Here is my experience in undegrad.

1. Most students simply don't care about their major's subject.

2. Most professors don't care about the subjects they teach enough to care about how students are doing.

3. Grading is aimed at punishing mistakes, rather than rewarding for learning things or doing things.

4. Guess what those things do to your group projects.

5. If you try to undertake ambitious projects or subjects for your papers, your grades go down, because of the things listed above. The most reliable way to get reliably high scores is to never experiment, never push yourself.

6. Degree requirements are pretty much arbitrary. For example, in my university, "IT" students (who weren't going to do any major programming on their jobs) were forced to take theoretical CS classes, while students in "Computer Engineering" (who were bound to do tons of programming) weren't.

7. Add to this the fact that you're expected to buy expensive useless textbooks that go from $200 to $2 once the next edition is out. (Of course, you can buy used books, but that's not the the point. The point is, they have no inherent value.)

Etc, etc. Of course there were some exceptions, couple of great profs, several enthusiastic students, some courses taught from an O'Reilly book, but such anomalies were a precious rarity.

I would disagree with this quite strongly. Most profs I've encountered love the subjects they work on - it's teaching they don't care much about.

This is mainly because teaching and research are minimally related topics which a single person is forced to perform for legacy reasons.

I do not have yummyfajitas' experience, teaching at (minimally) a top 50 US university, I've only taught high school students whose parents are paying lots for them to be there. They mostly don't care. Teaching primary school sometimes leaves me exhausted but never demoralised, middle school is occasionally like watching the capacity to care drain out of you permanently.

Anyone who does a Ph.D. for any reason other than a genuine love of research and a desire to become a professor is mad. There are fields where it's better or worse but none where a real doctorate[0] is the best way to get what you want except academia.

If you like teaching getting a good Master's degree and some highschool teaching experience before teaching at an expensive prepschool would probably be more rewarding than teaching at most state universities.

That the life of the mind and teaching the callow youth are currently bundled goods is a historical accident I devoutly hope to see ended within two decades; I'd love to see it happen sooner.

teaching at an expensive prepschool would probably be more rewarding than teaching at most state universities I've only taught high school students

talking out of your rear end? This one really alarmed me, because you're supposed to be a teacher.

Seriously, what is it with teachers who never check their facts and just banter on like they know everything? You are putting knowledge in the heads of hundreds of kids. It will be there forever. Looking at your quality of your discourse (where's that reference you were going to post?) you're not afraid of putting rotting crap in their heads, mentally crippling them forever. Knowledge (information) is the essence of your work, of your life, and of your calling. You should be nurturing it, and treating it with utmost respect. Instead, you come here, display lack of most basic education in your trade, and spew self-contradictions as authoritative statements. It shows total disregard for the trust put in you by countless hopeful parents of children left under your watch.

The worst thing? Teachers doing that sort of stuff just don't care. It's just another job, like flipping burgers. Burger flipped wrong? Don't worry, I'll make a new one. Kid fucked up for life? Twenty will come after him, I will perhaps maybe get it right some day.

Re-reading your post again and again I see more and more evil. For example:

Please expand considerably on this point if you want anyone to understand what you mean rather than giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Now I get it! You're not actually discussing with me, or replying to my post. You're grading my post! That's fucking amazing. Do I get an A? No? Well, tough luck.

You have assumed by default a position of authority over me, displaying you do not think of others as equal to you.

Let's now consider this quote: That the life of the mind and teaching the callow youth are currently bundled goods is a historical accident I devoutly hope to see ended within two decades; I'd love to see it happen sooner.

The whole post is written in simple English. Sometimes even broken English:

I do not have yummyfajitas' experience, teaching at (minimally) a top 50 US university

Sounds more akin to what someone digging up turnips for a living would say.

So you give us this cow-back ride, and then you go and put this at the end of your post:

That the life of the mind and teaching the callow youth are currently bundled goods is a historical accident I devoutly hope to see ended within two decades; I'd love to see it happen sooner.

