

I think of a classical education as debate/rhetoric, philosophy, and Greek/Latin but I went to public school so I'm just going off of hearsay.

> classical education as debate/rhetoric, philosophy, and Greek/Latin

It should also include music and art, both creating and appreciating.

Okay I went to a really great public school, so that's just standard education from my perspective. Everyone took fine arts and music. The classes I listed were the things that only the real enthusiasts trying for Ivy league schools got into. I was aiming for engineering school and kind of a philistine at that age, so I took auto body in my free time.

I realize many schools cut the arts classes first and I bemoan that as much as anyone now at my advanced age, but that's a different conversation.

Man, I did not think you were serious. I love how the liberal arts grads are trying to sneak in through the back door! That's hilarious. STEM is a hard nosed group of disciplines that build things. You'd have an easier time convincing me that CS doesn't belong in STEM than convincing me liberal arts does.

I thought it was something useful like accounting.

Should be more like FTEAM.

Finance Tech Engineering Accounting Medicine

Arts

An asinine addition to an already asinine acronym.

My old school electronics company has gone through some recent EE grads.

One of them is very sharp and definitely could have done the grind even 20 years ago.

The other three I have absolutely no idea how they passed those classes. They aren't engineers either, they are technicians doing low level work. All three also completely whiffed to a worrying degree when given a basic assignment to see how well they knew electronics (the one who is an engineer smashed his assignment no problem.)

> It wasn't like that ~20 years ago.

I've found that learning entirely new fields of study to be easier as I get older (although I'm "only" 33); I think going to college straight after high school is a disservice to those of us whose brains developed more slowly than others. Long-term thinking and impulse control are some of the last things to develop.

> impulse control are some of the last things to develop.

If at all. Guanfacine helps that though.

You may have changed more than you give yourself credit for, my experience at a highly-regarded place 20 years ago was that homework and showing up and passing the final went a similarly LONG way. But it was easy to not do those things.

I started university in 2004, and I did not party. My university coursework was no harder than my high school coursework, outside of a couple of weed-out classes (like organic chemistry) -- but those were graded on a curve, so they FELT difficult, but in practice weren't hard to pass at all because we were being graded against the students who were there to party and missed the fundamentals that everything else was built on.

I suspect that your partying made the coursework seem a lot more difficult that it really was.

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