The average college student today

In the 90s we had the "Plato" system for chemistry. It was a question/answer terminal in the library. Our Chemistry TA advised us to use it to study for exams as it had a lot of sample questions. It was really good because if you got it wrong, it actually gave you a detailed explanation of how to solve it. It was so helpful to have that. When I used the system, I made a bunch of mistakes but ended up learning from them, and it really helped for the exams.

1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994.

https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline

Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.

For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.

I graduated (admittedly many-many years ago) from a good but not top-notch university. I remember a somehow similar situation: obviously learning was considered a good thing, but both the students and the professors realized that it's the diploma what brings most students there, not a pursuit of pure knowledge.

So I quickly realized that, unlike, say, elementary school, a university is not a push system, it's a pull system. If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source. There's still plenty, but nobody is going to force-feed it to you. I read quite a lot beside the required books. I practiced quite a lot beside the lab practice (fortunately wielding a soldering iron or writing programs was a marketable skill; still is, but used to be, too). I asked my professors questions that were not entirely in the books; often that was during a few minutes after a lecture / classes / labs, so I got from them ideas and pointers to new directions to learn by myself.

Was it helpful in my career? Certainly yes, I started doing contract jobs three years before graduation, and then joined a bunch of interesting companies where that knowledge was somehow useful, mostly as a foundation of more specific skills.

I was certainly not alone; I knew (and often was friends with) a bunch of other students who craved knowledge and skills, and we helped each other shake these out of the university, past the transactional bounds. It wasn't all that hard, but it required a conscious effort.

Very certainly a large number of other students did more coasting than knowledge-mining. They got their diplomas, got some white-collar jobs that did not require such deep knowledge of engineering, I suppose, or started unrelated businesses.

I started college at the CC level (having no HS diploma) to get into a State school. And from a series of poor choices and ignorance on my part needed to take a several years gap before returning to finish up.

I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.

CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.

There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.

I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.

This is really unfortunate, and I think your instructor should read it.

It sounds like your instructor has confused homework with quizzes, and the cheating issue demands some rethinking of the course pace and assessment system.

In physics and related fields, I have found fully worked problems to be very valuable. If your textbook includes some of these, I recommend reviewing them and working similar practice problems if possible. I wonder if things like supplementary texts, khan academy, or tutorials on youtube might help as well.

As you note, systems like ChatGPT could be helpful for explaining or working through problems, but obviously you won't learn anything if you rely on them for doing your own problem sets.

Interesting. When I was an undegraduate we had textbooks which were at least 25% problems and solutions, allowing for near endless self practice.

I am currently holding my copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths in my hands; somehow it is rarely more than a metre from where I work!

Are such textbooks still popular and used (i.e. mandatory to purchase) in courses like this?

The best homework system i ever experienced was high school calculus.

4 points per assignment. Pass the assignment to a peer for grading. If they wrote down the problem and attempted it: 3 points. One more point if the logic and steps were followable, even if wrong.

The answers were in the back of the book. The homework grade should reflect attempts and practice, not mastery as that is what exams are for.

You are right, what degraded is not simply the students attention and motivation, it is the whole institution. They keep pushing ineffective approaches all over. You are right to blame LMSes, they are absolute disasters, poorly designed and ineffective at anything except save time for professors (and let's be real here, they also do social media and unrelated to their work activities so they are trading their teaching opportunities for leisure). Those LMSes are probably as detrimental as PowerPoint has been for communicating to an audience. It is as if everyone is trying to avoid doing what they are here to do. They replace thought, exchanges and discovery with miserable tools just so they can go waste their time on something else.

> my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.

Have you considered trying to do the problems yourself, away from the computer, then checking your work with ChatGPT or the like?

I'm lucky enough to teach in a school that has small classes; I get to be very accessible to the students. There is some auto-grading, but most homework I grade by hand and give partial credit.

But if my classes were 300 people, I couldn't do that.

I also have relaxed deadlines so students can take more time if they need it, and request it in advance.

The object is to learn stuff. That's where I'm aiming.

I remember this frustration clearly. It's valuable to be challenged and struggle and overcome, but the value of a perfect GPA is a lot more salient.

From your numerous comments on this topic, it seems that you are remarkably self-aware (for a college student) about your own learning process. That is kind of amazing. I hope you really know just how broken the system that you're describing is and that it is absolutely worth fighting to figure out how to really learn something hard.

Also know that there's a yin and yang here. You're in a broken system--but the system used to be broken in other ways. Your point about there being too many resources strikes me as fascinating and true--and yet we have efforts like Three Blue One Brown taking teaching to a whole new level. People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.

i’m assuming this is a system that changes the numbers in the question each time? often there is a separate “practice” button where you can practice and (maybe) get feedback, figure out the process, and then do the questions?

even if not, try putting the textbook and the question into an AI (I use the paid version of gemini, the $20/ month is the best money you’ll ever spend at college), then as it to explain how to answer the question. Then ask it to generate a similar question, and then give you feedback to you as you try to answer it. Then try and answer it step by step, repeat as many times as you like until you understand and keep getting the right answer, then answer the actual homework question.Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss!

I agree to some extent. A wild one to me is how schools will limit the number of classes you can take and/or pressure you to graduate on time even if it means choosing a major before you're really ready. That seems like a surefire way to kill any interest in exploring knowledge and replace it with a focus on mechanical box-checking.

That homework setup sounds awful. I wonder how much it was shaped by educators, and how much by techbros.

I agree. I took linear algebra through an online course. I can't imagine a worse way to learn the topic. I happily cheated on tests to pass the class.

Mind you, I already apply linear algebra daily—I simply refuse to waste my time computing basic operations on matrices by hand when that's why we have computers and partial credit isn't available.

Nah. Humanities professors keep claiming it's phones because that's visible to them when they lecture but read what they're saying carefully and the actual cause is obvious: students don't take it seriously because the professors don't.

The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.

It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.

The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”

I wonder how many people here (outside of college) spend lots of times on their phones (or their other types of screens)

It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.

Do people actually quit their addiction?

Yeah... There are exponentially more legacy applicants to colleges today than there were 30 years ago. By definition.

You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?

But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.

Do you think this might be tied to a person’s financial situation?

Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process.

Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?

> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.

I really love this. I'll try and bear this in mind over the next few years.

I'm a mature-aged student going for their second degree (CS the first time, science this time). I am loving the subject but it's hard at the beginning because the amount of new stuff I have to absorb is overwhelming. At the times when I have a bit of a breather -- either when I'm "getting it" or during mid-semester break -- I find the subject (biology) wonderful.

Agreed. I always felt my computer engineering degree taught me how to approach a problem and logically solve it, weigh the pros and cons, etc. As well as introducing me to the hardware side of things - I already knew by high school that I could learn any programming language given enough time (already had Basic, C, SQL, a couple of DSLs and knew at least in part, 3 different human languages). I wanted to force myself to get a similar "baseline" for hardware.