We've got it all. Inversion, long words, archaisms, assertions of superiority, uncommon punctuation, hazy - but superficially thoughtful - statements (the life of the mind, uh, thanks, Hakunin: http://youtu.be/J376ardIXvs ). Is this the obligatory pompous verse you put at the end of every homework feedback, or am I special to receive such exquisite treatment?

Then let's drop the lexical analysis of your post and look at the logic. First off, you're replying to the wrong post. Your reply is a non-sequitur; it does not touch on points presented in my post (the single point was observational bias). You drift from topic to topic in a clutter of thoughts, unrelated to the original point. You'd normally separate those out into a post that'll be attached to something it relates to. Then, you use absolutes (Anyone who does a Ph.D. for any reason other than a genuine love of research and a desire to become a professor is mad.) that are completely inane. There are dozens of reasons to get a PhD, such as: a) helping your career b) it's one year extra, let's do it anyways c) having fun while doing it d) wanting to have a PhD like your dad and see what he's been through e) wanting to learn about specific topics only covered in the PhD course.

I seriously hope this post is much below your usual quality of submission. So.. let's spend some time together, shall we? I will now go and look through your comment and submission history.

OK, first comment: you talk about how compulsory education is... bad? Wait, are you a teacher at all? I can't possibly imagine a teacher who'll think compulsory education is bad.. unless.. yeah, unless they're as bad as you and realize they're rather doing a disservice.

Second comment: someone asks about the possible security of self-driving cars and you refer them to a novelization of Wargames. Really?

There are more comments like this.

So let's look at the submissions. An overwhelming majority (around 3/4) of submissions is under 5 points. You'd hope a teacher would have something interesting to say, but apparently this is not true in this case.

Oh, boy, how I hated teachers doing all the stuff you managed to involuntarily display in just one vile venomous thorn of a post in this thread. I sincerely hope you get fired sometime soon and can't do that to children whose mental capacity is not enough to question your bad judgment.

I rest my case.

The far side of things is the kind of college life portrayed in 'In the Basement of the Ivory Tower' [1], or 'College, Inc' [2] where it has gone far beyond just 'not having fun' and more into full fledged panic mode.

Innovation wise, I think the kind of degrees and approach (flat fee all you can learn in a semester) of Western Governors University [3] is really interesting. It seems very much like a Khan's Academy style higher education offering.

1 - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b...

2 - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/

3 - http://www.wgu.edu/

* Pay disparity between professor and industry; if you optimize for money, you go more industry.

* Papers are a key metric of success, not actual results (Which are hard to quantify)

* Defunding of public universities

* Rising cost of education vs. inflation or cost of living

* Students loans leaving graduates (and non-graduates) in heinous amounts of debt. It's very hard to pay your way through school now with a part-time low-wage job.

* Worsening average quality of incoming students causes higher burden on instructors and institutions

* Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive.

* Training vs. education wars.

* Entitlement issues: "I paid for this course, I should get an A".

As usual, the cream is at the top, and can bring in enough money to keep things going, and can select on more than the ability to pay tuition.

Liberal arts majors can be smart and have broad understanding but so can technical people. In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people.

While universities have quite a few problems, universities is where most of the world-changing research has been done over the past few centuries. If you kill the university before coming up with an adequate substitute for that function, you kill the future.

That's a standard technical person bias. I'm betting that its not true on average, that a good philosopher, businessperson, or history student is equally smart, but it's not as discernible due to the falsifiable nature of technical work.

First of all - I wouldn't count being a businessperson as liberal arts.

One way you can look at it is how many people drop out of technical subjects because they find them too hard to move to humanities and liberal arts vs. the opposite. Anecdotally, for me the former number has been much larger. The latter number has been 0.

Similarly, I've had many technical friends who took liberal arts courses and generally did very well in them. I also have many liberal arts friends who took technical courses and did not do well in them. In addition, the technical people I've met have been much much more hard-working than liberal arts people. (An exception I'd make is creative arts - people I've encountered in that field have generally been extremely hard-working. Also no one I've met has moved from say math to music because they found math too hard.)

