Universities should be more than toll gates
waliddib.com
waliddib.com
These people can’t possibly be at every university, let alone colleges, community colleges, or technical schools.
> … rote memorization and bad classes …
Not every school will be good. There are at least three post-secondary schools within driving of me that take the minimum required curricula as a script and offer nothing more than the bare minimum required to get certification, accreditation, and receive that sweet state and federal budget money.
I can’t imagine how someone with a good or great post-secondary education is confused that this would be the situation for millions of students.
And then of course, the people I met there have shaped my life and career in wonderful ways ever since. The sheer level of diversity among students and faculty is unlike anything I've experienced elsewhere. Many of them are still my lifelong friends (or in one case my wife :)) and others have opened professional doors to me 15 years later and counting.
But also, I went to a very well known and respected university with sufficient endowment and financial aid that it shouldn't be functioning as a "toll gate" regardless. I know things are not this rosy at a lot of universities.
Just a few years ago my husband had all of his tuition refunded (and degree cancelled) because the school was so bad and so scammy that the government had to step in and force them to refund everyone.
The reality is that higher education in the USA is a for-profit venture, and like all for-profit ventures in the US, the number one explicit goal is to extract as much profit as possible by any means possible. Providing quality education and world-class faculty is completely disjoint and incompatible with that goal.
Most people in this country are not so privileged as you to attend one of our dwindling number of good schools. Everyone else has a predatory institution that technically meets the requirements to offer the degrees they claim. Usually, anyway.
It's this. Most undergraduate students do not go to office hours, try to get to know their instructors, ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable, so yes, it's understandable why many would consider higher ed the same as secondary ed: rote memorization and "bad" classes.
This was actively discouraged by the instructors in the school I attended. Not by policy, but by behavior - passive-aggressively belittling students for not “getting” the subject matter, showing a complete lack of interest in reciprocating any amount of getting to know the instructor.
> … ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable …
A failure of secondary education and students’ families.
He says it's only a matter of time before the students realize they don't need him. Or need to pay tuition.
Im not a huge defender of college and lean towards it being mostly a waste, but the other extreme is problematic.
Within at least the last 15 years, the paper provided by a school is no guarantee of better pay - but that’s how high schoolers are convinced to go into excessive debt for attending post-secondary schools.
Perhaps not, but the lack of that paper IS a guarantee of worse pay.
In some cases, an excellent researcher even has cogent papers but is absolutely abysmal at lecturing and in person teaching skills.
Peers are very important, but from talking to others, it's harder to know where you will get good peers than you would think. Even 1st tier universities will have majors dominated by students whose primary interest is in maximum grades with minimum work and where cheating is rampant. You've got to either get lucky (I did) or put in some leg work to find smart students who are actually interested in learning and doing things right.
I think how much rote memorization is encouraged or required is strongly dependent on the field. Pre-med students will sometimes memorize their way through calculus; a professor I knew once described it as "grimly impressive".
And I would gather you find more bad teachers than good, but that's true of many spaces from IT to sports.
Neither world-class researchers or office hours exist in most Universities.
"Office hours" is entirely an American (and maybe British?) thing.
"Office hours" did not exist, but TAs attend scheduled labs/exercises.
Professors were even under instruction to not engage with students outside of scheduled and budgeted time.
That was in 80s. I stuck around, changed faculty (AI, cogsci, neuro), and saw university change. It became very financially oriented. The number of students kept rising, norms kept dropping (2nd year student asking: what does this symbol √ mean?), students participating in real research became rarer and rarer, even PhDs shifted towards more and more teaching, and 20 years later, the most influential member of a university's board was the one doing real estate, and an academic career was based on the amount of funding obtained.
When exams were coming up, I would start skipping class just to read textbooks and work through practice problems, and it was a lifesaver!! The professors were great for getting me unstuck with a concept, but 90% of the time I just needed to be studying alone
> The number of students kept rising, norms kept dropping
All due to the student loans scam.
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-first-myth...
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-second-myt...
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/03/myth-3-college...
https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-last-myth....
1. Set tuition high
2. Advocate for student loan systems
3. Advocate for loan forgiveness
In this way, universities can simply allocate government money to themselves. That's why "everyone must be educated" campaigns always argue for government loan forgiveness and full tuition coverage.
Students are a device to acquire money from the government. No more.