Of course, it has impacted all parts of my life - I think differently than I did before studying engineering, and I sometimes try to apply this problem solving in non-technical parts of life with.. mixed results.

I'm confused with your comment, because you start here:

> If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.

> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.

But then follow that with:

> Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.

Like... I guess it depends what precisely you mean by "workers" but in my mind at least, if we're thinking similarly, that would be white-collar office workers. And what you describe in the previous quoted section is, IMHO, a perfectly reasonable breakdown of what college is preparing them to do. But then the subsequent line feels like a criticism of the output of that.

The process underneath is busy work to make some learning criteria milestone for accreditation

Yep. I gave a similar speech on the first day of every English 101 class I ever taught. (Though, damn, I wish I'd had as concise a formulation as your list of skills. Nicely done.) In my case I largely hoped to head off the resentment that STEM majors frequently expressed about how come they were required to take something so irrelevant to their eventual careers as writing. It sometimes worked.

"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids.

When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.

Don't hate the player — hate the game.

Because the universities themselves have been constantly lowering standards. It was always a transaction but there was a price. That price is locked in a race to the bottom because administrations and professors don't care about standards.

I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended.

Full. Stop.

That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.

As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.

Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.

I agree that the trend is not sustainable, but that's not the students' responsibility — they're just responding to incentives.

Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.

Agreed. A course that did not distribute slides / lecture notes 35 years ago when I studied (well known engineering school in Canada) was considered annoying / the prof trying to force students to attend.

The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.

The technology may be amplifying the effects because that's what technology does but it is not a change to the underlying dynamics.

"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives.

I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.

The transaction has changed a great deal though. GPA used to be more heavily weighted and professors used to be more essential for references. You might bring your transcript to an interview. Now, it seems to be all about projects. Coursework has dwindled in relevance.

I can't respond to any specifics of the documentary, but it looks to me like the universities themselves are the biggest cultivators of this perception, with the goal of increased enrollment.

If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.

I see state funded education as making the problem worse. The market just reacts to what is available, and funding everyone to go to college, whether or not its useful or resourceful to do so means companies have a large enough pool of applicants to make it a requirement.

I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do?

IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.

Professor here. We did not create it, we responded to administration prioritizing profit over performance and prestige. They passed the decision down to us instructors by threatening our employment if we failed too many students. Since tenure is heavily dependent on student outcomes, giving a student a lower grade than what they think they deserved will almost certainly result in negative feedback, which threatens your tenure. For non-tenured faculty it could result in a contract non-renewal.

I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."

In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?

At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.

As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.

Did you finish reading? The author said later on that holding the bar high wasn't an option since it would risk his job. The blame should be on the universities, not on the professors who don't have much power to fix the problem.

Does that mean it would be better if the majority of people went to trade schools and left the universities for the minority who want an education for it's own sake?

If that were actually the case, companies would be using simple IQ tests.

Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills.

Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.

That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.

What do you mean by that? That doesn’t really make sense

I can say at least that it was a major point in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).

Personally I always ask for lecture/presentation slides - it's common practice in computing and related fields. Technical conferences (be they industry-focused like Nvidia GTC or more research-focused like Usenix ATC) routinely provide presentation slides and recordings. Both are extremely valuable.

I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)

Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.

A professor's lecture notes would never be good notes for a student to learn from. They are simply reminders to the professor to talk about certain topics that they know the ins and outs of.

Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.

I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.

> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.

Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.

The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.

In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.

The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.

Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.

Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.

I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes.

I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.

It is not interactive because the professor has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter and thoughts, ideas and suggestions of the students are an order of magnitude less of less value than that of the professors.

Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.

Agreed, when I was at uni a few years ago, having the lecture slides was a handy reference EVEN when I wrote my own notes during lectures.

One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.

Yeah I don't get that statement at all. How can a professor not just post their slides on their website? What exactly is so special about their slides?

I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.

in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.

The physical act of having to take notes helped me understand and remember them. Being given a handout doesn't work that well.

> This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.

I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes.

But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.

> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time.

Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else.

I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).

100% agreed. When I was in Uni, I had a few lectures where going to the class was actually a waste of time for me (especially when I had to work on other time-consuming assignments) since I knew about the topic already. I passed those classes with high grades solely by going over the lecture slides.

Ha yep, I bumped on that too. Like, what? Post the slides for future reference, who cares? What an odd bugaboo.

Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments.

Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.

And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.

[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/

Not to mention that there are now also LLM’s to help you understand difficult topics!

In my experience it’s one or the other: attend all the lecturers and nullify the need to study more than that attendance and some specific exam revision if they drop hints or don’t attend but do the readings. I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way.

>But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.

From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.

> Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area.

You raise a good point, but in this situation I would usually either: 1) go to office hours or 2) ask my question to other capable students.

My median grade was an A+ and my brother got the silver medal for second highest GPA in the faculty.

I meant "pass" as in the sense of "Olé, here's an A+, so off with you to the rest of your life".

But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?

Please raise this with the university, be it 'Fachschaft' or the ombudsman for academic integrity. This is not representative for CS education here as far as I know. Other teachers or faculty want to know.

Besides that, these are ridiculous claims from the teacher. LLMs are powerful but in the end they are still a tool with random output, which needs to be carefully evaluated. Especially Python is my personal view much more subtle than people assume on first contact. Especially the whole numpy universe is like a separate language and quite complicated for a beginner if you want to write fast and efficient code.

I've had courses where LLMs where allowed for projects but we had to provide prompts.

> I am currently a CS student in germany and our python lecturer told us at the first lesson that "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways and we will not be writing any code after we graduate. He then encouraged us to use AI on all assignments he gives us. He even allows us to cheat at the final exam by using LLMs.

> I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.

Knowing the education system in Germany rather well, I ask myself in which (kind of) educational establishment this happened, since I'd consider this to be rather unusual for at least universities (Universitäten) and Fachhochschulen (some other system of tertiary education that has no analogue in most countries).

You do not have to put up with this. Your lecturer is significantly undermining your education (which you pay for!).

You should bring this up with the department chair of your study. The purpose of your CS degree is to build a strong theoretical foundation, replacing programming with prompting directly goes against this.

Don't believe them. I was also going to university in Germany and had to work so much to compensate for bad lecturers. Until now I can say I needed 100% of what I learned in university. Even the most esoteric stuff came back to bite me. For LLMs, they are close to useless if you can't review the stuff. Maybe at some point in the future they are better and can reason about their code, but as in fusion, self-driving, etc., you never know when this is. And there will always be people who have to develop this.

> but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end?

Given that it is billed as a Python course that is reasonable.