Now it might just be because liberal arts people just don't like the technical subject matter on average as much as technical people like the liberal arts subject matter. But even if that's true, one is then right to choose technical people over liberal arts people.

Lastly, I also know liberal arts majors who are smarter than many technical folk I've encountered but I'm talking about the general trend here.

Remember, not all courses are made equal. I went to a tech school, and transferred after my first year to a high tier liberal arts school. I had a much harder time with a 050 level into liberal arts course my second year, than I did with a 400 level course on Poetry (of which I didn't have any sort of background in). I found the liberal arts courses at the tech school were aimed towards tech students - meaning, in that specific case, many of them felt somewhat watered down.

I would be willing to guess that, as a frequenter of Hacker News, you're more likely to be more active in a tech oriented circle. Growing up, and at college, I was more active among humanities oriented folk; my experience was that the tech folk were good at one thing (whatever they studied) and otherwise just played lots of video games, while the humanities students did every thing + 1.

So, all in all - my point is that anecdotal evidence is just that. Technical people can have a broad understanding, but it doesn't mean they do. Same goes for Liberal Arts.

People drop out from technical studies into humanities because they did not perform well academically in their technical studies. Just because a group of people can perform better at school than another group of people are not smarter. One group is better at school. And school is not an indicator as smartness. Just because a class is harder does not mean that the people who do well in it are smarter. Performance at school is not a direct indicator of smartness.

1) Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away. Reading has been replaced by Wikipedia. Yet, the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. Students spend very little time actually studying and internalizing information.

2) College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day. The problem with liberal arts degrees isn't that they are liberal arts, it's that the actual activity requires reading a little bit and writing a little bit. There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline.

To silicon valley, technology in education means Khan Academy. In the real world, it means a semester worth of papers written by Wikipedia in a few hours and midterms furtively answered by iPhone.

For the amount of money students are spending to attend, Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community, the reality is that the demographic shift of universities has been towards exploding numbers of people with average intelligence who sincerely need full-time instruction.

If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago.

> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students

Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens.

> There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects].

Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist.

* * *

Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.

I'm addressing the day to day experience of most students. Most students spend very little time actively learning, and the work they do is diluted by technology.

Large universities aren't treating students like adults- they aren't engaging them at all.

I'm not recommending a high school format curriculum, but the trope that students spend two hours reading/working for each hour in lecture is used as a de facto standard explaining why students are receiving a full-time education. In practice this premise is false.

Freedom and ability to explore is actually THE main advantage of the US college system.

Now slackers will remain slackers whatever "platform" you put in front of them...

I own 100s of books the content of which is in no way googlable, available via ebooks, or anything else. They are undergrad level books... nothing fancy. Your comment shows you haven't been to a demanding university.

> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day.

I thought we were talking about universities. It sounds like you want to continue being spoon-fed all your life.

> Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community

Uh, how about this: we leave university degrees as only available to people mentally prepared for doing hard work on their own, and we give people who pay to be force-taught fischer-price toy degrees in bright colors? Laminated in case they slobber all over them.

But there already are universities that do what you want. Degrees from them are worthless unless the person hiring doesn't know the difference; and in that case you can bet the company is full of idiots and will fail anyways.

I mean, it's a tiresome task to even attempt to enumerate all the ways in which I feel college failed to live up to the hype they feed you before you go in. And perhaps it's because I went to a big, run-of-the-mill state school, but I typically refer to college as an extortion racket now.

I welcome any and all attempts to disrupt what I consider a corrupt and ineffective system.

I do still have quite a few friends who have trouble divorcing themselves from how tough it was, some of the "unfairness", and having to do learn things they didn't (and and most cases I assume still don't) see the point in. Perhaps the same sentiments are more common/intense at universities and programs within them that are middling quality?

