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I'm inclined to actually believing a lot of this.

When I got into university I found every course very easy, didn't attend any lectures, got all my workshops to run on the same day to reduce my face time and maxed out my free time to do whatever I wanted (work/friends/extra/etc). I'm a STEM major at a top 30 world ranked engineering school with good grades.

I've often asked if I could max out my classes and finish a degree within a year and a half - but I've never been allowed to skip more than a few subjects (tests/bugging the heads of departments).

University shouldn't be time capped or subject load restricted - people should be allowed to do as many as they wish - or you'll find more and more moving towards MOOCs instead.

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(I'm a professor in a University, mostly for first year students.)

The problem with allowing the students to take all the courses they want is that some of them can't correctly measure how much work they can handle. So you will get horror stories like: "A student get enrolled in 3 times the expected courses, has too many homework, too many midterms the same week, and finally don't approve any of them."

Now we have a lost of students that come with questions like "I didn't approve Calculus I last semester. Can I enroll in Algebra I, Calculus I and Calculus II, so I don't lose a semester?" And it is hard to tell them, but most of the times the best thing is to take only "Algebra I" and approve that than taking the three classes and approving none of them.

I also understand that there are special cases, but should be evaluated case by case.

Agreed. I'd like to note I literally have zero problems with either system really.

I'm rather enjoying university right now and the lifestyle I have and am perfectly fine taking the scenic route. I learn plenty on my own and basically consider it a semi retirement stage :-)

I'm glad you feel that way. Those of us with jobs and families snicker at college students who claim to be "so busy". Life is good at this time; do your studies and use those massive amounts of free time to socialize and create new things.

> do your studies and use those massive amounts of free time to socialize and create new things.

I never had massive amounts of free time at college. Maintaining a 3.9 in Computer Science without having the same amount of raw talent (and previous experience) as your peers is really hard, so I had to work my ass off. My schedule was close to 16 hours per day, 7 days per week (including classes). It was "Hell Week" for the ~4 years I was there. I worried my family and friends. It was unhealthy.

Trying to keep up with, frankly, __smarter__ (and, most likely, more intelligent) peers was a real challenge. I tried "Studying Smarter, not Harder", but lacked the skills from K-12 education to do so. Attending classes on "How to Study" and the like really didn't help and, no matter what I tried, I always fell back into investing more time as a solution.

I lacked the bio-hardware (read: brains) to go into Computer Science. I did it anyway. Don't forget about people like me!

> Life is good at this time

No, it wasn't. Not for me.

> Those of us with jobs and families snicker at college students who claim to be "so busy".

I don't. I have more free time now that I'm married and working (a stable and well-paying job, thankfully).

I think it's actually one of the point he made ... nobody teaches students "how to learn".

It might be good adding this to their courses. (And before reaching University would be even better. :))

As someone who at one point enrolled in too many classes and failed all but one of them, I have to say "so what?" I learned a valuable lesson about both my limitations and motivations. Why are we so afraid of letting students fail a little bit once in a while?

University shouldn't be time capped or subject load restricted - people should be allowed to do as many as they wish

I'm particularly happy that Math and CS department in my university (University of Warsaw) was precisely like this. It let me take 2-3 times the usual course load, which kept me motivated, prevented from getting bored, and let me learn a lot more things than I would have learned if I followed the standard path. Sadly, it seems like this will soon end, as a side effect of new changes introduced by the government to alleviate a separate problem.

Why not just skip some lower level courses, and catch up using your free time?

What do you mean by skip? You cannot test out of the lower level courses here, though you can just skip lectures and classes, do the required projects/homeworks and show up only on exam, which is what I usually did with easy courses or the ones I didn't care about. Frequently I couldn't even attend these, because other more advanced/difficult courses I took were at the same time.

Oh that is unfortunate. At my school you could take a test and start at whatever course level matched your knowledge. And there were often accelerated versions of courses, where B1 covered the same material as A1 and A2

University in continental Europe is very much like what you describe, though a shift in public attitude towards higher education as a means of job qualification is (sadly) changing this.

unfortunately so... I just loved the "fk education, fk your diploma" I experienced when travelling and working in the USA... unfortunately EU is heading in the opposite direction

what do you mean by that?

The predictable response - education isn't about learning stuff, but proving you can work on things which aren't really important.

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