But, to be fair, the intent of the course is almost certainly to provide background in the tools so that you can observe CS concepts learned later. Which is kind of like astronomy majors learning how to use a telescope so that they can observe its concepts. If Google image search provided the same imagery just as well as a telescope, the frustration in being compelled to teach rudimentary telescope operation is understandable. It is not like the sciences are studied for the tools.

You're being cheated out of an education by your feckless lecturer.

> "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways

Wow! I think this is an extreme comment to make. I get it.. but WOW! It really makes you wonder about the future of universities. If the answer is to let AI do our work.. even to cheat in final exams... what is the point of universities? Not only are we talking about Software Engineers dying.. but so if his lecturer job!

Anyway..

I am developer for over 20 years.

I have kids -- both are not even teenagers... but there are times I think to myself "is it worth them learning XYZ" because of AI?

By the time my eldest get his first job.. we are talking (atleast) around year 2032. We have to accept that AI is going to do some pretty cool things. HOWEVER, I still "believe" that AI will work alongside software developers. We still need to communicate with it - to do that, you need to understand how to communicate with it.

Point is, if any of my kids express interest in computer programming in the next year or so, I will HAPPILY encourage them to invest time in it. What I have to accept is that they will use AI.. a lot.. to build something in their chosen language.

I can see this being a typical question for new coders:-

"Can you create a flappy bird game in python"

Sure.. AI might spit something out in a matter of minutes and it might even work, but are they really learning? I think I would encourage my kids to ban using AI for (around) 4 days a week.

At the end of the day it is very difficult to know our future. Sometimes I have to think about my future.. not just my kids. I mean, would my job as a software engineer be over? If so, when? What would I do?

Overall It doesn't not bother me because I do think my role will transition with AI but for the younger generation, it can be a grey area understanding where they fit in all this.

I try to be optimistic that the next 100 years will be a very exiciting time for the human race (if we do not destroy ourselves beforehand)

To counter your lecturer, I am reminded of a John Carmack quote: "Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul"

Not even low-level -- any programming. If you really like to code, you are going to learn it whether in School, College, or University. To me, the best times I learned was outside of official education, shutting myself away in my bedroom. "Official education" is nothing more that doing what you are told for a peice of paper. What is its worth these days?

Whether AI exists or not - those that like coding will invest the time to code. This is what will seperate average to good programmers or developers. What seperates a good programmer to a great programmer will be their lack or AI generated code... to DIY!

Thats my view... but this is a large topic and I am only scratching the surface.

Well, he has a point about Maths :) But, the difference is that basic Maths skills are enough to live a decent life for someone who doesn't do Maths for a career. Basic programming usually isn't enough to pass job interviews and one needs to know the language for a career, atleast for now. I'm actually learning a lot of basic Maths concepts now that I have a kid I need to teach sometimes and have some money I need to invest and understand about rate of return, compounding etc.

> Ask the LLM for a solution, paste it in, get an error, paste that in, get a new solution, get another error, ask for a fix again, etc. etc.

That's exactly what I've seen as well. The students don't even read the code, let alone try to reason through how it works. They just develop hand-eye coordination for copy-pasting.

> Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive.

Part of it really is laziness, but what you say is also true. Unfortunately, this is the nature of learning. Reading or listening is by itself a weak stimulus for building neural pathways. You need to actively recall and apply, and struggle with problems until they yield. It is so much easier to look up a solution somewhere. And now you don't even to look anything up anymore -- just ask.

Just a funny, or depressing, aside - and then a point about LLMs.

Real coding can, unfortunately, be as bad as that or worse. Here is one very famous HN comment from 2018, and I know what he is talking about because participating in this madness was my first job after university, dispelling a lot of my illusions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

I went into that job (of porting Oracle to another Unix platform for an Oracle platform partner) full of enthusiasm and gave up finding any meaning or enjoyment after the first few weeks, or trying to understand or improve anything. If AI could do at least some of that job it would actually a big plus.

(it's the working-on-Oracle-code comment if you didn't already guess it)

I think there's a good chance code becomes more like biology. You can understand the details, but there are sooo many of them, and there are way too many connections directly and indirectly across layers. You have to find higher level methods because it's too much for a direct comprehension.

I saw a main code contributor in a startup I worked at work kind of like that. Not all his fault, forced to move too quickly and the code was so ill defined, not even the big boss knowing what they wanted and only talking in meta terms and always coming up with new sometimes contradicting ideas. The code was very hard to comprehend and debug, especially since much of it was distributed algorithms. So his approach was running it with demo data, observing higher level outcomes, and tweaking this or that component until it kind of worked. It never worked reliably, it was demo-quality software at best. But he managed to implement all the new ideas from management at least.

I found that style interesting and could not dismiss it outright, even though I really really did not want to have to debug that thing in production. But I saw something different from what I was used to, focus on a higher level, working when you just can't have the same depth of understanding of what you are doing as one would traditionally like. Given my Oracle experience, I saw how this would be a useful style IRL for many big long-running projects, like that Oracle code, that you had no chance of comprehending or improving without "rm -rf" and a restart which you could not do.

I think education needs to also show these more "biology-level complexity" and more statistical higher level approaches. Much of our software is getting too complex for the traditional low-level methods.

I see LLMs as just part of such a toolkit for the future. On the one hand, there is supplying code for "traditional" smaller projects, where you still have hope to be in control and have at least the seniors fully understand the system. On the other hand, LLMs could help with too-complex systems, not with making them understandable, that is impossible for those messy systems, but with being able to still productively work with them, add new features and debug issues. Code such as in the Oracle case. A new tool for even higher levels of messiness and complexity in our systems, which we won't be able to engineer away due to real life constraints.

I agree with this.

I've used AI as a crutch for a time, and felt my skills get worse. Now I've set it up to never have it give me entire solutions, just examples and tips on how to get it done.

I've struggled with Shader Programming for a while, tried to learn it from different sources and failed a lot. It felt like something unreachable for me, I don't really know why really. But with the help of an AI that's fine-tuned for mentoring, I really understood some of the concepts. It outlined what I should do and asked socratic questions that made me think. I've gotten way better at it and actually have a pretty solid understanding of the concepts now (well, I think).

But sometimes at work I do give in and get it to write an entire script for me, out of laziness and maybe boredom. Their significant advances as of late with "extended thinking" and the likes made them much more likely to one-shot the writing of a slightly complex script... Which in turn made it harder to not just say "hey, that sounds like boring work, let's have the AI do the biggest part of it and I'll patch up the rest".

It is one thing to get code explained to you (which can also be good) but another to engage in finding a solution, explore the problem space, fail a couple of times and learn from your mistakes also, and of course the embodied process itself of writing the code. Learning is an active process; having stuff explained to you is not bad but it does not lead to the same depth of understanding. Granted, not all subjects and cases benefit the same from deeper understanding and it is impossible to get into depth with everything. So this is a trade-off in each case to decide how much one may want to go in, and it is great that we also now have this option to not go in the same depth. But imo one should be mindful about it, and make conscious decisions on how they use LLMs in case where they may think that understanding a subject more is also important.