The meaningfull difference between right-wing and left-wing parties is how the University should be organized, with right-wing party pushing for centralized, more powerful unis that can reach international "power rankings", and left-wing parties usually push for a decentralization (that's how you get university branches in small towns usually). Also most right-wing/third way parties seems to want the admin staff to have power over the education staff, that there's that shift too (the exact same stuff is happening in hospitals).
I don't think so: educated people are much harder to control that uneducated masses.
The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model. Its more profitable and university presidents can now earn millions of dollars, further intrenching the problem as it now attracts exactly the kind of people into those positions who only care about money (and themselves).
The true blame for this situation, (IMHO), are the employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees' for jobs that in no way need those skillsets. Bullshit requirements then led to the demand for bullshit degrees which the universities changed to supply.
Somebody from HR admitted to me that they often do it to simply trim the applicant pool to a more manageable size.
Maybe if you require a liberal arts degree and immediately cut someone who's just "well read" but this is not my experience in technical and engineering focused roles.
I think we're witnessing the collapse of the university value proposition. In the decades post WW2, the attendance/competition within universities was quite modest compared to today. Relatively fewer people went, and it was essentially a social class sorter, with a liberal education sprinkled throughout. This actually creates a better learning environment, as once you're "in", you can focus on the experience. Nowadays, the university is just another hamster wheel in the grind, in a never-ending arms race against the sea of other students/degrees/credentials. Failure to deliver results means you didn't consume enough, and must consume more. Eventually this dilutes the value of the degree, both from a signaling and a financial perspective. It seems like we're in the peak enshitification stage of higher ed.
For employers, requiring a degree doesn't cost them anything. So they're happy to keep piling on the requirements. I guess the question is what type of employers would actually be the first to decouple their recruiting/hiring from credentialism and rely on other metrics of competency?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
And it's a slippery slope. Should, for instance, a chemist have the credential? It's easy to say, "No". Until you get another Bhopal.
Basically you would start getting more and more fields demanding credentials for liability purposes over time. Some would be entirely justified, like chemist and biologist. Some would be tenuous in the extreme, like c# or javascript monkey.
1) An external event, like a war, that stress test the credentials and to force selection based on outcomes. 2) Some sort of monetary benefit for employers, like extended internships for high schoolers. Assuming it's cheaper/more effective for an employer to train their workforce from scratch than pay the full salary of a recent grad. 3) A new field, where credentials haven't been established yet.
There are obv caveats to all of these. And they don't address the question of what a formal education is supposed to accomplish. At some point, it was supposed to be to train "better citizens". And that shouldn't be dictated by employers, imo. But nowadays it seems like the purpose is to get a job and survive.
Conversely, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
> Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too.
Perhaps I needed to grind out a dull degree as it ultimately set me on a path to a time/place/subject that I really do enjoy. My interests now have been shaped by my journey and if you'd tried to teach me computer science at 18 I'm sure I would've hated that, too.
I wish that we didn't talk down to kids to teach them, and instead approached them as equals, so that they wouldn't think that their passions and interests are below that of "grown ups". I recently learned that there's a term for that. Well sort of. It's "andragogy", which directly translates as education for adults, contrasting with "pedagogy" which is education for kids.
You might think that's archaic, but that's still the primary purpose of the Ivy League in the US and the older equivalents around the world. The caste system works slightly differently, with priests (persuaders and marketers) replaced by economists, lawyers, and politicians, and nobility (doers with financial/political agency) by CEOs, financiers, and oligarchs. But it's recognisably the same idea.
There are also supporting castes - the military, which has its own pipeline, and researchers/technicians, which are a weird hybrid caste. Some have limited political agency - which peaked around fifty years ago, and has been declining since - but most are just worker bees.
The idea that universities are there for personal and cultural intellectual development is relatively recent, and much more tentative. There's still a lot of hostility to it because the primary purpose of the system is to maintain power differentials, not to erode them.
The point being that the modern system is the vector sum of at least four different competing trends. There's political hierarchy, there's increasing financialisation of assets and processes (which actually conflicts with research and education), there's a need for workers who are accredited and educated enough, but not too educated and independent-minded, and there are the personal expectations of students, which depend on personality, talent, and acculturation.
There isn't a stable solution for this problem.
