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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

I was always thinking this was only because of outrageous tuition in the US compared to my country where it was €1k / year. Recently though I saw some curriculum from a random university (might very been a community College?) and it looked closer to "learn html" than fundamentals.

A lot of courses that looked like they were just there to fill time. Obviously everyone knows MIT and other top university lectures on youtube and those are great, but I was surprised to see people paying outrageous amounts for what looked like a genuine waste of time. Any more informed thoughts about the differences between top / bottom universities in the US?

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I’m French went to a French engineering school (INSA, ranked within the top 10), went to RIT (tanked 35th in the US) as an exchange student for a year. I found that the level at the RIT was really quite low. Especially when it comes to mathematics and fundamentals. On the other hand, RIT’s courses were much more pragmatic though, more up to date on more modern project management, much better entrepreneurship course. So, it’s different focus but not entirely bad. I still know that I ‘d take someone from a French engineering school in most cases though

During the time I was at RIT, I tutored in maths two students at the nearby community college (it was just down the road from where I lived), the level was abysmal and yes pretty close to learning html.

I’ve also hired and worked with people from top universities in my career, MIT’s reputation is deserving, people I’ve worked from there have been very good. Harvard not so much (but the sample is only 2 people and, well CS is not Harvard’s forte)

Note, this is most likely biased based on my experience but as someone educated in Europe that has spent most of my career working for US companies.

EDIT: oh one major difference between my mostly free(540 euros a year back then) French engineering school and the much more expensive (25000 usd per year at the time) RIT, the non-educational (sports etc) facilities were much nicer.

My guess is that out of the top 20 in the states, things fall off really quickly, since there is a lot of cherry picking before that. You really only have a few state flagship and Ivies (or near Ivies like Stanford) that are really good. As a counter, my experience at EPFL (one of the two Ecole's in Switzerland), I found it a bit behind where I went University of Washington (flagship research, public) in rigor and its grading curb. But UW CSE is top 5, so I wasn't really comparing apples to apples.

I went to a top 10 US university for CS, and while I completely agree with your disdain for things like 'write html classes', I experienced pretty much the equal but opposite. There was a relatively widespread disdain for application vs theory, to the point that I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of my graduating peers could not write a Tetris clone, even graphics aside - I just mean the logic/architecture.

I actually have an amusing anecdote there. In one lower level class the professor ended up asking about how to convert a lower case string to an upper case one, or vice versa. I immediately chimed in with the right answer - you flip the 5th bit. This is literally how ASCII was intentionally designed. Capital and lower start at 65, and are separated by 32, so changing the case is a single bitflip. The same even works in unicode english characters where they're still separated by 32, though in this case it was not a unicode input string anyhow.

He just about lost his shit trying to mock me and my 'inelegant hacky solutions' in front of everybody. It didn't bother me in the least because I knew I was right, but later (perhaps after he looked it up?) he actually went out of his way to find me outside of class and sincerely apologize. I just found it all pretty amusing. But if anything it really emphasizes the overly embraced gulf between theory and practice at higher tier institutions, or at least mine. And FWIW this was an algorithms class which should ostensibly be 100% about practical application.

Ouch. I went to a similar school I suppose, UIUC and never had that experience.

I once presented the most optimal solution, so I was tasked with presenting it to the class, but I wasn’t put down for it.

Back when I was a teacher's assistant in college, the professor for an introductory "learn to program" course was teaching students this is the right way to define an array of chars:

  {'h,', 'e,', 'l,', 'l,', 'o'};

He also gave them sample code where the assignment was to fill in the body of one of the functions, but in an unrelated part of the code he had a typo that resulted in infinite recursion in an object constructor.

I think your experience reflects high expectations that these CS students will be academics first and foremost. Also, if you have a big brand degree, you get away with knowing less. The expectation that you will learn on the job is higher among people that care about such things.

If you go to a lower-ranked school, it is full of working-class students who need to hit the ground running. So there is less abstract stuff and more practical stuff IMO. I've never been to a top school but I can tell you my program at a bargain state school was excellent and practical. It had theory as well but the university consulted industry people often to get feedback on the program.

I kinda went in reverse, as a kid I was (still am) very nerdy. I had consumed a tonne of MIT opencourseware years before entering university but usually at a freshman / *01 level.

I wasn't challenged at all throughout my time, was extremely disappointed at the piss poor quality of eduction, and basically skipped class 2.5 years of a 3 year degree (still got the highest GPA somehow). (Btw, it sounds like I'm bragging about how smart I am but I was always always a middle/bottom of the road student, never the top but at least I never failed out and I enjoyed learning)

Maybe it was the "school" (not university it doesn't deserve that title) I went to that was weak, but I really expected more, at the very least to be challenged. Looking at my friend's course work from other universities it didn't seem much different except for the person doing nanobiology lol.

I think another factor it could be is the country I'm in (Denmark) has piss poor education throughout schooling (by the time they leave high school they can barely and I mean barely solve right angle triangle problems). I went through IB which is held to some modicum of a standard so that could also be what influenced this experience. Denmark for years has been reducing the challenge of its university level courses because students coming out of public education cannot keep up - nearly every year several professors from "the best" institutions complain about these students and have now started setting up extra courses to teach them the basics before they can actually go into the degree.