There are still ways that LLMs can be used in that case, eg having them review your code, suggest alternatives to your code, eg more idiomatic ways to do sth, when you delve into sth new etc, and treat their output critically of course, but actually writing one's code is important for some kinds of understanding.

> In one case it acts as a tutor

This can be very useful when you are learning programming.

You don't always have a tutor available and you shouldn't only rely on tutors.

It might be useful when you start learning a new programming language/framework, but you should learn on how to articulate a problem and search for solutions, e.g. going through stackoverflow posts and identify if the post applies and solves your problem.

After a while (took way too long for me) you realize that the best way to solve problems is by looking up the documentation/manpage of a project/programming language/whatever and really try to understand the problem at its core.

I wonder how much even this approach would help. I would liken it to studying past exam papers with the solutions on hand. My experience is you actually have to solve the problems yourself to actually properly absorb the concepts, rather than just copy them into your short term memory for a short while.

Ai will make experts more effective and remove most people who are going to grow into experts.

Basically most people will be idiots, except for the mental exercise type people who like using their mental muscles.

So education will stop being a way to move up in life.

I agree - the truly curious will be rewarded while those who couldn’t care less will mindlessly copy and paste. Maybe that will give the rest of us job security?

It's just Google (web search) v2, if you are able to input the right terms and interpret the results critically you'll be accelerated. If not, you're just another mark.

I wasn't unemployable as a graduate, I found a job after all. But I was near enough useless and started from the ground up.

I've always felt my real education in software engineering started at work.

20 odd years later I lead a large engineering team and see the same with a lot of graduates we hire. There's a few exceptions but most are as clueless as I was at that age.

The "no devices in school" rule has been tried, scientifically tested, and it doesn't really improve outcomes: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

The real damage is in the brains and attention spans, traditional school just can't compete with the massive dopamine overstimulus of System A thinking students get every day for an average of 6-8h outside school, by simply requiring focused System B reasoning on tiresome and (comparatively) dull tasks while enforcing dopamine withdrawal.

Well, I see an e-bike analogy around the corner. People dont want to invest the energy anmore, now that they can buy expensive batteries to help with the pedaling. That is pretty much the human nature.

They were, but that vision was killed as soon as the phrase you quote was spoken.

LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Anyone can just go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai to access a tool that will understand their problem, no matter how clumsily formulated, and solve it, or teach them how to solve it, or otherwise address it in a useful fashion. That's pure and quite general force multiplier.

But don't you worry, plenty of corporations and countless startups are hard at work to, like with all computing before, strip down the bicycle and offer you Uber and theme park rides for your mind.

Full self driving Teslas for the mind

We have robots do physical chores for us: washing machine, robo-vac etc, so why can't we have robots that do mental chores for us? For most of us, our jobs aren't a pleasure, but a chore necessary to earn money to pay rent. How many factory workers do you think enjoy bolting the same car parts to a car over and over again till retirement?

So if I can outsource the mundane, annoying and repetitive parts of SW development (like typing the coding) to a machine, so that I can focus on the parts I enjoy (debugging, requirements gathering, customer interaction, architecture etc), what's wrong with that?

If the end product is good and fulfills the customers needs who cares if a large part of it was written by a machine and not by a human?

I also wish we can go back to the days we were coding in assembly in stead of say JavaScript, but that's not gonna happen professionally for 99% of jobs, you either use JS to ship quickly or get run over by the companies who use JS while you write assembly. ML assisted coding will be the next step.

> but increasingly we want them to think for us

Which is understandable. All societies are constrained by lack of experts / intelligence. Think about how relatively inaccessible healthcare is, even in rich countries.

Unfortunately, they got batteries for greater mobility and are now more like e-bikes for the mind.

Did anyone tell them about the current market for SW developers? :o

Agreed. Having time and a mental health status where one can relax and peacefully read a whole book is a luxury. Having a job where you can apply any knowledge from your studies is a luxury too. Having space in your life to care about knowledge and learning for its own sake is a luxury

I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.

Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me

> I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.

This was definitely the case for me.

However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.

Good points, but the other part of this is that back in "our time" (we may not be the same age - I was in University 1999-2005, but regardless) there was...basically no other choice.

If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.

Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.

Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.

You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.

I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.

For a take-home exam or assignment, I’m sure this is the case.

The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.

I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.

Totally agree. Unless the use of the computer is integral to the material at hand (learning to program, learning to solve problems numerically, modeling) it is superfluous. Tons of dough spent on making it "modern" just for the sake of it.

> Obviously not for classes like CS

Why is this obvious? Unless you’re talking CS = Programming a specific language, I think it’d be better for the K-12 version of CS to be completely analog save for maybe a “lab” for students in later years of high school.

It's fiction, but the NEAL Stephenson novel Anathem explored this idea.

"We need to explain..."

From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time. I disagree with you.

> outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit

I think it should be fine to outright ban them in certain contexts, like classroom learning; just as they are outright banned (usually) in theaters or playhouses or places of worship.

And to cite your example, even in the most liberal jurisdictions I think it's not acceptable for students to take drugs in the classroom. Phones are basically the same thing.

> If history has taught us anything, outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit.

They may be 'forbidden fruit', but does that means that it would lead to more use of them?

Do you think people drank more in 2020 or 1920 during prohibition?

Do you think people smoked more weed in 2025 or, say, 1985 when it was less legal?

Do you think there is more gambling in 2025, or in 1925 when the laws banning it were still fresh?

I think you'll reach the conclusion that outright banning does in fact reduce the usage of the vice.

OP didn't say ban. They said restrict. Moderation is what's needed here.

There was no mention of an outright ban, merely restrictions on use. Much as we have restrictions on where and when one can indulge in weed, nicotine, alcohol, and so forth.

> It really feels the same as weed/nicotine/alcohol/sex/other vices ... banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit.

How many 10 years old smoke weed, have sex, and drink alcohol ?

10 years old spending hours per days on their phone on the other hand...

Are laptops also banned?

Yeah. I was coming here to state this. It is working.

It's surprising that this isn't done everywhere.

Note, kids from year 4 (9 years old) in many parts of Australia do have a Chromebook.

For what goal? Just for them to get instantly addicted once the ban is lifted? For them to lack any communications with their friends and to be excluded from their social circles discussing the newest tiktoks or whatever?

I think you chose well

It should be enforced by the schools: put the phones in a tub in home group and hand them back out at the end of the day. If there’s an emergency call the office or the office calls you. Use exercise books for note taking, etc.