A recent trend is the availability of university-level teaching outside of universities. Textbook piracy, YouTube videos, and AI are all making it much easier for motivated people to learn - pretty much anything.
I'm not convinced the formal system is sustainable. But it's clear current ideas about employment aren't sustainable either. So there's going to be a period of complete chaos, and - at best - some new system of semi-formal self-motivated open education is going to replace what we have now, perhaps with some kind of external testing and accreditation for specific skills and abilities.
He might just have discovered he is more mature at 30 than he was at 18...
My university experience is somewhat different, and I believe whether this holds true or not depends a lot on the degree course:
- In mathematics, there are barely any "filler courses". Basically all of them were interesting in their own right (even though because of your own interests, you will likely find some more exciting than others).
- On the other hand, computer science more felt like every professor had their own opinion how the syllabus should be, and the hodgepodge that came out of it was adopted as syllabus (design by committee). Thus, there were quite a lot of interesting things to learn, but also "filler courses". Additionally, the syllabus did not feel like a "consistent whole" with a clear vision, but rather like lots of isolated courses that you had to pass.
In the German university system, there are in general no required "general ed" classes. :-)
(it is typically only required that you do some often prescribed classes in a minor subject that you can commonly choose from a typically pre-defined list by the faculty (but if you hate all of the suggestions from this pre-defined list, it is sometimes possible to choose other minor subject or classes, but this will typically involve more bureacracy). For example, when stuying mathematics, it is common to choose physics, computer science, economics or some engineering science as minor).
Any further general education classes (in particular foreign language courses) are completely optional - and it is not an uncommon complaint of students who have very broad interests that during a typical degree course, you have barely any time to attend classes outside of the prescribed syllabus.
How? Surely over 15 weeks each course taught you something about either the world or yourself.
I just looked back over my undergrad transcript to double check my experience. I took something away from every single class. It wasn't always the material itself.
Twenty years later. More experienced, working as a software and systems engineer. Masters in Systems Engineering and achieved 4.0 GPA. College was easier.
So often, I've had the experience with work that it just feels like a long elaborate lab and there really is not much of a difference. Whether I make Jupyter notebooks analyzing things in a computer lab or for colleagues, I still use the same skills. Whether I present in front of classmates or colleagues, same skill.
Also you have to keep in mind just how oversubscribed academic qualifications are now so you're more just placing yourself at the starting line and whats more important is what you did outside that institution.
How is it different? When you work in motivated groups at uni you split the work and rely on each other to do your part at a high quality. That’s also true for real work. Often enough you depend on certain things that your team mate does like finishing some part of a codebase while you worked on the theoretical underpinnings of an exploit and drafted that code. And now you can place your code into her code and rowhammer via JS works now.
I just don’t see the difference. Oh, and my performance reviews are “we are really happy with your work”. I used to work as a SWE and now as a data analyst. It all feels like school to me.
> Also you have to keep in mind just how oversubscribed academic qualifications are now so you're more just placing yourself at the starting line and whats more important is what you did outside that institution.
I see that it’s oversubscribed.
The only real solution IMO is to support institutions like St. John’s [1] and others that are explicitly not career-focused, and work on making similar institutions affordable and accessible. There’s no real reason why someone can’t start a student-operated (to keep costs down) university that focuses on the liberal arts, classics, mathematics, etc. that is affordable enough for the average person. I suspect the main problem is the lack of prestige and precariousness of the economy at large.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_College_(Annapoli...
Does the US not have something like a fachhochschule? A institute where peoeple are trained for specific fields/jobs? This systems seems to exist in most european countries that i know of, and it is specifically focussed on education related to a specific field or career. (this is also is there for different levels of practicality) for instance, you have also have schools for things like construction workers, hairdressers, etc etc.
University's are more seem as a very high level of education, but which does not train one for a specific job.
From what I understand Germany is much less classist in this regard.
But I also think we mythologize the trades. I can't remember a HN thread about higher education that didn't extol the virtues of trade school while dismissing college education as a scam. But are the trades really that wonderful? The tradespeople I've met, if they're my age, their bodies have been destroyed, or they've gotten out of the trades.
Many of the trades are cyclic, tied to the construction cycle. Many involve mostly small family-owned businesses that on the one hand greatly favor family members, and on the other, are exempt from certain labor laws such as OSHA reporting. Most are "not on the radar" of EEOC etc. The good things about the trades are if you're lucky enough to get into one of the bigger employers, that tend to be more highly regulated.