Also for those interested in learning more about how education takes place in Denmark you'll see a lot of crap about "the pedagogy of education" and a bunch of teachers espousing their personal philosophy of learning. Ignore them. Look at what the students actually do, look at what the parents complain about, and look at the passing grades (30% on a MC questionnaire).

From about age 11 they are introduced to GeoGebra, Maple, etc. and the remainder of their education focusses on translating problems from paper into the computer and hitting solve - the result is unsurprisingly a bunch of students who "are great at mathematics" but don't even understand what a %age is (I took to helping my uni classmates who were struggling and I blew a guys mind when I explained %ages are just fractions, take the number and divide it by 100).

The concept of the university is that you're supposed to learn a little bit about a lot of stuff. A significant amount of courses are a "waste" if you only want to consider things directly relevant to a specific career. This is changing a little because people have higher expectations for vocational training from schools these days (because the bar is higher for basic specialized work than it was in decades and centuries past), but the basic idea remains.

30 years ago I felt like my mid-grade "liberal arts" US university was definitely wasting my time.

Actually had to skip some Comp Sci (my major) and math electives because some required liberal arts thing was in the same time slot. I could have used more training on both of those, as I've dealt with a lot of unemployment because I'm naturally fairly weak in both. Did not need liberal arts, had plenty of that in high school.

But compared to today, I didn't pay a lot nor did my parents, it just wasn't that expensive back then. College today seems to be a much worse deal, more filler content and way more expensive, as well as worse employment prospects overall when you do graduate, especially now that AI may be poised to smash a good fraction of those jobs.

Community colleges are for learning skills. “Learn HTML” is appropriate as a community college course. Universities are more… well, universal in their approach to education.

We have "community colleges" here but they're a little more holistic than that, so I'd always been assuming the US ones were more like ours.

But it sounds more like a US community college is more like what's usually branded and adult education centre here if "learn HTML" is the kind of agenda.

It really just depends. I went to a community college and took maths through calculus 3, a discrete math course, some gen eds like history, english composition, etc. But there are also those kind of remedial adult education and specialized "how to" courses as well.

"Community college" in the US can offer everything from remedial high school for adults, via technical certification and job skills training to 'real' university level education and university associate degrees.

You go to a community college to learn something specific. You go to a university to learn a little bit about everything.

I went to a mid tier state school and no class was even close to "learn html"

I think my education was pretty good. Was about 8k a year about 10 years ago. Worth every penny.

Hell, my community college's CS classes were better than that.

The same problems exist everywhere. Nothing US specific about it. There is no institutional system within higher education to ensure quality across the board, so whether you get a good experience or not is down to the individual professors and staff, not anything you can systematically rely on. The same is true of research outputs. Pick a random paper from a random field. It might be good, if you're really lucky it might even be useful, but it might also be full of faked data, fake citations and built on false premises. My experience has been that there's no way to tell up front. Field has predictive value, brands mean nothing.

I went to a supposedly good university in the UK (Durham), to do a computer science degree. The university is in the so-called "Russell Group" of leading research universities and comes a little below Oxbridge in the rankings. That turned out to mean nothing: the course itself was garbage, with the department and its course being almost entirely fake. Cheating by the professors was rampant because they really didn't want to do teaching (teaching programming is notoriously hard), and universities mark their own homework, so if they don't want to do it properly there's nothing forcing them to do so as long as they team up and cover for each other. The students also didn't care because they were all struggling and happy to conspire a little with their teachers in order to get the bit of paper they were all there for. I was gutted, I'd been looking forward to doing CS at university literally since being a little kid. My parents had been singing its praises for years, but looking back I wonder to what extent they were just flattered to be allowed to go at all. My mother was the first of her family to go to university and they were all super proud of her, a common story in that era.

After graduation relatively few of the students took jobs related to doing computing, let alone to do computer science. A lot went off to do things like accounting, subject switches, banking, one even became a VC. After graduating I went to work for Google and was assigned to interviewing rotation. On that road you learn pretty quickly that degrees mean nothing. The best candidates have random degrees in unrelated subjects. Back then people with CS degrees from supposedly top universities regularly couldn't start new projects in the editor/IDE of their choice, couldn't write programs that load text files from disk and struggled to manipulate arrays. Sometimes people with no degree at all managed to get past the recruiter firewall and breezed their way through it. Even job history was of little use back then, though I imagine it's got more signal now.

Asking people if college is worth it is a tricky thing, because it conflates two very different things. Is it worth it for the educational value? I suspect many realize the answer is no. Is it worth it to get past the ever escalating auto-filters HR departments like to mount? Maybe still, but that's not a sustainable perspective. Soon people will master the art of using LLMs to review CVs properly and cut HR out of the loop. The prompts probably won't be dwelling on elite universities outside of the few firms that have incorporated that demand into their cultural DNA.

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