The "social pariah" thing is FUD. It's just people repeating what other people claim to be afraid of, and then becoming afraid of it themselves. Kids can be shitty--if they want to exclude someone or bully them, they're going to do it whether or not the victim has a cell phone. Conversely, if people will only be friends with you if you have a cell phone, then I have some bad news for you: They're probably not genuine friends.

Lead by example, and show there is much fun to be had away from phones etc.

I make sure that my daughter (6) sees me writing in my notebook, reading, making things etc. More often than not, she then wants to join in.

I will hold out giving her a smartphone as long as possible, and up until she has one, I will try and show her all the other fun things.

If we can all agree that cannabis is bad for the still-developing mind, and can generally get on board with the idea that kids should be kept as far away from it as possible, because it's addicting, because it causes long-term alterations to brain development, because it diminishes motivation and hijacks executive functioning networks, why is it so hard for society to consider treating smartphones, social media, and highly-immersive video games like MMORPG's, with essentially all of the same effects, the same way?

I am part of the generation that grew up with MMORPG's from early childhood (I was about 9 years old when I made my first RuneScape account), but approaching 30, I don't game at all anymore for the exact same reasons I don't touch cannabis anymore. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, it's all the same thing for teenagers. At a neurological level, these platforms are as highly addicting and neural-network-altering as actual psychoactive pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise.

Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.

No, that doesn't address the incentives that cause all those things: maximizing engagement to maximize ad impressions for money. You have to choke the money supply off at the source or the big corporations will just find other engagement mechanisms to hook users to get at more profits.

Instead, tax ad impressions per day per user on a sliding scale that makes it quickly unprofitable to display more than a handful of ads and use the money to fund media literacy classes in schools. Restrict the number and types of advertising that can be shown to children and adolescents, like forbidding animated ads.

> There, the phone addiction crisis solved.

I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV. Cutting back to chronological feeds might improve some things but I don't think that's the root of the issue.

I would suggest the primary difference between then and now is accessibility. As a kid, my screen time was limited not just by my parents indulgence but the social pressure from using a shared device. Smart phones let you carry your personal distraction with you.

I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.

You sound like one of the author's students. Just restricting juvenile phone use to dumb phones is obviously the more feasible solution than banning or manipulating entire platforms.

Why not educate the users about the dangers misuse and abuse lead to the attention span, instead of banning things?

I vaguely recall too students back in the era where our biggest distraction was MSN messenger and our university forums. They kept both off until late at night.

We're letting people experience the downsides of the attention economy when it's almost (if not entirely) too late to avoid the negatives.

You'll also have to ban all the addictive games.

You’d have to ban websites with algorithmic feeds as well, like this very site we’re on.

I've no clue why people have downvoted this; you're right as rain. A phone is nothing short of a digital slot machine and shouldn't be put in front of adults or children. These algorithms are designed for profit, not humanity. They have far greater control over us than they should.

Including Hacker News, presumably.

Parenting and upbringing could be an important and overlooked reason for this lost generation.

I can only speak anecdotally. Way before smartphones were invented, I had enforced limits on computer time to 1-2 hours a day via time tracking software. All this did was breed resentment between me and my parents that led to conflict and punishment. As soon as I got to college I was back to being on my computer all night nearly every day, relieved that I didn't have to put up with them anymore.

The technology restriction wasn't the beginning and end of my mentality all through college. The true cause was how I was raised and my relationship with my parents. They were the only real bullies I've ever had.

People will always attack apps, algorithms and corporations since they're easy to feel powerless about. But if a developing person is given good enough reason to doomscroll so that they able to forget the pain that was imbued in them from an early age, then 1) the outcome in the article results, 2) a major underlying factor in the analysis of why we're failing young people will be missed, and people will assume it's solely the fault of addictive "algorithms" and capitalism, and 3) it's unlikely that people are going to open up about stressors as personal as childhood trauma (a cause) as opposed to behavioral addictions like doomscrolling (a symptom), so the focus will be on attacking and regulating the symptoms, and this cycle of trauma will only exacerbate and repeat itself.

A certain level of trauma can steal decades away from developing persons and set them up for failure, with or without smartphones, and smartphones only make their problems worse. Not to mention, past a certain age people start to blame you for your own failings, even though many of them have roots in actions taken against you that were not your fault, and this only contributes to feelings of misery and hopelessness. Knowing this firsthand, it's no wonder so many people find little else interesting than doomscrolling all day - myself included.

You can regulate apps and restrict smartphones, but I have no idea how to fix bad parenting/emotional trauma at scale. What goes on in families is private by its nature, emotional abuse is legitimized if you never lay a hand on the child and some arbitrary standard of defiance is crossed, and intergenerational trauma can have completely arbitrary causes going back decades, which end up transmitted as meaningless stressors to a victim trapped in an endless search of anything at all to hold close to them...

It depends on the model, some universities are easy to get in but have weed-out classes, some are hard to get in but comparatively easy to finish, and some are both hard to get in and hard to finish.

Discrete maths back in my days was one of those almost universal weed-out classes which got rid of people with limited abstract thinking ability who weren't willing or able to get over that with hard work. Very heavy correlation between how well you did in that class and core CS subjects.

In my EU country, lots of first year students are kind of lost and are picking their major more or less at random (or very unprepared). Very low passing rates in first year are very common. It gets better in 3rd year and after.

Unfortunately, my uni was free admission, so the first year helps filter out unprepared students.

I might suffer from a bias, but what I did was study to pass the test. I don't expect everyone to pass every exam as I don't expect everyone to get a degree. Universities need to be hard if they want to keep their reputation and not be outlived by online courses on YouTube. A degree, more than a certificate that the student attended some classes, should prove that a person is capable of thinking, studying and doing hard work.

The top marginal tax rate was 91% from 1945-1963. It was still 70% up until 1981.

>When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.

I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.

Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.

Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.

Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in a family where my dad at one point was a musician and my siblings and I all pursued competitive careers at one point in our lives (academia, acting, business, music, sports), but I don’t know if Americans in general are averse to competition. In fact, I’d say Americans love competition. Americans generally love sports, for example.

I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”

I wonder if, as inequality increases and the social safety net disappears in the USA, this will change. My parents told me “do what you love, as long as you work hard you’ll succeed and be fine.” I did what I loved (the arts), worked my ass off and succeeded, and wasn’t fine. Thank god I learned to code in the 20-teens, when competition was lower.

I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)

Who do you think worked harder in high school?

A) the median university student in the USA?

B) the median university student in China?

Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.

Of you summarize yourself what the professor said and write it by hand there are more chances you will remember it.

Same. My professors did this because they wanted you to not be spending your time and energy writing notes during class but instead following the lesson and asking questions.

But why wouldn't you just give them the slides? Isn't it the students problem if there is stuff missing?