My knee jerk reaction is that we could get more people into the trades if we addressed real issues that affect the working class: Health care, retirement, workplace safety, and so forth.
And issue with them is not the school itself, but the type of teenagers that attend them. As much as it pains me, for zawodówka schools - you will get the most demotivated people. And even if you really just want to be trained, you will get into an environment that will destroy you.
I wonder how Germans are faring with this.
There are also Technische Universitäten (Technical University) which are "proper" universities with the ability to grant doctorates and the ability to become professor.
So Fachhochschulen are a separate thing from both Berufsschule (vocational school) and universities.
I was thinking of high school, not uni itself. I'm myself also from a technical university equivalent in Poland.
Today, there’s a shortage of labor in all of the skilled trades, so the unions have taken it on themselves to provide the trade school education concurrently with the apprenticeship. In the electrical union (IBEW), apprentices go to school one day a week for twenty weeks a year, for five years. Pipefitters, sheet metal workers, and plumbers have similar programs. This benefits both the apprentice, who doesn’t get paid to go to school by the union but they also don’t have to pay for their education, and the union, which is able to filter and train candidates directly instead of relying on a third party to do it.
I’m an electrical project manager who has never been an electrician and I never went to trade school so it’s definitely possible to work in the industry without any formal training, but I’m definitely the exception at my employer.
... so a book club?
But maybe that's just me.
I applied for admission and was accepted based on having not-too-terrible grades from an optional high school exit test, but later all admission tests were cancelled due to COVID. The idea is to admit hundreds of applicants and keep those who pass the nontrivial first semester, which I much prefer to hard exams.
Despite some missteps caused by COVID and just me being me, I really enjoyed my years of study and am now continuing in the masters programme.
Some lectures were great, and most were at least decent. I learned to check who taught what class and ask around for feedback, and I'll shamelessly admit to choosing my specialisation based mostly on that feedback and personal experiences.
I almost never felt that rote memorisation was being asked of me, or that it was the key to success. The vast majority of issues I had could be solved by understanding more, not just knowing more. Some examiners even allowed small cheatsheets (and plenty of people still didn't pass, so no free exams).
I know that not all university students in the Czech Republic have had such a good experience. I've heard about plenty of problems with stubborn teachers or unfriendly bureaucracy, but on the whole I'd say it's about more than the degree.
This is incredibly self-indulgent. You were given opportunities you refused to engage with and are now continuing that pattern by blaming everyone else for your failures.
University has no value beyond credentialism only if you don't put any in.
That's not what I read at all. They went to a good university and got good grades. They did what they were supposed to do.
Then they later realized how little of value the actual education was.
The university missed an opportunity to educate them, not the other way around. The student is not responsible for having a bad teacher.
Not going to university was not an option. It would have been the only way to guarantee work in my region.
I don't think I'm misunderstanding anything; you've been very clear. This is not a description of someone who was let down, but of someone who never had any interest in learning.
This is the problem with the current generation. They are addicted to their phones, and want fast dopamine triggers, without actually putting the hard work.
Could have stopped there.
Nothing, absolutely nothing I learned at university was because of the university. What I did learn was that the whole thing was a crock of shit when I had to buy the same book 3 times for calc 1/2/3 because each semester the author, who also taught the class and used the same book for all 3 topics, put out a new version with different problem sets each semester. Gulick or gulic was her name. Her husband also taught there. I think they were in cahoots.
I guess I did learn something: it was a crock of shit.
For myself uni wasn't a success, and maybe we whould require children to work before getting to uni if they don't know what they wat to do yet, but at least for some, Uni is great and function exactly as it should.
You can easily get lots of information about various jobs using some magic technology called the "world wide web", so there is basically no need to work before university to get an informed opinion. If you are incapable of doing this, you likely simply don't "belong" into a university.
Looking back at my life, the problem is rather that the only kind of internships from which you really "profit" because they extend your perspective, are basically "unreachable" if you don't have parents or friends who are insanely well-connected in upper circles.
Also, if you worked in some "practical" area before going to a university, you will in my opinion become a much more misanthropic and arrogant person because you have seen how "stupid" the people were at that job. The university bubble helps you to avoid a lot of contact to "ordinary" people, and instead puts you into an environment where most people around you are much smarter, and you have to "fight hard for survival" (passing a class; passing a class with a decent mark; ...). Because this experience is very humbling (intendedly so), this makes you a much a much more humble person in your defining years.