Over in the humanities, the faculty gave up on / let themselves get chased off the Great Books about two decades ago, what they're left with isn't much fun. The social sciences mustn't come up with the Wrong Answers, or else. And the whole notion of merit and quality is sort of suspect in those disciplines, so the joys and terrors of seeking excellence are heavily obscured.

So, yeah, those programs are a lot less exciting than they should be.

Yes, I got my butt kicked by it but every course after that was comparatively easier because of the rigor of that course and the mindset it left me with.

I think I'm in your camp. I left the research world after finishing a PhD, but before I did a post-doc. The first few years of grad school were great fun -- far more than any job I've ever had -- but eventually the music stops, and you need to find a chair. And that's when it starts to suck. The academic job market is dismal, and third-tier universities all over the country are staffed with graduates of top-tier PhD programs. You have to be a true exception to land a good professorship these days, and the ivory tower is littered with the corpses of the brilliant people who failed to reach the top.

I had always been eager to become an entrepreneur, but back when I was right out of college, there was no such thing as YC, and definitely no such thing as a college kid getting venture capital to try out an idea. So I went to grad school. Years later, I'm looking down the barrel of a crappy academic job market, but the startup world had become much more vibrant. So it was compelling.

That said, there's absolutely no way that your average startup is going to be as intellectually fulfilling as graduate studies in a field you love. Most startups are doing boring CRUD apps that take little technical ability or knowledge to produce, but a good grad program in computer science will let you work on the technology that startups will be hyping in 2032. There's no comparison.

I think that's a myth. The fields I studied aren't any narrower today than they were two decades ago -- the fields I studied didn't exist two decades ago. They barely existed ten years ago. And now there's a vibrant field of research. The same is true all over the biological sciences, computer science, chemistry, biochemistry, bioengineering, etc. The fields where a PhD means something are constantly re-inventing themselves, because the frontier of technology keeps getting bigger.

In the 1980s, Rodney Brooks at MIT was doing some interesting academic work with simple, toy robots, while everyone else was building thinking machines and planning systems and industrial robots. Twenty years later, and there are multiple companies commercializing the technologies emerged from that work. Some people might look at iRobot and say "what an innovative startup!", but I look at them and see a company that has done a good job of commercializing 20-year-old technology. They've definitely refined it since then, but the core technology was invented at MIT, in the 80s. The same applies to nearly every "hot" technology that startups are pimping today -- dig a bit below the surface, and you find an iceberg of academic research.

And that's what I mean when I say that the startups of 2032 will be hyping academic research done in 2012. It's all a matter of perspective.

-Publication pressure makes it such that research progress has become significantly harder to gauge (e.g.: it's become uncommon for results to get reproduced) across many fields (statistics, machine learning, the health sciences, which I've done work in for over 7 years at a highly respected institution)

-Balkanization of research fields where problems become increasingly exotic and narrowly focused to the point of being contrived (all the better for publishing papers of course)

-Increased difficulties in securing research funding or employment (more temp jobs though);

-Arbitrary metrics often being used to judge one's work. Example: if you do theoretical work, reviewers can reject your paper for lack of "applications"; if you do applied work, they can reject for "lack of theoretical depth" (what either of these terms mean in 90% of cases is arbitraily defined by a single reviewer who just wanted to torpedo your work).

-In some fields, entire mafia groups have formed that rigidly control the review process for that field, which means good luck to you if your work competes with theirs and you're submitting a paper/applying for grants

-Lack of accountability as to how research dollars are spent (vis-a-vis the public's interests)

-...

BTW, I say the above as someone who did a lot of enjoyable open-ended research as a grad student.

I get the impression that the best American universities are perfectly fine, and then some.

But the paper chase is utter horror. Crap papers and crap results are trotted-out as productivity in some sort of bibliometrics hell-scape.

Quantity rather than quality is part of the wrong path academia took. PG is right to focus on universities as ripe for a shake-up.

Yes.

It must be amazing to have gone to a university with good teaching and electives, along side peers who actually cared.