My psych professor twenty years ago gave out the slides with strategic blanks in them, that way you didn't have to write the whole thing down, but you did need to listen at least to the point where you could fill in the missing bits.

> you end up with lossy notes

Notes are definitionally lossy. If they weren't lossy, they'd be a transcript.

The act of compressing a lecture into notes helps students learn. Merely transcribing does not imply understanding.

I was in school (2011-2016) and almost all professors had a wiki or moodle where we could find all their slides and documents.

I noticed that the rare few professors who didn't upload their powerpoints, were mostly the ones who would just recite the content of their slides in class (almost) word-for-word.

You're not wrong. Another part of the problem is that industry itself is rampantly anti-intellectual in many ways. I can't tell you how much of an uphill battle it can be to get coworkers to even acknowledge a useful idea from academia or read papers, even at good companies.

Hell, the "industry languages" are just now more broadly adopting good language design ideas that have been around in academic contexts for decades.

I'm not sure how to do it, but we really need a return to a society in which intellectual curiosity and sophisticated debate are viewed as worthwhile—our incessant desire to just maximize profit as quickly as possible over anything else and the sharp division between "the intellectual domain" of academy and "the real world" of industry needs to blur and evaporate.

Back when I was a product manager in the late 80s and 90s, I had a ton of meetings where I would often have to walk to a different building and sit through an hour of meeting with no laptop/connectivity even if only 20% was relevant. You really couldn’t multitask.

Elite in the economic sense. Places like Harvard are anti-progressive and serve to gate keep opportunity and wealth.

If a visit from a Ivy League school is the difference from submitting a App or not, that's not really the schools problem.

> Free revenue for universities.

Many years ago when I went to university my state created a fund to pay a certain portion of a student's credit hours. This was implemented in my second or third year from what I remember. I noticed that my direct out of pocket cost (or really how large the loan I took out was) never went down from before this program and after. The university was pretty flush with funding though.

Goes kind of deeper than that though.

How is a college realistically supposed to reject a guy with a clearly qualifying 28 or 29 on the ACT? You're going to have to give a helluv-an explanation for that, because I can guarantee, you do that to too many kids and the politicians are gonna come after you.

The problem is enormous. That kids can pass these entrance exams without being truly literate is what makes this issue so intractable.

To me, the only politically and socially acceptable option is to fail them in their college coursework. We don't do that though. Most students live by the "curve".

> When you convince employers to require degrees for middle class wages, this is what you get.

Yes, that.

Also how did this happen?

And also, middle-school (high-school? what is it called on the US?) children are supposed to be able to read a small text and understand it too. This is one of those things everybody should be able to do, and employers have good reasons to require.

> trade school, while potentially viable for a single person to fix their own situation, is not the answer to the overall problem at a societal level

Isn't it? Isn't being realistic about your skills in relation to the rest of the world in the current time and place (as opposed to some idealistic past that may or may not have ever existed) a way to "fix this" at a societal level?

Whether or not it's easy or even possible to live a middle-class without starting a business or getting a college degree is irrelevant to whether or not we should be giving college degrees to people who submit this as an answer to a final exam:

> > With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives [sic] we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase [sic] life is short and you never gonna [sic] know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause [sic] sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

>Most parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers).

My central question is what are other countries doing that we aren't? Because other countries aren't seeing such a dire and systematic drop in student's academic ability. Germany being the most notable for how it directs its resources, even though its a fairly rigid in many respects.

I don't get the sense that parents in Europe are overwhelmingly more involved in the schools either, but I have limited purview into that specifically, having only had the pleasure of meeting europeans of different backgrounds (UK, Sweden, Germany most specifically) via work, its a limited subset of understanding, however most of the folks I've worked with who grew up in any of these European countries really seemed to believe in hands off parenting even more so, and experienced it often in kind.

I have one theory, which is that education is highly politicized in the US in a way that perhaps its not in other western countries. This has been happening since the 1960s but it really accelerated in the last 30 years or so.

>Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid

One could make the argument that they can't even do anything. They exist at this point mostly because if they didn't, we'd have packs of naked feral 10 year olds roaming the streets and butchering any human they found for cannibalism. Have you ever seen a reddit thread where someone randomly thanks the gods because the kids finally school age and they can stop spending $40,000/year (or more) on daycare?

But, I think, in the coming decades all these problems will evaporate like some nightmare that fades away upon waking... public schools will continue to close at ever-increasing rates as our population rapidly ages.

If you ask peolle whether they're stressed of course they say they are. But they are objectively living in less stressful times than parents in the years in which young men were sent off to die in the trenches, but their younger siblings and young children still got better educations than kids are getting today. So maybe self-reported parental stress isn't actually the issue. Maybe we need to accept the issue is low standards at every level of education and teachers being unwilling to teach basic grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc. because they are seen as "old fashioned"?

Based on the intro of the article, the university where this professor works is likely below median. Each year the typical student at his/her university is worse because the best students go to better schools

>1. Lectures are often not held in front of just a handful of students, but hundreds, where frequent interaction and questioning between student and lecturer becomes practically impossible, awkward and socially intimidating. Sitting between many other students is incredibly distracting, and I've more than once seen students bring binoculars to class, because they sat so far away from the blackboard!

Where on earth did you go to school?

Vegetables can taste good if you cook them properly. Healthy food doesn't have to taste bad, and lectures don't have to be boring either

To be blunt, the current economic value of the humanities is pretty low, just like STEM as developed by humans will be in the future. I think universities may play a role in the future, but more as something people do for fun as a hobby, and not mainly for its superior teaching capability, but for the social experience.

There are two types of people in the world; those who can understand the humanities without the help of an instructor, and those who are incapable of putting such abstract knowledge to good use. Zero overlap.

Then they simply do not matter.

Exactly my experience in Belgium where we have a similar grade system. Teachers would give a list of questions in advance, students would just memorize the answers and repeat them at the exam. Most of them had absolutely zero understanding of the material.

Meanwhile, students who need to actually understand what they are learning (I can't memorize like others) before passing a test often end up with worse grades but a better understanding.

Absolutely broken system.

They worked hard (long) once they entered the workforce. My understanding is that the college was considered as like a bachelor party.

It was their parents who worked really hard and they didn't go college. It was peak blue collar.

Seeing everything in an utilitarian pov frightens me. I'm a university student, I love reading, I love acting, I love spending my afternoons riding my bike to the seaside or to the tuscanian hills. Nothing of this is going to make me a better developer. But I can't imagine a world in which I don't read, in which I don't get to know people acting or working at the venue meeting other performers, or feeling connected to the Earth with flowers blooming and birds chirping

This is nice when you have the time to sit down and enjoy literature at a leasurly pace. It's not nice when it's one of many obligations that comes with its own deadlines and tests.