I would have gotten much more if I'd attended university starting at 25. However, it would have set me much farther behind in my career, by 25 I was already deep into my career. That would not have happened if I'd been still in school.
I am able to write C++, I worked as a C++ dev, and in france I cannot get a job because I failed to validate the degree for personal reasons 15 years ago, so I don't have a degree, yet I have excellent senior C++ tests. French companies want degrees. Many recruiters say that it's a problem.
If anything community colleges are more like toll gates. Pay a small fee to use a locally shared resource to then get your job.
Software engineering however is so vast there is very profound wisdom to be learned that you won’t discover much later in your career that would make your solutions so much better had you known them (dear undergrads, pay attention at systems 101, it’s worth it) and you also have an opportunity to learn subjects that would otherwise be very expensive to self-teach (eternally grateful for the fully equipped ethernet laboratory, it’s been almost two decades and the knowledge is still very relevant.)
Yes, but I have a great divide with people who can’t draw UML on a whiteboard. Same length of studies, and yet it takes double the time to agree on what’s to build.
They start, and after 3 code reviews I ask them “So where is this abstraction we’ve talked about?” and they say “It’s planned, I’ll do it at the end” and that’s when I know they’ve understood nothing.
The first two employees caught me off guard with implementing the instances instead of the pattern, but for the third, I made it a requirement to start with this.
Lack of abstraction and lack of UML language to express it, is definitely an impediment for a good developer.
(Come the “but you said same length of studies”, so, for those guys: Imagine slaving away with a 5-year bootcamp with no sleep where, at the end, you think you know coding, but you can’t write a treeview where every node is of a different type and calls different implementations — it’s that simple, but in the end, it’s not done).
It shouldn’t be the sole purpose of a class, but sometimes you have to drill people to memorize a bunch of stuff so they’re able to deal with the higher level material.
Imagine doing math if you never had somebody force you to learn multiplication tables. Or if you were doing medical programs but hadn’t been forced to learn the names of all the bones/organs.
As someone with two degrees (B.A. English, followed after I caught on a bit, by a B.S. in physics and computer science with minors in math and chemistry), I can say that I would not take that route again. Mostly a waste.
"What you can accomplish in the real world will rapidly become more valuable than a credential such as a conventional college degree. The credentialing gatekeepers are protecting an 'asset'--the college diploma--that is largely a phantom asset for the vast majority of students."
I wish.
This rings so true for me. Lot of teachers has this ass backwards style of teaching where they will come up with final formula like deus-ex machina. Why? To buy his text book where it is explained the way he wants it.
But that often expects that the person explaining a thing knows what they are talking about. I.e. people on high school does not like logarithms because they don't understand what it is for. I would bet that's because teachers themselves have absolutely 0 clue what in essence is a logarithm and why did it came to be. It was centuries of research, which you can summarize with one sentence - to make multiplication as simple as addition with lookup tables, because at 15th century they did not have calculators so multiplication was a hard laborious process. 135+265 is simple. 135*265 is difficult.
Given a flood of results, you look at the most promising results and then figure out how they work, not the other way around.
Almost all successes are built on having knowledge of a desirable outcome first and foremost, rather than the means to obtain them.
"Oh, you have a PhD in Chemistry? I hated orgo in college..." I heard it often enough to suspect some kind of a collusion. But no, there is no collusion, just old crummy dudes gatekeeping knowledge to preserve their status, and the departments allowing them to do so.
Lectures were all over the place for me - some useful, some awful. Professors really vary a lot in skill here. Same with tests - some helped me learn, some were rote memorization.
Labs were incredibly, incredibly useful. 4 years of practice doing coding problems made me a way better programmer.
I feel I got value out of the degree, even if there were some silly games to play.
This is also a reason why in Europe when you have a diploma from private university, nobody really takes that seriously and looks at you like you would be showing him diploma from University of McDonalds.
There are some good private ones; but most of them are degree mills.
But yeah, we had exams with 70% failing.
Even 10 years ago, this used to be the case in Poland. But now, with demographic decline (current generation of students significantly smaller than previous ones), universities are desperate to fill the seats. If they don't, they lose public funding, which means layoffs - and no one wants that (the university, as any institution, first and foremost serves its employees).
