Nick Sabalausky wrote:
If there's one thing my school experience taught me, it's that teachers are only interested in focusing on the low-to-mid-range students.
That wasn't my college experience at all (Caltech). I was a low-to-mid-range student there, and the profs were always ready to help me, but I would get the impression they thought the material they were teaching was basic and they wanted more advanced students to they could teach the fun stuff instead.
The advanced ones are only there to shell out tuition money and act as cheap tutors.
That role was filled by grad students.
They would be far better off saving their time and money by not even going, but they almost *have* to go anyway just because the rest of society (and HR drones in particular) are brainwashed into thinking that there's a direct correlation between academics and competence (if anything, it's slightly inverse - one of the smartest people I know had so much trouble with school he ended up a high school dropout).
My 4 years at Caltech were transformative to me, particularly in my problem solving skills.
Certainly, you can be very successful without a university degree, but there can be a lot of value in a degree. It kinda also depends on how one goes about getting that degree. If one picked courses solely for the purpose of getting the degree, well, probably it won't be of much value in the end. I picked courses on the basis of thinking they'd be fundamental to the kind of career I wanted. The degree itself was not of much interest to me. It's forgotten in the bottom of a moldy box somewhere :-)