Oh we don't get novels to read for class in university. Any reading would be voluntary

I want this to be true, my arts degree says I even put my money where my mouth is, but university has largely become viewed as vocational training. You do it not to become whole, you do it to become employable.

I'll do that when I can be confident in my ability to afford food. Being a "whole human" just isn't a priority when you might literally become homeless

The disconnect here is that your professors are assigning you work like this because the purpose of a university education is to broaden your horizons, challenge you, and force you to think about _how to think._

this would be fine if it didn't cost as much as a new car and my career did not depend on it. I can broaden my horizons for free at library

> The fact that you're treating it like trade school is your problem, not the university's.

When (for many people) going to college almost necessarily means accruing 5-figure to 6-figure debt at the infancy of their careers, they sure as shit better have some sort of marketable skill to justify and remedy that debt coming out of it.

I understand the sentiment of higher education being useful for broadening one's horizons, challenging you, teaching you how to think etc; but you should be arguing in the _positive_ for these things to be available to everyone without a paywall.

As a college student, feel like I haven’t met any college student with “all the time in the world” as the people say we have lol. Most of my friends who graduated feel like they have more free time after graduating than in college

> The ratio of internships to qualified students is far better than 1:1200.

To be fair, for a person with several years of industry experience it feels like the ratio of applicants to openings for tech jobs really is some absurdly high number - high enough to where you can be out of experience-appropriate work for years, plural.

I don't know if the overall market can generalize to university internships however, which may be the disconnect.

However, I remember one time in the recent past where I was offered to interview for a position that was designed for recent graduates with no industry experience. They offered this to me knowing I had graduated long ago and already had industry work for a while. My conclusion was that after a whole two months of interviewing candidates, they simply could not find any recent graduates qualified enough for their own recent graduates opening.

I did feel some guilt being offered that position knowing it was supposed to have gone towards someone with far fewer opportunities to get hired than me. I don't know if this is an indication of the state of universities, recent graduates, hiring managers who write up the postings and don't know what they actually want, the job market in general, or some other factor I haven't considered...

I suppose so. 99% of what I learn is outside uni.

Yeah I misread by clicking into their profile

> I'm a tenured philosophy professor with an Ivy League PhD.

The Ivy league isn't teaching Dostoevsky any differently than from an 'average' school, and have a significant number of legacy and preferential admissions who wouldn't otherwise pass the academic standards that everybody else had to.

Good advice.

> Read a paragraph then stop and have a conversation with yourself about what just happened.

I like that approach, as it combines the training of attention span and memorizing.

I've come to the painful realization that we are not only losing our attention span --our capacity to concentrate--, we are also concurrently losing our deep memorizing abilities --our capacity to retain the information we managed to intake--. So it's really a double whammy effect, making it even more difficult to revert.

You're correct. But I think that it is still difficult to make an argument that is original enough to make a professor happy.

I believe the choice of the word “dependent” was deliberate in their comment.

You're kinda ignoring my point though - as a teacher (if I was), there is no way for me to unilaterally control what students have learned in those prerequisite classes. And clearly that's not working. Students entering my hypothetical classroom are coming in with insufficient knowledge to be successful. What can I alone, right now, do about it in my class?

Sure, I agree it's a systemic problem that needs to be addressed holistically, but I also need a plan for what to do in my classroom right now with these particular students. And I don't feel good about either passing those who haven't learned the material or failing 80% of the class.

I'm thinking for intro just tell the students they are guaranteed a b- if they skip everything. Just acknowledge the transactionalism.

But the entry to the next class level requires a passing grade on the final exam, and DON'T water that down.

And of course, the exorbitant cost of college was unmentioned. These people are buying two new cars a year to go there. That uod the ante on the transactionalism substantially, and colleges everywhere would rather mint b+ degrees for 250k than impose standards

> Quals will never be implemented at large in undergraduate mass-market coursework.

I believe proctored math placement tests are still common upon matriculation at less-selective colleges (e.g., directional public schools). Usually Accuplacer or done in ALEKS. That said, the outcome these days may be corequisite section placement rather than remedial course placement. Colleges have to balance readiness against the graduation delays that remediation adds (which often lead students to drop out entirely).

As a teacher I would be okay with that - I tried my best and did what I could.

Why is that a priority? I would think maintaining the reputation of a StateU diplomas would be more important for the school and graduates.

This phrase in my comment: perhaps not it kind but at least degree

That not negation of the article and is instead questioning the extent to which their observations are accurate vs caricatures influenced by an outlook on their customers that is already, in software terms, “user hostile”.

The last time I taught in college was about 8 years ago at a school with a similar demographic fit, and I can recognize a fair bit of what the author say but not at all to this degree. I still work in the industry and there’s a post-Covid shift that I think strongly explains a sharp downshift in students feeling attendance is important, but I think that aught to resonate with the HN crowd with respect to a now-common feeling that dogmatic adherence to mandatory full work-from-office isn’t necessary or worker friendly. Consider all the more how that feeling would take hold for young students that spent significant formative years just prior to college being fully or highly remote.

On literacy, that’s an area I have some analytical experience in. As far as I have seen, at least a fair bit of this perception is from the fact that students view homework etc as low-stakes writing but higher stakes get more attention and the end product reflects more ability than might otherwise be shown. Also, the professor in this article may simply not be adept at getting the best results from a group of students that sense the dislike aimed their way. However my analysis side also predates ChatGPT.

I always laugh when professors complain that students doing poorly in the class don't show up to class or office hours; they might just be really bad teachers, and they know those things won't help them.

Pedantically, the grandparent comment didn’t say it was obvious, only it was unsurprising :)

They’ve been sucking up international students from Asia mostly to fill in the gap just like everything else. Let superior countries raise them then bring them over with the lure of big money. It’s all the US has to offer anymore is a chance for the select few to become part of the 1%, oligarchy. 300 million normal people may as well not exist here.

For the overwhelming majority of students, tuition is not paid out of pocket. It's paid with loans. They see it as an investment towards a career which will allow them to pay back those loans. For many, the weight of their debt does not sink in until well after college. Meanwhile, textbooks are an immediate cost with an immediate impact on a student's financial situation.

I attended university in the early 2010s. After my freshman year I stopped buying textbooks for most classes. More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course. I figured I could always buy a book later if I found out I needed it, but that never happened. The few books I actually did buy after my freshman year were all mistakes. I have not read any of them and I had no trouble with their associated classes.

It sounds like the professor who wrote this article actually incorporates the course material he assigns. Good for him. But in my experience that is quite rare.

Because it is an additional expense and fairly often you don't actually need it. You are paying a lot of money for that one chapter you will maybe have to read and whose content you can likely find elsewhere.

Plus, the idea that everyone should buy it is bonkers. There are or should be libraries in school that costs $10k a year. Or at least, there should be used book from last year or rhat one book 5 friends bought together. All these would be financially reasonable decisions.