One approach used is to attract foreigners (mostly students from Asia and, to lesser degree, Africa - the main draw is the EU visa), another one is to keep lowering expectations.
unless you are a passionate about the subject of study.
I ran out of money, dropped out of college and self taught myself straight to 6 figures.
Thank you Brendan Eich for JavaScript. Without it I'd probably still be making minimum wage, or working in a Java shop which might be worse.
I finished my useless BA just to hang it on my wall.
College should not be a job training program. It's valuable on its own merits, but the loop of you need a degree to get a job, and you need money to get a degree, so you can get a job to pay off your loans is stupid.
If anything, and this is an American perspective, high school has failed.
You should be able to read and write to a point of employability.
If you want to go to college, it should be optional. Do it after work or part time.
Outside of maybe medicine, law( which is debatable, you can technically just take the bar after a clerkship in a few states), and maybe a few other careers, college isn't needed.
Why in God's name would you get a Masters in Art, the loan payments will make it impossible to survive.
Just make the art!
Draw.
Write poems!
Want to make games, make games!
Knowledge is basically free, we're still adapting to this.
That being said, the essay itself wanders and sometimes repeats points instead of driving the metaphor home. Tightening the structure would make the message stronger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pc3IuVNuO0
Today, most students would fail this class. Note, the reading list is still relevant decades later. =3
That's what we get when we pay video producers per minute.
Could always increase the playback speed to 1.25X for slow-talkers. lol =3
As for universities, they will likely stay as signaling mechanisms until society finds a more efficient way to signal the things that universities do. This is a worldwide pattern that has emerged, and to the extent you see deviations from it it's usually situations like e.g. getting into Tokyo University is already so incredibly difficult that some employers will just accept your letter of admission itself as a sufficient signal of your value to the firm and hire you and let you skip the whole getting a degree thing.
What does university graduation signal? Some combination of raw intelligence, conscientiousness, and ability to conform (not against the "I have beef with the standard model of physics" nonconformance, so much as the "I will not physically assault the professor for telling me I'm wrong in class" nonconformance). Admission to a selective university signals you had these traits even earlier and with greater strength than your peers.
I'm going to underline something from your own article here, which is that you went to an excellent university and got near the top of your class despite hating it. It is an incredibly rare psychological profile in the wild to be able to war-of-attrition your way through so many elite classes, while having virtually zero interest in the material themselves. Any employer would be drooling at the mouth to hire you because you sound reliable even in a pinch. Alas they cannot tell you apart from the ultranerd who gets all As because she genuinely finds all knowledge presented to her endlessly fascinating - but she's probably a good hire too, for different reasons!
But, almost by definition, you can't really signal that kind of ability if you only ever do things you want to do... And most of the things most people in the world want to do most of the time aren't very economically valuable from the doer's perspective. Everyone wants to eat, nobody wants to grow crops, etc.
Probably the best class I took for my philosophy degree was a 3 hour metaphysics course, held once every Wednesday. There were maybe 6-7 people in the class, and the discussions we got into were incredibly educational.
I don’t think reading a bunch of books and web pages about metaphysics would have been 10% as insightful. Maybe with talking to an AI, you could get that up to 20%…but still, it’s not the same.
Self-education is great but is also leads to a kind of idiosyncratic blindness, because no one really forces themselves to study anything that they aren’t already interested in.
I've been self-teaching cryptography since I graduated with an engineering degree, and it's amazing how woefully unequipped a degree program alone leaves you compared to the information that's just out there
The experience the author describes seems totally disconnected what I have ever experienced in university. The author believes (which I think is unlikely) that the university had nothing to teach to him, in my experience this always was the fault of the student. Often blaming "esoteric" and "irrelevant" subjects such as linear algebra for their lack of success, while not understanding that it is a vital course for any engineer.
The author was successful in his particular environment. It was only much later he understood that the content of his education wasn't valuable in itself.
He is not blaming linear algebra, rather complaining that he was graded on memorisation rather than understanding.
His success, as the author makes explicit, has nothing to do with his university education.
But - he achieved some of the highest grades, so by all accounts he was successful in his education.
Much later, he understood that the contents of his education lacked intrinsic value and the only effective value it offered him was an opened "toll gate".