In fairness, as a philosophy major, I realized fairly early on that most of what we read was out of copyright. I suppose if he's assigning stuff that is ABOUT what some philosophers wrote, it makes sense, but forgive me if I prefer just saving money to read Aristotle from Project Gutenberg.

And sure, there is more contemporary philosophy, and it's great he's keeping the books affordable. But if it's anything early 20th century or prior, don't be so surprised people are going to read what's in the public domain instead.

We used to peruse the library back in the day.

Setting aside Libgen (never used it, don’t know anything about it), it’s unlikely that any of those authors is available on Gutenberg in a modern, critical translation. Reading primary texts in their publication language was dead or dying even when I was a philosophy major, but still it’s impossible to do close textual analysis without a scholarly translation.

I know some of the early translations of e.g. Nietzche sometimes end up saying the opposite of what might have been intended, which is a downer.

Pfft one of my text books isn’t even a PDF— it’s a proprietary app that requires internet access and is 350mb. Doesn’t allow copy and paste either of course. And I’m sure I’ll have to pay another $60 for the license again next semester for the second part of the class.

Yes, this is it. You can usually find some discounted or free way to get most books, but I had classes where you literally submitted homework through the same system you accessed the book through, and it was like $150.

Don't know how school funding operates in the US so this is a guess:

Parents cover the fees and give the kids an allowance for the rest; either the kids budget poorly or the allowance fails to really account for just how expensive the first few weeks are with all the books you're expected to buy?

Aaah I loved the dragon book!

For those who want to do that today there is no need to bother with eBay or shipping from abroad. The publishers tried to stop them claiming copyright violation but the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the first sale doctrine applies [1].

Since that ruling many independent booksellers in the US started importing those foreign editions and selling them through online marketplaces such as Abe Books and Biblio.

Here are some examples of the savings. Lets say you are a math student, and your introductory calculus is taught from the first volume of Apostol's Calculus, your multivariable calculus taught from the second volume, and you real and complex analysis class uses Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.

The US editions of those will set you back around $220 for the first volume of Apostol, around $140 for the second volume, and around $240 for Rudin.

On Abe Books you can get the international editions of the Apostol books from a US seller for $24.39 for volume 1 and $23.40 for volume 2 with free shipping. There are several more US sellers with then in the $30-40 range.

For the Rudin book $22.06 will get it from a US seller on Abe Books with free shipping. There are few more US sellers in the $35-50 range.

Biblio isn't as good on these particular books. They are available at comparable price but only from Indian sellers with shipping from India.

I haven't seen the international edition of Rudin but I have both the US and international editions of both volumes of Apostol and the text is the same. It is the physical form that differs. The US edition is hardback printed on finer paper. The international edition is a paperback printed on rougher paper and the pages are smaller.

[1] Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013)

Yes. Not because it's a good idea but because facilitating learning is their primary job and uploading the slides is generally helpful for all students, including the ones that do take notes.

Not doing so because it allows students to put in less effort only makes sense if you view college as transactional.

The author doesn't have a problem with students getting the notes. He only has a problem providing the notes.

> It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate.

Around 2 million people take the SAT every year.

A score of 710 on the reading portion gets you into the top 5%.

So there are ~100k students who scored 710 or higher on the reading portion of the SAT.

Those students are the ones I'm talking about. I claim that anyone who can score a 710 on the reading portion is above the level of capability that the author of this post is complaining about.

Some evidence for this claim, a score of 710 would put a student in the top 10% of a "regional public university", but the same student would be in the bottom 10% of Harvard or MIT students (probably would not get in with a 710). In other words, the author of this article is complaining about a capability level which is the overwhelming majority of his school, but ~0% of the students at the best schools.

It makes sense. Many reasons I write the documents conflict with how it will be used.

I often write a ton of bloat in documentation to seem impressive or comprehensive. I put in my performance review once that I contributed over half the total pages. Nobody checked that I added value. They checked that I added pages.

It isn't meant to be useful as I am not a meaningful shareholder, so I don't care if the user's time is well spent reading it. I work for my boss, not the user.

So both sides using LLMs makes sense, as their incentives are different.

It exactly matches the meme where people use LLMs to expand some bullet points to a full document, and then other people use LLMs to convert a full document to some bullet points.

I think it's impossible to tell who is telling any kind of truth online, or who is just "vibe posting"

Of course I noticed the statement that students have always been transactional. I agree with it.

I don't think my students are unusual. Perhaps the situation in Canada is better than wherever you live.

Calculus 1 remained, but that's hardly enough to develop an intuitive understanding of why things behave as they do or how to begin analyzing them.

But this isn't an isolated case - this has been widespread ever since the education system adopted the "no child left behind" policies. They now teach to the lowest common denominator instead of valuing competence, not to mention excellence.

Like I said in my post - this affected subsequent cohorts. My cohort did the full curriculum of calc 1, 2 and 3 (differential & multivariate calc). I was trying to preserve that for those who came after us.

I think you're confusing intellectualism with classical academics

And upon failing the course, the students and their parents sue the university for failing to award a degree. They have, after all, been paying tuition fees of tens of thousands of dollars for the last four years. They damn well expect a degree in return!

In response, universities remove degree grading altogether. As your bachelors degree is now guaranteed, graduation is purely ceremonial. Matriculation immediately awards you the degree of Baccalareus Expectum which automatically converts to Baccalareus Artium after paying for 8 semesters.

These can optionally be paid in advance and, if so, the bachelors degree (or masters, if you pay for 16 semesters) will be available immediately. Attendance is encouraged but optional.

Backlash against a lack of real grades starts to build — without exams or marking, all degrees are the same. Institutions use actuarial tables and AI to determine what grade you would have achieved based on upbringing and family background. Dynamic pricing means the degrees costs less for the rich. Lower class families are able to buy their bloodline a ticket to the elite by proving they are worth it: paying full price.

If you think you are elite material, you can take out a loan of course. Why care about the burden of repayments when you’ll be the next superstar lawyer, programmer, analyst, quant, consultant, etc., right? Instead of an end of year exam to prove yourself you can instead prove yourself by paying off that student loan! Go bears!

I doubt that the SATs were ever that effective at screening this sort of thing, at least for the past several decades. They're an aptitude test.

By the time you're graduating secondary school you should be able to demonstrate end-to-end ability in multiple subjects (in something like an AP or an A-Level), which should be a better proxy for doing well in university than something as handwavey as the SAT.

Could it be that the author changed as a person, sees the past with rose-tinted glasses, or fails to recognise that the context changed in the last 30 years?

It would still be a million times better than anecdotes and ragebait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

> Policy-makers in most participating countries see PISA as an important indicator of system performance

Well, the comment you replied to talks about classes where books are secondary to better sources from which to learn the material, like lecture notes and other sources.